EUVC E679 | This Week in European Tech with Dan, Mads & Lomax
Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.
This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.
From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI. This is one of those episodes where everything connects.
The common thread is power. Who has it? Who’s losing it? And who’s still pretending nothing has changed?
This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.
What’s covered:
00:00 Intro: ChatGPT Health launch, privacy/encryption, “use with skepticism”
00:03 FDA shifts: deregulation + faster approvals for AI medical devices / wearables
00:09 Trump + Greenland + NATO: geopolitics, minerals, defense, European sovereignty
00:18 France proposing social media ban for under-15s; phones in schools; EU vs US regulation
00:23 Meta reportedly buying Manus (AI agents / applications layer)
00:25 Octopus Energy’s Kraken spin-out: valuation, contracted revenue, European “hidden champion”
00:27 Discord IPO chatter: nearing ~$1B ARR; monetization model
00:32 UK pensions: pressure to allocate to privates; constraints + risk/return tradeoffs
00:42 FTSE 100 hits 10,000; UK vs S&P; defense-driven rally; low tech weighting
00:50 CES: Nvidia autonomous driving + open sourcing; “physical AI” + Mercedes partnership
00:54 China & Nvidia H20 pressures; AMD vs Nvidia software gap; Intel relevance