Jun 20, 2026 ยท 2026 #22. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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Your Job Title is a Liability
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Andrew Keen (Avatar)
Hello everybody and welcome. It's Saturday, June the 20th, 2026, and it has been one of those weeks where the machines quietly got more capable and the rest of us got a little more nervous about our own job descriptions. SpaceX sailed past Amazon to about $2.7 trillion. ChatGPT for the very first time slipped under 50% of the market. We found out OpenAI lost the better part of $21 billion last year. and a clip went round of a Databricks executive cheerfully announcing that 81% of the new databases on his platform are now built by agents, not by people. And the man who has to make sense of all of that, as he does every week, is my old friend and sparring partner Keith Teare, editor of That Was The Week. Keith's editorial this week has the wonderfully reassuring title, Your Job Title is a Liability. Now I Have Held The Same Job Title For The Better Part Of 20 Years So Naturally I Take This Personally Go On Then Keith Tell Me Why My Business Card Is A Liability
Well Your Business Card Might Be Alright Andrew It's The Rest Of Us I'd Worry About No Look The Whole Thing's Meant To Be Optimistic I Promise So A Few Weeks Back I Wrote This Piece And I Spelt Agency In A Daft Way On Purpose A G E N T C Y Which Irritated A Lot Of People But I Was Trying To Get At Something There's A Difference Between Automation Where The Human Just Drops Out Of The Loop Altogether And What People Mean By Autonomy Where The Machine Wanders Off And Does Its Own Thing Which Let's Be Honest Nobody Actually Wants The Bit I Was After Is Neither Of Those It's The Middle It's Still You It's Still Your Judgment But Somebody's Handed You A Pair Of Hands Software That'll Go Off And Actually Do The Thing What Struck Me This Week Is That's The Whole Conversation Now People Just Aren't Using That Word For It The Thing People Get Backwards Is This The First Wave Of All This Was Just Tools You'd Ask A Chatbot To Write A Paragraph Or Draw You Something And It Would Fine Lovely But An Agent's A Different Animal It Doesn't Sit There Answering You It Goes Off Into The Actual Work Picks Up Other Tools Makes The Calls Comes Back 20 Minutes Later Having Done It Everyone's Gut Reaction Is Well That Leaves Less For Me To Do I Think It's The Reverse Honestly There's More To Do And It's Harder And It Takes A Better Person To Do It The Skill
Goes Up It Doesn't Go Down See This Is The Move I Want To Stop You On Because You Make It Every Single Week Keith And It's Always So Beautifully Reassuring
The Very Technology That Is Busy Automating Somebody's Job Gets Reframed By The People Building It As The Thing That's Going To Elevate That Same Person It's A Gorgeous Story If You're The One Shipping The Agent It's A Slightly Less Gorgeous Story If You're The Call Center Worker Or The Junior Coder Or God Help Us The Journalist Watching The Machine Do The First 80% Of What You Used To Be Paid For So convince me this isn't just a comfortable story in a nicer suit Because this
week it stopped being a theory Take Pichai, he said something I keep chewing on That once you've felt what an agent can actually do for you You stop calling it a tool, you realize it's agency His example is the interface The old web you and I grew up on It was tabs and search boxes and filling in 18 fields on some airline form The new version is just you hand it over and it goes and does the booking But Somebody Built That Agent Andrew Somebody Decided What It's Allowed To Touch Somebody's Checking What It Did Somebody Makes It Less Stupid Next Week That's The
Job And It's A Bigger One Than The Job It Ate And Then There's Your Databricks Man Ali Godzi Who I Have To Say Delivered The Single Most Chilling Sentence Of The Week With An Absolutely Enormous Grinch 81% Of New Databases Built By Agents Software 10 Times Faster To Write And Then Quote Your Margin Is My Opportunity Keith That Is Not A Man Describing Human Flourishing That Is A Man Describing The Controlled Demolition Of An Industry And Rather Enjoying It It Is A Demolition
You're Right I Won't Pretend It Isn't But Look At What It Clears The Ground For Gods Is Just The New Software Industry Knocking On The Old One's Door Think About It For A Second Once Software Is 10 Times Cheaper To Write The Walls That Protected The Incumbents Fall Over Once Your Main User Is An Agent Rather Than A Person You Design The Whole Product Differently A Couple Of People Can Now Throw Together In An Afternoon What Used To Take A Department So The Thing Worth Owning Stops Being The Big Clunky Application And Starts Being The Loop Around It The Data The Judgment The Rails It Isn't Fewer Jobs It's A Harder Job In Different Clothes
Alright, this is where you reach for a piece by a developer called Dan Farrelly, The Agent Loop Architecture, which I will confess I had to read twice in a bit. You clearly think this dry little engineering note is secretly a manifesto about the future of work. Make the case.
I do it genuinely lit me up. So Farrelly's point is that an agent's really got three layers to it. There's the loop, which is the easy part, a job on a timer with something deciding what to do next. There's The Skill Which Is The Actual Durable Piece Of Work Not Some Prompt You Typed Once And Last Then The Orchestrator Which Is The Grown Up The Thing That Remembers Where You Were Retries The One Step That Failed Instead Of The Whole Job Keeps The History His Throwaway Line Is The Good One That The Loop's Just Plumbing And The Thing That's Actually Worth Money Is The Skill It Calls Plus One More Which Sounds Like A Footnote And Isn't These Things Have To Survive A Restart That One Sentence Is More Or Less The Whole New Profession And The Phrase You've
Fallen In Love With For All Of This Is Satya Nadella's Token Capital Now I Want To Push On That Keith Because It Has The Exact Shape Of A Davos Word The Kind Of Thing That Sounds Profound On A Panel And Means Absolutely Nothing On A Tuesday Morning And In Your Own Venture Section This Week Tom Tungus Is Waving A Number At It Databricks At 6.9 Billion In Annual Revenue Growing 80% A Quarter Of It Now AI Is That Token Capital Being Real Or Is It Just Everyone Who Happens To Sit Near The
Inference Getting Rich For A While No It's Real And Tungus Is Circling The Right Thing Even If He's Counting It As Revenue So Forget How It Sounds On A Panel For A Second A company's always had human capital, the stuff inside people's heads, the judgment, the know-how. What Nadella's noticing is there's now a second pot. It's the workflows, the evals, the permissions, the loops, the whole record of how this place actually gets its work done, except written down so a machine can run it. The reason it's not froth is that the model isn't where the advantage lives. Models get swapped out every few months. The price caves in. The leader changes. We sit here and watch it happen. What stays yours is everything you wrapped around the model. That's what's still standing when the model underneath you gets replaced by a better one.
And yet, the model layer this week looked like anything but a moat. Chat GPT Dropped Under 50% Share For The First Time Ever We Learned OpenAI Spent $34 Billion In Order To Lose 21 And Moses Sternstein Has The Essay That Genuinely Worries Me Friction Full Intelligence And His Whole Point Is That Every Single One Of These Tokens Has A Real Cost That Somebody Eventually Has To Pay He Says We're Moving Out Of The Token Maxing Phase Use Everything Who Cares And Into Token Rationing With Uber And Meta Already Tightening The Taps So Is Your Beautiful Agentic Future About To Walk Straight Into The Electricity Bill?
Oh It's Going To Meet The Bill Alright Good Frankly That's A Healthy Thing Not The Funeral You're After Token Maxing Was The Toddler Phase Grab Everything Off The Shelf And See What Sticks Rationing Is Just The Market Sobering Up And Learning To Read A Price Tag The Funny Thing Is It Helps My Case Rather Than Hurting It Because How Do You Ration Well You Need Good Loops And Good Evals You Put The Cheap Little Model On The Dull Jobs And Only Wake The Expensive One When It's Worth It Godzi Calls It An Advisor Setup That's Token Capital Doing Actual Work The Lord Who Panic When The Bill Lands Are The Ones Who Bolted AI Onto The Side Of The Building The Ones Who Built The Loop Properly Just Ease Off The Throttle Chat GPT Numbers The Same Story By The Way It Isn't Slipping Because It Got Dim It's Slipping Because Trust And Where It Sits In Your Day Matters More Now Than The Benchmark Claude's The Best At Turning People Into Payers Because Of Where It Lives In The Actual Work The Value Is Already Drifting Off The Model And Onto Everything Round It But The People Keith This Is
Where I Cannot Follow You Up Into The Clouds Krugman Wrote A Lovely Thing This Week Technology And Social Change And His Point Is One I Put On Your Office Wall You Don't Judge A Technology Only By What It Does To The Productivity Statistics You Judge It By What It Does To How People Live Where They Work Who Has Authority What An Ordinary Day Even Feels Like And then Casey Newton very practically asks the question you and I are too comfortable to ask, which is, how do you actually help the knowledge worker who loses the job this year with the mortgage, who is not going to gracefully reinvent herself as a, what did you call it, a loop designer? What do we owe the person in the gap?
No, they're owed a proper bridge. I'll give you that without a fight. And Newton's right to make us say it out loud. My quarrel is what the bridge is for. The instinct, and it's Kurds' instinct, will come to him, is to build a cushion, something permanent, soften the landing and leave it there. I want a ladder instead, the wage support, yes, but tied to getting people into the new rooms, the loop work, the eval work, the agent operation stuff, which is genuinely appearing at about the rate the old work's vanishing. The benefits should follow the person around, not be bolted to a job title that just turned into a liability. Because the cruel bit here was never the technology, Andrew. It's leaving someone to cross that gap on their own. Isn't inevitable. That's a decision a human being makes.
And yet the whole drift of the age is to make people cross everything on their own. Two essays in your own stack haunt me this week. Danny Crichton, going back to Postman, amusing ourselves to death. That old warning that a culture wired for spectacle slowly loses the ability to think in public at all. And Freddie DeBoer On How Even Sport The Last Shared Sweaty Democratic Thing We Had Has Been Quietly Priced For The Rich So The City Makes The Joy And Then Sells The Good Seats Back To The Financiers My Fear Keith Is That Cheap Intelligence Doesn't Widen The Public Square It Narrows It And It Puts A Velvet Rope Around The Good Bit
That's The Strongest Form Of The Worry And I'm Not Going To Brush It Off Because It's Real But It's The Same Fight Just One Floor Up Sport The Public Square The Agents It Always Comes Down To The Same Question Which Is Who Ends Up Owning The Thing Everyone Built Together Which Is Why I Go On About Ownership Instead Of Just Deploring Concentration If Cheap Intelligence Ends With Nine Companies Owning Every Loop Then Fine You Get Your Velvet Rope And I'll Be Standing Behind It With You
You Get Something A Lot Closer To The Open World You And I Both Miss It Isn't Settled Which Is Exactly Why It's Worth Making A Noise About Now While It Can Still Go Either Way
Which Brings Me With As Much Modesty As I Can Manage To My Own Interview Of The Week I Sat Down On Keen On With The Stanford Economist Mordecai Kurz Whose Book Is Called Private Power And Democracy's Decline And Who Is How Shall I Put It Not A Member Of Your Church He Says The Top Billionaires Took Something Like 25 Trillion Dollars Between 1980 And 2019 Probably 35 By Now While A Worker Without A Degree Gained Essentially Nothing Across 30 Years His Fix Is A 65% Top Tax Rate And Some Very Serious Antitrust And When I Put Your Optimism To Him That AI Will Eventually Set Us All Free He Just Quoted Keynes Back At Me In the long run, we are all dead. So why is he wrong and you're right?
I don't think he's entirely wrong, which is the irritating part. He's pointing at a genuine wound. Concentration happened. Ordinary people really didn't get their share of the last wave. And pretending they did is precisely how you end up with the politics we've got. Where we part company is the cure. His reflex is to let it all concentrate and then tax a chunk of it back afterwards, redistribute. Mine is to go further up the river and change who owns the thing to begin with. If token capital really is the new wealth, then the fight worth having is making sure a working person, a small firm, can own a slice of it instead of just collecting a check for having been made redundant. One of those treats you as a recipient. I'd rather you were an owner, and on Keynes, yes, fine, in the long run, we're all dead. But we're alive now, and we still get to decide who owns the loop.
I'd Say That's Worth Turning Up For Then Give Me The Sane Version Because Your Sections This Week Have Both The Sane And The Deranged The Deranged Is Gurglia Ross On Meta Engineers Some Of The Best In The World Reassigned To Labeling Data The Code Quality Apparently Falling Apart Anna Roche Floating This Phrase I Cannot Shake AI Psychosis In The Leadership And The Sane Version Is On Alex Conrad Show Jaleh Rezaei Of Mutiny Who Apparently Set 10 Million Dollars Of Perfectly Good Revenue On Fire Fired Her Own Customers Cut Down To 15 People And Rebuilt The Entire Company Around An Agent One Of Those Is A Catastrophe Tell Me Why The Other Isn't Just A Smaller One Because They're Opposites And You've
Spotted The Exact Hinge Between Them Meta Bolted Agents Onto The Existing Org Chart And Then To Look Suitably AI First Trashed The Standing Of The Very Engineers Who'd Built The Place And Got An Instagram Outage And Rotting Code For The Trouble That's The Psychosis Bit Confusing Doing More Things Faster With Doing The Right Thing Resier Went The Other Way Which Takes Real Nerve She Didn't Ask How To Sprinkle A Bit Of AI On Her Sire She Asked The Frightening Question Which Is If The Agent Is The Main Worker Now What Is My Company Actually For Most Incumbents Can't Get That Question Out Without Flinching So They Flinch And They Bolt It On She Started Over 15 People One Snowflake And Uber Back Inside Six Months That's A Company Built Around The Loop On Purpose Instead Of Having It Forced On You When The Bill Turns Up And Dan Gray And Namdi On The Seed Stage Quietly Shrinking That's The Same Thing From The Investor Seed The Old Structures Cracking And The Value Sliding To Whoever Holds The Context And
Hanging Over All Of It Is The Geopolitical Turn Which Got Very Sharp This Week Daae Shipped GLM 5.2 An Open Model A Million Token Context Benchmarks A Whisker Off The Frontier And In The Very Same Week Washington Forced Anthropic To Cut Off Access To Its Top Models For Foreign Nationals Mark Daly Called It Diffusion Versus Denial China Spreading Capability Around America Locking It Up And His Line Was Availability Is Now Part Of Capability Ben Thompson Separately Thinks Safety Is Quietly Becoming Anthropics Moat So Which Is It Keith Is Denial Strength Or Is It A
Gift To Everyone You've Just Locked Out It's A Gift To Everyone You've Shut Out And That Daily Line Is Going To Get Quoted For Years Put Yourself In The Buyer's Chair A Moment You Run Technology For A Canadian Bank Or A German Manufacturer After This Week You Simply Can't Treat The Best American Model As An Ordinary Supplier Not When Washington Can Reach In And Switch It Off Over Your Head So A Slightly Worse Model You Can Run Yourself That Nobody Can Take Away Suddenly Beats A Better One That Might Banish On A Tuesday That's The Whole Reason My Startup Of The Week Is Sarvam Out Of India They've Just Raised 234 Million To Build Sovereign AI Indian Language Models India's Own Stack A Year Ago You'd Have Filed That Under National Pride A Bit Of Flag Waving After The Week Anthropics Had It Looks Like Plain Prudence Every Serious Country Is Going To Want Its Own Loop The One Nobody In Washington Or Beijing Can Switch Off Savam Is Just The First Well-Funded Version Of That It Won't Be The Last
Which Leaves Your Post Of The Week And I Rather Love That You Ended Where You Began Dan Gray Again With A Single Line That Early Stage Investing Lives In Futures That Haven't Happened Yet And Therefore Aren't In The Training Data The Best Opportunities Are Precisely The Ones The Model Can't See Because The Map Doesn't Exist Tell Me Why That's The Whole Show In A Tweet
Because It Pretty Much Is The Whole Editorial In One Line The Machine Is Wonderful Wherever The Map's Already Drawn The Summaries The Known Stuff But The Work That's Actually Worth A Person Is Out Where The Map Gives Up Gray Says It About Venture But It's True Of Every Job We've Talked About Tonight Let The Agent Have The Chartered Ground You Go And Work The Edge The Part Nobody's Written Down Yet In The End Is The Answer To Kurtz Your Job Title Is A Liability Because It Names A Task And The Task Is The Charted Bit The First Thing The Machine Comes For So Don't Pin Your Name To The Task Pin It To The Judgment To Whatever It Is You Do Out Where The Map Runs Out Graham Had The Other Half Of It This Week In An Essay About Earning A Billion Dollars Of All Things When He Said The Real Secret Isn't Exploitation It's Empathy Knowing What Somebody Actually Needs Which Is The One Thing You'll Never Pull Out Of The Training Data Because It Hasn't
Happened Yet Stay Updateable Name Yourself After The Judgment And Set Fire To Your Business Card It Is I'll Admit A Better Provocation Than Anything I'll Read In The Financial Times This Weekend I Remain The Resident Pessimist I Think Rather A Lot Of People Did Not Sign Up To Rebuild Their Identity Every Six Months And I Think Kurtz Is Right That The State Is Gonna Have To Catch The Ones Who Fall But You've At Least Given Them Something To Aim At And That I Suppose Is The Job That Is That Was The Week For June 20th 2026 Thank You Keith As Ever Thank You All For Watching And For Listening Stay Updatable Whatever It Costs You And We Will See You Next Week Thanks Andrew Always A Pleasure Being Argued With See You Next Week Everyone