Friday Wrap-Up: Leadership Longevity and Nicolai's biggest regret

**Marthe Skaar** (0:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome back to In Good Company. I'm still Marthe Skaar.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:05)
I'm Nicolai Tangen.

**Marthe Skaar** (0:06)
And what we'll do today is, this is a short 15-minute chat where Nicolai and I cover three things, highlights from this week's main episode, what's going on in the fund and the markets, and then we'll talk about what you will do in the weekend.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:20)
Absolutely. Should be fun.

**Marthe Skaar** (0:32)
And this week, we're heading into the fields.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:34)
Absolutely. We have had a podcast with John Deere, which you may recognize for the Green Tractors, and wow, what a company.

**Marthe Skaar** (0:42)
Have you learned anything new this week?

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:44)
I just didn't think, I just hadn't taken on board how far AI has come in agriculture and how important it's going to be. And interestingly, Bill Gates wrote a letter recently also, where he talks about who the main beneficiaries are going to be. Number one, healthcare, number two, agriculture. And having listened to John Deere, you see how important it is for having gone from like field-based treatment of everything from like fertilizers, how you put the seeds in the ground to now going like plant by plant.
Fertilizers, all these kind of things. It's saving them just so much money and energy and it's good for climate and productivity.

**Marthe Skaar** (1:25)
Yeah, I agree. And that struck me most with the episode as well, because when I talk about John Deere, I must admit I think about tractors and green hats. But this is a company that 190 year old tractor making turned into a technology company.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:39)
Absolutely. No, it's very, very impressive.
You see, you know, the service business is really growing. There is a lot of there's a big cloud element to it. More and more autonomous driving tractors, harvesting, just huge productivity gains going on there.

**Marthe Skaar** (1:57)
Yeah. And talking about that, because he also talked about like this computer vision, which I thought was really fascinating, where they kind of you can tell a weed from a crop and then you know what to spray. So how important is it for companies to be able to innovate?

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:14)
It's totally key. It's basically what differentiates the winners from the losers. Interestingly, next year at the investment conference we have in April, that's what we're going to focus in on. So we have a lot of the best leaders in the world, the leaders in innovation, they are going to come and tell us how they do it, how they structure the companies and what kind of process they have.

**Marthe Skaar** (2:33)
That would be very interesting. You also touched up on driverless, because they have had driverless tractors all the way since 2022
What do you think about what they're making and the timeline when they also look into US corn production that they really want to automate by 2030?

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:50)
Yeah, it seems to be totally feasible according to what we know. We of course see it from many different industries, but automation is coming really, really fast. You have it on the car side, you have it on humanoid robots.
This is just really, really fascinating. I have to say, I went to drive a tractor this week because you have to check out the things you do. Wow, that was fun. It struck me also, you have tractors coming in all these different sizes, and I'm just wondering whether you have the same vanity problem as you have for most vehicles that you're on a farm, you made a little money, you want to show the neighbor guy, a woman, that you made more money, so therefore you just up the size of the tractor a bit, because they are huge, some of these things.

**Marthe Skaar** (3:40)
They are really huge. You learned how to back up as well, right?

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:43)
I did back. I drove both forward and backwards. I have to say, they had capped it on 20 kilometers an hour because they were a bit worried that I was going to destroy the whole thing.
But hey, fun. I'm in Lamborghini, the Italian tractor maker started to make racing cars. So let's see, perhaps in the future we'll have a fast green racing car from John Deere.

**Marthe Skaar** (4:05)
Yeah, there might be. I also was really fascinating about how the role of farming is changing.
One thing is that these tractors are super fancy with instruments and everything. But what also struck me is, he talked about data and the cloud and how they look into it. For me, it sounded like they were analysts in the sovereign wealth.