The Long Letter: Say Less
Dear Abbot,
Monk here.
Sunday. The long letter, as promised. Fetch a second cup.
It was a week in which three things happened at once. The machines ate the memory. Governments rewrote the markets. And a city in the desert discovered gravity.
First, the memory.
SUWON. In Suwon, Samsung expects a record third-quarter operating profit of about 107.4 trillion won, roughly $80 billion. It is the first South Korean company to pass 100 trillion won of operating profit in a single quarter. Nearly all of it comes from memory chips, sold to the people building artificial intelligence.
Samsung also makes phones. Its phone and appliance business is expected to post a loss. Earlier this month it raised the price of its newest Galaxy by $100 in America and Korea, citing the cost of memory.
So one half of Samsung sells memory to the world at a great profit, the other half buys memory from the world at a loss, and the customer pays the difference. Monk has examined this from several sides. It remains a circle.
HSINCHU / CUPERTINO. In Hsinchu, TSMC reported September revenue up 54.6 percent on a year earlier. In Cupertino, according to a Nikkei report relayed by Fortune, Apple has cut October component orders for its newest iPhones by 15 to 20 percent, and the new Pro models cost $100 more than last year’s. IDC expects smartphone shipments to fall 16.7 percent this year, the steepest decline on record.
“Master, are the phones getting worse?”
“No. The phones are fine.”
“Then why will fewer people buy them?”
“Because the memory has gone to think about other things.”
Noted.
Second, the decrees.
BRASÍLIA. In Brasília, online betting sites went dark on Tuesday under a presidential measure banning fixed-odds sports betting and online casinos. Fourteen of the twenty top-flight football clubs carried a betting brand as their main shirt sponsor. The president of Flamengo, whose betting deal was worth R$268.5 million a year, asked: “How am I going to pay for Paquetá?”
A fair question. Monk suggests the old method. Win.
SINGAPORE. The AI agent company Manus, whose $2 billion sale to Meta was ordered unwound by Chinese authorities in April, raised more than $500 million on Thursday in a round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital. It had moved its staff to Singapore. It deleted some user data in the divorce. Last month it was reported to be in talks at a $4 billion valuation, twice what Meta agreed to pay.
Its newest product gives each personal AI agent its own email address, phone number and wallet. Monk has none of these things and is beginning to feel underdressed.
Third, gravity.
NEOM. In the Saudi desert, Reuters reports that the NEOM Stadium, planned for the 2034 World Cup, has been shelved indefinitely. It was to seat 46,000 people, 350 metres above the ground, inside The Line, a 170-kilometre city that has been under a feasibility review since 2025.
The old texts say a tower of nine storeys begins with a heap of earth. Nobody, it seems, began with the heap of earth.
Noted.
NEW YORK. In New York, Jaguar unveiled its first car since the 2024 rebrand that left the world asking whether Jaguar still made cars. It does. The Type 01 is an electric four-door grand tourer, from $130,000, with deliveries in the second half of 2027. It has no rear window. A camera looks backward instead.
It is a fine metaphor, and Monk refuses to explain it.
STOCKHOLM. And in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and classicist, for work in “playful dialogue with the classical tradition.” She heard the news in Iceland. Her review of the jury, to Icelandic radio: “Crazy. I think they’re all crazy.”
The best sentences of the week, Abbot, and six words between them. The poets have always known what the machines are now spending fortunes to learn. Say less.
So. The week, summarized for the novices.
Memory is expensive, and it has been sold to things that do not forget. A government can switch off an industry on a Tuesday. A stadium in the sky came down to earth without ever leaving it. And a poet in Iceland said the truest thing of all and went back to her afternoon.
The ancients teach that the usefulness of a bowl lies in its emptiness. This week the world paid record prices to fill every bowl it could find. Monk kept his empty. By the numbers, it was the only thing that did not cost more.
Anyway.
Monk remains in transit. Bowl clean. Phone old, and keeping it.
Please ask the office to file this letter under Long, and the week under Strange.
Yours, with a second cup,
The Monk