The algorithm vs. the old world

Issue #00030: June 4th, 2026

I was in Los Angeles recently and called a Waymo for the first time. My driverless taxi was ten minutes late. It pulled up on the wrong side of a narrow two-way street. I jogged down the sidewalk to catch it, just as it made a U-turn toward me. That’s when a grocery delivery robot rolled through the intersection. The two machines froze. They gyrated back and forth. Neither could decide who had the right of way. Traffic backed up. Horns blasted. Someone overrode the system from a headquarters somewhere. It summed up where we are: bubble about to burst, or the chaotic start of a new industrial revolution? No one is sure.

We ran a quote a few issues ago, attributed to philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” It came back to me listening to Mo Gawdat on The Diary of a CEO. Gawdat ran Google X and has been warning about AI since 2021. He called himself optimistic about the future, but added: “I’m not optimistic about the next year.” Those who make it to 2038, he said, will enjoy what comes next. Anthropic and OpenAI are both heading toward IPOs that analysts are calling historic. Neither is public yet, but in San Francisco the money is already being spent: a townhouse just listed at $3 million, the seller accepting stock in either company as payment.

It’s easy to look at Silicon Valley and assume our world is insulated. We make things that are physical and real. But the wave is hitting us too. Humanoid robots running fabric mills around the clock may still be years away; the back-end disruption is already here. When a single back-office employee armed with AI can do the work of ten, corporate structures change overnight. Look at design: a principal designer with the right tools may no longer need junior designers, renderers, or project managers. I’m speaking from the front lines: Our own hiring for back-office and marketing roles has slowed dramatically. Our enterprise software now handles automated commands and serves real-time data, and we recently brought on a digital marketer who uses AI so avidly they easily produce the output of three people. This is sobering. Colleagues and friends we love will lose their livelihoods. Economically, if 10 to 20 percent of the workforce faces sudden unemployment, consumer spending collapses — and the broader economy goes with it.

So what do we do? What we have always done: run great businesses and make exceptional, human, soulful products. That is our defense. The demand side will work itself out. In fact, I suspect people will grow to resent AI so intensely — its synthetic, frictionless sameness — that they will come flooding back to us, wanting the handmade more than ever.

Which brings us directly to the world of interiors, where the old world is refusing to die. The rest of this newsletter concerns the crafts of the past. An atelier in Mumbai has a waiting list of women who want to learn embroidery by hand. The Times has profiled the last remaining long-straw thatchers in all of England. Their cottages sell for £1.75 million ($2.35m). Here in the US, Mahjong rooms are up 20 times year-over-year. As we wait to see how this shakes out, one thing is clear: the more automated the world becomes, the more valuable the handmade. See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery word into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun!

Anti-algo rooms are the new luxury
The 2026 London WOW!house opened this week at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, comprising 22 rooms and 22 designers, open through July 2. The big story here is anti-algorithm design.

Tiffany Duggan of Studio Duggan built a speakeasy salon. The bar disappears behind a wallcovering. You’d walk past it without knowing it was there. No screens. Just people talking in a room nobody can find. Sara Cosgrove’s Morning Room, built with Phillip Jeffries, is designed for magazine reading and long conversations. “I’ve had so much sensory overload in the last few years,” she said. “I just wanted to create a space that I would feel completely calm and relaxed in.” She got there with woven wallcoverings, bespoke upholstery, and a sculptural stone fireplace. She calls it an “anti-algorithm space.” 

Your clients are overstimulated and most of them can’t name it. They spend their days switching between a small screen for work, a tiny screen for life, and a big screen at night. Now they want a room where you walk in and feel calm.

Position your marketing to solve this emotional problem for customers and watch the money start rolling in. The best part is… what better way to make money than by helping people be healthier? And they say our industry is frivolous. 🤷🏽‍♂️

The Mumbai masters
This article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine was enough to calm my jittery heart this week. Karishma Swali runs an atelier of 2,400 artisans whose hand embroidery appears in collections for Christian Dior, Prada, Gucci, and Schiaparelli. For the Dior Fall 2023 show in India, Chanakya produced a monumental toran composed of 1,008 individual pieces, each made by a different master. Swali also built the Chanakya School of Craft from nothing. She went door-to-door in underserved neighborhoods until 22 women showed up. The school now has a waiting list, and it is 100% free. 

At one of my brands, we’re building something we call the Five-Star Maestro program: an artisan rating ladder where reaching the top in any one specialty earns you the title of maestro. Some of our processes take a decade to learn. You don’t pick them up in a weekend workshop. We start the pipeline early or we don’t have an art form.The logic is the same as Chanakya’s: make craft careers aspirational, or watch the craft die. Artisanal craft is the best marketing story out there in this new, synthetic world. “The physical act of making and working by hand is maybe the single strongest human act,” Swali told WSJ Magazine. “Thankfully, AI cannot replace that.” Preach.

The last straw
Talking of historical craftspeople: Only 800 thatchers are still working in Britain, according to this beautiful New York Times story. And only 20 to 30 practice long-straw thatching, the technique that gave English villages their silhouette before cheaper water reed from Eastern Europe and China replaced it. The economics are stark: water reed lasts 70 years against long straw’s 40, and costs $8 a bundle against long straw’s $20. Rethatching an average cottage runs $40,000 to $50,000. 

Master thatcher Stephen Letch, 66, is the most vocal holdout. The craft carries its own vocabulary: yealms, broaches, spars. Just like with the Mumbai embroiderers, when the last practitioners go, the craft will go with them. My first thought reading this was fire. At my brands, fire resistance is the first conversation I have before anything goes on a building. Long straw catches faster than water reed and is notoriously hard to insure. Sienna Miller’s thatched Buckinghamshire cottage is listed at $2.2 million. I don’t know what she’s paying for coverage. 

My second thought is my gosh, how beautiful a thatched roof looks. And how crucial it survives for the sake of the community inhabiting those villages. It would be a tragedy to have this art form lost. We must fight to preserve it.

AI is buying San Francisco
A townhouse in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle is listed at $3 million, and remarkably, the seller says they’ll accept OpenAI or Anthropic stock as payment! Neither company is publicly traded yet, though Anthropic filed for its IPO on June 1. This whole deal is a symptom of a crazy real estate market in San Francisco, where the median sale price hit $1.7 million in April, up 10% year-over-year, the highest in the country. 

I’ve watched this movie before. In 2015, a buyer offered Ryan Serhant's client 50,000 Bitcoin for a $13.95 million Manhattan apartment. The seller turned it down because it was also a million below ask. Guess how much those 50,000 Bitcoin are worth today? I’ll tell you at the end.* Pre-IPO AI stock is 2025’s Bitcoin offer. It feels like imaginary money until it doesn’t.

The point is, the San Francisco market is running hot — more than most American cities can claim right now.

Berkshire bets big on housing
Greg Abel, who became Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO when Warren Buffett stepped back in January, has made his first major acquisition: Taylor Morrison Home Corp., for $6.8 billion, all-cash. The Scottsdale-based builder focuses on higher-end homes and build-to-rent communities. Abel paid a 24% premium over Friday’s close and TM stock jumped 22% on the announcement. Let me catch you up: The US housing shortage stands at 4+ million units and more than 75% of young renters still expect to own a home. But single-family starts fell 9% in April and a third of builders cut prices last month. Abel sees an opportunity.

Berkshire already owns Clayton Homes, Shaw Industries, Benjamin Moore, Nebraska Furniture Mart, and HomeServices of America. This deal makes TM a top-five US homebuilder. Abel said: “This investment is grounded in a long-term belief in the strength of America’s housing market and its underlying fundamentals, which we see as enduring over time.” 

That is the most sophisticated capital allocator in American history betting on housing after four consecutive difficult years. This is a very, very good sign.

The tariff refunds are here
We got part of our tariff refund last week. Fourteen percent of what was owed, with more tranches coming, slowly. We filed in March. I called my accountant before I told anyone else. If you haven’t checked your portal, go now. One catch: the White House is appealing the order compelling refunds. Get what’s yours while the portal’s open.

Mixed news otherwise. Steel, aluminum, and copper tariffs drop June 8 and hold through 2027. The new front is more serious: the White House is proposing 10 to 12.5% tariffs on 60 trading partners under Section 301, legally sturdier than the IEEPA path SCOTUS struck down. Cotton for garments is on the list. Comments due July 6. Hearings July 7. 

Trump’s new maneuver to get his tariffs back is the new front to watch.

Mahjong mania
I went to a mahjong lesson on Monday, dragged there by my wife. I may have had three beers and an edible beforehand, which did not help my retention. I must admit I enjoyed the ceremony. The game is beautiful, the art on the pieces is unique, and it has a beautiful slow-down-and-socialize vibe to it—with zero screens.  

But it’s not really for me, even though our teacher mentioned that regular mahjong players report lower rates of dementia and anxiety. The next morning, I opened the Houzz 2026 Emerging Summer Trends Report, and saw that Mahjong rooms are up nearly 20x year-over-year. This is part of a larger movement: Bibliothèque searches up 191%. Card rooms up 129%. Speakeasies up 75%. Clients want spaces to play old-fashioned games. If you’re not offering them, you’re a few tiles short of a set.

Sleeping with the fishes
Eric Moskow, a healthcare entrepreneur in Delray Beach, just spent $250,000 on a 2,200-gallon custom aquarium in his $17.9 million home. Monthly maintenance is a staggering $3,000. An aquarium from Infinity Aquarium Design in Los Angeles starts at $75,000 and reaches $1 million. Their best line from this Wall Street Journal article: “Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets.” 

Jeff Franklin, the creator of Full House, has five tanks in his Beverly Hills mansion, including a 5,000-gallon separator between his dining room and family room that occasionally houses blacktip sharks. The house is listed at $49.95 million. His fish alone are worth $80,000. “I sleep with the fishes,“ he told the Journal. 

But seriously, a 2015 University of Plymouth study found that watching an aquarium for 30 minutes elevated pain threshold, with readings still elevated 10 minutes after viewing ended. Studies in dementia units found fish tanks increased body weight and nutritional intake. 43% of saltwater-fish owners opted for custom tanks in 2025, up 19% from 2023.

I wasn’t really a fish guy until my son convinced me to buy a clownfish. He named him Bubbles. Bubbles has a personality. He knows my son from me. He comes straight to the boy and hides from me briefly before deciding I’m safe. Little does he know, I’m the reason this little bastard is staying alive. 

Fish tanks are a legitimate designer revenue stream nobody in our industry talks about. Living art, a body of science behind it, and a commission on every install. Get ahead of this. You’d be a fool not to take the bait.

Obama library
The Obama Presidential Center opens in Chicago on June 19. I am not an architectural critic. I want to be clear about that. I am a man who sells fabric and occasionally has strong feelings about buildings. But when I watched this one go up, I didn’t get it. Just four granite towers, heavy and intense.

Then I went back and looked at what came before it. The Hoover Library looks like a country club. The FDR one looks like a Nantucket home — I’d live there. JFK got it right: modern, timeless, feels like its moment. Nixon’s is Spanish Tuscan and beautiful. I would also live there. The Ford Library looks like the DMV in a backwater town in Mississippi. Gerald Ford misread the brief and actually built a library. The Reagan one is fine and Clinton's looks like Tesla's factory. You should totally check them out in the above link. 

Against that field, I still don’t get it.

*If the seller had accepted, those 50,000 Bitcoin would be worth $3.18 billion today — enough to land him on the Forbes 400.

Huge shoutout to Caroline P., Hillary E., Parker W., Martin R., Tullia P., Chad S., Dianne M., Ted L., and Scott G. for totally crushing last week’s puzzle and sniffing out the mystery word, CRANBROOK. Thanks for keeping the energy high and the competition fierce in our community. Awesome work!

Dropping an interesting one for you this week, threaders. Let’s see who uncovers the hidden mystery word. It’s playtime!

The Clue: The powerhouse embroidery Queen from Mumbai

The Stakes: Every correct guess earns you points that accumulate for our upcoming raffle. The more you play, the higher your chances of winning. We’ll be holding the grand draw on July 29th! Our lucky winner gets:

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Henri Rousseau’s work seemed perfect for this week’s issue about the tension and friction caused by AI in our lives and businesses. His work blends together reality with fantasy and oftentimes leaves you scratching your head wondering what the painting was all about. Seems pretty apt for our times.