America, the Beautiful

Speaker

[music]

Andrew Keen

Hello, everybody. it is saturday june the 4th 2026

Keith Teare

July the 4th, Andrew. July the 4th.

Andrew Keen

Oh, I think I'll start. Hey, my geography is... That's not geography. What is it? What's the word? My knowledge. yeah my my dates are bad okay ready yeah Hello, everybody. It is July the 4th, 2026 celebration of you know what I might actually put this interview out on July the 5th but it's worth noting that we're speaking on the 250th anniversary of America's birthday foundation and it's the day for our weekly tech roundup with my old friend Keith Teer. That was The Week newsletter and surprise surprise his editorial this week focuses on what he calls america the beautiful so happy anniversary keith what's your i was thinking about this before we went live what's your relationship with the united states you came here quite late in your life didn't you relatively late certainly compared to me

Keith Teare

yeah it just shows how old i am because i've actually been here 30 years now i can't i came here initially in 1996 and spent some time in new york realized how superior american um investing landscape let's say risk appetite was compared to the uk and determined that um living in the uk was for fools so i moved here so what year did

Andrew Keen

96 96 so you've been so your life has really been pretty much split or relatively split between the uk and the us how do you do you have a us uh passport i do i'm a i am a citizen and you have a very a very core identity as an entrepreneur as a startup guy does that connect with your identity as an american do you think of yourself as both an american and a startup entrepreneur

Keith Teare

actually i don't think of myself as an american i mean it's a it's one of the labels i have and i embrace it that's fine but it's not a singular label um i'd say entrepreneur is way more core for me and then there's probably other labels uh like um i don't know um i think of myself as essentially um a critical thinker that wants change that's my real core

Andrew Keen

and you've read three americans you have three big american boys and a boy they're young men now um so so you're adding to what you call the america the beautiful what's the editorial this week keith what are you writing about how you command how are you combining this week in tech with the July 4th celebrations?

Keith Teare

I think it's really two things. Firstly, it's an acknowledgement of America's success over the last 250 years. America really symbolizes human growth, human progress economically, lifestyle-wise and in politics. I mean, the fact that we have Donald Trump as president voted for by more Americans than voting against him symbolizes that the people still rule because most intellectuals, the last thing they wanted to see was Trump winning. But he won't and that's...

Andrew Keen

I thought American intellectuals liked Trump.

Keith Teare

there are some

Andrew Keen

who do aren't there well one american intellectual yourself is shall we say ambivalent so on the one hand your editorial talks about the achievement of america abundance wealth creation and freedom but on the other hand you're not some sort of mega fellow are you keith i mean you recognize that not everything is perfect in the american garden in in july 2026

Keith Teare

the pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed easy for me to say but look capitalism at its best still has huge swathes of poor people who can barely eat and so any idea that it's perfect this idea of the perfect union is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been And because I believe that America has kind of peaked in world terms, it's only going to get worse unless policy kicks in to make sure it doesn't. So we're at a moment where the next 250 years there is a lot to play for, but it's not a foregone conclusion that it looks anything like the past 150 years if you look at it through American glasses.

Andrew Keen

and you're looking at it through american glasses you're an american living in palo alto or you are half american at least one of the pieces that i forwarded to you which you included in the newsletter this week and i found this astonishing it's from the wall street journal which is not biased although i think they would enjoy this sort of piece is that the united states added 1200 new millionaires a day last year which is astonishing especially when it's compared with the rest of the world the chinese only added a little over over five million over the year america added 23 and a half million oh no these are countries with the most millionaires so america has almost 24 million china only has a little over five and then we get down to italy and netherlands south korea or australia france uk all under three million so it's really an astonishing statistic i don't know what it tells us but it certainly speaks of the prosperity amongst some for america

Keith Teare

well look the the math underlying that is gross domestic product per capita uh what is the average salary and and and in america it's uh not just salary but income it's around 85 000 a year per head obviously it's highly skewed between rich and poor but the average is 85 000 a year china is on 20 something thousand dollars a year so just the math alone will tell you that someone who owns a house that's worth more than a million dollars which probably has to be the case for most of the middle class in on the coastal areas of america california in particular

Andrew Keen

where there are you can't even buy a hut in uh where you live in palo alto for less

Keith Teare

than about 10 million can you exactly and under 60 million 50 60 million people in california if my memory serves me right so those numbers really um are disguising a highly skewed set of people that live either in california or new york and maybe boston that live in homes worth more than

Andrew Keen

a million dollars your editorial this week focuses not on the past but on the future you ask in the editorial how to make america more prosperous both literally i think and in symbolic cultural and perhaps uh communal or or uh political terms uh you refer to an interesting piece uh by scott nolan america's next 250 years he was writing as a guest in the paddy mccormack blog what's nolan saying and and how does he connect the next 250 years of america with tech

Keith Teare

um well nolan focuses uh very very temporally on energy uh he he draws the conclusion that the next 250 years is predicated on abundant and inexpensive energy and and uh you know without that everything that uh ai prefigures including uh robotics but also intelligence um can't develop and so his answer to the scarcity of energy is to focus on um a nuclear renaissance and space um which seems to be coming consensus well that's muskian isn't it it is muskian yeah very muskian but musk muskian without the musk

Andrew Keen

without all these distractions of Elon's bizarre politics.

Keith Teare

I don't think he's...

Andrew Keen

We're not having another Musk argument on such a nice day, Keith. Let's leave that one. I shouldn't have brought it up. My fault. I acknowledge it. Move on.

Keith Teare

Yeah, but no, it is a good article the next 250 because it predicates itself on what's happened since 1776 and then talks about the future you know the future requires innovation as it as did the past uh

Andrew Keen

when it was yeah i mean it the thing with energy is really interesting but i wonder whether there's a lot of unintended consequences i mean when america began fracking which i think explains what their energy lead over the rest of the world particularly in europe no no one even no one made the argument even the most extreme frackers they didn't make the argument in terms of ai can we be sure that in another 50 or 100 or certainly 250 years energy will be so central we might have fixed it entirely or maybe we'll be in a post ai age which energy becomes irrelevant

Keith Teare

yeah i think i think it would be a fairly solid prediction to say that energy eventually will be close to free because we will figure out how to leverage the sun and also nuclear fusion and when when you do that energy scales close to free so i don't think energy will will remain a bottleneck i do strongly believe energy will be decentralized that is to say it won't require a national grid which will be a huge innovation why because you'll be able to produce energy locally very very cheaply and distribute it locally without relying on a grid on a on a on a global or national grid so I I don't see energy as a bottleneck but I do see it as a challenge because those things i just described are still unsolved problems there are really good people working on the man making progress which is why you can predict they'll probably be successful i wouldn't want to put a timeline on it because that that requires scientific breakthroughs

Andrew Keen

which are highly unpredictable all right and and that comes back to your notion of abundance you and i have talked about that you have your own manifesto in this editorial of five things uh that america can do to make itself a better country not in the next 250 years but certainly in the 25 or 50 associated with ai maybe you can mention some of these uh some of

Keith Teare

these points, Keith. Yeah well the context here is Sam Altman in The Financial Times offering apparently offering the US government a 5% ownership stake for sovereign wealth fund in open ai right he wrote

Andrew Keen

the editorial in the in the ft on july the first and everyone's picked up on this the the fact that you know that two interpretations the slippery slatter the slippery sam crowd i i guess assumes he's just selling out to donald trump others get are a little more generous yeah

Keith Teare

and now there's some context there as well um Sam Altman joined the Dario Amadai regulation camp this week as well, although he argued for a global regulator, not just national. National was his plan B, but he said he would prefer if it was global. And that, I believe, is triggered by the success of the Chinese model, is it GLC2, G something C2, GLM2, uh 5.2 that's it glm 5.2 which um is a frontier model by capability but is open source and can be run on your own hardware and there is a flood of american companies running towards using it and replacing open ai and anthropic due to cost and only using open ai and anthropic for a small subset of highly um difficult use cases so you're gonna you you we're moving to this uh uh it's called um a token router concept in the enterprise where the uh and and um palantir and and video yeah alex carp just was

Andrew Keen

on cnbc uh making some strongly anti-anthropic open ai remarks standing back a little bit keith um the headlines about open ai and talks to give trump administration a five percent stake in the company one of the things i've thought we've talked about this uh in the last few months is this convergence of the american and chinese model is this more evidence trump's interference or the america u.s states interference in anthropic and open ai altman's willingness to allow the state to own and in some ways operate his company does that suggest that the chinese and american models are actually becoming quite similar similar in some ways

Keith Teare

but honestly i think the key driver here is altman and amidai being scared of open source models and wanting regulation uh and so i think it's very self-serving the fact that they're offering five percent which is a pitifully small amount is indicative of that they're not really serious

Andrew Keen

about maybe their their opening uh offer they may go a bit higher there's a lot of money there i mean if they're worth trillions of dollars five percent of two or three trillion is a lot of money Yeah, and I still think OpenAI is going to be worth $10 trillion. You've said that. But is Sam beginning to become like Dario? You always used to love Sam and hate Dario. Now are they in the same camp?

Keith Teare

I think when it comes to wanting government protection against open source models, yeah, they're converging. They're very different in other ways, of course. My manifesto that you called it, I'm saying. and i'm here i'm echoing others so it's not my idea it should be 75 percent not five percent well only 75 percent

Andrew Keen

of what that this the government should own 75 percent of open ai of

Keith Teare

the shares yeah uh not the government but a sovereign wealth fund which i think is not the same as the government i think it's very important it isn't the government it's a sovereign wealth fund and that sovereign wealth fund itself should be um owned by every citizen every citizen when you're born you should get shares in it and it should pay dividends every year based on liquidity and you know that's an american idea probably you need a global version of that idea

Andrew Keen

if this is really going to work and my friend somehow doubt you'll get a global and it actually brings more into context the increasing sensitivity over citizenship and immigration. Because if what you're calling for actually happened, let's just say that every citizen owns a little bit of 75% of OpenAI and Anthropic and all the big tech companies of the future, then being an American citizen would be a very lucrative business.

Keith Teare

You know, they did something very similar in Norway.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, but Norway had all the natural resources.

Keith Teare

I don't know if there's any real difference between being the leader in AI and natural resources from a value point

Andrew Keen

of view I still I think yeah I wonder what Norway's policy is in terms of I'm guessing that Norway is a very very hard place to immigrate to and certainly to get citizenship but I don't know I don't I don't know the details

Keith Teare

on citizenship I think immigration like in most of Europe is is easier especially if you're a refugee because they have very liberal...

Andrew Keen

Right, well let's sidestep that one. So you've got 75% sovereign wealth fund. What else on your manifesto in the US to make America even greater