Can EU Starlink? - The EU’s 25yr Mega Trade Deal - Anthropic's CoWork Kills It!

BBC yeets kids shows onto YouTube, EU does a mega trade deal, Open Cosmos tries to be European-ish Starlink, Meta buys nuclear vibes, UK bins digital IDs (again), Anthropic’s “CoWork”, Grok vs governments, plus Deals of the Week.
Basically: geopolitics, space, energy, AI, and British admin disintegration.

(00:34) BBC on YouTube: “iPlayer walked so Netflix could run”

• Dan: YouTube is enormous; BBC is adapting for younger audiences (and maybe… survival mode).
• Mads: iPlayer was genuinely visionary; regulators stopped BBC going too commercial back then.
• Andrew: Stop geo-blocking. Just take my money. (“Not in your region” = crime.)

(02:51) EU–Mercosur trade deal: 25 years, 700M people, farmers furious

• Biggest-ever EU trade deal: Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay. (03:30)
• Why now: EU wants options beyond US gridlock + China dependence.

(06:07) Open Cosmos: “EU Starlink?” …Not quite, but it’s something

• Takeaway: not a consumer Starlink clone; more “secure, sovereign comms” for governments. (07:56–08:32)

(08:32) Meta’s 20-year nuclear power deals: AI runs on electricity (and contracts)

• Hyperscalers locking in long-term nuclear PPAs in the US; Europe stuck with slower buildout, planning pain, and NIMBY boss fights.

(10:12) UK drops digital IDs: “25 incompatible IDs is the national strategy”

• Mads: Digital ID is foundational (identity + access). Most OECD countries have it; UK is the holdout. (10:45–12:14)
• UK backlash feels emotional; we already have loads of IDs that don’t talk to each other.
• Cost debate: rollout ~£2bn-ish vs long-term fraud reduction. (13:33–13:48)

(15:35) Anthropic CoWork: “built in 10 days… by Claude Code”

• CoWork: “Claude Code for knowledge workers” — chat UI + sandboxed VM. (19:31)
• It’s early/buggy, but the meta-point is wild: AI building AI products at startup speed. (18:17–18:34)

(20:30) Yann LeCun “world models”: why LLMs aren’t the whole story

• LLMs can talk; they don’t understand physics.
• Four buckets: video prediction, interactive simulators (e.g. “move left/right”), physics engines, and latent world models (JEPA). (22:41–23:27)
• Robot “pick and place” success rate cited as a compelling signal for JEPA. (23:27–24:15)

(28:13) Grok: sexualised imagery = policy grenade

• Group consensus: when it’s minors, “platform self-policing” isn’t cutting it.

(32:19) JPM Health conference: biotech meets the LLM invasion

• Nvidia + Eli Lilly: $1B partnership for AI drug discovery. (33:28)
• Big pharma facing $200–$300B revenue going off-patent → likely acquisitions spree. (33:28–33:53)
• Torch acquisition: “unified medical memory” pulling from records/wearables/visits. (36:54–37:10)
• Cool paper alert: stroke triage via CT platform cuts transfer time by 64 minutes; “2M brain cells die per minute.” (38:57–39:25)

(42:19) Deals of the Week — “capital markets therapy session”

• Quantinuum files confidentially for IPO; quantum + encryption randomness today, “R&D roadmap” tomorrow. (42:32–43:52)
• Aikido Security (Ghent) hits unicorn: $60M Series B led by DST. (46:41–47:05)
• Parloa (Germany, call centre automation): $350M Series D @ $3B, six months after Series C. (46:41–47:05)
• Equal1 (Ireland, UCD spinout): $60M for quantum servers in data centers. (47:20)
• Harmattan AI (France, drones): €200M Series B @ €1.4B, Dassault invested; supplying drones incl. UK Army contract mentions. (47:36–48:12)