E136: Hacking the pod, Threads launches, Fed minutes, immigration, balloon farce, heart health

But I think what we're going to find there is that there's some pretty useful use cases, but narrow, where these chat interfaces are very useful and the usage will decay to that number. And that number is probably a fraction of what the peak was.

When you have those kinds of experiences, it makes you just want to go to Google, which is what I did. I eventually went to Google to find what I was looking for.

And so I think if you think about the evolution of user interfaces in computing, chat as an interface faces quite a bit of friction.

Over the next four to six weeks, they're going to have massive launches out of the AI side of the business.

And, you know, rage quitting Twitter because you're not a fan of the product right now or Elon isn't a successful long term use case, because all of those people will eventually come back.

And the people who use Twitter are really addicted to using Twitter. It's where the conversation is. There is a strong network effect there, not just around the users and the social graph, but like the habit of daily usage.

But the Fed did engage in a huge intervention to save the banking system. And they may not be done with that yet.

The UK, it seems like, I don't know what you guys think, it's definitely going to 7%. And it could go to 8%. I mean, it could be a very bad situation for the UK. They're in a lot of trouble.

To your point, David, a lot of these companies will have to thread a needle because if rates don't go down materially in the next 18 to 24 months, these folks are going to be paying rates that they cannot bear.

China economically, I don't know where the demand is going to come from. You know, on the same time that their internal demand is imploding, they're creating all these export controls that I think are not going to actually help them solve the problem because it just accelerates Western economies' desire to delever from China.

But clearly the economy is not crashing. We had a lot of people who said that the economy was going to hit the skids in Q1 or Q2 of this year due to these higher rates. The economy is incredibly resilient.

Hard landing was sort of the Druckenmiller thing that I think that, you know, I said, I think it was a few weeks ago. It's very difficult to see a hard landing when China stimulates just because of their natural gravitational pull in the world economy.

Yeah, look, I don't think we're out of the woods quite yet. So Druckenmiller, by the way, said that he was predicting a hard landing in the second half of the year. We're just starting the second half of the year. So he's still got six months to be proven correct.

It hasn't helped the commercial real estate guys, I don't think. That's why there are still, I think, huge problems in the commercial real estate sector.

I know, but the other side of this is the trend, again, there is no doubt oversupply and a problem, particularly in a place like San Francisco, where we're going to see some blowups because nobody wants to, you know, to enter a long-term lease in a city that's under siege.

I'll make a prediction right now. My prediction is the federal government is going to help to monetize that debt, and they're going to help to support that commercial real estate sector through some sort of structured lending program.

Do you think there's going to be a TARP-like program for real estate assets and for private... I'll take the other side of that.

I just don't think it's that draconian. Rates are not that high.

So by continuing to constrict the money supply, have rates that are relatively elevated, maybe a quarter or two longer than they need to, it gives them a lot of positive optionality if they need to step in if something bad really happens.

I talk with a lot of people in the farm economy, as you guys know, and this is an endemic problem in California agriculture, is that the lack of a labor force that allows the farms to be profitable is really impacting folks' ability to operate and to grow, and that ultimately translates into consumer prices and so on.

But already, by my estimate, these guys get to 100 million, which looks like they may be able to get to tonight.

So if this instead gets integrated into Instagram, I think it's much more dangerous to Twitter than as a standalone product. As a standalone product, I tend to think it's DOA for the most part.

So I wouldn't just look at the signups here. I think you have to look at the amount of posting and the actual usage before you know that Twitter has a threat.

And it just gets back to this culture of flattening the organization, speeding up the organization.

So yeah, again, it's part of the hype cycle and we all kind of fell for it. The only winner here is NVIDIA. I think the loser here are most of the VCs who pumped in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and ran those stuff too early.

Then on top of that, try downloading plugins. It's still a pain in the ass. And if you don't have a plugin, I think there are only 500,000 people using plugin. If you don't have a plugin, you have no new data past 2021, which makes it dead on arrival as a product.