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Growing Up?
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Andrew Keen
Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, the 28th of March, 2026. As always, I'm talking to you from San Francisco. Saturday, as always, that was the weekday our summary of tech news two big trials uh in california on the west coast uh this week one in which meta and youtube were found negligent uh are in big trouble they were fined uh campaigners were thrilled women hugged one another outside the court Meanwhile, down the coast in San Francisco, a federal judge granted Anthropic an emergency reprieve from the Pentagon's unprecedented designation of the company as a supply chain risk, although this morning Politico came out with a piece suggesting that Anthropic is still in trouble. And in terms of these two court cases, Keith Teer has focused on the anthropic case for his editorial and for his focus of the week. Keith, you barely mentioned this meta YouTube thing. Do you just think it's irrelevant? Do you think it doesn't matter?
It's a nothing event from the point of view, but obviously that's measuring in money. If you measure it in opinion, I think it is quite a big event. I think the issue is addiction.
Right. That's why I thought I was expecting your editorial this week actually to be all about that because I know you don't see much of this technology in terms of its... addictive dangers. So I was struck with how much you might have objected to the decision of the jury.
Yeah, I mean, their entire business model is about monetizing engagement, and you can't get engagement unless people are compelled to engage. So, you know, by definition, just like TV, by the way, and newspapers, they're also designed to be addictive. They just fail. um any any media business so any product then is designed to be so in the way
you're you're you're you're arguing this anything whether it's a a piece of cake or a car or the infinite scroll on on social media they're all addicted there's no
difference between any of them yeah i mean look if the world is about supply and demand you try to boost demand for your product. That's a given, right? I mean, you wouldn't be a very good product manager if you didn't. So addiction is successful demand management. And every single product manager, no matter what the product is, is seeking to achieve that. And that, I don't even think that's to do with capitalism, although it is also to do with capitalism. And that, you know, in social media, they've gotten better and better. The recent experiences of scrolling through short videos is relatively recent. But it's just the latest incarnation of those attempts. So the real question is, why do we consumers get addicted? And the reason we get addicted is nuanced. There's a lot of possible discussion points inside of there, you know, typically, the more alienated you are from other things, the more you will glue on to the things that amuse you or please you or feed your your need to have a pleasure zone. And so you could say there's a direct correlation between
the current zeitgeist for especially younger people, where the received wisdom is they won't be as wealthy as their parents and the ability to be addicted to trivial things. What's really hard, and this is where I really think the jury was wrong, is to blame social media for the underlying alienation and the consequences of it. They feed off it for sure, and they're expert at doing that, but they don't cause it.
Yeah, and as you know, my wife runs litigation at Google, who are on YouTube, so she was heavily involved. She was down at the trial for the closing arguments. And I think that was the Google YouTube argument, of course, that the woman involved in this case, her life had been pretty much ruined by a bullying, abusive father and mother and sister and everything else that could possibly go wrong before she ever saw YouTube or Meta for that matter. Keith, I know you've got a family friend who was on the other side arguing from Stanford Medical School, we won't mention names, a psychologist. Are the therapists only adding to the problem here? Do you reject any kind of psychological analysis of the addictive qualities of social media, the infinite scroll? Do you just think that that's irrelevant?
Well, look, I think, and I'm very close to that friend, this person I like a lot, but we disagree and we talk about it openly. And she was an expert witness for the prosecution. And look, she imagines a world in which humans are perfect. And then she measures actual humans against that paradigm. And then she diagnoses why they're not perfect. And so for her, the world is a constant effort to achieve perfection in human beings who are not dopamine addicts. And her root cause is dopamine. And what produces dopamine is the things you get addicted to. And so she covers a whole spectrum of things, not just social media, drugs and alcohol and everything. So
No, I'm not. I'm not doing that. I think it clearly can be damaging to a person to be addicted to social media. I don't have TikTok on my phone for good reasons. Because if I do, I will look at it and I waste time. So I take it off. So clearly there's an area of knowledge and activity there that's completely legitimate. But it's a little bit like a labor of Sisyphus, as in humans are always gonna find distractions for their alienation. And if it isn't one thing, it'll be another thing. And so the root is happiness.
Yeah, alienation is a term used by many traditions of thought, including Marx, that's true. But he uses it in a different way than I am. I'm talking about a psychological disposition to feel displaced and to want comfort.
Yeah, and... Certainly there is a sense of alienation and anxiety. I was struck with a couple of things on the trial. Firstly, the way in which it's become this event where either you're for or against tech and the fact that Google and Meta were found guilty was celebrated by people who weren't even following the trial strikes me. And also the kind of the celebration outside the courthouse, I think, was slightly odd that perhaps reflects a broader cultural element. Anyway, moving on, maybe it wasn't the most important trial for Keith. The most, and I'm quoting you in your editorial, the ruling in the north in San Francisco on Anthropic is this week's most important event. You keep on coming back to this. The last three weeks we've been talking about Anthropic and the government. Why is this such a big deal in your view?
It's a big deal because the future is going to be a future in which AI is autonomously doing lots of things that today humans do. And what's being contested is the canvas on which it's allowed to do it. And so the future is being defined in front of our eyes. As it happens, that particular trial didn't really address that core issue. It addressed what Anthropic asked it to address, which was whether the punishment from the Trump administration was caused by a desire to constrain Anthropik's free speech rights. That by designating it a supply chain risk, what Trump was really doing was limiting free speech, which no matter how much you hate Trump, I think that is a stretch to think that was the motivation. The motivation clearly was to have full control over AI's use as a weapon. and I'm sure it made the administration unhappy that Antarctic wouldn't go along with that and then went very public with their views and then furthermore filed this law case. None of that would have been pleasant. But the underlying motivation isn't a free speech motivation.
Well, there's the politics there, and you know that it wasn't just Anthropic. All the big tech companies were supporting Anthropic in this case. I think one of the unspoken elements here is that big law... failed to stand up to Trump. Certainly the big universities have failed. Some have done a better job than others. So in a sense, the politics of this is the willingness of Silicon Valley, or at least some in Silicon Valley, exclude obviously Thiel and Andreessen and others, the willingness to stand up to Trump. Do you admire that, or is that something you think is... The subject of your editorial this week is growing up. In your mind, is this rather immature on the part of Anthropic, to be standing up to Trump?
In this domain of discussion, I think it's entirely juvenile. It so happens, on this case, Trump is right. So standing up to Trump has zero merit on this case, because Trump's in the right. Governments get to decide how to use weapons. That's it. End of story. There's nothing more to it.
Well, yeah, but they didn't do that. Anthropic, the opposite. Anthropic wanted to sell to the government. They didn't choose not to. They wanted to sell to the government, but they wanted to stipulate how the buyer used what they bought.
Yeah, I saw one of the things. You haven't seen it yet. Maybe we can talk about it in more detail next week. I saw yesterday the AI doc, How I Became or How I Became an Apocalyptomist. It's a new documentary about AI, which features Dario Amadai and all the other players, Sam Altman as well. And I was struck with the immaturity of everyone in the business. I mean, it's not just I'm not a big fan of Altman, but, you know, Amadai is also in his own way rather childish.
A trap is set. And the trap that's set is, do your best to attack me. And in so doing, I'll expose who you are. And that's worked on what you might broadly think of as the left for now about 12 years, which is the left behaving badly in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the administration of the hate. And there's lots of examples of it. And it ends up that the elections end up being won by, you know, your enemy because you've exposed yourself as not worthy of being elected yourself.
Although I'm not sure these elections are going to be one way or the other and Trump can't run again anyway. I'm not sure the next elections are going to have anything to do with Anthropik's case against the Pentagon.
Yeah, but I do think they've taken the bait and they're in the trap. And now they're stuck. I mean, Anthropic is going to have a... But Anthropic's a great product. Don't forget that. It may be the best product.
You know, it's pretty hard to say which is the best. They're both excellent. But Anthropic's certainly, you know, up there. Yet the entire discussion is about the government and Anthropic, which is ridiculous from their point of view. They should want it to be about enterprises adopting it and making gains. That should be the narrative that is everywhere.
There's a piece that we missed the newsletter this week because it just came out this morning in the Wall Street Journal by Keach Hagee, who's a very well-connected tech reporter for the journal on the decade-long feud shaping the future of AI, which I'm sure she's writing, working on a new book. intense dislike between Altman and Amidai, not just Dario, but his sister, Daniela, who I didn't realize from the movie is also a very big player at Anthropic, maybe the business side of the company. There is again, and this comes out in the Hagee piece, and it certainly comes out in the AI doc, a kind of adolescent quality to everyone involved in this, doesn't matter who it is. The only person who came out of the AI doc looking like an adult was Mr. Google. Keith, we talked about this before we went live. Yeah, Demis. Demis Hassabis. So why are they all such children?
You know, if you think about the history of entrepreneurs in the Valley, they're not unusual. I mean, you wouldn't describe Elon as an adult much of the time.
He has his moments where he isn't. You know, I think you have to be emotionally driven with a passion to be successful. Demis is the opposite. He's a stone-cold scientist. He does have passion, but he's at core a scientist, closer to Larry in Demena. Larry Page, for those who don't know who Larry refers to. but still successful because he does have drive, he's just less juvenile about it. I don't worry too much about that. I mean, I don't even criticize Amidai for his juvenilness, except he needs counsel. He's making the wrong calls and allowing the wrong instincts to dominate. And I'm sure at core, he's an excellent representative of entrepreneurialism, but he needs some counsel.
Speaking of counsel, I know that... Sam Altman's counsel is Chris Lehman, very influential Silicon Valley power broker of one kind or another on the democratic side. Is Altman, in your view, you seem to be suggesting this in your editorial this week, growing up, winning wars involves losing battles. And this was a week in which you seem to be suggesting that OpenAI lost some battles, but actually is winning the war. Is Altman getting better counsel in your sense than Amidai?
And also to make it clear that they were shelving forever, their adult modes, ChatGPT adult mode, sort of the soft porn application of OpenAI. So they're clearly in, I don't know whether you call it repair mode or what is it? What is it? Code red? They keep on using that term.
I think it's a recommitment to the core business and and pulling in things that had gotten out of hand but weren't merited by any economic criteria. And that is a sign of maturity. And it was widely reported as a fail. But I think actually it's the opposite. It's the end of a fail and the beginning of a period when they're going to...
We're all so biased on this. Any kind of criticism of open AI is always, oh, these people, they're just against SAM for one reason or another. They're doomers. They're pessimists. They're reactionaries. I mean, there was a good piece in The Atlantic where... by Leela Shroff on OpenAI is doing everything poorly. There is an argument to suggest. I mean, you used to argue that OpenAI was the dominant company. It's going to be worth $10 or $15 trillion. No one else is going to compete. Things have changed. Not really, no.
It used to be 100% of consumer AI two years ago. Today, it's about 70% of consumer AI. In that time, consumer AI has grown about 10x. So it's 70% of something 10 times bigger. Its revenues are going through the roof.
Well, that's not a very technical term, going through the roof. Well, it's the biggest revenue. Well, but then we can get into the argument. I don't want to get sucked into this of whether it's a personal company.
No, I don't say that. In fact, I agree with the Atlantic article. I do think they're doing lots of things poorly, but I think that's normal. How could they not be? They're learning. They're doing something brand new and learning as they do it. So, of course, they're doing lots of things poorly. But that's not, you know, unusual. That's normal.
Why are they what you call, I think, the notoriety? Why are they so against them in your mind? Why are they so against Sam Altman? Are they envious? Are they reactionaries?
You know, I think his personality doesn't lend itself to being liked. He's very, very confidently declarative. He's clearly capable of navigating difficult negotiations and giving the appearance of being devious, let's say.
So if you measure him by likability, you're not going to like him. If you're measuring by outcomes, which is, as we said last week, what the market prices is outcomes, he's fantastic.
Yeah, as I said to my wife when we were coming out of the movie last night, would you buy a used car from Sam Altman? I don't think I'd buy anything. But maybe, Keith, you need to see the movie and we can talk about it next week. Yeah. So it hasn't been such a bad week for...
for Sora, sorry, for not Sora, that was an error for OpenAI. You think jettisoning Sora, moving clearly away from the porn stuff is a good thing. And probably Sam is getting good advice from Chris Lehman. What about on the product side this week for Anthropic? Did anything happen or is it just another week for Claude?
Nothing major happened this week. Claude actually was way more prolific this week. It's focused in on, for those of you who don't use it, the Claude desktop app on Mac has three behaviors. One is called chat, one is called co-work, and one is called code. and there are tabs at the top, and you can choose which one you're in. And they released a lot of new elements. One is called Dispatch. Dispatch is where you can continue a conversation with Claude on your mobile that you began on your desktop. A little bit like with OpenClaw, you can be remotely connected to your computer and direct what you want to happen even when you're not there. And lots of connectors, connectors meaning that Claude can access your Gmail or your calendar or other applications. So they're rapidly moving to, if you think of AI as being in three eras, the first era being all about LLMs and chat, the second era being about agents that you can direct, and the third era which we're entering being autonomous agents that do things for you when you're not present. We're moving into that third era, and Claude's announcement this week, almost all were to do with that third era.
Yeah, and that was the other thing about the AI doc. It was made earlier this year. They call it a 2026 documentary. It was mostly filmed last year. But it already seems very outdated. One of the things that also strikes me is the comparison between the social media trial and the stuff that's going on on AI is that the social media stuff is fighting yesterday's war, isn't it? I mean, it always seems to be the case with the law, that they're always at least one step behind.
Well, that's given. I mean, that's inevitable one way or the other. Yeah. And it won't be a few years. I mean, it will be a handful of years, certainly by the end of the 20s.
Right. And, you know, happiness is a rare commodity. So there's a lot of fuel for the claim that unhappiness is caused by some software, when in fact, the roots of unhappiness are way deeper than that.
Thank you, Dr. Teer. There was one other interesting piece. You didn't put it in the newsletter, but it struck me in the context of what we're talking about. This week, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill banning sports bets in prediction markets. There was a good piece in the New York Times, too, on the predictive market, the casino that's eating the world. Are you in favor of much more regulation on the prediction markets these prediction engines are enormously influential especially with young people and many people see them as addictive like social media like perhaps ai yeah well you know if i tell you uh i
hate sports betting um those who are British will know this, but in the UK on pretty much every, I was raised in a small council estate that had like 5,000 homes and there was two bedding shops on the council estate and the dads and sometimes the moms would go on a Saturday and place bets on horses or football or whatever. There's also the football pool, which is you guess the results of the soccer every week, and some people become millionaires if they guess right. So sports betting is deep in British culture. And I hated it because, you know, you discover very quickly that you never win.
That's our alienation argument. We get out our unhappiness, our misery, our alienation from ourselves or from the world through betting on miracles. Well,
not only that, but they'd come back from the betting shop and spend the next three hours happy, excited and full of hope in case they would win. So that is probably some truth in that.
It's certainly cheaper than opium. So, you know, my natural habitat is to hate sports betting. That said, I think my belief in... choice trumps that. I think if people want to sports bet, you know, it's not the job of regulators to stop them. They should put rules around it in terms of, you know,
No, we are. The new left libertarian Keith wins out over the old British Yorkshire left regulatory Keith. Yeah. Well, finally, you end this week's newsletter in your editorial saying nothing new to see, meaning not much has changed. So it wasn't such a big week, really, Keith. Nothing new to see?
I think the bigger trend is happening in the stock markets where software companies are being priced down based on their likely future value. And the AI companies are teed up to do IPOs. I think OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX with XAI inside out probably all going to do IPOs this year.
The markets are basically saying that the future is an AI future. And unless you can benefit from that, you are not worth as much as we thought you were worth.
It's obvious. And I think the other things that are winning are anything to do with leisure. You know, real world human activities like Disney World, for example, not that I would suggest anyone spends any time at Disney World, but people do on Netflix or any of the leisure focused stuff is gaining.
And you end with an interesting remark. You say intelligence is getting cheaper. That is good. More people need to have access to it and at a price that is inclusive. Fast forward to that and policy helps determine outcomes and markets will price them favorably. Anything else is fear wrapped up as principle. Time as you end to grow up. But this idea of intelligence getting cheaper, it's getting cheaper for you and I. Not that we even need it. that intelligence in the first place. You and I are already the most intelligent two people in the world. But one of the things that struck me from this movie is it's still the AI movie. Is it still very much a Silicon Valley thing or a tech thing? Most people, most people, if you talk to most people, maybe in Scarborough in your old estate, the idea of intelligence getting cheaper is, It's like talking Chinese to them. Does that actually, is it mean, is it breaking through in any way to anyone outside Silicon Valley, Keith?
I think it's fairly ubiquitous for young people still in school. And that is the future generation. When these people who today are between the ages of seven and 13 are between the ages of 20 and 30,
they'll be running the world and that isn't going to take very long. And for them, AI is ever present and increasingly present in their lives. So I do think you're not wrong if you look at, you know, there's about a billion people use open AI and there's 8 billion people in the world. So clearly that says it isn't yet ubiquitous. But if you narrow it down to young people in school and you want that to be true in Ghana as much as it is in Palo Alto, and I think that will happen, then it is going to become ubiquitous and we're going to sit on top of it. And whatever is built, one of the interesting consequences of that is the life cycle of companies, which used to be decades. might be reduced down to single digit years as disruptions accelerate. And therefore pricing outcomes for companies becomes very perilous.
There you have it. Growing up. That was the theme of this week's editorial. That was the week. Growing up. Winning wars involve losing battles. It's a good lesson for kids. You talked about kids. If we were allowed, Keith, we would end this show with Bruce Springsteen's Growing Up, but we can't because we'll get sued by the lawyers. But you can all imagine you will remember the wonderful song from Springsteen, Growing Up. There you are, Keith. You will grow up. Bye next week and we will talk again. Thank you so much. Thank you.