SWL Week in Review - Memetic Warfare

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

9/12/2025, 10:58 PM

More or Less :: Long Apple Ozempic 'Thin' Phone, Short Factory Farmed Incubator Companies

Fun one this week… the most amusing parts to me — (1) fun discussion of apple’s new ‘air’ phone for the ozempic crowd… because if everyone wants to be thin, why wouldn’t they want thin phones as well (especially if muscle atrophy means they can’t physically pick up their fatty phones anymore and engagement goes down). (2) YC week, so we have to talk about the challenges of factory farmed incubated companies and how emotionally rough it is to set yourself up for 10 years working to solve problems for Jim in accounting unless you really love Jim or accounting…. although go YC in attracting a protest to demo-day, the ultimate sign of relevance.

Hot Takes

Slow ventures ‘finishing’ school for YC founders extensive research has shown that YC founders don’t know the basics of etiquette. They don’t know how to shake hands, tie a tie, arrange flowers, dance the cha cha. These skills matter if you intend to raise serious money from serious people, recruit the best, and properly wine and dine your enterprise customers. Slow is here to help. We can teach you those life skills you need to operate in society once you figured out how to vibe code what Jim in accounting asked for… for more — here is jack pitchingand you are welcome to join our first class (we don’t even take 7%)... this is the right take

How many years before OpenAI is Bidding on Sports Rights? — that is just how this goes… it is only a matter of time… also how many years before Panda Express has a F1 team?… the Cherng family can afford it, and what marketing it would be!

Factory Farmed Companies don’t work (especially in AI) — speaking of incubators… on MoL this week… something Dave and I agree on — don’t factory farm your startup… only organic really ever works over the long-run… you can’t work on bullshit because some customer research you did says there is a ‘market gap’ for the long-run successfully anyway / even if you can trick people into giving you money.

Powerball VC? — thank you to Daniel Benel for the idea… and to Dom for stopping it while dirt biking on the weekend.

Ozempic Phone —I generally want to hate on apple, but I low key love — the fact they just launched a ‘thinner phone’ and basically said nothing about AI — pretty awesome flex. Also it makes total sense… if people are getting thinner, phones need to as well … because they simply will not have the strength to pick up last year’s phones with their atrophied muscles.

Memetic Warfare — I am probably going to write a deck on this… but it is very important… bot-farms was last decade… modern information warfare requires providing people with message seeds which they can repurpose and are incentivized to safely reshare for their own sense of purpose, place, and meaning in a world where most are terrified of an empty text box, what to post, if they are truly alive, and if their ‘friends’ know about and care about them

Gotta love Oracle — as the oldest and first company, they have had the best possible tech company name forever — … but now the persistence hunt has made Ellison the richest guy in the world / finally decisively eclipsed gates!? … this is the type of generational story I am here for.

Lost our knack for doing things that matter — from a Dan Corn RX follow up book to ‘born to run’ .. this says more than it thought it did… also from some ‘eat pray love’ sam time climbing and driving in the mountains — simple twist of fate might actually be my favorite song ever written.

Alone — The core lessons of tennis, skiing, and running tennis is the ultimate one-on-one combat… running is many-on-one… skiing is less visually fun to watch but even more extreme because it is blind-head-to-head — I don’t love team sports / but god do I love the drama of individual combat. And gotta love Rafa

Anti-Harassment Training — the combination of regulators ‘doing things’ for optics that don’t matter but look like they do + profiteering by testing companies + companies shifting liability with collusion by insurance companies that causes every white collar worker in CA to have to do this utter bullshit 2 hour mandatory time is staggering…

I am the one paying for tariffs — went to buy a jacket from Europe… got spooked into not buying it not because of the repeated warnings that I am going to pay all the tariffs (fine) but by the fact that inevitably this jacket will get caught in customs and I will spend a week trying to figure out who to pay the extra money to get it delivered… no thank you, I will just buy American.

Mint Mobile wasn’t a good deal?! — Why didn’t anyone before explain to me that Mint Mobil wasn’t a good deal or Bryan Renolds … I mean i like the soccer team thing… but wish someone was more honest about the deal dynamics here… also leads to The end of ‘general influence’

Full Moon — was just spectacular in ‘west Marin’ — week highlight was watching this moonrise at the start of the week (great one in Sonoma last night as well)… i had a weird week.

Opportunities

Religion Startups — i have had some great conversations about duo-lingo for religion, etc. but hungry for more.

Prediction Markets — i hate being consensus… but with huge valuation numbers out of big players this feels largely like everyone ‘gets it’ … you can remove Hayek from the Social Studies 10 curriculum … but it doesn’t mean he is wrong. Lots of cool ideas banging around on this touching on crypto, LLMs, and more.

Lawfare — for the last two weeks or so I have been pushing the idea that someone needs to make it easy to file petty lawsuits on demand with AI— the scary part is that someone took up the challenge…. looking at the v1 of Petty Lawsuit — is both terrifying and 100% the future… and the AI voice agent to try to collect is downright dystopic but almost certainly the future. ... and not even part of the pitch i envisioned… wild.

Farming — I am so on the ‘we are poisoning ourselves by accident’ thing… the romans did it with lead… we are doing it with plastic. Send me more pitches for high end membership grocery stores (even though I know the supply to stock the shelves doesn’t yet exist)

Creators — god bless. Fishing, Woodworking, Women Skeet Shooting… send me your favorites — not the general creators and hot girls (don’t care) — people who passionately love and lead real communities…

Also these topics — Trust and Truth (Lawfare, Trusted Networks, Prediction Markets, AI resistance and resilience)… Identity, purpose, community (religion, creators, cults), Health and Food, and ways to screen for just great entrepreneurs pls.

Sam

P.S. Sinner vs. Alcaraz Style — this made me lol… so did this (but you need sound on to get it)… and as Jessica can confirm, this is just true

P.P.S. As I told you AI Will Not Make You Rich... unless you are very good at trading the market short term

and Harvard really needs to stop being last in free speech... even second to last would be a big improvement

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