SWL Week in Review - Forward Deployed Monks

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

5/15/2026, 8:28 PM

More or Less Pod - Nuropod & Micosoft

We discuss Jetlag and the nuropod / vagal stimulation, and then actual topics like Microsoft story (from total winners / heroes of the era to insert where you think we are now … the OpenAI / Anthropic forward deployed ‘send monks out form Rome’ strategy (history says like the monks sent out from Rome before them… many will be burned at the stake, this time by the AI-hating masses), warehouses of people who lose their job pretending to work at jobs in the Truman-show to build data sets, and local AI…

HOT TAKES

Forward Deployed AI Monks — hard to unsee… AI is a religion… this time rather than going out form Rome to be burned at the stake for cutting down sacred trees while saying ‘convert or g-ds wrath will destroy you’… the AI monks will say ‘adopt our AI or ye business shall shrink, wither, and die at the hands of the all mighty’ — history rhymes

Vagal Stimulation Works — I was impressed… 3am 10 hour jetlag — and it is fun to watch it work!

Intercom is Now Fin — which is super personally funny to me, because 8 years ago we were in partnership negotiations with Intercom as fin.com … instrumenting and optimizing customer service work (at one point 10s of thousands of operations agents were streaming us data to figure out what to optimize and automate)…. 6 years early I guess :) — but the name transition hits home (and funny they don’t even have fin.com, which we did!)

Shiller CAPE Ratio of 42… — talking to fancy serious investors this week… and we just have no idea where we are at in the public markets… related My claude’s take on Cerbras… but let’s be honest we are all just trading the idea of AI and the deep fomo of being left out of 999TRILLION (as sam a. apparently says on text) — so number. go. UP.

Krishna, Sane in Crazy — it is so fun to see Krishna stepping out, if just a bit. Sometimes the world does indeed feel really really small. Great interview if you haven’t listened to it.

When Knowledge is Cheap… Insight is Everything — this is a really interesting essay touching on AI and Judaism / does the book survive and the people not? Anyway worth a full read and deep think.

The New X algorithm — it is pretty fun that they publish this all on GitHub… and that you can just feed it into Claude for updating how you post & interpretation without even thinking about it… which reminds me… there is a new exciting crypto project and one crazy implication of Claude is that it is insanely easy for anyone to mine (and optimize the mining) in a way that required quite a bit of technical know-how even months ago. This is cool, but very much changes a lot of dynamics in a very practical way / interesting to see.

I thought you should know … Ask your clade.

Regards,

Sam

P.S. Clankers. obviously just for fun… but think about it and societal structures… there are some parallels worth thinking about re the landed ‘gentry’ / capital owners of the time, etc.

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