Two Years Till We're Cooked: The Death of White Collar Work and Other Human Things
"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare)
Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's a metaphor for the AI moment. The water represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith calls "beyond belief." The spiders represent the fear, which he acknowledges is not irrational. But maybe spiders are the wrong metaphor. Maybe we're the frogs being slowly boiled, not noticing the temperature rise until it's too late.
The trigger was Matt Schumer's viral essay "Something Big is Happening," which got 50 million views by telling engineers to become AI experts immediately or become irrelevant. Keith tested the thesis: he built venturebets.io, a prediction market, in a single day. He automated That Was The Week so completely that his weekly workflow dropped from six hours to under one. But then Dario Amodei and Satya Nadella both said the quiet part loud: in two years, there may be no white-collar jobs left. Keith's response? The glass doesn't contain jobs—it contains the future of life. And he'd rather have time to make videos of spiders crawling out of glasses than spend six hours curating links. The rest of us may not have the luxury of choosing.
About the Guest
Keith Teare is a serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of SignalRank, and author of the newsletter That Was The Week. He co-hosts the weekly tech roundup on Keen On America.
References
Essays discussed:
● Matt Schumer's "Something Big is Happening" went viral with 50 million views, arguing that engineers must become AI experts immediately or face obsolescence.
● Noah Smith published two essays: "The Fall of the Nerds" and "You Are No Longer the Smartest Type of Thing on Earth," arguing that humanity's destiny is now mostly out of our own hands.
● Josh Tyrangiel wrote "America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs" in The Atlantic.
● The Financial Times published "Anthropic's Breakout Moment" on the company's enterprise momentum.
Tools and companies mentioned:
● Claude 4.6 from Anthropic and CodeX 5.3 from OpenAI represent a "step change" in agentic AI—you give tasks, not prompts, and sub-agents complete them autonomously.
● Google Veo is Google's video generation tool, which Keith used to create the glass-half-full-of-spiders metaphor.
● Polymarket and Kalshi are prediction markets that Keith's new venturebets.io aims to match in quality.
People mentioned:
● Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted that white-collar jobs may be gone in two years.
● Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, echoed Amodei's prediction about the end of white-collar work.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Spotify
Chapters:
- (00:00) - The glass half-full of spiders
- (01:30) - Matt Schumer's viral essay
- (03:15) - Every week is the biggest week in AI
- (04:30) - Claude 4.6 and CodeX 5.3: a step change
- (06:00) - Keith builds a prediction market in a day
- (07:45) - Fear is a bad operating system
- (09:30) - What's actually changed with That Was The Week?
- (12:00) - Trusting the algorithm to read for you
- (14:00) - Noah Smith: You're no longer the smartest thing on Earth
- (16:00) - The rabbit vs. the tiger
- (17:30) - Google's quantum computer and parallel universes
- (19:00) - America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs
- (20:30) - Amodei and Nadella: two years to no white-collar jobs
- (22:00) - What's in the glass is the future of life
- (24:00) - Anthropic's breakout moment
- (26:00) - Claude Code vs. CodeX: Keith switches sides
00:00 - The glass half-full of spiders
01:30 - Matt Schumer's viral essay
03:15 - Every week is the biggest week in AI
04:30 - Claude 4.6 and CodeX 5.3: a step change
06:00 - Keith builds a prediction market in a day
07:45 - Fear is a bad operating system
09:30 - What's actually changed with That Was The Week?
12:00 - Trusting the algorithm to read for you
14:00 - Noah Smith: You're no longer the smartest thing on Earth
16:00 - The rabbit vs. the tiger
17:30 - Google's quantum computer and parallel universes
19:00 - America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs
20:30 - Amodei and Nadella: two years to no white-collar jobs
22:00 - What's in the glass is the future of life
24:00 - Anthropic's breakout moment
26:00 - Claude Code vs. CodeX: Keith switches sides
:43 — Introduction to "AI Fallout"
Andrew Keen: Hello everybody, it’s Sunday, February the 15th, 2026. We are back to our weekly tech roundup with my old friend Keith Teare from That Was The Week. This week, Keith leads with a video... It’s the image of a half-full glass. (Pause) One glass was half-full of delicious-looking water, the other glass was half-full of very unpleasant-looking insects. Keith, I assume this was made on AI?
Keith Teare: It was made on Google’s... what’s it called? I forget what they call it—Veo. Their video generation tool.
2:14 — The End of White-Collar Work
Keith Teare: It was really driven by the essay "Something Big is Happening" written by Matt Schumer... saying that the end of, in quotes, "white-collar work" is much nearer than any of us imagine. And secondly, advice to people, especially engineers, is: become the expert in using AI in your environment very quickly, because a year from now everyone will be an expert.
4:04 — The Speed of AI Obsolescence
Andrew Keen: What is he saying that’s original or important?
Keith Teare: Timing. That it’s happening now and literally next week, unless you change what you’re doing, you’re going to become irrelevant.
Andrew Keen: Wow, that’s dramatic. Every week though, Keith, we hear the same message... When’s this going to stop?
Keith Teare: I think implicit in the very nature of AI is that it isn’t going to stop.
5:13 — Shift to Multi-Agent Systems
Keith Teare: Anthropic's Claude 4.6 and CodeX 5.3... are a step change in how you use AI. In the past, you kind of had this interface where you typed in prompts... Now, you type in things to be carried out, and the agent creates multiple sub-agents, each with different tasks, and only comes back to you when it’s finished.
8:36 — Reality Check on AI Quality
Andrew Keen: I like your product... but it’s a series of links. I’m not sure why it takes you six hours to put together.
Keith Teare: Two weeks ago that entire process took about, I don’t know, five to six hours... This week it took less than an hour... I gave the feeds to an AI agent. It reads them every morning... It then builds a draft, which it iterates daily. It’s building it, not me.
14:27 — AI as the "Tiger"
Andrew Keen: Noah Smith... said if the pet rabbit had been a tiger, he’d be dead. Is he suggesting... that AI is the tiger and we might be walking into a trap here?
Keith Teare: Yes. He is. Absolutely that.
15:39 — Quantum Computing and Civilizations
Keith Teare: A YouTube video immediately came in and said that silence in the universe is a function of the fact that when AI meets quantum computing, civilizations get wiped out.
17:18 — The Two-Year Job Deadline
Keith Teare: Two years from now there may be no white-collar jobs left.
Andrew Keen: What is a white-collar job? You mean like a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer?
Keith Teare: The AI will be better than any human at almost every one of those jobs.
19:50 — Anthropic vs. OpenAI
Andrew Keen: Are you beginning to acknowledge that Anthropic is a real competitor to OpenAI?
Keith Teare: Anthropic clearly is an enterprise-facing revenue generator, and OpenAI is a consumer-facing revenue generator... Anthropic is about one-third to one-quarter of the size of OpenAI measured by revenue and by valuation. But that’s closer than it used to be.
24:10 — Google's 100-Year Bond
Andrew Keen: Google gearing up to sell a 100-year bond to fund some of their investment in AI... Are these companies now more powerful financially than governments?
Keith Teare: To buy a corporate bond, you have to believe that company is going to be around for 100 years... It does represent confidence in longevity of Google.
26:15 — Humanoid Robots (Apptronik)
Andrew Keen: Your startup of the week is Apptronik, a humanoid... robot startup that’s raised almost a billion dollars... Where are we with companies like Apptronik?
Keith Teare: With LLMs and reasoning and now these... continuous learning models... they’re going to be able to manage the real world while reasoning about the real world.
29:10 — Closing Thoughts on Human Agency
Andrew Keen: My observation of two types of people... people who use this technology who will become busier and busier... and everybody else is going to be out of luck.
Keith Teare: Which of those [futures] ends up happening really comes down to what we want to happen and how we act to make it happen.
Andrew Keen: Thank you so much, Keith. Bye.