Live from a Lisbon beach studio, Dan, Mads and Lomax dig behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week: China's AI power play, is UK pension money finally trickling into venture, and a full 10-vs-10 slugfest on whether we're partying like it's 1999.

01:10 — Quick news roundup. Grok 4.5 with Cursor, all three flavours of GPT-5.6, Nvidia shedding $1tn (still up 1,500% since ChatGPT), and UK startups raising $17bn in H1 2026 across four mega-rounds.

03:17 — Last week, settled. Tesla smashes deliveries at 480k on European demand; SpaceX's index entry proves a non-event; Samsung's 19x profit jump still can't lift the stock.

06:13 — Burnham and the OBR. A sobering warning: £100bn a year in cuts or tax rises to stabilise debt, against a new PM promising to spend more.

09:24 — GPT-5.6 gets the nod. OpenAI's public launch arrives only after government sign-off — a sign of the strange new times.

10:41 — China's AI playbook. Distilling US models, then gating their own. The lads debate Europe's exposure and why Mads thinks Nvidia's Nemotron wins whatever happens next.

21:10 — UK Pensions pile in. NEST's £200m venture sleeve via Schroders. Small beans, late-stage, top of the market — but is coercion or incentive the right unlock?

32:00 — Is it 1999? Ten reasons yes (CAPE past 40, $800bn circular deals, burn rates) versus ten reasons no (real revenue, saner multiples, constrained demand). The core split: this time the tech actually works.

46:13 — AI Corner. Fable 5 goes metered and chews credits alarmingly fast; Sonnet 5 mops up the low end; ID verification goes live.

48:57 — Portugal special. The 1755 earthquake, Pombal's proto-prefab "birdcage" buildings, and why Lisbon punches above its weight on unicorns per capita.

56:50 — Prediction. Europe's opening: win the real-world, industrial, regulated applications when the bubble deflates.

58:15 — Deals of the week. Luffy AI (£8.1m), Proxima Fusion (€411m), QuantumDiamonds (€91m), plus Blue Origin's $130bn raise.

1:00 — Week ahead. US CPI, ASML and TSMC earnings, and the VW restructuring showdown.

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