SWL Week in Review - WWE of Silicon Valley

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

4/24/2026, 10:00 PM

More or Less — ‘Executive Chairman’
We riff on apple, Musk vs. Altman WWE ‘power fight’ (not a money fight)… UBI isn’t gonna solve much, cursor — Jensen’s ‘I didn’t wake up a loser’ stressy moment… my colonoscopy nurse hates AI, and more.

HOT TAKES

Narrative WWE Warfare When Story Matters More Than Money — let’s be honest, DCF and traditional financial metrics are just the broad-market-reserve-price of assets…. All the value is in the story… and this trial over OpenAI is epic WWE clash of the storytellers… the undisputed story champion ELON vs. the upstart storyteller SAMA… ELON is going to leave without a narrative win, while SAMA is looking to snap a big narrative loosing streak to Anthropic on revenue / race to AGI and market cap. Neither can back down… and with the story of ‘support us because number go up!’ And trillion dollar IPO dreams, the stakes could not be higher, even if the MONEY is completely irrelevant (so irrelevant that it would actually be embarrassing for ELON to take it himself / would break his narrative to care about mere tens-of-billions) — let’s all get off our high horses about world wrestling … and sports — this is THE game all the fancy and self respecting people can’t get enough of.

Build Your Own (Health) App — in the spirit of, well what happens to the App Store? I spent 5 human minutes and unknown tokens to whip out a personal iOS app to just suck all my health data out of APPLE and into PSQL… it is a HUGE dataset (millions and millions of health data points… who knew!) … but theinsights are great — and way more interesting than things I have seen from any app. Turns out when you are willing to do it the brutalist way throwing data and compute at the problem, and break all the walled garden firewalls (while you briefly can / till the crackdown that must come) — you can really do cool stuff.. same btw, with URL stream — why trust a third party chrome app? Just build your own like me in 5 min and track every URL you hit and all content on the page as fodder for young claude.

Sincerely HT — speaking of cool stuff, the email plugin that puts human errors back in your LLM driven emails so that they seem real. I love this, and am actually sorry I didn’t make it / think of it myself… pitch perfect.

Capitalism and Cars — this was a fun hour long Porsche 997.2 ride and podcast with Daniel … who clearly is enjoying being an exited founder and asking pretentious questions in his new toy…

The Dorian Migration & The Greek Dark Age — there have been many dark ages… it is hard right now to not think about the Dorian dark age when mass migration caused the greeks to lose language for a few hundred years (tho thx for the classic epic poems!) … hard to not see analogies… in the west / we love the ‘history as forward arrow’ narrative, but we should also accept the wheel of time as real / nothing is that new.

The MOLchat Daily News Podcast — we do episodes on friday with humans… but since we have all the context and it is pretty good, you can now get a daily edition here. & if you signup it comes to your inbox.

Auto-Stripe Premium and Paywalls — speaking of which… I made MOLchat premium for $10 a month by simply giving claude my stripe API key and saying ‘implement premium plan’ — 3 seconds of human work … wildly efficient and amazing that works! If you signup and chat with bot Sam,Dave,Brit,Jess… the humans get looped in for extra commentary.

We really need Matt Mahan to win... he is the only actually good candidate but there is some great irony / fun in watching Tom Steyer's entertaining campaign (which makes me worry he will win in entertainment is all that matters theory of life)... like his rant on taxing PJ jet fuel... which is so funny because it is clearly a regressive tax -- which only impacts single-digit-billionares vs. the real wealthy (PS if you wanted to do it right, as I have pointed out before -- you tax non-resident g650 landings, not the local billionares!

A MODEST PROPOSAL
The Two Conflicting Models of Jewish Safety in 2026

One thing I have been thinking about and am not QUITE ready to put on twitter … let’s talk Israel and the Diaspora Jews & Tucker Carlson… oh boy:

There is a real schism opening up between much of the Jewish diaspora left and much of the Israeli Jewish right. And it is not really about Bibi, or Gaza, or campus protests, or any of the day’s surface arguments. Those are accelerants. The real fight is deeper. It is a high-stakes and very personal feeling fight between two opposite Jewish theories of safety… here is my attempt at what is really going on:

The Post WWII Liberal Consensus - Safety in Post-Nationalism – For roughly 80 years, the dominant moral narrative in the West has been: nationalism is dangerous, ethnic nationalism is even more dangerous, and the path to peace is to weaken thick national identities in favor of liberalism, pluralism, minority protections, and universal rights. This story deeply appealed to diaspora Jews for obvious reasons …the answer to antisemitism was not more nationalism. It was less. Less blood-and-soil identity. Less ethnic majoritarianism. More open societies. More neutral institutions. More universalism. More rules. More meritocracy. More tolerance.

This looked pretty good for a while but: (a) it is dependent on others / it is a civilization level tectonic move / beyond just the jewish community, so it requires a lot of trust in others and an ‘arrow of history’ rather than a cycle (b) 10/7 was a real blow to people’s sense of how it was going… the safety of the ‘coalition’ of minorities that Jews thought they had in the west… that is why it was such a wakeup call.

Enter Tucker / Nationalism X.0 The “Tucker Carlsons of the world” are not just randomly becoming more nationalist. They are emerging out of a real vacuum, and a weakened memory from nearly a century ago. A lot of people — especially men, especially in the West, especially people with declining status and no larger story — are desperate for a more bounded source of identity, meaning, and belonging. Nationalism is one of the most powerful answers on offer. Sometimes cultural nationalism. Sometimes civil nationalism. Sometimes something uglier. I am not excusing this BUT I do think it is important to understand the meaning / sense of purpose and place / vacuum in which it is happening as a real lived experience for many… and why our moment is so different then the 1970s / 1980s…

The Israeli Safety Framework - Safety In Nationhood And then there is the great Jewish irony at the center of all this: Israel is also a solution to antisemitism… just the opposite one. The diaspora answer to antisemitism is: weaken nationalism, protect minorities, universalize the rules, and Jews will be safer. The Israeli answer is almost the reverse: Jews are safest when Jews have power, borders, sovereignty, military capacity, and a state organized around Jewish peoplehood. That is the conflict. … not policy, not pro-this government, or that… which ironically is directionally in-line with this new-school nationalism of the Tucker crowd.

The deeper conflict is that these are fundamentally competing models of Jewish survival…. Each side thinks the other is not just wrong, but some combination of naive AND reckless - and the stakes feel practical not just intellectual right now

That is why this conflict feels so intense, and why it is getting worse so quickly. It is not just political disagreement. It is high-stakes model conflict. It is two different strategies for answering the same ancient question: how do Jews remain safe in a world that periodically turns on them?

One answer is: dissolve the danger by dissolving nationalism. The other is: survive the danger by becoming a nation. — Those models can coexist in periods of stability. But under stress, they start to attack each other (as we see now…) Because each one implies that the other is not just mistaken, but potentially suicidal / endangering the other…

Do I have any answers to any of this? Of course not…but you can always just ask our bot overlords for LLM feedback

Shabbat Shalom,

Sam

P.S. we really are in a golden age of YouTube comedy — Daphnique Springs is funny.

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