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Those who do win. Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world. But the real question, of course, is what to do to win this war. The battle (to excuse all these blunt military metaphors) is to assemble the AI pieces to reassemble what Keith calls the “jigsaw” of our new chat centric world. And to do that, the veteran start-up entrepreneur advises, requires owning “the front door”. Yet as Keith acknowledges, we're still in the AltaVista era of AI—multiple contenders fighting for dominance before a Google-like winner emerges. His key insight is that “attachment becomes the moat”. Users develop emotional bonds with their preferred AI interface, creating switching costs that transform temporary advantages into permanent market positions. Multi-trillion dollar success belongs to whoever builds the stickiest, most indispensable gateway to our AI-native future. Those who do that will win; those who don’t, will not.

1. We're in the "AltaVista era" of AI - Multiple players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity) are competing for dominance, but like the early search engine wars, one will likely emerge as the clear winner within 1-2 years.

2. "Attachment becomes the moat" - Users develop emotional bonds with their preferred AI interface that create powerful switching costs. Keith uses Claude for coding and won't switch despite trying alternatives, demonstrating how user loyalty becomes a competitive advantage.

3. The shift from "page-based" to "AI-native" internet - We're moving from a web of URLs and content pages to one where every interaction starts with human-AI conversation. The browser is becoming yesterday's technology.

4. Publishers aren't doomed but are unprepared - The monetization model will evolve from traditional advertising to contextual links surfaced by AI. Publishers will eventually "beg to be included" and AI companies will pay for training content while driving traffic through relevant links.

5. The "jigsaw pieces" already exist across industries - In healthcare, finance, and other sectors, all the components needed for AI transformation are available but need assembly. Whoever puts these pieces together first in each field will become massive companies - potentially the world's biggest in their respective industries.

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How can you not love the Divine Comedy whose inspirations include Tom Lehrer and “Landfill Indie”? And Neil Hannon wrote music for Wonka, Father Ted and the IT Crowd. There’s a new album, Rainy Sunday Afternoon, and a tour in October and all bases are covered in this conversation from Kildare, these among them …

 … seeing U2 at Croke Park “and feeling as though I’d won the Wonka Golden Ticket”.

… favourite bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s - Pixies, Sugarcubes, Sonic Youth and Ride.

… the miserably cancelled Father Ted musical and how he’s recycled the songs he wrote for it.

… a research trip to an Indie Disco with Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian.

 … how it feels to record at Abbey Road.

 … his teenage band inventing new words to R.E.M songs in an Enniskillen youth club.

… how new songs begin.  

… supporting Carter USM and Suede, “the moment I first felt like a pop star”.

… Mar-A-Lago, a childhood trip to London and further melancholia on his new album Rainy Sunday Afternoon.

… rocks on the street in Derry en route to Primary School during the Troubles.

… Hepworth and Ellen appearing on a Duckworth Lewis album - “nudging and nurdling!”

… his first stab at “witty pseudo-intellectual lyrics”.

… “never leave your tour bus, be rehearsed before you start rehearsals” and other ways touring saves money.

… and the five songs he always plays.

Divine Comedy tickets here: https://thedivinecomedy.com/live

Pre-order Rainy Sunday here: https://lnk.to/RainySunday

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We have a broadcasting legend for you today on Rosebud, as Gyles interviews the creator and host of In Our Time and The South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg, Lord Bragg of Wigton. Melvyn takes Gyles back to his roots in Wigton, a small town in Cumbria, in which his parents ran one of the local pubs, and the young Bragg played all day long in the streets, making bows and arrows from trees overhanging the river. He tells Gyles about his schooldays, the brilliant teachers who guided him and there's a really interesting discussion of the unexpected mental health problems he had as a teenager. He takes us to Oxford University, where he fell in love with cinema, and was encouraged to apply for a BBC traineeship. And we hear about some of the landmark interviews of his career, with Francis Bacon and Paul McCartney. But its Bragg's evocation of his working class childhood which will really stay with you - this is a journey to a special time and place which no longer really exists.

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Labour Party grandee Fergus Finlay asked permission to run for president from the party’s leader Ivana Bacik. Instead, his party has chosen to support Catherine Connolly. It isn’t the first time he’s lost out on the nomination. Fergus spoke to Pat this morning on the show.

Have you ever woken up with a crick in your neck after a bad night's sleep? Or feel like you can't rotate your head? Many people will experience neck pain at some point in life. Luckily, there are science-backed treatments and exercises to ease those nagging aches. This episode, a spine surgeon, sports medicine doctor, sleep expert and physical therapist give tips on working through neck pain.

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David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward edge of the leftward tendency," Brooks argues that America's core problems aren't economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our "secure base" of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security.

Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of audacity, what made William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman great mentors, why academics should embrace the epistemology of the interview, the evolving status of neoconservatism, what Trump gets right, whether only war or mass movements can revive the American psyche, what will end the fertility crisis, the subject of his book, listener questions, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded July 22nd, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography

We’re constantly being told that the State is one of the richest in the world but we don’t make the cut among The Economist’s list of 178 countries. We discuss this further with Economist  Austin Hughes.

Leonora Carrington's charming and surreal novel The Hearing Trumpet (1976, probably) is the subject of this episode. Joining Una, Andy and Nicky is author and lecturer Dr Paul March-Russell, who offers insights into all aspects of Carrington's career. Leonora Carrington lived a long and extraordinary life; we discuss the ways in which her biography intersects not just with her books, but her remarkable paintings and sculptures, which at auction now fetch tens of millions of dollars. How did the daughter of a Lancashire industrialist become first a muse to the Surrealists, and then an artist in her own right, whose visionary work will probably outlast theirs? How did the many challenges she faced - institutional, sexist, financial and health - shape her writing? And why, as Paul suggets, is Leonora Carrington so relevant to young artists today? Point your hearing trumpets at wherever you get your podcasts.

On Mon 27th Oct 2025, Backlisted is recording a show at 92NY in New York, on William Maxwell at the New Yorker. Tickets are available now from https://www.92ny.org.

On Wed 29th Oct 2025, we are recording a second show at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, NYC, a special episode on books by Bob Dylan, including Tarantula and Chronicles Vol. 1. Tickets are available now from https://bitterend.com.

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Miriam Toews reads her story “Something Has Come to Light,” from the August 25, 2025, issue of the magazine. Toews, a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, is the author of eight novels, including “A Complicated Kindness,” “All My Puny Sorrows,” “Women Talking,” and “Fight Night.” A new memoir, “A Truce That Is Not Peace,” comes out this month.

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