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This week’s guest is Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, the founder and CEO of Sceye. (It’s pronounced like “Sky.”)

Mikkel is a fascinating dude. His family started a sewing business in Denmark back in 1957. Over the years, Mikkel helped transform the company and parlayed its materials expertise into some very well-known humanitarian efforts, including the PermaNet for fighting mosquitoes and malaria and LifeStraw for potable water.

We talk about all this on the podcast, but, if you’re watching the episode, you’ll see that the focus is on the giant airship-looking thing in the background, which belongs to Sceye.

Sceye has created what it calls a High-Altitude Platform System. (It’s a mouthful, and we won’t fault you for calling it a blimp or an airship, although people in these fields will fault you.) This inflatable craft can travel for thousands of miles and then keep its position over a particular location for very long periods of time. It’s meant to beam down telecommunications and internet services to people who can’t be reached by other means, and/or to take photographs and video, and/or do whatever a machine dangling underneath it can do.

The aircraft can get closer to its targets than, say, a satellite and can also be present for much longer periods of time than, say, a drone.

The airship behind us in this episode ended up flying to Japan for a test run. SoftBank liked the results enough to order a fleet of HAPS for nationwide mobile broadband across Japan.

I’m into airships. Like, really into airships. As proof, I will link to this mini-documentary we made on them for Bloomberg instead of linking to something else on the Core Memory YouTube channel, which is really where you should go for all your science and technology video needs.

I’m also skeptical that these things can have a big enough market to justify all the cost and effort that go into making and flying them. Mikkel takes offense at my position and sees a future full of thousands upon thousands of HAPS in the sky. We’re into what Sceye is doing and hope Mikkel proves us wrong.

SPONSOR

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster. Learn more here.

Timestamps

0:00 Intro4:38 From Denmark to Lagos11:06 LifeStraw and Mosquito Nets19:54 The Leap Into Aerospace24:57 Airships, Balloons, and Staying Put32:12 What About Starlink?39:06 Watching Wildfires From Above42:51 A $100 Million Bet49:26 The Fabric That Holds Helium55:27 Broadband Straight to Your Phone59:18 Flying First, Talking Later

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AI is collapsing the distance between an idea and a playable game. What happens when almost anyone can build one? In this episode, a16z General Partners Anish Acharya and Jonathan Lai discuss how AI is changing game development, from generating art and code to operating tools like Blender and game engines directly. They explain why cheaper development could let studios take more creative risks while opening game creation to people without traditional coding or design skills. They also explore modding, remixing existing games, and the emergence of AI-native experiences that generate characters, abilities, and storylines on the fly, potentially creating games that never really end.

Drug discovery and development has long relied on expensive, time-consuming empirical trial and error. By shifting the discovery process onto computers, Isomorphic Labs wants to fundamentally change medicine from a process of discovery to one of precision engineering. Elad Gil sits down with Isomorphic’s president Max Jaderberg to discuss his vision for using predictive AI models to achieve experimental accuracy. Max details how the success of AlphaFold provided the first proof of concept that a deep learning model could generalize in the field of biology, and how an AI model’s compounding of learnings allows it to achieve generalizability with scale, thus greatly increasing the probability of success as well as speed in real world clinical trials. He also talks about evolving past the need for animal testing through in-silico models, Isomorphic’s focus on developing drug design engines that are agnostic of disease area, target class, and modality, why accurate molecule engineering unlocks the potential for multidrug cocktails that span complex biological pathways, and how he believes AI molecule optimization will improve both human lifespan and healthspan. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MaxJaderberg | @IsomorphicLabs Chapters: 00:00 – Trailer 00:45 – Max Jaderberg Introduction 01:24 – Isomorphic Origins 05:23 – Drug Discovery Stagnation 11:49 – Hiring at Isomorphic 14:35 – Bringing Drug Discovery Onto Computers 19:31 – Isomorphic’s Datasets 20:30 – Rethinking Endpoints 22:50 – External vs. Internal Dependences 23:57 – Automating Biologic Labs 26:22 – Internal Development vs. Partnerships 27:19 – Areas of Human Health Focus  29:21 – Multidrug Approaches 32:17 – Risk Appetite Variation 34:26 – Disease Treatment Outlook 35:42 – Human Longevity and Drug Development 39:16 – Conclusion

AGENDA:

03:47 Sequoia exits London and ends its scout program
14:46 Nvidia board opens inquiry into Jensen Huang
21:51 Nasdaq 100 sheds $2.5T in one day
24:13 Anthropic targets $1T IPO valuation at $70–$78 a share
34:16 Revolut hits $115B, Zipline triples to $21.5B, fal doubles to $16B
40:47 Fireworks AI suffers two breaches in 30 days
45:41 Dialpad buys Ada for $400M in stock
50:35 Cloudflare revenue jumps 39% after a 20% staff cut
1:00:05 California voters reject billionaire wealth tax

 

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How did the Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizarro take advantage of the Incan civil War? Were they able to discover the glorious city of Cusco, with all of its riches? And, what terrible brutalities did they commit along the way…? Join Dominic and Tom, as they discuss the next dramatic phase of the Spaniards conquest of the Incas, as the violence escalates and the city of gold prepares to fall… _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AGENDA: 

04:00 OpenAI Cuts Valuation to $1.25 Trillion as Fundraise Shrinks
08:00 Google Loses $500 Billion as AI Stocks Sell Off
10:00 Anthropic's Growth Slows as AI Price War Intensifies
27:00 DoorDash Buys Instacart for $17 Billion
33:00 Kalshi Raises $1 Billion at $40 Billion Despite Legal Threats
41:00 Cognition Eyes $80 Billion as Baseten Hits $30 Billion and Serval $3 Billion
51:00 AI Law Firm Crosby Bids for Collapsed Legal Giant Weil
57:00 Physical Intelligence Targets $20 Billion Valuation
01:00:00 Hugging Face Deal Faces Scrutiny as Salesforce Buys Cresta for $2.7 Billion