Can I show you my fancy bag of clothes yes, I think I've got some good stuff for us all milk is good
Want to celebrate the finish right? I got some classics here
Come in here. Wow, these are we got a few of these and then I thought you might like this one. This is like
Maybe if you could me style okay. Yeah, yeah
Do you want to go sorta, you know almost underarm like that or this is just pure overall. I don't know
I think I would go over armed because I'm used to that one. Yeah, I'm
Looking forward to you embarrassing me
Alright here goes nothing. Oh
Holy shit
Yeah
Wow
It is said not by me. But by their nordic neighbors the finished people are weirdos Oh
Their language is basically elvish
They're aloof and do not engage with strangers or conduct Smalltalk
Their hobbies include competitions such as wife-carrying air guitar playing
And obviously cellphone bro
whoa
And yet here I am on a cool Helsinki morning hanging out with Finland's future Olympic javelin thrower lasse had a lot alone
All right, you pick?
All I had to do to make this happen was slide right into his DMS and promised to bring some old Nokia's
It turns out that the Finns are in fact very hospitable and that their cell phones are sturdy. Oh
So they are not
Was there a metaphor in all this?
something bigger being said about Finland's nosedive into a technology apocalypse and
subsequent rise as a vibrant inventive force in the technology industry
I'm not sure but I'm gonna go with yes and try to prove it to you. What comes next?
We all know the idea of a company town but here in Finland so big really unusual happen it became more of a company nation
During the early to mid 2000s Finland's economy booms driven almost entirely by Nokia
In its heyday Nokia accounted for 40% of all mobile phones sold and one out of every two smartphone sold
Then the 2007 something terrible happened to Finland. Apple released the iPhone
I've come here to Helsinki to find out what happened in the aftermath of Nokia's decline. And what startups have risen to take its place
For starters, I'll need a primer on the decline and fall of Nokia
And his luck would have it this long haired gentleman. David cord wrote a book by that very title
He also happens to be an American but nobody's perfect
You know when I was researching this episode were just telling people what we were gonna do
Especially some of the younger people had already
They're like, you know was Nokia that big of a deal because I remember them being seeking out the kings of the mobile industry
Well Nokia was huge in Finland
they were
Integrated than everything in the Finnish culture finns were very proud of what nokia did it was our success. It was a Finland success
Nokia's started way back in
1865 as a paper products company plush toilet paper was its first hit
It got into boots tires cables all kinds of stuff and then began making cell phones
first for this cool guy in the 60s and then for all of us
Can you hear me now the new iPhone is cool at all
Life was grand for Nokia and for Finland
From these glorious headquarters by the Baltic Nokia poured money into the Finnish social system
And then this raging capitalist named Steve Jobs came along and ruined everything
Today Apple is going to reinvent
The phone and here it is
My life always crazy
Right because I remember and this like ridiculously quick period of time
It's not like the company was wiped off the face of the earth
But I mean, it'll just lost the phone industry when Nokia started to stumble
I started to fail many people took that very personally
It was a Finnish failure there were you know thousands of people who are unemployed in the factory workers
software developers
In its moment of greatest desperation. Nokia's phone division suffered that greatest of dishonours
getting sold to Microsoft
Yeah, it was tough. There's a town called Nokia in Finland
Which actually the company was named for and the day the announcement broke a vandal went and changed the town sign to?
Microsoft okay before upset that, you know we used to be on the top of the world and now or on
Nokia, of course still exists and makes things namely telecommunications and data infrastructure gear
But where the company used to employ thirty five thousand people in Finland it now only employs thirty five hundred
Gonna pour one out for the notes
After Nokia, everyone is always talking about. What's the next Nokia?
What is the next big company that will be able to go international and have such a big impact on?
Finland and many people at the time thought maybe with Rubio
Rovio created Angry Birds one of the first gaming mega hits of the iPhone age
But while they had a few hot years it soon became clear that Nokia levels success was not in the cards
Eventually, we came to the side
That's not gonna happen again
We need to be more diverse. We need instead of having one gigantic company. We need to have a 10 good profitable mid-sized companies
The birds may not have replaced the notes
But they did kick off a gaming boom in Finland one that came to be dominated by supercell
The maker of all your favorite games and the master of your time
Supercell has only 300 or so employees, but it raked in about 1.6 billion dollars last year
100 million people plays games every day some of them spending thousands of dollars to upgrade their compounds and farms
and all of this winning happens in a strictly shoes off workplace a
common trope among finished startups that supercell claims to have invented
Ilka here the CEO is beloved by his countrymen for creating Finland's biggest post Nokia success story
I'm here to find out how he did it and hopefully score some free upgrades in clash of clans
You know for my kids
When you guys started supercell, what were you trying to do maybe in the gaming industry that was was different, you know
It seems to us that most games companies. They're Oregon organized very like in a very traditional about
basically, they had this hierarchy and the underlying assumption is that the leadership knows best what to do but in in games business I feel
That it actually is the game developers who are obviously are their closest to the games. We know best
I bought double games the company should do
so therefore we had this idea that what if you would like flip this traditional model like, you know,
The game developers would own the vision of what double games they would do
The strategy has made super so one of the most coveted places for game developers to land a job
Like Seth here the game engineer on clash Royale who moved all the way from San Francisco
I had always been aware of supercell not always kind of looked up to them as a an ideal place to work on
Mobile games do you think you're gonna stay here for a long time?
I bought a flat this week if that's real put that on camera
Other supercell imports like Bryce who hails from France bring new characters to life with their fancy pens
They fight among each other to get their characters onto the most prized real estate the game startup screen
The loading screen is that light? That's the prize. That's the best parts of a masterpiece of
Course there's just one problem with putting the creatives in charge
crazy-ass perfectionism
the way this philosophy is translated is that you guys are very careful about
What you actually release and that you cancel games all the time. How many of you killed over the last nine years?
There's no dozens or it's probably doesn't I think there's some story the Girona playing and and in the time that you're flying across
Some David you were pretty happy about God got whacked. Yeah, it was actually one of my favorite games
He's ever done. I used to play the lot for example with my kid son, and I really really loved that game
And then I just heard what the team had got together, I guess in a typical Finnish Finnish sauna
And then they had had a like show of hands
But you know who believes that this is the best game that they can make and you know
I don't think about many like hands went up and then they decided well, that's if that's ok
Let me should just kill it. How did you explain that to your kids? Oh, you know
Have you run this day I dunno that's me
Some doesn't call myself like the least least powerful CEO
My goal is that teams make, you know, most difficult all of all of the decisions
Which of course means means that I make very little or no decisions
So let's say that supercells games are exactly good for you
But I will say that these fine people seem to be having a good time making them and bringing
ungodly piles of cash to their homeland in the process
And you're telling me you cannot get my son Jules
Now go outside and play
To see what's next for the finished tech scene I scooted right into a former hospital
Which has been turned into a startup incubator called Maria 0/1
This place has it all
Gurney's
more Gurney's
tunnels full of startup refuse
wheelchairs hanging from the ceiling and
A cemetery right outside where venture capital goes to die
This hospital is founded in
1990s and then we took over
2016 so currently we serve over 130 startup companies. It's the largest startup campus in the Nordics
The startups here make all types of things from games to corporate software
But the freshest startup in Moorea zero one is certainly Nava which produces a high-tech version of a green wall
Until this is like breathing in 1,000 trees at once
All around the world
We see these plant walls
But this was the first one I've ever
That I've ever run into that had yeah a lot of built in technology into it as well
Yeah, so instead of a plant being just a decorative part of that
We have removed altogether the soil from the system almost all of the air purification in plants happens in the root zone
Microbes not in the leaves as people think okay. And if your plant is growing in soil the air is not touching the microbes
We could rid of the soil in from the system and then on top of the product there are fans
So it biofilter raise the air
24/7 in your room and this makes the air purification of plants efficiency over hundred times more more efficient and
We're talking about you've sold like hundreds thousands. Yeah, so now it's the biggest Greenville company in the world
We have about 3,000 units in our our customers place right now how kind of bigger vision is?
How can we help a billion people to enjoy nature and breathe forests great air in the building environment every day
Now that we've learned that the shock paddles have been applied in Finland's tech scene has come back to life
I would like to show you just how much better Finn's are as humans than the rest of us
It's the annual eating of the herring in Finland but gossip for safari
For one week in October people come here to downtown
Helsinki to gorge on the freshest of fish and other delicious smoky treats
They jockey for position prepare Instagram posts and enjoy some Tolkien inspired folk
Yes, Jesus
As he may have heard life is good for the Finns
The kids are smarter than yours
Their health system is healthier than yours and my god their parks are parking our than yours
These fins also eat really well on a square plate is some old fed
lightly smoked pork and boiled garlic emulsion on top
Here I am at your run-of-the-mill fast casual joint
popping some bubbly
And gobbling up a ham and cheese roll
followed by a nasa inspired marshmallow made out of beets
Good, that's crazy
But the future of food for Finland and the rest of the world may be here
Where protein is grown in a VAT overseen by the finished version of Walter White
This is solar foods with its headquarters in Espoo on the outskirts of Helsinki
We make food out of thin air using just electricity water co2 and some minerals as the main ingredients
Have you ever seen Breaking Bad?
Yeah, is there anything else we should know that happens in here?
This is pretty legal, okay
Until the pivot to full-blown meth labs needed
Solar foods is focusing on making protein and other nutrients with as little water and other resources as possible
No cows. No soy fields just bacteria being fed in a tub by Nature and
harvested by lab coat wearing laborers
In a sense what we are making is an ingredient for different food products
so tofu yogurt breakfast bars, or
Any meal that one could think of?
solar foods grab co2 from the fresh finish air and hydrogen
Produced via solar panels and uses this fuel to feed a microorganism
discovered by scientists in Finnish soil
The bacteria is then fed a cocktail of water and a secret blend of elements such as iron sulfur and calcium
The slurry of goodness is then dried to produce a powder
That's 65% protein with a few fatty acids and carbs making up the rest
This is the end product this yellow is powder
Protein powder and then this is just the liquid form of that
And how long is the drying process take it takes about the day to dry bunkie local?
Solar foods calls this stuff. So lame powder
Is it vetted by the FDA yet? No, is it safe for consumption?
I'm told yes, and since I'm the guinea pig for a technology show my gut is your gut
This is my personal vegan pancake recipe. It's like the regular ingredients for pancakes pretty much
Except we're replacing eggs with with silane powder
That's the magic moment
All right here goes our better
Yeah, you're a pro
Do you want to try it first I'll try it this is this is like the pancake of the future
I've never eaten pancakes grown in a laboratory before
It's a delicious pancake
Those dudes may cook a mean protein powder
But the true star of the finished healthier food movement is this one Maya it Conan the
co-founder and CEO of golden green
Golden green makes a vegetable based meat replacement called pulled oats
Everyone I met in Finland eats it
It's in the grocery stores in a variety of flavors
You can even get it at Taco Bell inside the vegan burrito
It's a thing a brown chunky thing
Maya and I met in a former Nokia cable Factory where else to try out some pull notes
You're not trying to mimic meat necessarily at all, right. You're just trying to make something that's sort of delicious that's made from oats
That's the exactly through and and it might be to the final application
It's mimicking, you know, because when you make a burger it needs to be something that feels like a burger
But what actually doesn't mimic is the incremental instinct ingredient least
We actually want to make sure that you have few things and they're really healthy and really clean label and everything is based on that
What are the big advantages of us it's not meat or yeah, I mean what yeah why yes, it's not originally
It's like marvelous. It has so good health benefits for your heart health and digestion and blood sugar and it's like medicine, you know
Thanks so much it's like a curry
It's delicious, I mean I read this idea anyway
So when we got started we didn't even plan to sell in Finland
this was like two years ago or is this 2016 but we thought let's just
Aim to test it in a couple of grocery stores
Then it was so funny because what happened was that people could entirely crazy
Although all the newspapers started to call us and all the buyers start to call us
So it was like, okay, we're gonna sell this in Finland, you know, and actually the market grew like 700 percent during that year
Unlike just about every other company in Finland
Golden greens headquarters are not in a former Nokia building
They're in a former bra factory and it's elevators real and spectacular
This is where pull doubts come to life so these are the basic ingredients
Yes, actually, this is oat flour
Then we have a fava bean flour. Then we also have a yellow pea pea protein, but that's about it
Okay, and then the magic the secret is how you blend this all together? Absolutely
Yes, so we first make like a dry material based of these ingredients. Okay, then we start
Moisturizing and baking it and it becomes something like this. Okay, so this
This goes through like a machine and the machine in the process. That's all
Top secret nobody gets to see that
But I am allowed to see this a brand new venture for gold and green
And it's sizzling salty and pork ish it's something that can be made to to replace like chicken
And this is not a debate
Maya refuses to call it bacon
But it's pretty much bacon and it might even be good. I
Mean that's delicious got all the like nice salty fatty kind of feel to it. Yeah, I
Like this a lot
And now thanks to a brave volunteer from golden-green a
Better living through Finland interlude that will come as quite the shock to my American friends. I
Present to you a baby a
mother and
a baby box
This is something that the government
Sends to every mother
Yes, or you can like choose you maybe don't want this and you can take the money. So it's 170 euros
The box is this meant to be like a crib. Yes. It is like a safe and comfy place to sleep
But also in this box there is 63
Items, okay. No, there is like the first baby book
You get all these clothes all the clothes in
Finland it is quite common that
You leave the child outside
To take a nap. Okay, so that's why we need a lot of quotes. So the baby's warm they sleep outside
yes, that's all seasons or just what it's
The wintertime. Why do they sleep outside? I think it's it's good for you
How much maternity leave do you get in Finland?
9 months
So in the box
There's also the hygiene things it is for the baby and also for adults
You get like a
Man you guys think of everything. Yes. I think I know that
One day the American dream will also include state-provided lube, right, right
By now
you're probably thinking these fins are godless vegan socialists who have an unnatural amount of concern for nature and
general well-being
This is probably even true
They also have a thing for relaxing in the glorious outdoors like this open-air Oasis on Helsinki's waterfront, I
Give to you the Alice pools
Steamed to perfection
And refreshed and frozen by the Baltic Sea I
Returned to the mean streets of Helsinki to find out the other ways in which the finns are better than the rest of us
Which brought me here to a start-up and Suvi jaime
she is the co-founder and CEO of sulla panic and
They want to replace plastic with this
What is important in our material it's micro plastic free
eventually plastic degrades into micro plastic particles and they stay
hundreds of years or even permanently in the nature
But we have created almost all the benefits of plastic without the plastic waste problem
The big idea here is to take waste wood
Mash it up with some plant matter and create a substance that can be molded into all kinds of things from straws
to containers to coat hangers
Then when you're done with the objects you ditch them and they gracefully turn back into play it matter
we make our materials out of wood and natural binders and
These plant-based binders they degrade so they can be eaten by natural occurring microorganisms
Ok, so no micro plastic left
Soula pack has pulled in some big-name investors including Chanel
And it started making its products in factories all over the world
Here are their straws coming to life in a factory in st. Louis
And unlike paper straws these wooden things actually work
So with the straw
How long would this last compare like a paper straw when I put it in a drink every second it's usually melted by the end
Of the drink. Well, the criteria is that if you change the drink you have to be able to use this one straw
So the whole evening you're able to drink mojitos Frances, which is my favorite drink. What is one straw?
We need new
Initiatives to make these micro plastics free materials because there is so much plastic out
There you with one company with one material. You can't solve it all
Of course if experimental protein and plastic induced shame is all too much for you have no fear the
Fins still have you covered?
Here at a traditional finished restaurant a very nice set of ladies will set you up with finished gin
Scrumptious reindeer moose a ski loaded with shots
And one hell of a bear pie
Well fed and well lubricated I set out for helsinki's wooden house district
These beauties were built back in the early 1900s so that the workers of Finland could have nice places to live
and nice gardens to tend
Their symbolic of Finland's famed social support system that has made Finns some of the happiest people on earth
Bless you Finland and your wheelbarrow gardens
Of course progress often has its own plans
The workers here for example have been replaced by artsy hipsters
seeking a trendy neighborhood and
Soon enough workers and hipsters all over the world might be replaced by robots
The don't care about social systems or pretty Gardens at all
Hello robot overlords
Here at Helsinki is most scenic garbage dump are some hard-working robotic arms from a company called Zen robotics the
Zen part obviously being some bizarre marketing ploy because there's nothing calming about these things
Their mission is to divvy up industrial trash sorting things like wood and metal into their own piles
How do you get the robot to see you know that it's not wood that it's a piece of steel a plastic bag
All this stuff is so amorphous and ever be use cameras. We use metal detectors
We use 3d sends us and we used all the near infrared sensors the AI is able then to predict
Okay, what kind of material?
We try to understand how is a human operator
Sorting waste and he is not picking it and putting it here it picks and throws
Yeah, and we simulated the same movement. So our robot opens a grip and lets the object fly
And what do we know about how accurate the robots are
Depending on the different kind of ways. We can go to a purity up to ninety percent
Here we go. Take a closer. Look. Yes. Okay, so
The waste comes up it goes on this conveyor belt and then this is where it's getting spin and
Then in this moment where it's getting scanned, it's telling the robots down the line
There's gonna be an object coming then I want you to grab. Yes
And then the arms start to go to work yes the robot gets to pick which trades and to throw it in which spin I
Mean, it's a really good jobs and way of picking up these
Objects that are such different sizes. Yeah. Yeah
You can believe that there many men hours invested to really develop a gripper what is able to grip?
total different kind of sizes shades and
I think that is one of the biggest challenges
Zen robotics recently put its robots to work right here in the heart of Silicon Valley
At this massive garbage processing facility in San Jose
Artificial intelligence and trash commingling and harmony just the way nature intended
Back in Finland. I took a drive from the dump to ESPO. It's a city about 25 minutes outside of Helsinki
That is something of a tech suburb
Nokia's once glorious headquarters are here and
So to arts more sedate current headquarters
and
The Angry Birds are here, too
But I have not come des Beaux for disgruntled birds or airborne pigs, I
Have come to see some satellites
This is the headquarters of ëyesí
It's one of a handful of startups that have built small satellites that take constant pictures of what's happening on earth
How many satellites have you guys put up today?
The commercial constellation that we operate right now is three solar three satellites and then your satellites their mini-fridge
Yeah, and then you also want to try and surround the earth with with dozens hundreds of these things, right
Yeah, so we really want to make the system that allows you to sort of
Reliably and accurately and sort of objectively
See everything at the whole times. It's almost like, you know having a sort of a
MRI scan for the earth
Ëyesí satellites travel from pole to pole every 45 minutes
Rather than cameras
They're three small SATs use something called synthetic aperture radar or SAR
To pound the earth with microwave signals from low-earth orbit
They then used signals that are reflected back from the earth to build images of the surface
Unlike cameras SAR can see through the cloudiest of days in the darkest of nights
Ice I combined this radar technology with advanced image processing and computer vision
software to create highly detailed pictures
To a peek at some of these images and walk through kind of what you guys do
So this was an example of the hurricane durian in in, Bahamas
We were able to image this exactly when the hurricane was on top of the island
This is the island as it normally is
then in in the afterwards the land border used to be here and
I think here's a really dramatic thing is that all of these red dots are me no buildings, you know fully submerged
This is exactly you know, what becomes a sort of insurance information yet proves that others the flooded and yeah, yeah
And then proof is one thing and then of course in just ability to react it like now, you know
What if you could trigger the payment to these these guys?
Automatically so that like the people get to rebuild their lives and so forth. So, yeah
Now here we're looking at large tanker the grace one it relates to the sanctions to Iran
It became this big story when it was impounded in Gibraltar
When it was said that it was headed towards Syria with a tank full of Iranian oil
This is an image from a while back where we're able to see the grace one ship here in the Iranian shores
Okay in in January
So maybe the US knows where this tanker is the NSA knows the CIA
And they can choose to make public what they want. But basically with you guys
I mean there's a democratization to all this where anyone who's willing to pay for your imagery, you know
Yeah, it's not just in the hands of these few governments now. It's like everybody good. Yeah can know what's going on
Yeah, I think I think that's you know part of the part of the big story here in the case of this tanker
Like what was really interesting is what was it full or was not full powerful was it?
If it's full of oil it's down in the water and you're getting something on yeah
Just the depth from like a shadow off the water. Yeah
And this is a mine it's an open pit mine
So, you know
This is like the more mundane use case here is just that you monitor the progress of the mining activity, but of course
You know the safety of is there some display ventilation you're likely to cause
Landslides or is there some underground mining that is likely to cause collapses
When it started in 2014 ice I was the very first company to build a commercial satellite in Finland
Since then, it's raised more than 65 million dollars from investors and
Plans to launch a constellation of 18 small satellites in the next couple of years
Right now we're sort of fully booked with customers. So there would be some governments there
There would be some insurance some finance
I mean, there's like a ton of positive use cases all the stuff
I do think some people though would be creeped out a bit right about this all-seeing eye
That is keeping track of what people are doing
I think you know as far as sort of like the sort of creepiness honest or personal level
I think a lot of the the sort of mobile phones, you know internet, you know
Google type services like they tend to track you to much higher position and we ever are so like, you know
We would never really be
In the business of identifying humans, like, you know, we don't image faces or like the resolution is way lower than that
For us it's about objectivity of being able to provide as neutral source of information as possible
Hey, I robots and super fancy satellites are all well and good probably
But no visit to Finland would be complete without exploring its oldest and most famous tech
The sauna or as they say it hear the sound
And since Finland is a tiny place full of accommodating people I was able to find not just a sauna
But the sauna and not just any sauna companion, but these on a companion
Finland's most famous actor. Yes, Bert Bach on it
Along with having an outstanding 6-pack jasper owns this beauty
He joined me at about 11:00 p.m. To teach me the art of the sauna and
What it means to the Finnish people
When you walk into a sauna
you're stripped down from your clothes your stripped down from all the titles your wealth you leave your wallet outside and
It's just a bunch of people at their most bare
state of being and
It's really hard to not be honest when you're so exposed and so bare
So this is a pretty common thing is to take over here and hash things out. Yeah
sauna is the only word from Finnish language to travel to other languages as a common word to use and
And saunas are more common in Finn. It's more common to own a sauna that it is to own a car
Okay, which means every single person has a song. Yeah
Everybody has these sounds but the ones here are very traditional and well, you know what?
What is the classic Finnish sauna the real song it would always be a would heat?
Would heat it sauna because the burning of the wood gives it gives the other song lights
Hit this very distinct flavor or this load right load of the word means like the spirit of the song
I'm going to feel when you throw water on to the sauna heaters rocks
That's load and you just get much better load when you are heat it with wood
Perhaps unimpressed by my grasp of the Finnish language
Gasper decided it was a good idea to complete the sauna experience
By subjecting me to a ritualized form of icy torture
To our necks, and then we take a few deep kind of just easy breaths try not to hyperventilate
Alright, let's see now you start feeling this on
tingling
Able to breathe now
And you don't feel cold, right? No good actually. Yes
Once you do it a few times first you get used to it. Yeah, and then you get addicted to it
So how many times would you do that during the course of a saw that session I usually do it four times back and forth
Okay, so sauna swim sauna swim and then you end it with via with the swim. I often say that
Sauna is like the church for a normal average Finn he or she goes to the sauna
You're in silence and you sweat out the daily sorrows both mentally and physically there's something church like
Sadly, I think our version is like football game
You