E683 | 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:03:00 ChatGPT Health launches and why Europe is locked out05:00 The FDA’s pivot to deregulation and what it means for health startups10:00 Using multiple LLMs as a “second medical opinion”13:00 Trump, Greenland, and the slow collapse of Pax Americana18:00 Sovereignty, defence spending, and Europe’s strategic wake-up call23:00 France moves to ban social media for under-15s27:00 Meta buys its way into the AI application layer30:00 Kraken spins out of Octopus at multi-billion scale34:00 Revolut’s Turkey move and the march to 100 million users37:00 UK pension funds, catastrophic underperformance, and broken incentives45:00 Why venture returns matter more than fees49:00 FTSE hits 10,000 and why it doesn’t mean what you think56:00 CES, Nvidia’s autonomous ambitions, and physical AI01:04:00 Grok’s $230B valuation and free speech trade-offs01:07:00 Deals of the Week