"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare)

Are we spiders or are we frogs? That's the existential question facing us humans after just another revolutionary week in AI technology.
Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video the aspiring filmmaker created on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's his metaphor for the AI moment. The glass half-full represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith acclaims as "beyond belief." The glass crawling with spiders represents the human fear of the unknown, which he acknowledges is not irrational. But I wonder if spiders are the wrong metaphor. Maybe we're the frogs being slowly cooked in that pot of boiling water, not noticing the temperature rise until it's too late and we (don't) wake up with our algorithmic overlords.

The trigger this week was Matt Schumer's viral essay "Something Big is Happening," which got 50 million views by advising 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 Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Microsoft's Satya Nadella both said the naughty part loud: in two years, there may be no white-collar jobs left. Oh dear. But Keith isn't too bothered. His metaphorical glass, he suggests, doesn't contain jobs—it contains the future of life. And he'd rather have time to make art videos of spiders crawling out of glasses than spend six hours curating links. The rest of us may not have that luxury of choice.

This Way to the Pot, Ladies and Gentlemen.

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.

Essays discussed:
Matt Schumer's "Something Big is Happening" got 50 million views
Noah Smith: "The Fall of the Nerds" and "You Are No Longer the Smartest Type of Thing on Earth"
Josh Tyrangiel in The Atlantic: "America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs"
Financial Times: "Anthropic's Breakout Moment"
Tools mentioned:
Claude 4.6 (Anthropic) and CodeX 5.3 (OpenAI): https://www.anthropic.com
Google Veo video generation: https://deepmind.google/technologies/veo/
Keith's new prediction market: https://venturebets.io

People mentioned:
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

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.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keen-on-america/id1448694012 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4MvPXVxAI8u5LtMJIr4S1b

Chapters:
00:00:00 The glass half-full of spiders
00:01:30 Matt Schumer's viral essay
00:03:15 Every week is the biggest week in AI
00:04:30 Claude 4.6 and CodeX 5.3: a step change
00:06:00 Keith builds a prediction market in a day
00:07:45 Fear is a bad operating system
00:09:30 What's actually changed with That Was The Week?
00:12:00 Trusting the algorithm to read for you
00:14:00 Noah Smith: You're no longer the smartest thing on Earth
00:16:00 The rabbit vs. the tiger
00:17:30 Google's quantum computer and parallel universes
00:19:00 America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs
00:20:30 Amodei and Nadella: two years to no white-collar jobs
00:22:00 What's in the glass is the future of life
00:24:00 Anthropic's breakout moment
00:26:00 Claude Code vs. CodeX: Keith switches sides