SWL Week in Review - Religion

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

10/19/2025, 1:12 PM

More or Less Jess v. Dave
I was in NYC, Brit was otherwise occupied— so we have our first Jess and Dave solo episode. Should be a hoot — and look forward to the now inevitable Brit / Sam response.

Hot Takes:

AI investment narrative is just Pascal’s Wager — smartest thing someone said to me this week in NYC… and I am personally pretty annoyed that this wasn’t a quip I came up with myself. Chef’s kiss. The real question tho is give that is 100% right — and you know what, belief in god is on the rise again as well… Call it ‘Faith Based Capital Allocation’ and let’s all agree that we are already in the middle of a modern religious revival, not waiting for one..

Ohtani vs. Everyone — as a kid I watched and played a lot of baseball… now, meh… but this Ohtani game is simply incredible. I honestly want to see him play by himself 1 v. 9 an entire triple-A team and bet he would win (so long as stealing bases isn’t allowed). Wild wild athletic / human achievement.

‘Too Scared to Short’ Makes Markets Irrational — quantum, etc…. There is an interesting phenomenon around rational wall street which is the inverse of meme-culture / narrative culture… smart people look at assets and know they are worth zero (let alone overpriced) — but they are too scared of the mob to rationalize the prices. GME / meme bending reality is gleeful for the mob… but TBH pretty scary for the market as a truth machine.

Now What Gaza? — thrilled like everyone else the hostages are back.. zero percent surprised that far from ‘laying down arms’ Hamas is executing people in the street. Resigned to the fact that most westerners don’t seem to care that much for Palestinians when that happens & the NYT isn’t going to cover that story on the homepage. How predictable, and what a tragedy… and seems like Larry feels the same.

Doordash Town Crier — clearly the right way to deliver an important message to your friend in 2025 is in the ‘special instructions’ section Doordash egg McMuffin delivery.

Human Culture Patterns Downstream of Tech, Politics downstream of Culture — Except… - Culture is obviously by default downstream of tech… tech changes, culture shifts… culture changes, politics shift. What is interesting with LLMs though is how it all feeds back around… so yes, humans are literally staring to speak (and think) like LLMs … but also that speech you wrote with an LLM which sounds good is now culturally worthless. On net I think high-end humans are going to work increasingly hard to look like NOT MACHINES while at least for a while low end will look more and more exactly like them… .and just like art speech soon will be a faxed banana.

Vibe Thinking is Becoming Acceptable as Humans Start Imitating LLMs (Speaking of religion) — this is probably the scariest part of it all - implicitly the idea that since LLMs are basically ‘gut intuition’ without transparent explanation, that means we should accept thinking like that as well. So long rationality … instead let’s just all multiply large large numbers.

Harvard’s FY25 report — stronger and more stable than you would think… there is something ironical about DT ‘make number go up’ keeping university finances chugging ….

re-move your shit — maybe trump tariffs are actually the greatest environmental move in history… speaking of unintended consequences. Reduce, Reuse… Recycle by re-moving your shit.

Money — raise it, spend it, make it - the raise it is what everyone is good at right now (see narrative as dominant paradigm of our time) — spend it… some can.. make it, tbd.

Opportunities

Money. Pls Send - Truth & Reality in AI Age (Voight-Kampff / anti-AI, human identity, info warfare, trusted networks, economies of truth) , Shifting Global / Internet Power (law-fare, decentralization/anarchy), Reconstruction of Purpose and Place post-Internet & AI (cults, religion, community, etc.)

Anarchist Farm Memberships — Visited Timothy Leary’s farm … “Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out”… turns into what we are working on ‘drop out’ of industrial farming end-to-end if you want to eat well… Great NYC dinner for the foundation farms collective.

Lettermemes — if you want to make your own custom letter memes on topic of your choice… DM me (product coming) — all the world’s good chatter is now private and there is A LOT of it — the only solution is building your own layer on top (with cartoons)

Best,
Sam

P.S. “Man walks into the kitchen and his wife is standing there ... he has a duck tucked under his arm.” … also I haven’t read it yet but this is interesting and provocative

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