We Are (Not) the Champions: Why Silicon Valley Isn’t Providing an AI Human Dividend

That Was the Week — August 22, 2026
Andrew Keen with Keith Teare

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, August 22, 2026. We're getting towards the end of the summer, and there are two themes on the tech front. On the one hand, as, two of my VC friends from Silicon Valley suggested in an earlier show this week, Dave McClure and Aman Verjee, we're on the brink of a $7 trillion future when OpenAI and Anthropic go public. They're both forecasting that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX will be collectively worth about $7 trillion. So that's the good news, I guess, if you wanna think in good and bad news. The bad news, at least in terms of Silicon Valley, is that AI isn't popular. Ed Luce had a piece in the Financial Times this week suggesting that AI phobia has become America's new consensus, and America's best historian, I think, Jill Lepore, had a weekend essay, in the FT suggesting that, AI versus the people will define the politics not just of 2026, but of 2028. So this division between the economic locomotive of AI and the resistance, the unpopularity of it is, the theme of Keith Teare's We Are the Champions editorial for That Was the Week. And Keith, as always, is joining me from the center of innovation, perhaps the most unpopular place in America, Silicon Valley. Keith, would you agree that these two, realities are kind of jarring? On the one hand, it's clear that the AI economy is remarkably successful and profitable. On the other hand, most Americans, are increasingly suspicious of AI.

00:02:35 Keith Teare: I think I don't agree, but I do agree that that's the zeitgeist. I think the zeitgeist exaggerates the negativity. I think in fact, most intelligent people are now using AI from very young, high school onwards, and just don't talk about it. So the loudest voices are negative. And I fear for the Democrats that they're gonna embrace that, assuming it's a populist rejection of AI and end up handing the election to the Republicans.

00:03:14 Andrew Keen: But then what's the point of your editor—? You said, who are they and this is about champions, AI champions, and we'll come to those. You say in the beginning of your editorial that, you're concerned that the AI argument— I'm quoting you here. It's not the best English. The AI argument keeps arriving in negative form. So isn't that the problem that people aren't making the best argument for AI? Or is that— what that seems to be what you're saying in your editorial.

00:03:47 Keith Teare: Well, I am saying that, but if you weigh on a weighing machine, the people using it to good effect and the people speaking against it, I suspect the users who are happy with it massively dominate. And the— but the voices are dominated by the negative. So in fact, it's a complex judgment call whether we're really on this anti-AI binge or whether it's really fake because the people that are happy with AI don't feel the need to evangelize it. They just use it.

00:04:28 Andrew Keen: But then what's the point of all your hysteria? Your— it's almost like a weekly hysteria. You— a hysteria you have about everyone who's critical of AI. It doesn't really matter. I mean, we were before we went live, we were talking about Gary Marcus's, arguments, and he's one of the leading critics of AI. You suggested that, he's out of control. He's an old friend, been on the show many times. Maybe he is out of control, but you just don't have to read him. So what?

00:05:00 Keith Teare: I think you can conclude that. You could nail me with, why you're talking about champions when you say there isn't really a problem. I think that there is a different problem. That's why. The problem isn't negativity. The problem is lack of vocal connection between AI and people's futures. Vocal connection. So AI is missing an articulate group of people who together are reinforcing an understanding of the future that will make normal people happy that it's happening. I think it's missing that. I think anyone who examines it does draw those conclusions. But, of course, in normal life, most people don't examine these things. They just live through them. So the editorial is trying to stake a claim and saying, okay. Well, there are champions. They don't speak coherently altogether, but here they are. Here's what they're all doing. Let's try to fill that gap. The gap that is the, I'd say, silence of the majority. So that the minority who are, politicizing negativity can be exposed as a minority.

00:06:21 Andrew Keen: It's Nixon's— so you're reintroducing Nixon's silent majority. So this idea of champions, what does that mean? I mean, anyone who works for an AI company is, by definition, an AI champion. You don't include Amodei in this. You put Sam Altman. I don't wanna get back in the Altman versus Amodei, OpenAI versus Anthropic argument. But isn't, by definition, anyone who works in the sector, and it's increasingly the sector, everything in Silicon Valley, everything in innovation is built around AI. They're championing AI, is— aren't they?

00:07:01 Keith Teare: Well, I think the answer is not necessarily. They're very circumspect. There's— there is a— you could call it nuance, but I don't think it's nuance. I think it's defensiveness. There's a circumspection and a defensiveness due to the belief that the negative, ideas are strong and dominant. And people don't want to get on a bandwagon and go on in the other direction fully, so they nuance everything to the point where they're really not making a point. Yes. On the margin by the way, I left out Elon as well as Amodei, so I was fairly balanced with who I left out. I tried to pick the middle, the mainstream, if you will. And I do believe that if you are tactically running an AI company today, you've got this little voice in the back of your head saying, don't upset anybody, and don't pretend it's safe even if it is because people don't believe it is. So it's almost like they're being trained as politicians as opposed to business leaders. Meanwhile, of course, they are running a business and doing very well as you acknowledged. But it— but that isn't ideal, is it? I mean, can you imagine any other major breakthrough in human history where people would be shy to champion it? It's kind of a strange feeling to me.

00:08:30 Andrew Keen: You, in the newsletter this week, you referred to a— an— a tweet by David Sacks, the former— AI czar— Trump's AI czar, now kind of a conservative commentator, very critical of Amodei, and, Anthropic. I'm quoting the tweet. Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute. We believe it is too powerful to centralize. Dario appears to believe sincerely that safety and progress are best served by centralizing authority in a marriage of corporate and state power. The weight of human history gives us reason to fear that outcome. Now I'm in Dario's camp. I don't wanna have this argument again with you. I know you're not. But couldn't you at least acknowledge that you may not agree with Dario's conclusion, but he's championing trying to champion something?

00:09:29 Keith Teare: He's championing, handcuffs on AI. He is championing, but it's handcuffs. State power, how could you interpret that other than handcuffs? And so he is basically saying don't trust us, but if you are gonna trust us, just trust me because I'm big and centralized. And that if you look at Martin Vazovsky's [unclear] Post of the Week this week, which is all about what you can do without centralized AI, and it's a lot. There are really two trends. You could think of it as a purely capitalist libertarian trend that doesn't want the state involved and believes people will get control over, distributed intelligence through their own hardware at the edge. Vazovsky even says it could be done without the electricity grid. So imagine some, you know, post-nuclear situation. As long as you've got a box and some solar power, you have the world's intelligence in that box. It wouldn't have been destroyed, and it's there forever. So there's that libertarian trend which Vazovsky really embodies. And then there's the corporate state power trend which Dario embodies. I think most people are somewhere in the middle. I'm in the middle. I don't mind, large AI companies investing lots of money to deliver stuff at scale that would be very hard to deliver otherwise. I'm fine with that.

00:11:05 Andrew Keen: You know what they said about the middle, Keith, in Texas? The only thing in the middle of the road, squashed armadillos. So you really wanna be squashed? You gotta take a position. Either you're in the Sacks camp or you're in the Amodei camp. My sense with you is, for all this fiddling around, you're in the Sacks camp if you had to choose between the two.

00:11:27 Keith Teare: I agree with Sacks, I'd say, 90%. Yeah.

00:11:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So you're in his camp. You're not in the middle. But I don't— why even talk about being in the middle? You're a Sacks guy.

00:11:37 Keith Teare: I don't think he has a camp. I think my book—

00:11:40 Andrew Keen: What do you mean he doesn't have a camp? Of course, he does. I mean, for better or worse, he has a position.

00:11:45 Keith Teare: He's just an individual. He has no followers. He has no movement. He doesn't represent—

00:11:50 Andrew Keen: I don't mean his camp. I don't mean that Sacks has a camp itself. But that position, that general position that, against the idea of centralizing authority and whether it's marriage of corporate state.

00:12:03 Keith Teare: Agree with— that's the 10% I don't agree with. I'm completely happy. Let me say it again. With centralized large AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm totally happy. So that differentiates me from Sacks. I'm also totally happy that the edge is growing, which, also differentiates me from Amodei. And I believe that the human outcome or the dividend we'll get from this is free intelligence that needs investment. And I don't believe that investment can come without large centralized corporations.

00:12:46 Andrew Keen: Jill Lepore argues that in the past— I mean, she's a historian— that the car industry, for example, she writes about in AI Versus the People, she has a new book on this, that required a degree of regulation. I mean, this is, again, a debate that's ongoing about whether or not innovative industries need to be regulated. What's your take? Do you agree with Lepore that AI isn't any different from the car industry, for example, that require the degree of regulation about how one can drive, the laws of the road, that AI needs the same sort of stone [unclear]?

00:13:28 Keith Teare: Yes and no. The no bit is that, AI is just, you know, corporations. And there are already regulations surrounding corporations. And there is nothing new needed to govern corporations. Every legal remedy needed for anyone who does anything illegal is already in place. And so the call for special regulation is not required. I don't think AI itself as a technology needs regulating. I don't think it's dangerous. I think it's safe. I think it's not only safe. It's fantastic for humans to use it unless you use it more and more. [as spoken] And anything that slows that down is anti-progressive. So on the whole, I disagree with her. I do agree that in general, states need to regulate corporate behavior to stop, illegality, and that's fine. And so, you know, AI companies have to live within the law just like everybody else. But I think what is happening, and this is especially true in journalism and book publishing, is if you want to sell, you have to create a bandwagon. And the bandwagon around regulating AI is a fairly weak one.

00:14:53 Andrew Keen: So you're suggesting that, Jill Lepore made that argument in order to sell a book or sell to publishers. I don't think she quite needs that. I mean, she's America's leading historian.

00:15:07 Keith Teare: Well, historians usually don't comment, on current opinion. So she's obviously not acting as an historian in this piece. She's acting as an opinion piece. And that opinion, AI Versus the People, is fundamentally, gonna damage the left in America by identifying against AI. I honestly think they will lose in 2028 if they stick to that idea, and quite heavily.

00:15:36 Andrew Keen: There was— I— we didn't put it. I didn't think you put it in the newsletter, but there was an interesting Ezra Klein has probably the most popular podcast show, certainly amongst progressives. He interviewed Helen Toner, who used to be on the OpenAI board. She was one of the people involved in the scandal when, Altman was try— was being pushed out. She talks about AI already being out of control, the Hugging Face episode. You said it— they're completely safe. Are you not concerned at all about the Hugging Face incident or the fact that AI seem, at least in the language of Toner's conversation with Klein, to be out of control?

00:16:22 Keith Teare: Honestly, no. The Hugging Face incident was contrived in a lab to try to see how far AI would go in order to achieve a goal. And, the only critical part of it could be that they didn't pay attention, so it took them a few days to figure out what was going on. But it was a laboratory experiment, and it wasn't very damaging, frankly. It— I mean, these AI tools, and now this is true even for normal individuals like Grok Build can control browsers, login sessions to websites, your hard drive and the files on it, that— you know, we are giving them access so they can achieve things for us. Like yesterday, I got a text from [unclear] saying, your calendar's telling you to drop off the car at the airport at 3:30, but your flight's at 4:11. So ignore that. You need to check it in by 2:30. And it knew that because it had access to my calendar, and it knew where I was on my GPS on my phone. So it— so we're opening ourselves up to AI having access to software and tools. And, you know, outside of the context of what's called a harness, then you may have a fear that it's gonna do things. But it doesn't have a consciousness where it has a plan. It only has the goals that you set for it. So if I said to the AI, I want you to delete my calendar, it would.

00:18:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You should listen to the Toner piece. You clearly haven't. But, I mean, you were— I would— you weren't expecting to—

00:18:07 Keith Teare: Listen to what?

00:18:09 Andrew Keen: The Toner conversation with Klein. In your, in your editorial, you said—

00:18:13 Keith Teare: Are you telling me I'm ignorant of something?

00:18:19 Andrew Keen: Well, I— it would just— yeah. I mean, you're dismissive rather than ignorant.

00:18:23 Keith Teare: Well, I think I'm an expert that uses it, so I think they're the ones who are—

00:18:29 Andrew Keen: Well, Toner was on the OpenAI board. Now she runs a foundation [ed.: Toner is executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology]. But, anyway—

00:18:33 Keith Teare: we all know how bad the OpenAI board was. It wasn't technical, Andrew. That— you shouldn't elevate people above their station.

00:18:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Why—

00:18:44 Keith Teare: do you do that? Do you actually— do you think she has actually got technical chops and the sounds of this stuff [unclear]?

00:18:50 Andrew Keen: Well, actually— sounds certainly more intelligent than some other people I can think of.

00:18:56 Keith Teare: Like me.

00:18:57 Andrew Keen: You say that intelligence needs to be metered, funded, built, distributed, and made cheap enough. We've talked about some of those. I'm curious about the metered element. We haven't talked much about Stripe on the show. But for you and— I'm curious what this means. Stripe— you see Stripe as a champion. They usually get pretty good press. You in the edit— in the newsletter this week, you quoted, you linked to a piece by Alex Wilhelm on Stripe wanting to meter intelligence. What does that mean, Keith, metering intelligence?

00:19:37 Keith Teare: It's a little bit like metering bandwidth. You know, when you sign up for AT&T, they send you a bill every month for the package that you put down their pipes. Well, the AI companies, as we can all see, are having to invest crazily large amounts of money to build the ability to deliver access to intelligence as a shorthand of what they're delivering. And metering, it just means they need to get paid for the investment. Metering means you get charged according to your use. They're being fairly generous, to be honest, because they're giving us money—

00:20:22 Andrew Keen: Stripe or the providers?

00:20:24 Keith Teare: The providers first. Stripe's just a payment—

00:20:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah.

00:20:28 Keith Teare: A payment—

00:20:29 Andrew Keen: So Stripe can do that. I mean, I agree with you on this. I mean, when I use, and I brought this up last time, this hasn't happened again with me. I pay $100 a month for Anthropic, for Claude. But I'm not entirely clear what I can and can't use. I've never been throttled before, but last week, I was, and I didn't really understand why. And there was no way for me to determine, how much quota I was using. So is that what you mean by metering?

00:21:00 Keith Teare: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, if you— there is a way. We won't explain it now because it's too convoluted, but you can go to log in on their website, and you'll see your token usage, and you'll see your quotas and what percentage are left in the day, the week, and the month. And that $100 buys you something. It's a specific amount. It's actually a very generous amount. They're losing money on you. So when they throttle you, you've really been using it. And, at the moment, if they charged what they would have to charge to be profitable on you individually, you'd probably have to pay, you know, $200 to $400 a month, maybe even more.

00:21:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I— so but even the Internet, I mean, my Comcast where I get my bandwidth from, my, I mean, I'm sure you can check it, but it— they still— they don't make it very easy. It's still a hard thing to do.

00:21:57 Keith Teare: It's a hard thing to do. And to be honest, most of the most these days, most of the metered plans on anything in the Internet are, a little bit like your mobile phone. It is a subscription that's hard to go to burst through. You can burst through them if you really try hard, but it's hard. So it's mostly flat pricing on a subscription, and that's what you and me pay for the AI companies.

00:22:24 Andrew Keen: So what I don't understand, you're saying, though, that we're getting good pricing, that all these companies are losing on us. But you're also saying that AI intelligence needs to be made cheap enough.

00:22:38 Keith Teare: Yes.

00:22:38 Andrew Keen: So should be— should they— I mean, I take your point on the metering, and, certainly, Stripe is a champion here. I don't think anyone's gonna argue with you on that, although that's the nature of their business. So it doesn't require any sacrifice on their part. But how are we gonna get this cheap enough, Keith, if these companies, OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX, are losing money on it?

00:23:09 Keith Teare: So the OpenAI [ed.: Stripe] acquisition of OpenRouter is a good way of answering that question. OpenRouter is, a software service in the cloud that has inside of it all of the open source models, including, the closed source model. It's got all of the models. And what you do is you subscribe to OpenRouter instead of the underlying LLMs. And it will look at your prompts, and it will route the prompt to the cheapest good answer. And so it's lowering the token use and the dollar per token use. And Stripe has acquired them, so it's got itself in the middle of the traffic stream for tokens.

00:24:00 Andrew Keen: So that's good. Yeah. Because sometimes when I use, Claude, it seems to default for better or worse. I don't know whether this is their way of trying to get you to spend more money, but it defaults to the most sophisticated algorithm, which presumably requires the most horsepower.

00:24:20 Keith Teare: Correct. So, you know, and that obviously is, self-interest. The all of them—

00:24:27 Andrew Keen: That's Amodei. Dario. That hypocrite.

00:24:31 Keith Teare: Oh, they all do it. I wouldn't knock him especially on that because they all do it, and that's what they should be doing, of course.

00:24:39 Andrew Keen: But I want to— I mean, I take your point, and these things are always expensive until they're not. You have a piece by Azeem Azhar, the London-based futurist on the curious economics of a $6 AI agent. But I wonder whether it really makes any difference in terms of the anti-AI hysteria at the moment. It's not coming from people like you and I who use this all the time and are bothered by the fact that we're spending $100 a month, whereas we think we should really only be spending 75 or 50. Is that— is bringing the price down gonna dramatically change anything, do you think?

00:25:22 Keith Teare: Well, I think the price over time will tend towards zero. I mean, the real question is, how much will it cost to deliver AI to 8 billion humans? And it isn't really 8 billion because you have very young children and so let's say 6 billion. How much will that cost? And the answer might be it's certainly trillions of dollars. It may be tens of trillions of dollars. But if these companies themselves are each worth 5 to 10 trillion ultimately. In the big picture over long enough time, that becomes a meaningfully good investment. It does need to be maintained, so there'll be some ongoing costs. But it should be possible to get the price of AI down to zero for use cases that are, you know, individual. And if you can get the price of AI down to zero for individuals, schools, and so on, hospitals, that is a massive uplift to what we can achieve, together as people. And I— so I do think that is something—

00:26:36 Andrew Keen: But how are they gonna get it down to zero if they're money making businesses?

00:26:43 Keith Teare: I mean— Well, it's not gonna be zero for everybody. It's gonna be zero for the lightest touch cases at the edge. Meaning, you know, a kid in school can do everything they need to do in school. That's a light touch. But, you know, a company that is running, 3,000 agents running all kinds of software infrastructure is gonna be— they're gonna have to pay for it. So it's really how do you build out a business-to-business AI and a consumer AI with the end goal of free AI for most people at the edge of the network.

00:27:23 Andrew Keen: I think the real issue is the— getting people to even understand how it affects them. You talk about cheap enough to delivering a human dividend, whatever that means. But that dividend isn't clear to a lot of people. One of the most interesting pieces in this week's newsletter is the story of a dumpling shop that became— or has become a poster child of AI adoption in China.

00:27:50 Keith Teare: Yeah.

00:27:50 Andrew Keen: So tell me about this dumpling shop. What— why is this, an example of how AI can become a human dividend, to use your language?

00:28:01 Keith Teare: Well, so this is a store owner. Small store makes dumplings, delicious dumplings.

00:28:08 Andrew Keen: Well, we don't know if they're deli— have you been there?

00:28:11 Keith Teare: Well, have you ever had a dumpling that wasn't delicious? They are—

00:28:14 Andrew Keen: I have actually.

00:28:15 Keith Teare: So, this guy decided that he'd get a lot more orders if he built software for the shop that would allow a— AI agents to place orders for their human owners. And so he built out a whole agent API for ordering dumplings, and he's now, gone through the roof in terms of how many dumplings he's selling simply by recognizing that humans would rather get out of the way for trivial tasks. And if he made it possible for agents to do it, people would send their agents to do it, which they have. So it's kind of a— just a mini sign of how individual creative individuals in their own context are gonna change their situation through using—

00:29:08 Andrew Keen: So is it kind of like— in— it's the sort of story that we had in the early nineties about businesses or retail stores getting a website.

00:29:20 Keith Teare: Yeah. Yeah. I even more like when they put it into a vending machine and you could order a can of Coke or something, which also happened in the late nineties. But it but, yeah, it's leveraging what's there now to revolutionize a small business into a much bigger business. And anyone could do that with their business. I mean, you could do it with Keen On. I can do it with That Was the Week if I had focused on that. We could all think of ways to use AI to multiply our capabilities in different—

00:29:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I but, again, I don't think anyone would disagree. Anyone who's used AI, and everyone's using it. I mean, as, as Dave McClure and Aman Verjee know, and you've said this many times, Keith, in the show. I mean, these are real businesses. This is not a repeat of the dot-com—

00:30:10 Keith Teare: Yeah.

00:30:13 Andrew Keen: —experience, because these companies all have revenue. So people are still using it, and, presumably, a lot of people who were using it are still not crazy about big AI companies.

00:30:26 Keith Teare: I you know, I'm starting to doubt that that's true. It's— it definitely feels like received wisdom, and I would grant you that appears to be where the world is going. I suspect we've reached a tipping point where more and more people are using it and are happy with it. And that minority voice is starting to sound a little cultish and a little, you know, outside of normality.

00:30:55 Andrew Keen: So it's the weirdos who are against it, but they have the most noise. There was a interesting piece this morning. I don't think you've got it in the newsletter from the journal about how startup founders are working harder than ever to keep up with their agents. There are also gonna be some founders, I think, who are just disillusioned or angry about being on this treadmill, do you think, or not?

00:31:21 Keith Teare: It's certainly possible. Look. Look. You can't run AI agents without, engaging with them pretty much constantly, daily at least, but probably several times a day. I because I experiment a lot, I'm running agents on OpenAI, Claude, and Grok Build. They kind of overlap using the same skills, working on similar projects. And, my productivity is gone through the roof, but my work with agents has replaced what I used to do. And so, yeah, you're kind of in a control. It's like being Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise, you know, flying the thing. And I don't think agents really have reached the stage where that is, an option. I think you have to engage with them, at the cost of time, but with the benefit of productivity. I think that's— so I do think this is an accurate article of— is, you know, finger on the pulse of now. I don't know how we get past that yet. It's not clear to me that truly autonomous agents are in the near future. They— all they can do automations that you pre-planned and agreed to, but make— you know, kind of making things up and figuring things out without your intervention, not yet there.

00:32:51 Andrew Keen: Another piece this week, in the journal about how the— how AI is plunging the book publishing industry into utter chaos. We've talked about this in the past. And yet, Keith, you end the editorial this week, which focuses mostly on AI. I mean, you got two essays and about 20 AI pieces. I don't know what's happened to all your essays. By noting that you're still working on the book, you— your update, and we've talked about your book before, is that, you reduced this, quote, unquote, book from 80,000 words to about 60,000. So how did you do that?

00:33:30 Keith Teare: I went through it chapter by— you know, it's actually good. I got an agent to create a two-panel—

00:33:36 Andrew Keen: You didn't get a literary agent. You got a what? An AI agent.

00:33:41 Keith Teare: To throw up a two-panel, you know, the, view of the book. We're— giving me editing rights on the right-hand side. I literally went through every paragraph of every chapter and rewrote it, deleting repetitive stuff, getting rid of AI-isms if I found them. Seventeen chapters. I— it took me three days.

00:34:04 Andrew Keen: Seventeen? One-seven or seven-zero?

00:34:06 Keith Teare: One seven. It was a three-day job. I did about five-ish chapters a day. And by the end, it was a Keith Teare-written book that was originally done. [as spoken]

00:34:17 Andrew Keen: So in that way, as you wrote this book, who owns— and the book's called Who Owns Intelligence. You did it in a week?

00:34:24 Keith Teare: I did the edit in a week. I wrote the book in about two days.

00:34:30 Andrew Keen: So do you think it's gonna be a bigger seller than Jill Lepore's new book on AI?

00:34:35 Keith Teare: I haven't decided whether I'm gonna sell it yet. I might give it away. You might get more readers than her.

00:34:41 Andrew Keen: You think you'll have more readers than Jill Lepore?

00:34:43 Keith Teare: I'm definitely gonna— going to do something with it. I mean— and what's your advice? I think the message that I'm trying to send is an important message, and I don't think it's said loudly enough yet. And I'd like to be able to make an impact getting heard on these topics.

00:35:00 Andrew Keen: Well, the message— and let's just repeat the message, and maybe we can end here. The book is called The Human Dividend. No. Is it called The Human Dividend?

00:35:10 Keith Teare: It is. Yes.

00:35:11 Andrew Keen: Who owns intelligence?

00:35:12 Keith Teare: That's just the blurb. It's called The Human Dividend.

00:35:16 Andrew Keen: Okay. Well, your conclusion at the end, at the moment at least, the book hasn't come out yet. Intelligence is the central product of this era. Its surplus is co-produced. The property should be too. What's the property? What does that mean?

00:35:34 Keith Teare: The property is, referring— it's inside the book, so it is a bit, convoluted that sentence. Probably needs to be edited itself. The property is the equity of the AI companies that have harvested intelligence and are metering it back to us. The book argues for equity ownership modeled on better versions of the Alaska and Norwegian equity ownership program.

00:36:02 Andrew Keen: Public ownership, but not centralized public ownership.

00:36:06 Keith Teare: Public ownership, directly to individuals rather than through a state body. Through— it's actually through, I call it the Human Wealth Fund. It's a fund.

00:36:16 Andrew Keen: Is it like what Trump's doing with giving everyone a thousand dollars when they're born?

00:36:22 Keith Teare: It's different to that because that— state gives it, state can take it away. This is a fund. So it's just like you're buying shares yourself, except you don't buy them. You— they're given to you, one share each. And, you own a piece of this entire AI infrastructure because of the unit of the fund that you own as an individual. And its lifetime goes away when you die. So there's no inheritance.

00:36:50 Andrew Keen: But who's making the laws here? It's the state, isn't it? Who's defining it?

00:36:54 Keith Teare: No. It's a direct— the argument is— by the way, it doesn't exist. It's something I want to exist. The argument is the AI company should set it up themselves. They should donate equity to it on day one, and it should be, have its own constitution just like a fund and should be only regulated by its own rules.

00:37:18 Andrew Keen: And it's— you're suggesting this is in their interest because otherwise, they're gonna get regulated by the state.

00:37:23 Keith Teare: It's in their interest because they want people to have an affinity with their success. And the only way to really do that is that everyone is an owner— not just a user, an actual owner.

00:37:37 Andrew Keen: And when's the when did you say the book? You're gonna give the book away? Who Owns Intelligence?

00:37:41 Keith Teare: I haven't decided. What—

00:37:43 Andrew Keen: what—

00:37:43 Keith Teare: would you do if you were me? Here's my options. Just put it out there as a PDF and just read it for free, you know, link to it on every version of That Was the Week and blah blah. The second is to chapterize it, put it into another Substack, and release it week by week, chapter by chapter, either for free or paid. I'm against paid because I don't need to make money from this. I want the ideas out there.

00:38:08 Andrew Keen: Well, I have to see. Maybe give it a little bit more thought, Keith. We can talk about it in future weeks. That was the week for August 22, 2026. Keith is calling for AI champions. He's certainly not gonna get it on the football field. Manchester United lost to Hull today, Keith. Right?

00:38:31 Keith Teare: They lost, and quite dis—

00:38:33 Andrew Keen: So they're not gonna be champions.

00:38:35 Keith Teare: Yeah. They— I mean—

00:38:35 Andrew Keen: You needed to have the music. You'd have the Queen music, "We Are the Champions," although you might have got sued for that.

00:38:42 Keith Teare: But I did say who are the champions as opposed to We Are the Champions. So—

00:38:48 Andrew Keen: Well, we will see. Certainly, neither Manchester United nor Spurs will be champions this year. We will see you. I think, next week. I'm actually at Josue Vardy's Kinanet [unclear] in Italy, so we might take a break. But we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Have a good couple of weeks, Keith.

00:39:02 Keith Teare: Will do. Bye.