Cheeky Pint

Toto Wolff, Team Principal and Co-Owner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, joins John Collison for a pint to discuss the engineering, management, and economics behind modern Formula 1. Toto breaks down how Mercedes spots generational driver talent as early as age eight, why they enforce a strict "No Dickheads" hiring policy across 2,500 employees, and how the F1 cost cap transformed racing teams into $1B+ assets. He also shares his early career as a dot-com investor, the team’s "Navy SEALs" approach to car development, and why he believes live sports are immune to AI disruption.

Timestamps

(00:00:22) Spotting driver talent

(00:06:24) Engineering and team selection

(00:09:11) The F1 cost cap

(00:25:21) Toto’s early investing career

(00:38:15) Running Mercedes as an owner

(00:46:47) Why F1 team values exploded

(01:08:24) Succession planning

Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, joins John and Chris Sacca for a pint to discuss how underwater autonomous robots are scaling up to solve critical ocean challenges.

They cover the technical history of Guinness (including the math breakthrough that created Student's t-test), why seagrass is an overlooked super-sequester of carbon, and the engineering required to operate robots thousands of meters beneath the surface. Will also breaks down Ulysses' vertical integration strategy, the reality of eco-pragmatism versus "green tape," and what it takes to sell hard tech to defense and offshore energy sectors.

Timestamps

(00:00:30) R&D at Guinness

(00:05:43) Planting seagrass with robots

(00:16:53) Lowering the cost of doing things in the ocean

(00:19:00) Landing in a Chinese prison
(00:20:38) Works in Progress

(00:27:53) Building robots to withstand saltwater

(00:31:08) Live use cases for underwater robots

(00:46:03) The undersea cable vulnerability

Resources:

Guinness Quality Standards: https://www.guinnesscelebrate.com/our-quality/quality-standards

No Great Stagnation in Guinness by Will O’Brien: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guinness

As Meta scales its AI infrastructure past five gigawatts, Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO, Meta) and Alexandr Wang (Chief AI Officer, Meta Superintelligence Labs) join John for a pint to discuss the launch of Muse Wonder and the future of personal AI agents.

In this episode, Mark and Alex open up about the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the decision to execute a complete talent reboot, and what it really feels like to make a $100B+ CapEx commitment before knowing if the model will work. They dive deep into the architecture of Muse Wonder—including active memory, multimodal perception, and frontier coding—while laying out their vision for agentic commerce, hardware form factors like smart glasses, and why superintelligence belongs in the hands of billions.

Timestamps

(00:00:24) Muse’s breakout use cases

(00:07:28) Why the model is the product

(00:14:35) Meet Muse Wonder

(00:24:56) How frontier models are actually built

(00:48:26) Betting $100B
(01:07:21) Agentic commerce

(01:19:34) OpenRouter 
(01:20:06) Beyond the smartphone

(01:27:00) Funding
(01:34:06) Why AI won’t be winner-take-all

(01:40:46) Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)

(02:08:11) Working for Mark Zuckerberg

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel joins John at the pub for a deep dive into Snap's "crucible moment" of 2026: the long-awaited consumer launch of Spectacles. Evan explains why he believes the smartphone has become an isolating legacy device and how true AR glasses represent the first step toward making computing human again. They discuss the technical hurdles of fitting a spatial computer into a glasses form factor, why Snap built its own OS from scratch, and how Claude is transforming their software development, with over two-thirds of Snap’s new code now written by AI. Plus, the pair dig into the complex reality of teen phone usage, the distinction between social and media, and why Norway was the first country to embrace Snapchat.

Timestamps

(00:00:15) Snap’s crucible moment

(00:01:05) Specs

(00:09:12) AR as the right form factor

(00:20:45) Stablecoin payouts on Stripe

(00:21:46) Monetizing the camera

(00:28:13) Social media vs messaging

(00:47:37) Content moderation

(00:59:49) Snap’s evolution

Tony Xu, cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, joins John for a pint to discuss how they won a crowded market by obsessing over retention and the reality of fighting fraud in the physical world. They cover the harsh economics of the restaurant industry, why DoorDash succeeded where Google failed, and the harrowing story of spending 40% of their remaining cash on refunds to save the company’s reputation. Tony introduces Dot, their new autonomous delivery robot, and explains why true autonomy requires solving for the “last two feet” of delivery. Finally, he shares lessons from the early days, including why customer obsession sometimes means baking cookies.

Timestamps

(00:00:25) Why did DoorDash win?

(00:10:50) China

(00:17:10) Restaurant trends

(00:27:59) Loyalty

(00:30:40) Stripe Issuing

(00:44:09) Delivery modalities

(00:51:11) Fraud

(00:58:32) New products

(01:13:26) Dot

Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder of ElevenLabs, the research company making audio accessible across languages and voices. He sits down with John to discuss the "voice Turing Test" and why AI has conquered text but still struggles with conversational speech. They discuss the future of human-computer interaction, including why we still can't get our phones to read a PDF properly and the massive potential for voice agents in everything from farming to healthcare. Mati also opens up about ElevenLabs’ rapid ascent to an $11 billion valuation and gives a behind-the-scenes look at how Ukraine is using their tech for digital government services.

Timestamps

(00:00:27) How audio models work

(00:08:52) ElevenLabs business model

(00:17:50) The conversational Turing Test

(00:21:01) Link by Stripe

(00:26:02) Cascaded vs speech-to-speech

(00:31:53) Universal translation

(00:51:41) Designing an AI-native org

Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. He sits down with John and Elad Gil to discuss Google’s resurgence in the AI race, managing a massive $180 billion CapEx budget, and why 2026 is the year of the supply crunch. They cover the constraints of memory and power, why he believes the US economy will grow significantly due to AI, and the internal cultural shift back to "Googley" optimism. Sundar also shares details on long-term bets like data centers in space, why he wishes he had funded Waymo even faster, and the small thing inside Google that still ignites his passion for building.

Timestamps

(00:00:18) The history of Google and AI

(00:05:17) Speed and Search

(00:12:12) Google’s AI comeback

(00:27:03) Stripe network intelligence

(00:27:53) Bottlenecks

(00:41:25) Capital allocation

(01:00:44) How Google works

Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, joins the pub to discuss building the future of agentic trust. She explains why compliance has a “vitamin vs painkiller” dynamic, the drama behind their famous 101-billboard campaign, and why she believes "market sizing is bullshit." They cover the tension between vibe coding and rigorous security, how Vanta is using agents to generate UI, and why the best founders are relentless truth-seekers.

Timestamps

(00:00:17) Vanta

(00:12:30) How compliance works

(00:15:06) Breaches

(00:23:52) Stripe Tax

(00:24:43) AI and compliance

(00:44:50) Go-to-market

(00:47:22) Lessons from USV

Waymo is now doing nearly 500,000 rides a week across 10 cities. Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov came to the pub to discuss how they moved from scientific research to massive global scaling. He gives a masterclass on the sensor stack (and why you still need Lidar), how they use "Simulation" and "Critic" models to train the AI, and why he believes cars that require human supervision will never naturally evolve into robotaxis. They also cover the new custom-built vehicle that feels like a living room, the economics of ride-hailing in rural Alaska, and the "Russian math nerd" diaspora that seems to run the UK tech scene.

Timestamps

(00:00:22) Russia

(00:02:51) Waymo architecture

(00:09:59) Why now?

(00:19:46) Driving nuance

(00:29:37) Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite

(00:30:17) Hardware

(00:40:20) Emergent behavior

(00:46:36) Scaling

(00:57:56) Google

Article:

EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving – Waymo Research: https://waymo.com/research/emma/

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara are the co-founders of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market in the US. They sit down with John and Matt Huang to discuss growing their revenue 11x in six months, why they sued their own regulator to list election markets, and how they are building the "New York Stock Exchange of events." They cover why prediction markets are an antidote to social media polarization, the mechanics of market making for culture, and their vision for trading everything from GPU shipments to the Oscars and the weather.

Timestamps

(00:01:39) Suing the government

(00:14:42) Why now?

(00:17:12) Kalshi by numbers

(00:20:58) Solving market making

(00:31:33) Agentic trading

(00:33:43) Sharps

(00:38:45) Stripe Connect

(00:39:33) Evolving Kalshi

(00:44:50) Who loses from Kalshi?

(00:47:35) Insider trading

(00:53:28) The ethics of sports contracts

(00:58:08) New derivatives

(01:04:27) Politics

Article(s):

• On the Observational Implications of Knightian Uncertainty – Kevin Hassett & Weifeng Zhong (AEI)
• The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis – Citrini Research