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Civilization: What is it Good For?
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Speaker 3
Hello, everybody. It's March 1st, a Saturday, the first That Was The Week tech roundup for March, almost spring now. Last week, something was back. It was unicorns are back, according to That Was The Week's Keith Teer. This week, something else is back, or maybe it never went away. Civilization, what is it good for? Keith is joining us, as always, from... I'm not sure how you look at it. Keith, is Palo Alto the heart of civilization or the problem with civilization?
Well, civilization is a pretty fluid concept. So I'd say it can be civilized, but there's a lot of uncivilized elements to Palo Alto as well. Let's not go into the details, but the school board meetings are fascinating to listen to.
Yeah, I don't want any more rants from you on woke school boards. So civilization, what is it good for? I mean, this is supposed to be, Keith, a tech show, or at least our tech conversation of the word,
Well, I think we owe civilization to tech. There wouldn't have been an enlightenment were it not for the various innovation revolutions that happened prior to it. And there wouldn't be democracy without the kind of uplift in humanity that innovation gave rise to. we'd still be kings and lords and feudal serfs. So civilization and tech are highly interconnected. And this week there was a really good article that leads the newsletter, We Can Achieve Great Things.
By David Brooks of the New York Times. It was one of the rare times where you and I are thinking identically. I sent it to you and then you said, I've already got it in it. We can achieve great things. I have to ask you, you talk about civilization and... lords and serfs. Some medievalists would say that the medieval period of lords and serfs was a high point of civilization. That was, even in technological terms, that was the period in history where the great cathedrals of Europe were built. Why are we more civilized than the medieval people?
I think civilization is a process. So we can disagree about the definition, but my definition would be the average experience of life of the average citizen is constantly improving. Being able to get fresh oranges and bananas from the store, as mundane as that may sound, couldn't be assumed even within the last century. So supply chains, global markets, transport, flying around the world in less than 24 hours, or to the other side of the world at least. All of these things are representative of human life experiences that become available to many people, not all people for sure.
I'm not sure if you're really talking about civilization. You're talking about progress, or at least your version of progress. Because some people might argue that civilization was was realized with the ancient Greeks, and it actually has nothing to do with technology.
Well, that's why I say it's fluid. I think civilization is a container word. Within it, there are required elements. In the past... Ancient Greeks being a great example. Democracy wasn't required to have civilization. You could have slavery and civilization. So I personally wouldn't call that civilization. I'd call it a slave society with intellectuals, which is a different thing. I do think civilization these days contains politics, economics, social norms, law, legal systems, the rule of law, the right to not be picked up off the street and thrown in prison for your whole life, and so on and so forth. So the meaning changes. I think it also these days implies access to communications, the ability to communicate. There's all kinds of things that civilization today means. And I think the only way to judge it actually is from the future. You have to have in your mind an ideal civilization and look today and ask what's missing to have the ability to write an article like we can achieve great things because great things need to be defined from the point of a desired future. And so what you're really discussing is what does future civilization have within it that doesn't exist within it today?
So it's the idea of progress. I looked up Western civilization. And one of the things that got thrown back at me was apparently a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. What do I think when somebody asked him, what do I think of Western civilization? And Gandhi famously responded, I think it would be a very good idea. Although apparently, according to AI, he may not have actually said that. I'm not sure if we need AI to ruin that wonderful remark, even if it wasn't true um did did gandy or does gandy have a point that that we're talking about western civilization your op-ed this week is just broadly about civilization i don't know whether you chose to use an ai for the art keith but we have this picture of a huge metropolis in the cover, I'm not sure everyone would necessarily associate huge high-rise metropolises with civilisation.
Well, the ability to live in a warm apartment with a bed is certainly one element of civilisation and that certainly couldn't be taken for granted until last century. So yeah, I do think big cities are part of civilization, transport systems. And I think we can achieve great things really is pointing to the fact that a narrative about a desired future has gone missing. from the polis, if you will. He's focused on... And this is Brooks's point, right?
And his point is, and I'm quoting him here, that he points out an irony. Progressives, and Brooks is a conservative rather than progressive, progressives who believe in using governments to do good things have built a system that renders government incompetent, at least according to Brooks.
Yeah, and that's the core of the discussion, which I focus on the editorial, which is what is the relationship between innovation and government over time? And can you see government as a tool for the creation of civilization? Or is government a problem? You know, in America, at least, conservatives always want, in quotes, small government, and Democrats are characterized as wanting, in quotes, big government. And that is too static a way of thinking. What you need is a government that helps the underlying drivers of progress, part of which is technology and economics. And government over time will become less and less required for that as abundance is produced, as it always has been in the history of the human race, government will have less and less role to play because there'll be more organic access to the things you need to have a good life. And so government itself is a variable. It's not big or small. It should actually be shrinking. In a world where there is civilization and progress, government should shrink. organically not because of your political point of view it just should be less and
less necessary it's interesting that you bring up the word abundance in brooks's uh assets it's it's definitely for all our viewers and listeners it's definitely well worth reading it's one of his better pieces, We Can Achieve Great Things. Brooks talks about two upcoming new books, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's Abundance, and also Yoni Applebaum's Stuck, which we'll talk about later. They're coming out with a book, Klein and Thompson, probably the two hottest relatively young writers in the US at the moment. um and it'll be interesting i'm very curious i'd love to get one of them on my show i'm not sure if i'll be able to but i'm interested to see what they're saying about how we get to what you call the politics of plenty or the economics and technology of plenty.
And I would say, Andrew, it goes to the core of that was the week that you and I discuss every week for the last several years. And most of what we talk about is, or at least what I talk about is a kind of inevitable globalism that comes out of technology and progress,
a desire for wealth to be uninhibited by government. We talked a lot about Lina Khan. Your favorite grad student. Yeah, and I think these themes that the book and the essay this week in the New York Times are really echoing what we always talk about. And it's a hard point because Most people, when they think about these topics, think very specifically in the moment, and they have opinions about specific events, but they don't stand back and contextualize any sense of history, where it's come from, where it is, and where it's going.
Well, but the history stuff is particularly relevant when it comes to progressives because, and I get this on my show all the time, I'm particularly interested in this, is many, many progressives still ultimately fall back on New Deal, Great Society fixes to all the problems with America and the world, that the government is really the only set of institutions that can really address this stuff. And we saw this with Biden. And I think, for better or worse, that's why he lost the election, because he was never really able to explain where all those trillions of dollars went and how would it impact... ordinary people. And of course, we're seeing it now with Trump and Musk and all the hysteria over the cuts in government.
Yeah, I think he lacked any narrative. I will say, you know, the roads around where I live have all been fixed. There is actually tangible evidence that good things happen because of some of that money being spent. But there was no overarching vision or narrative to accompanying it. So there was nothing to believe in. It was actually quite negative. I'm going to fix the bridges and the roads would be interpreted by most people as the roads and bridges are in disrepair.
and that's a negative that may be true i mean it's like i'm gonna obama said i'm gonna fix health care you might see that as a negative but the american health care system was and in still some ways still is broken i mean just got to be honest
about that yeah no i'm not i don't deny that but i think if you want to own the future it's better to say um It's inevitable that in the future, nobody will have to pay for health care because society will have enough abundance to pay for that for everybody.
Yeah, but you can say whatever you want in books like Abundance. But first, very few people are going to believe you. And secondly, that's so far in the future that... It's not going to really impact.
Well, not really. There are countries in the world today where it's literally true that nobody has to pay for health care at the point of needing it. Nobody. It's free. It's not free, of course, because they pay national insurance contributions from their salaries, but it supports 100% of the population, and you can show up and you don't pay. That's normal in some societies. It will inevitably be normal everywhere in the world at some point.
Well, you say that, but as Keynes famously said, in the long run, we're all dead. You're going to say, well, I'm going to say prove it. And you're going to say, well, I can't prove it, but I guarantee it in the long run. I mean, it seems in America, the reverse is happening for all the cuts and the obsession. with lowering taxes of the Trump regime, they're going to cut Medicaid and maybe even eventually Medicare. So there's no evidence in the US of this at this point. I can't speculate on the future.
I agree with you, Andrew, but it's because they focus... Who's they? Politicians, mainly, focus on the immediate present, and the narrative becomes costs and savings. And this is where Musk is wrong. The narrative should not be costs and savings. The narrative should be service provision, modernization and excellence. And if you do that, you will get costs savings. But the focus on cost savings is a focus on destroying what has been built, not building something new. And building something new is the only way to get people excited. And you're right, free healthcare in America may be in the distant future or never. But the idea that you're for it is a galvanizing idea and it contributes to a sense of civilization that you're striving for. And if you can strive for civilization, I would imagine most human beings would want that.
Well, no one's striving. I mean, you're never going to get a politician or anyone coming on the show, with the exception perhaps of a leftist French intellectual arguing against civilization, or maybe Mahatma Gandhi, although he's not around at the moment. It seems as if... Brooks's argument was summarized by Yoni Applebaum's new book. Yoni Applebaum works for The Atlantic. He's a senior editor there. Stuck, how the privileged and the property broke the engine of American opportunity. Applebaum was on Keen on America this week. on why America is stuck in a crisis of immobility, I'd strongly suggest everyone watch it, not for me, but for Applebaum. He's particularly good. I mean, the argument that Applebaum makes that really resonates with Brooks is that America, and particularly American progressives, are stuck. They've created a culture, an economy, where nothing ever changes and where, in a sense, that's celebrated. So Applebaum focuses on the fact that nobody moves anymore, that everyone's stuck in the same town, and that the American dream is rooted in the fact that people move all the time. But partly it's because of local laws, partly it's because of cultural assumptions. Do you agree with, I'm not sure if you've read the Applebaum book, it's well worth having a look at. I have. But do you agree with Yoni Applebaum?
Well, I haven't read the book, Andrew. You've given me just a snippet now from your show. And therefore, I haven't got a lot to go on. But I would say that the American dream being correlated to movement,
there's a missing part of the narrative, which is the movement was always focused on gain. So the move west, the gold rush, the move to Detroit and the motor industry after Ford, Hollywood, New York, money markets. There's always been something to move to. The problem with America today is what is booming to move to other than possibly AI in the valley, which needs specialists. And So I think it's symptomatic of something else we talk about a lot on that was a week, which is America's dominance of the economic leader with new growth breaking out that can employ millions of people doesn't exist anymore. If you were going to move today, I would speculate that if you're young enough and open minded enough, it would be probably to China. In fact, a few years ago, I even thought about going to Shanghai.
But I asked Apple about this. On Monday, I've got Nicholas Lalla on the show. He's a Tulsa-based investor and entrepreneur, and he talks about new Silicon Valley. We've had this argument lots of times before, or this conversation about new Silicon Valley is opening up in places like Tulsa. If you're an engineer in... Menlo Park or Palo Alto or San Jose, Keith. Why would you stay there? The rents are ridiculously high. There's too much competition. Why not go to Tulsa or Detroit? or any other smaller place where there's lots of incentives for innovation. That's what I don't understand is people aren't moving. I get the rules and the laws, but you're still allowed to do it.
I would say moving to Tulsa would represent a negative compromise in your life chances. People move when there's a positive change. life. I don't have Lala would agree with you. But anyway, why would it why does it represent a negative? Well, because there's less happening. It's less important. It's like It's like, would you go to Florence at the time of Leonardo or would you go to, you know, Sicily? You'd go to Florence.
I don't know. It depends what you're doing. I just I think that's wrong. In fact, there's because there's so many variables and not everyone's going to be Leonardo. Not everyone's going to be Steve Jobs.
No, I'm not. I'm talking about ordinary people who aren't going to become multibillionaires. But they don't know that. They think they might. But I think what Applebaum argues is it's more also bound up in local laws. I mean, should regulation be or should laws be restructured to encourage people to move?
I do think it's liberating if movement is easy. for sure. And I would include borders in that. But I think the world is actually going in the opposite direction. I agree with Applebaum that we are building walls around borders, including cities. And That is wholly negative. I agree with him on that. I don't know if he says it's negative, by the way, but if he does, I agree with him.
I mean, and I talked with Applebaum about this in the interview. It's with all this revolutionary technology, the internet obviously comes to mind. Is it... it's not in contradiction to being stuck, it almost compounds it. So people go on the internet and they do everything online, but they're still stuck in their physical lives, in their physical places. And it'll be interesting to see in the age of AI, whether that only compounds things, because as we're going through more and more profound revolution in how we work or how we don't work, Are we going to be more or less stuck in our lives?
I would say the concept of stuck is a fascinating concept. It's actually fascinating. I think it's a mindset. It's when you do the same thing week after week without considering anything else. And That's so alien to me. I mean, from one week to the next, I've always got new things I'm focused on. And so that's a mindset. It's a kind of almost like your emotional DNA forces you to do new things because it's boring to keep doing the old things. But you need to have the confidence that it's okay to fail, that it's okay to put things at risk. And stuck is the word I'd use for people who take no risk, don't imagine what comes next, have no energy for even putting their foot into what might come next, and therefore they get stuck. But those people are not going to change society or build civilization. They're consumers of civilization. They're not creators of civilization.
Well, the second essay in your Insights, Essays of the Week, was an interesting conversation. I thought it was particularly interesting on the Ezra Klein show between Klein and Martin Guri. He's been on my show before. He's the author of The Revolt of the Public, which is a A kind of a cult book. He first self-published it. Now it's become almost a classic. The Crisis Authority in the New Millennium. Guri is a Trump supporter, not hardcore MAGA. But he has an interesting take. Why did you choose Klein's conversation with Guri?
Well, I mainly chose it because it attempts an overarching understanding of a whole period of history. in which the media has gone from professionally produced credible news coverage and conversation to highly partisan tribal media that then gets disambiguated by social media. And you've now got the crowd or the public as they call it, being able to independently arrive at points of view that are not shaped by media barons anymore. And they talk a lot about the crisis of authority. I think almost every government in the world is suffering from a crisis of authority. We just had the German elections this week. And underlying that is look at the decline of the Social Democratic Party in Germany to a minority party in a coalition from what was back in the 1930s Germany's government. and many times since, you know, you're seeing almost every institution, the monarchy in England, the Supreme Court here in the US, lose authority. And the media is part of that. And the public are alienated from it and don't believe in it anymore, which is why you get populism.
And speaking of media barons in crisis, this isn't the X of the week, but there was an interesting post by Charlie Kirk on how Jeff Bezos sent an email to Washington Post employees telling them that the opinion page will now write... write daily op-eds about two, what he called pillars, personal liberty, free markets. What do you make of Bezos? You have a link in your insights. It's the third bullet about Bezos taking control of the Washington Post. Is this, from your point of view, is this a reaction? Is this... Bezos reacting? Is it a weak response or does it actually reflect Bezos's management of all this, successful management? Or is he just kowtowing to Trump?
I think all of the above, to be honest, Andrew. Firstly, I think he's completely wrong to do this in the spirit of his free speech. It's weird that he is, as the owner, doing the Rupert Murdoch thing and setting editorial policy.
And the Wall Street Journal was thrilled with it because, of course, their op-ed pillars are free market and personal liberty. So the Washington Post seems to be simply wanting to become the Wall Street Journal.
I actually agree that free market and individual freedom are really important things to talk about. I think they're correlated, and I think shrinking government over time, if there's abundance, will be part of that. And those are normally right-wing... If you tell me it's inevitable, abundance. Yeah. Well, and I was going to say... What, in the next 10,000 years? And I was going to say, those are normally right-wing talking points. Left usually sees government as... having the job of taking some of the wealth from the free market to provide services for people, which, by the way, is true, it should. So I think that narrative that Bezos is focused on and choosing sides in it, I understand him personally believing those things. I think it's a mistake for The Washington Post to be told that's all it can write about. By the way, Me and Jenny talked this morning. Is it the editorial page he's focused on or the opinion page? I can't remember. Or both. Opinion. Opinion, okay. Yeah, so that's weird. That's even worse that he's focused on opinion.
And some of the... more progressive opinion writers have left like Ruth Marcus, others like Dana Milbank have stayed and he had an interesting editorial in response to this. I mean, I think it's part of a broader shift as well. People like Milbank and Marcus will end up on Substack because why should they be answerable in their minds and in the minds of their readers? And these are clearly highly gifted, passionate, well-informed individuals. Why would they have to rely on what Bezos thinks? And so I think the two things are going together. Paul Krugman, of course, moved from the New York Times to Substack. We don't know the backstory of why he left the Times, but I'm guessing it was probably a similar thing.
Yeah. But, you know, if you really, if you hope for a kind of a, a future that you would be happy to live in, what you would hope is that people like Krugman read, uh, you know, the New York times thing from this week and start articulating. You mean the Brooks piece? And Krugman still seems to be fighting old fights. Um, uh, a bit like Robert, Robert Reich did last week.
I think they should be watching, not to be self-promotional, because I don't mean just me, but they should be reading the stuff that we published as well from the original authors. And they have to start crafting a believable vision of a future we want to live in, rather than all this turf wars that focus in on what happened in the news today.
Yeah, man, you and I don't always agree on everything. In fact, we rarely agree. But on this one, I think we're on the same page. Let's talk some tech. We've been talking sort of politics and tech. You've talked endlessly on this show about how you're not a coder, but you're using AI now to become a coder. There was an interesting piece in the New York Times this week summarizing this. Not a coder with AI, just having an idea can be enough. Is that really true? I mean, you have a degree of fluency in coding, even if you're not a coder. I don't, but I know what I would like to do. Could I really use Perplexity or Anthropic or ChatGPT now to code without having any understanding even of what coding is?
It's interesting. I spent, I don't know, a couple of hours this week with Steve Gilmore on this topic because he wanted to do some coding using AI. And so in about 15 minutes, we built some code using Anthropic that could take his RSS feed out of Feedly and produce a reading list for a newsletter automatically. And it was 300 lines of Python code
You don't need, that's the whole point in answering your question. You don't need to understand coding because Python, that the AI does, you need to understand what you want the code to do and then ask it to write it for you and it will. What did Python write for Steve? It wrote a way of accessing the RSS feed from his feedly, grabbing all the articles he'd saved to read,
downloading an HTML version of all those articles with some web links connected to it and a summary of each article that allowed him to then think about the articles and whether he wanted to put them into a Gilmore gang show. And, and, and all of that was written in code, but based off of plain English requests and, and the Python is a file, just like a word document. It's a file with a dot P Y ending. He could save it and he could then type in Python name of file. it ran and did all the things it was intended to do.
Coming back to Abundance, Klein and Thompson's new book, and this Times piece about everyone now being able to code, What does this suggest? I mean, you've got, I think, two of your sons, two of your three sons either studied or have studied or are about to study coding. What does this mean for coders? What will coders have in the future if this AI technology allows even still Steve Gilmore and myself to become coders?
Well, at this point, the coders... I'm not allowed to use AI in larger environments where there's lots of interdependencies between teams of coders. Well, this is in a firm. In a firm. But as an individual coder doing your own projects, the sky's the limit. And the popular belief is there'll be billion-dollar companies built by individuals, which
Yeah. And I actually think it might be true. And, you know, what's his name? Sam Lesson this week announced a fund to invest in individuals. And the coder becomes the driver of the AI. It's not as if the AI doesn't need the coder. It does. But non-coders can use it too. That's the key.
So in other words, you have a business idea. You may not be a coder, but you're able to ask perplexity or anthropic to put your idea into practice to give it flesh.
And it could be anything. I've never written an iPhone app. You have to know a language called Swift, which I don't know. And two days ago, I had this idea. My youngest son has some challenges, like all teenagers, and his doctor suggested he sees a therapist and there's no therapists. And I thought, I wonder if I could build a therapist app that basically takes on the role of a therapist for a teen. And two days ago, I started building an app called Luke, which is his name. And I now have an app where it asks you your name. It asks you what you want the therapist's name to be. It gives you a chat interface where you can go back and forth on various personal topics. It all runs on the iPhone. So your data doesn't go to the cloud at all. And it has a history and you can create challenges from the conversations, challenges for your life. Like I want to get up in the morning or whatever. I wrote the whole thing using cursor and anthropic. David Brooks would be impressed. You're achieving great things, Keith. Yeah. Without the government. And by the way, it's an example of an app that would be relevant to hundreds of millions of teens. So who's to say it wouldn't be a huge business if it was real? Because it clearly is needed. Teens need to talk to someone privately. that they can confide in. And the parents, as I know.
Yeah, we'll have to keep up. We'll have to see how that one goes. My understanding is there are already lots of businesses on that front, but no harm to have another one. One interesting piece of news, you've always been a very bullish on perplexity, which was historically always represented as an AI version of search. But now they want to reinvent the web browser with AI. I'm sure that's thrilled Google. I have to admit, I've played around a bit with perplexity, and I'm not as impressed as you are. It seems a little more complicated. But is this a big piece of news? Can they reinvent? the web browser with AI? And does that mean that Google should be losing some sleep?
I'd say this is one of those where you've got to say, let's wait and see. But I think it's the right decision by perplexity to do it. Their app that you can get on your Mac or Windows or Linux
is already kind of a web browser, but it's question-specific, and it creates things like separate spaces where you can contain conversations and content. Going to the next level, a full-on web browser with search, makes a lot of sense. I will say perplexity, anyone listening to this who hasn't used it, who uses Google, it will blow you away how much better than Google it is for most things. It's not even a close competition.
You mean Google as a search engine? As a search engine, yeah. So when the search stuff comes up on Chrome, that's obviously Google AI, are there browsers now that have perplexity as the default?
Right. You know, the problem is the innovators dilemma. If you've got, as Microsoft and Google both do, a business that is about advertising revenues, where they curate the top half of the page for people paying them, And they really focused on the revenue from ads on search. It's pretty hard to escape that revenue stream. And you kind of have to turn that off to be able to do what perplexity can do.
Why won't some of the DAI startups go the other way, so to speak, from perplexity? So why wouldn't Anthropic, for example, use their technology to reinvent things? the web browser. They have more backing than perplexity. Aren't they all going to kind of meet in the middle here?
I think we've done this a couple of times on the show where we have to separate out the layers in the cake. Anthropic... And OpenAI and many others are base level large language models. And they make money from selling API calls or from consumers who download the... But they do want to,
and you've talked about this endlessly, though not so much recently, they do want to move up the stack, so to speak, and even kind of do away with the stack. That's why originally you were so bullish on OpenAI.
Well, I would say everything I build, I build on top of OpenAI perplexity and the others using their APIs. So in a way, the stack has gone away. I'm directly writing code that speaks to their large language models. And they're getting paid for that, by the way, by me. They charge on a per, it's called a per token basis. So the stack has already gone away. What Perplexity are doing is the same as me. They're building something on top of those LLMs and they have access to all of them, including their own, by the way. They have one of their own. which isn't terrible. And so... Which is your way of saying it's pretty shit. No, I actually think it's good. Isn't terrible.
It isn't as good as this week's Claude 3.7 or OpenAI's 4.5. And it can't do the reasoning stuff that's now. So I think the underlying owners of LLMs are making huge amounts of money helping people build stuff for users on the other side. And I do think that that is valid and that will happen. But I think the big winners are the LLM owners without needing to innovate that much on their LLMs because they're already good enough.
Well, speaking of innovation and LLMs, you mentioned OpenAI unveiling its GPT 4.5 Orion. I know you're not always in agreement with Gary Marcus. Gary Marcus seems to get a lot of joy out of the fact that it's been poorly reviewed. What's your take on GPT 4.5? Is it the big failure that Marcus is arguing?
I haven't read this piece, but I will say they've rushed it to market and it's super expensive. The API price of using it is I think almost 100 times more than using their O3 mini model. So it's super expensive because it's very large and needs a lot of computation. And clearly, they haven't yet been able to package it up into a way to deliver it to people paying $20 a month. Yeah,
and that's a serious, coming from you, who's always been very, very bullish on OpenAI, that's a considerable degree of disappointment, Keith, because there's lots of alternatives. Billions of dollars are being poured into this. Marcus, who I don't think is a great fan of Sam Altman, suggests that it reflects Sam Altman's dishonesty. What's your take on why this has happened?
I think, you know, we've seen it since the Deep Seek edition of That Was the Week. The space is now moving weekly at a rate much faster than any time during the last two or three years due to competition.
Yeah, US and China, not so much Europe. And, you know, it's a life battle for survival. OpenAI, by the way, is still miles ahead. I think Anthropic is running them neck and neck, quality-wise.
You're being a bit too literal. If we break it, I'm irritating to answer because we're at 42 minutes, but there's a deeper conversation. OpenAI has its finger in hundreds of pies that the others can't play in. The LLM piece is less and less important. What's really important is the APIs and the agents and the ability to reason. And by most of these different variables, OpenAI is still very far ahead.
I know you're using the time clock as an excuse, but with or without APIs, if OpenAI is... is not keeping up or if they're equal and their pricing is different or if people lose faith in Sam Altman, then I expect things to change. Moving on, Keith, because as you said, we're We're taking advantage. I hope we haven't lost our entire audience. Startup of the week is Tactile with a K, T-A-K-T-I-L-E. What's the big deal about Tactile? On their website, they have two announcements. Firstly, they raised $54 million, Series B, which is your sweet spot. And then they have announced as a Gentic AI workbench, every decision matters. So Tactile, a big deal.
Well, it's an enterprise application of using AI. It's a good example of what we were just talking about. They are building on top of LLMs, but they're building specific features for an enterprise decision-making flow. The RAM was led by a UK investor, Balderton, which used to be called Benchmark in the UK, and they, through a whole series of events, changed the name. And it was worthy just because you're starting to see the application of AI to enterprise processes.
Interesting. So we will hear more about this. Finally, you're, and it's become more now, an X of the week. Connects with another piece of tech news that we didn't cover, but it's covered in your X of the week from Simon Taylor. Wow, Stripe just dropped the annual letter and the numbers are huge. $1.4 trillion of total process volume. Acquired bridge for $1.1 billion. What's the big Stripe news? Why is this news this week?
Yeah, so Stripe is a little bit like Intel Inside on a PC. It's the billing system that most internet and mobile websites use. And so most money that you pay in subscriptions or for goods and services on the internet, not most, but a lot of that money goes through Stripe. There's a few other players similar.
So they do an investor letter, which they did again this time. And the investor letter focused on the AI companies using Stripe. And they quantified how fast AI revenue is growing. And it's one of the first times when you've been able to get real data on AI's revenue. And that made it kind of super interesting. Stripe themselves are growing at about 38% a year. So even though they're huge, they're still growing fast. They're going to do an IPO, is that? No, I don't think anytime soon. They're doing a secondary sale, valuing themselves at 91 billion, which means their employees can sell shares to new buyers, even though the company is still private. And so you don't have to go public because you can provide liquidity for investors and employees while still being private.
So in overall terms, what does the Stripe, finally, Keith, what does the Stripe news tell us about? Civilization, which was the subject of this week. What's it good for? Can Stripe make the world more civilized?
to go back to tech, I mean, where would civilization be without indoor plumbing? So since Stripe is the plumbing of our AI future, why do we need them to have a civilized world?
You know, that's very apt. I think one measure of civilization is how interdependent we are as human beings. And plumbing is the thing that allows us to leverage interdependence, to act as a whole instead of just as individuals. And to me, the more interdependent we are, the better, because it's kind of the world's population leveraging its capabilities to collaborate on the future. Stripe is a big part of that, on the internet at least.
Well, Keith Teer, we will continue all our conversations about civilization and its techno discontents in future March and all 2025 shows. Keep well, Keith, and we'll talk next week. Bye.