Anthropic Trounces OpenAI with Its Papal Pivot: Value Investing in Our AI Age

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Saturday, 05/30/2026, the last day in on the last Saturday in May. And, of course, it's time for That Was the Week, our weekly summary of big tech news. We haven't done it for ten days. Last time, with Keith Teare, we asked whether capitalism has a future in the AI age. That was back on May 20, so we haven't done a show for ten days. Before we went live, Keith said to me that it wasn't a big news week this week, but I wonder whether he was conveniently ignoring the big news. The big news, of course, of the week is that Anthropic, not his team, his team is OpenAI, has become the world's most valuable AI startup. It raised $65,000,000,000 this week, putting its value at $900,000,000,000, almost at a trillion dollars, way ahead of OpenAI's last valuation of 730,000,000,000. But as it happens on Keith's notes this week, he talks about something called agency, which we'll come to. There's no mention of this news. So, Keith, have you conveniently ignored the big news of the week, or do you not consider it significant? Will you tell me that it doesn't really matter?

00:01:53 Keith Teare: Well, you heard it here first, but, It's both true and BS at the same time. It's true that, they did a funding round at, that valuation and open a is just slightly behind on funding rounds. That's true.

00:02:11 Andrew Keen: Slightly behind. What's a $150,000,000,000 between friends queue?

00:02:16 Keith Teare: Yeah. But it's gonna be two weeks before it changes again. So it is what it is. It looks

00:02:22 Andrew Keen: You on that two weeks. So you're saying that by mid, June, OpenAI will have overtaken Anthropic again?

00:02:29 Keith Teare: Well, OpenAI is pretty far ahead on IPO filing, and, we're, you know, just behind SpaceX. So I'd strongly expect OpenAI to get through the gate first. Now that is gonna shine a light because both Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna have to write s ones. That's the document you write for the SEC that investors get to read. And the s one has to have audited accounts in it. The most recent ones can be unaudited, but it has to be, you know, accountancy, rubber stamped accounts. And the talker of the town is that Anthropic's revenues are basically lies. What do

00:03:15 Andrew Keen: You mean they're talk I mean, the who is exactly saying that, they're lies, that you mean they're just misleading people? What do you mean talk of the town?

00:03:24 Keith Teare: They're misleading people. Om Malik, go to Om Malik's website, anyone listening, and look at his most recent post, which isn't it's gonna be in next week's newsletter because it only came out. Yeah.

00:03:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. This week, you have a piece from Ome on the copy and the guru. So Ome says that, Anthropic is fraudulent.

00:03:41 Keith Teare: Yeah. And then, go and listen to yesterday's all in podcast discussion about this. It is pretty well received that Anthropic's s one will not have the revenue numbers that have been leaked because they're not real. Now that doesn't mean the numbers are fake. It means they're counting things in revenue that they're really not allowed to count. And that is and the second sub theme there is that Dario Amodei is deceitful and devious.

00:04:12 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You don't like Dario. We've had that many times.

00:04:15 Keith Teare: Well, it's not whether you like it.

00:04:16 Andrew Keen: Hold on. Hold on.

00:04:17 Keith Teare: But It's not about whether you like it. It's whether it's just factual.

00:04:21 Andrew Keen: Can't we just have some love for OpenAI? Can't we credit them that they've done rather well? I mean, they're getting backing from Green Oaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer, the top VC firm. So, presumably, they've looked at their books. They're not gonna pour billions of dollars in without actually knowing exactly what they're investing in. I mean

00:04:42 Keith Teare: You're not wrong. That's a that's a slightly different question than the one you asked, which is the competition with OpenAI. If you just ask me about Anthropic, they released four point eight two days ago. That honestly, they're fantastic. Their stuff is fantastic. I, just to give you a personal anecdote, at SignalRank, we are moving to a regime where we have to have a third party value all of the holdings that we have in the index. So we don't we can't do it ourselves anymore. And yesterday, that third party delivered to us their first assessment of the value of each of our assets. And I had an agent that was creating a valuation report monthly for the for our internal valuation committee, and it had to completely change its rules, and produce the report using this new third party stuff, including making databases, analyzing, and then blending. And in about an hour, Claude had completely changed the entire agent flow and produced an outstanding report that would have taken me days to produce. So It's definitely fantastic. So that so that's not really an issue. And I think Dario, by the way, as a technical leader of a team, is also fantastic. We I've always characterized him as slightly juvenile, making mistakes. I do think that's also true, but it doesn't take away from the other stuff. Right.

00:06:16 Andrew Keen: I mean, it comes to slipperiness or being juvenile, and I'm not quite sure how he compares with either Sam Altman or Elon Musk. That's another question.

00:06:24 Keith Teare: Well, Altman's grown up. I mean, he really has. If you could use some dated stuff. But if you look at his actual statements, the last, I'd say, two months, very different tone. Like, this week, Altman talked a lot about, UBI, and jobs. And whereas Amodei is still fearmongering about, the devastation that's gonna be wreaked by AI. Altman is saying, UBI is not gonna be good enough. What we need is ownership. So humans have to get ownership in the AI platforms in order that the wealth growth benefits them. And he's changed the narrative from UBI to ownership. And, you know, that's an interesting conversation. So I'm, I don't like the fanboy stuff, and you're right to characterize me as tending more towards Altman, than Dario on the on the edge that I've characterized both of them as, not good leaders. And I think that

00:07:31 Andrew Keen: But you have to admit, Keith. I mean, I know it's easy for me to say this, and hindsight's always 2020, that a year or two ago, you always used to say on this show, oh, no one can catch OpenAI. They're gonna be a five, ten, fifteen trillion dollar company. They've already won. They've sewn up the revenue. Everyone's using them. They're the new Kleenex or Google or whatever AI brand. And that's wrong. I mean, a, Anthropic have overtaken them.

00:08:00 Keith Teare: Well, you're using them.

00:08:01 Andrew Keen: Point on, you know, Dario is certainly not the pope. We'll come to the pope later. But they've overtaken them, and their valuation has doubled, what, in the last six months, whereas OpenAI seems a little stalled to say.

00:08:14 Keith Teare: It's more than doubled based on leaked revenue numbers, and I'm predicting on this show that will come back to bite them. And, but it's interesting, Andrew, because you're not one to normally take what VCs do as, gospel. In this case, you you're swallowing whole, what the VCs are doing.

00:08:36 Andrew Keen: Well, are you saying that, like, VCs have been are you saying the VCs are being tricked by these numbers? I mean, they must be seeing what their look. The VCs are acting media.

00:08:47 Keith Teare: No. The VCs are acting rationally, but they're playing a different game. The game the VCs are playing is that they'll make two, maybe three times their money by investing these large sums this late prior to an IPO, and they probably will. But, you know, yesterday, there was a guy, he said he was offered $10,000,000 worth of Anthropic stock at a trillion dollar valuation. This was owned, by the way.

00:09:17 Andrew Keen: Own was offered $10,000,000.

00:09:19 Keith Teare: Was a friend of his. And, they turned it down because when they look at the numbers, the there's no justification. Now that's true, but it's also true that if you invested a trillion, you'll probably make two to three times your money at an IPO. That's also true. And that's because it we're at the stage of everything where, you know, the only way is up. So but looking back Normally, you'd be

00:09:47 Andrew Keen: I take your point, and we will see in the future. I'm not gonna call you on it, but we will do many shows many shows on this subject. We have done many, and we will do many in the future. But looking back and this isn't so much of a critical question. What did you get wrong? What did you misunderstand about the finding because you were convinced that OpenAI had Sona up, that there wasn't gonna be any

00:10:15 Keith Teare: So I'll ask answer a question with a question. Why do you think I'm wrong? I in my view of the world, OpenAI is, executing better. Codex is unbelievable in terms of what it can do. It massively dominates consumer use.

00:10:36 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But not corporate.

00:10:38 Keith Teare: Worldwide. It is now catching up in corporate. It wasn't really playing in corporate. It's now catching up and fast, I think. They just hired the head of sales from a enterprise company. I forget which one it was. They're doubling down on corporate.

00:10:55 Andrew Keen: So how do I okay. So I take your point. So in other words, you're not wrong. In other words, OpenAI

00:11:00 Keith Teare: I don't I don't think I'm wrong. I think I think OpenAI is building, they're both gonna be very valuable. Let's be honest. But OpenAI isn't losing here. It's So

00:11:11 Andrew Keen: Is it still gonna be worth 10 or $15,000,000,000,000 in a few years? Do you

00:11:15 Keith Teare: I said 10. I stick to that. But I and I think Anthropic can be worth 5.

00:11:21 Andrew Keen: Oh. And

00:11:22 Keith Teare: It and so

00:11:23 Andrew Keen: And that friend of Om, if you're listening, invest at the trillion dollar level. You mentioned that, neither Sam Altman or Dario Amodei are the pope, and, of course, there's only one pope. And, apparently, I know this was, slightly older news, but we haven't done a show for ten for ten days. The pope now, of all people, is disrupting Silicon Valley. And interestingly enough, is he's doing it not with, OpenAI executives, but with, one of the cofounders of, Anthropic, Christopher Olah. I've never heard of him. We always joke on this show about how many cofounders. They seem to come out of the woodwork every time. So what do you make of this, Keith? I know it's slightly older news, and it may have come in your newsletter the week before, but you included, John, Thornhill's excellent FTPs on

00:12:16 Keith Teare: Yeah.

00:12:17 Andrew Keen: About disrupting Silicon Valley. Is this a big deal?

00:12:21 Keith Teare: Well, you can learn from everything. So what do we learn from this? Firstly, we learned that Anthropic, sent one of its founders to ask the pope's help in protecting the world from AI. Well, what is that all about?

00:12:37 Andrew Keen: No. He didn't. I mean, he went there to talk about how wealth can be redistributed. I'm not sure he's talking about protection.

00:12:45 Keith Teare: No. He did. The Feet is only picking up on one side of it. And the pope, to give him some credit, emphasized the importance of AI, whilst also, you know, not liking its military uses, which of course is an Anthropic mantra. And so what this really is, a doubling down by Anthropic on trying to create a space, a moral space, where it is the, benign, and concerned. I'd say benign and concerned are the two elements there. Seeking of from all people, the pope, to come onto their team. Whereas, OpenAI is, you know, benign and unconcerned and argues that they're in control, that the AI

00:13:44 Andrew Keen: Maybe the OpenAI should send their cofounder to the chief rabbi or the head of the room or the head of another church or maybe even to the head of the Islamic faith. But, I think you're being a little unkind. I mean, you you're like one of these parents who, for some reason or another, the child cannot satisfy them. Anything they do, you're critical of. You don't give any credit for trying to work with the pope

00:14:09 Keith Teare: Anthropic, you mean?

00:14:10 Andrew Keen: Sorry. Anthropic to address this. I mean, there was an interesting piece. I know you didn't include it in the newsletter from, Noema. It's a very good online magazine.

00:14:20 Keith Teare: Yeah. It is.

00:14:21 Andrew Keen: About what they call the universal destination of goods. They've been calling for a year or two about policies that should induce as many as possible of the people to become owners of capital. You and I have talked about that. I know you're sympathetic to that, and that's something else that the pope addresses in this Magnifica Humanitas

00:14:41 Keith Teare: Well, actually, the only one of the two, embracing that is Altman. Oh, that was exactly Altman's point this week. So

00:14:50 Andrew Keen: Well, maybe he should have sent someone to the Vatican, or maybe he should have shown up himself.

00:14:55 Keith Teare: Well, do you really think the Vatican matters? I don't.

00:14:59 Andrew Keen: I got a lot of press. Are you suggesting it's irrelevant? It's not really news?

00:15:03 Keith Teare: It's, you know, it's a it's a pre medieval institution that believes that there's a super being and that super being talks to this guy.

00:15:13 Andrew Keen: Well, except that it has a lot of political power and significance that it's made significant news. And the fact I mean, I agree with you in some ways, but on the other hand, the fact that the pope of all people is getting involved in conversations about Silicon Valley, that the co the pope in Thornhill's words is disrupting Silicon Valley speaks of how this technology now, for better or worse, is so central to everything.

00:15:36 Keith Teare: Well, I what really happened this week is the opposite, is that, Trump blocked, an AI bill that came from Congress, on the grounds that he doesn't believe government stepping in to have a role in AI as a arbiter of what can be released makes any sense and will slow down America's development. And so, you know, the real news of the week is the opposite of what Anthropic was asking for has happened, which is AI still got independent authority to determine its own future.

00:16:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. No. Anthropic hasn't gone badly out of that. Let's Yeah. So, we will see. This is an ongoing conversation, but Keith clearly does not like I'm not sure if it's Anthropic or it's just, it's just Dario you don't seem to like, but we will come back to that. You're

00:16:29 Keith Teare: Not about whether I like him. It's, whether it's my assessment of him.

00:16:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You don't think much of him?

00:16:36 Keith Teare: I think he's making some mistakes.

00:16:38 Andrew Keen: Well, Dario, if you're watching, even if you're almost at a trillion dollars, Keith says you're making some mistakes. Maybe will you give him some lessons, Keith? Private consulting. Tell him how to run a company properly.

00:16:49 Keith Teare: I do a lot of that with founders, but he's not gonna come and ask, is he? So

00:16:53 Andrew Keen: Would you do it for free? Maybe for some, Anthropic stuff.

00:16:57 Keith Teare: No. I'd do it for free. I enjoy There

00:16:59 Andrew Keen: You are, Dario. Keith here will give you some free advice on how to run your company. Let's move on to your editorial this week about something called human agency, but it's for people listening, can't see the screen, it's spelled a g e n t c y. It's not a typo. What does this word agency, Keith, mean for you?

00:17:24 Keith Teare: It's derived from a bunch of the articles that are in this week's newsletter that are talking about this step change in the use of AI. Tomasz Tunguz is, one of the people writing about it, but there's, several. Reid Hoffman talks about it, and Om Malik, responds to Reid.

00:17:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the Tongue, the Tunguz's piece, skill distillation, I found very interesting. The Malik piece is, called the copy and the guru, and Reid Hoffman features in a Wall Street Journal piece about digital twins. So it's an important issue this week. So what are they all arguing or agreeing or disagreeing on?

00:18:04 Keith Teare: They're disagreeing. Re Reid Hoffman, I think, is a little bit dated in describing AI as a digital twin. And he u he's created, a digital Reid Hoffman. And I can't remember how you can go and use it, but you can go and ask him questions, and it sits on top of all of his body of work.

00:18:21 Andrew Keen: He's a busy guy, Reid. He doesn't have time for you and I. So he's, but he sometimes responds to my email. He's actually a very nice fellow.

00:18:29 Keith Teare: He's a very nice fellow. I agree with you. Reacts to that and saying, look, the purpose of AI isn't to be your digital twin. It's not to make many copies of you. It's actually to allow you to carry out tasks that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do because it would involve too much time and effort. And so you can you can multiply your outputs using AI, and that is agency, agent c.

00:19:00 Andrew Keen: So where's the, so explain where why is the c? Oh, it's so it's a g e n t and then a g e n c y agency. So you're combining the two agents.

00:19:12 Keith Teare: Combining the two, and I'm and I'm what I'm making the point Did

00:19:16 Andrew Keen: You use OpenAI for that, Keith, or do you think of it yourself?

00:19:19 Keith Teare: I thought of it myself. A AI, actually had a very boring view of what the title should be this week. And I said in one word, agency, and it said, oh, that's so much better than what I suggested.

00:19:33 Andrew Keen: I'm gonna ask Anthropic I mean, after we finish this, I'm gonna ask Anthropic if they think it's a bit cheesy.

00:19:38 Keith Teare: They

00:19:38 Andrew Keen: Wouldn't let Anthropic wouldn't let Claude would tell me that was a bit cheesy, but maybe they're a bit higher end than OpenAI.

00:19:45 Keith Teare: But yeah. But you're right to ask. Originally, I didn't have the word human before it. I just said agency, and I decided it's a bit too subtle. So I put the word human. So

00:19:55 Andrew Keen: It's very subtle. Agency.

00:19:56 Keith Teare: And that says human agency. And the point it's making is that these agents are extending your ability to get stuff done. They're not autonomous, and they're not independent. They're really your, assistants, if you will, or better than assistants because they actually do stuff. The example I gave earlier about the valuation exercise at SignalRank is a great example of it. And suddenly, if you look at your week's work, what do you have to get done? If you understand how to use agents and by the way, you don't have to install anything anymore. Agents are now built into both Claude, code and, codex, the OpenAI equivalent. So you can tell them, create agents for each subtask here, and it will do it for you. And the task will get done much more efficiently.

00:20:53 Andrew Keen: So I said to you before we went live, I couldn't agree more with the own position or your position. But isn't it kind of obvious? And you said, no. A lot of people aren't using AI in that way. They're using it, in a kind of or they're seeking digital twins. How are most people using Claude or OpenAI, Trevor?

00:21:15 Keith Teare: It's interesting, Andre. If you if you look at the user interface for the Claude app on a Mac, there's three tabs. The first tab is chat. The second tab is Cowork, and the first third tab is code. And, chat is heavily dominant in use. People are just chatting, looking for answers to questions, which, of course, is a good use case for AI, and it's better since it became less hallucinatory. Cowork, it's where it gets access to your browser and, your, let's say, your word processor or your PowerPoint or your Excel, or other tools, and can work carry out work using your all the tools on your computer. That's pretty powerful. Not many people have are yet doing that. I mean, obviously, quite a few are, but it's not the dominant use. And the third one, which is code, is what developers are using it for. And some non developers who are learning to code for the first time, while not learning to code, learning how to produce code using AI. So I think the middle one, Cowork, actually ends up being super important, but is the least used of the three.

00:22:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You, refer to the Tunguz piece. You he's one of your favorite writers, highly sophisticated, guy in Silicon Valley. And he has a piece called skill distillation, and I'm quoting the intro. He said, I've been using state of the art models to teach small models running on my computer how I work. My personal agent based on pi runs my inbox, my deal pipeline, my blog publishing, my calendar, and my research. It looks like a chatbot.

00:23:05 Keith Teare: It looks less like

00:23:07 Andrew Keen: It looks less like a chatbot and more like a small operating system. So what I found interesting about this is he's clearly a highly sophisticated user investor. He knows his tech. But this is the future ultimately, Keith, for all of us, isn't it?

00:23:22 Keith Teare: I think so. Basically, you get surrounded by, you know, a paraphernalia of stuff that makes you super efficient at getting stuff done. And he calls it

00:23:36 Andrew Keen: Some of us at least. I mean, the Tunguzes of the world, maybe the Keith Teares, but not everyone, but certainly people who know how to use it.

00:23:43 Keith Teare: Yeah. Not everyone. I mean, my, you know, my team at SignalRank, I say, is pretty typical, and they all buy into AI. They all use

00:23:52 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm sure if they didn't, you'd fire them.

00:23:55 Keith Teare: Probably not. But they all use AI, But they look at my use slightly weirdly, I'd say. But the results are getting better and better and better. And so there's there used to be a lot of pushback on my use, and now there isn't because the outputs justify the, you know, doing it. Yeah. So it I think it's a process. And,

00:24:20 Andrew Keen: So where will we be? I mean, Tunguz I mean, I said to you before we went live, it seems to me we're still in the pre the almost the pre web browser moment in AI. Where are we gonna be in five or ten years? There's gonna be software, hardware, interfaces that will just make this seamless, Keith, won't it?

00:24:41 Keith Teare: I think seamless, but to the point of this week's, headline, I think it will become

00:24:48 Andrew Keen: Agency with a c and a y and a t.

00:24:53 Keith Teare: I think it'll become very obvious that what we're witnessing is human evolution, not AI evolution. That AI is not a separate autonomous scary or dangerous thing. It's elevating humans to a new capability level. And, therefore this whole narrative as if AI is something other won't be able to survive because as people use it, becomes clear that it's your thing, not a thing.

00:25:27 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although the Tunguzes, as I said, of the world are gonna be so far ahead. In five or ten years, they'll be on to something else. We will see. It certainly speaks of the concentration of power. I mean, the Tunguz is of the world already powerful and wealthy. They're gonna become even more powerful and wealthy. Your wife, Janae Teer, talks about the concentration of venture capital this week. No surprise. What's happening on that front? What does Janae tell us, Keith?

00:25:57 Keith Teare: Well, she's reporting the news, and the news is that a vast proportion of all the dollars being invested is coming, and this is true at every stage of investing, from less and less funds into less and less companies, and that, therefore, venture capital is not what it used to be. If you are a, you know, a startup or a founder trying to attract capital, at the seed stage, unless you, fall into the, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Ventures.

00:26:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The people who've just put all that all those billions of dollars into, Anthropic this week.

00:26:44 Keith Teare: Unless you tick their boxes, it's gonna be a struggle for you to raise capital. Now last week when you were away, I wrote the editorial about venture capital, and I made the point that, paradoxically, this may be a good thing.

00:27:01 Andrew Keen: For who? Venture capitalists or entrepreneurs?

00:27:04 Keith Teare: Actually, for, pensioners. What what's big picture, venture capital has not been returning money to the source, which is pension funds. Since 2021, investments are being lost. Large amounts of money being lost and funds, underperforming. And so there was a liquidity crisis in venture capital. And, paradoxically, this the rise of AI and the concentration is, the saving grace because if you can invest hundreds of billions of dollars and in a very short space of time because of IPOs, return two to three times your investment, that money will flow back to pension funds and ultimately will provide capital for the early stage funds as well as everyone else. And so what we might be witnessing here is a fix, not something broken, but actually a fix for the entire venture ecosystem. For that to be true, these IPOs have to happen, be liquid, and money has to be returned to the pension funds that originally gave it. That seems quite likely to happen,

00:28:24 Andrew Keen: Isn't it? I mean, certainly, the, IPO is supposedly later this year of x, of, Musk's conglomeration, SpaceX, whatever he calls it these days, OpenAI, and then, Anthropic will be very interesting. But I think also Janae's point, and this has been happening for a while now, this concentration of power and wealth, of course, venture capital, but it's everywhere, which also is it explains why the poke has become involved in these conversations about Yeah. Figuring out and I know you you've often talked about this, about we gotta figure out ways of redistributing both power and wealth. So the fact that the pope is involving himself in this conversation, even if it's with the help of Anthropic, is presumably a good thing, Keith, isn't it?

00:29:24 Keith Teare: It's a good thing if it translates into a real conversation about the future of society in a leisure heavy world. That transformation hasn't happened yet. It It's gonna take

00:29:39 Andrew Keen: A while. I mean, there is some skepticism, and the Guardian, wonders whether this Anthropic alliance, and they're a little skeptical like you. The alliance with the pope on AI is a form of Vatican washing, which is an interesting way of putting it.

00:29:57 Keith Teare: Yeah. That I'd, yeah, two things can be true at the same time. I think I think probably there's truth in that. If it feels as if Anthropic is highly strategic in what it choose to do based on its internal needs. Neither on topic nor open eye can yet be trusted with a societal level narrative.

00:30:24 Andrew Keen: So who do we trust then? And there was a piece in The Verge which connected to an interesting interview with Sundar Pichai, the, CEO of Google. Can we trust the grown ups? I mean, Sergey and Larry joked about bringing a grown up in when they brought in Eric Schmidt to run the company at the beginning of the century when they became a real company. Is Google, maybe Amazon, maybe Microsoft, are they the grown ups? Are they more trustworthy on this front?

00:30:56 Keith Teare: I you know, I'd characterize Google as the most capitalist of them all. It's

00:31:02 Andrew Keen: In a good or a bad way? Both.

00:31:06 Keith Teare: Look. Here's the question that needs to be answered. How can the benefits of capitalism end up producing a better society?

00:31:15 Andrew Keen: Or redistributing at least the wealth and power in a fairer way to everybody rather than just a tiny group

00:31:22 Keith Teare: Of billionaires. Yeah. I agree with that, but I also have a slight reaction against the word redistributing because it makes it feel like welfare.

00:31:34 Andrew Keen: Redirecting. I

00:31:36 Keith Teare: I would say, Leveraging.

00:31:42 Andrew Keen: Re

00:31:42 Keith Teare: Leverage. Leveraging the growth of wealth to benefit society as a whole, not through welfare, but through uplifting everything. What is that? And, you know, for that to be answered, Altman is arguing for ownership, mass ownership of these companies. I don't think that really cuts it. I think it, eventually, it comes down to, you know, an impossible problem, which is capturing the wealth that is privately owned for common good.

00:32:24 Andrew Keen: Now at least you're not talking about your friend Elon's vision of the end of money.

00:32:29 Keith Teare: Well, Elon honestly is closer to understanding this than anyone. He hasn't got a practical plan yet, but he at least can describe the processes that are that are gonna happen.

00:32:40 Andrew Keen: And I as you know, and you and I have argued on this endlessly, I really loathe Elon Musk, but I think you're right on that front. I think that he has nothing to lose. He doesn't care what his marketing people tell him. I mean, Dario and Sam are probably still being pushed around by their marketing people or their strategic people. Musk says whatever he likes, and you're right in the sense that he addresses it directly. Yeah. And my interview of the week is with Eric Ries, a very influential writer. He's famous, of course, for his concept of the lean startup, which acquired a great deal of popularity in the twenty teens, an iconic book. And,

00:33:23 Keith Teare: Here's the book, Andrew.

00:33:25 Andrew Keen: You got the book? You're waving the book? Well, he has a new book out. It's called Incorruptible. What seems to me what was interesting about my conversation is, clearly, he's being pushed around by the zeitgeist. He's gone from fetishizing the lean startup to talking about how companies can be more mature and responsible. But I thought that the conversation with, Ries I mean, he doesn't speak on behalf of Silicon Valley. He lives in the North Bay. But he still sees morality coming from within companies. So his model are companies like Patagonia, moral companies, maybe Anthropic. We talked about that. Do you believe in that Ries model of the only way in which we're gonna get a more moral capitalism is by corporations being more moral key?

00:34:12 Keith Teare: No. I'm pretty happy with corporations just being purely profit driven. Of course, there's limits to what you can do. The law governs that in pursuing profit. I'm more interested in what happens to the profit than the I don't really want to you know, it's like, saying to a world champion boxer, you should punch more soft because he might hurt the other person. That doesn't make any sense.

00:34:39 Andrew Keen: You don't want a you don't want a capitalism dominated by Patagonia style companies?

00:34:44 Keith Teare: It'd make me throw up, to be honest. I mean, I don't look to companies as being

00:34:48 Andrew Keen: Throw up live for us?

00:34:51 Keith Teare: If pushed hard enough, quite possibly. But, you know, I don't look to companies to be moral guides. I look at the I want them to be good companies. You know, when you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing fast and making profit. That's it. There's nothing more to it. That's

00:35:10 Andrew Keen: So Sundar, That's your message to Sundar. I shouldn't worry at all about morality. This is a $5,000,000,000,000 company now.

00:35:16 Keith Teare: I don't think it's the company's job. I do think Sundar personally should. I think individuals who care about the future absolutely should start making plans for societal good, but the job of their company is to produce wealth.

00:35:31 Andrew Keen: Okay. So we've established that. So where does the moral guidance come in? We'd come back. Let maybe we'll end where we began with the pope, Keith. I mean, it's gotta come from somewhere.

00:35:42 Keith Teare: Yeah. I wouldn't put too much

00:35:44 Andrew Keen: Okay. So we've done away with the pope. We've done away with Sundar and Dario and Sam. Where does the moral guidance come from?

00:35:51 Keith Teare: Honestly, you end up with, you end up having to discuss politics. The let's call it the, in sociological terms, the, superstructure and civil society. Our politicians are massively disappointing. Massively disappointing.

00:36:10 Andrew Keen: So it comes from politicians?

00:36:12 Keith Teare: No. It doesn't. That's the problem.

00:36:13 Andrew Keen: It should do. That's your point.

00:36:15 Keith Teare: Yeah. And in the absence of that, what you get is populism because the people care. The people care about the future. And if politicians can't be trusted, they end up, you know, going elsewhere. There there's a couple of articles already in next week's newsletter about, liberal nationalism, one from Noah Smith. And I do think that populism is the unintended consequence of lack of legal

00:36:43 Andrew Keen: That's another criticism. Where does it I you're dodging the question. Where does the moral guidance come from?

00:36:48 Keith Teare: I think it probably comes from the populists.

00:36:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I don't disagree. So, was it a big Newsweek, Keith? You began by saying it wasn't. I think you have to acknowledge it. Was a little bigger than you acknowledge.

00:37:02 Keith Teare: I yes. I was wrong.

00:37:04 Andrew Keen: And can we credit Anthropic? Is this, maybe you should slip one of those pieces into your newsletter to acknowledge that the news that Anthropic, I'm this is my you know, you I don't I don't really know. Bad year for football. So Anthropic's my new team. I've replaced Spurs with Anthropic. We have to at least acknowledge on this show that this is big news. Anthropic tops OpenAI, at least according to the New York Times, tops AI tops OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup. Keith says that's not really true, but it kind of is true. Yeah. That's big news.

00:37:41 Keith Teare: Look. I think our listeners need to understand what's happening here is every week, I write an editorial and a title, and Andrew's job is to write an alternative editorial and title. And what he's just set up, I guarantee this is his prediction, that when you look at the Keen On version of this show, and compare the, top bullet points, it's gonna be the opposite of mine.

00:38:08 Andrew Keen: Great news, in other words. Well, Keith, as always, you're a good sport. Excellent conversation. We will talk again next week when no doubt we will tussle over the moral credibility of your friend, Dario Amodei. Have a good week, Keith, and we'll talk in a week's time.

00:38:24 Keith Teare: Will do. Bye, everyone.