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