Cheeky Pint

Nik Storonsky, Founder and CEO of Revolut, joins John to break down how Revolut scales across 80 million customers worldwide, their strategy to challenge Amex and Chase in the US, and why products live or die by strict retention curves in their "new bets" process. They also discuss building a profitable fintech around subscriptions rather than lending, how they are cutting 210-day compliance approval cycles with AI, and why CEOs should skip conferences in favor of product development.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:21) Revolut growth
(00:04:03) New bets framework

(00:12:35) Why bank lending is like selling options

(00:20:12) Automated cross-sell machine

(00:27:39) Stripe Radar

(00:28:10) Lightweight users to primary accounts

(00:33:16) Building the AI-pilled bank

(00:39:04) Taking on Amex and Chase

(00:42:36) Products over conferences

Scott Nolan, Co-Founder and CEO of General Matter, joins John for a pint to discuss the engineering, economics, and geopolitics behind uranium enrichment. Scott breaks down why advanced reactors can't scale without High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU), why the US outsourced its fuel supply following the Cold War, and how General Matter is building a domestic facility in Paducah, Kentucky, to replace Russian imports. He also shares lessons as an early employee at SpaceX, and why 1970s interest rates stalled nuclear.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:41) America’s missing nuclear fuel
(00:05:27) Why small reactors need stronger fuel

(00:11:42) Can nuclear power the AI buildout?

(00:15:25) Why nuclear became so expensive

(00:22:24) The startups reinventing nuclear

(00:25:31) General Matter’s race to 2030

(00:29:44) Stripe Press’ new books

(00:30:22) The SpaceX playbook applied to nuclear

(00:35:18) Uranium enrichment, explained

(00:45:53) How small startups beat stagnant incumbents

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, joins John to break down how models uncovered critical PHP vulnerabilities, why test-time compute unlocks massive agent swarms, and OpenAI's internal experiments proving complex math problems like Navier-Stokes. He also shares why sandboxing superhuman models is an unsolved safety dilemma, how robotics will scale future gigawatt data centers, and why businesses must adapt as personal agents replace traditional web forms and mobile apps.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:12) PHP week
(00:02:37) Internet early days

(00:07:33) Cyber Blue

(00:08:54) Sandboxing

(00:15:47) Math

(00:23:12) Agent swarms

(00:24:48) Stripe Atlas

(00:25:17) Compute

(00:37:53) Revenue per gigawatt

(00:49:27) Token pricing is fake

Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, joins John and Ben Thompson to break down the airline business and United’s contrarian bets shaping commercial aviation. 

Scott details United’s massive COVID fleet expansion while competitors shrank, why customer surveys are useless for predicting the future, and rolling out SpaceX’s Starlink across the entire fleet. They also cover in-housing seatback software, why low-cost carriers fail, air traffic control bottlenecks, and Scott’s weekend vibe coding projects.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:00:26) Buying planes while the world shrank
(00:06:35) Owning the airline tech stack

(00:22:02) Aviation’s biggest bottleneck

(00:26:21) Stripe Economics

(00:26:59) Hidden economics of airline networks

(00:30:19) Starlink

(00:38:28) What Wall Street gets wrong about aviation

(00:43:43) It’s the routes 

(00:55:44) Why Spirit failed but Ryanair works

(01:15:38) Kirby’s unusual time management hacks

Scott’s reading list: 

Unreasonable Hospitality – Will Guidara

The Impossible Factory – Josh Dean

Freedom’s Forge – Arthur Herman

The Sleepless Ape – David R. Samson

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Tolkien and the Great War – John Garth

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