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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 b******t." 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

Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and Chair of the OpenAI board, joins John for a pint to discuss the rapid shift toward an agentic future. In this episode, Bret explains why outcome-based pricing is the future of software business models, and why he believes the atomic unit of AI productivity is a process, not a person. They cover why big companies struggle to adopt AI because they are “shipping their org charts.” Bret also discusses a new type of hyper-generalist, reflects on his experience with the OpenAI and Twitter boards, and explains why he believes we might see the end of the smartphone era. Timestamps (00:00:26) Coding (00:16:23) Sierra (00:27:14) Agentic UX (00:38:47) Building support agents (00:45:43) Co-developing with the models (00:50:08) SaaSpocalypse (01:00:50) Stripe Sessions (01:01:33) Outcome-based pricing (01:09:14) Is Sierra short AGI? (01:13:50) AI productivity (01:23:47) How to structure a tech business (01:30:25) Board drama (01:38:24) AI predictions

Garrett Langley is the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, a public safety operating system that helps communities and law enforcement eliminate crime. He sits down with John to discuss why most crime is opportunistic, how Flock helps clear over one million crimes a year, and the engineering challenges of building solar-powered cameras and autonomous drones. They cover the shifting landscape of criminal technology, why hardware requires making "one-way door" decisions, and his vision for a future where technology prevents crime before it happens. Timestamps(00:00:19) Flock (00:19:51) Safety vs privacy (00:23:54) Crime and technology (00:32:36) Crime rates (00:43:56) Corporate security (00:52:16) Stripe Radar (00:52:54) Competitive landscape (01:02:41) Drones (01:09:01) The Flock business (01:11:39) Building hardware (01:20:01) Cameras (01:25:17) PD procurement (01:32:56) Building your own drones (01:40:52) What’s next for Flock? Books: The Digital Silk Road: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Silk-Road-Chinas-Future/dp/0063046288 Boyd: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316796883

Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, designing specialized chips for Large Language Models. A former Google TPU architect, he joins John to discuss why the current generation of AI hardware is hitting a wall. They cover the "uncomfortable trade-off" between latency and throughput for current chips, why MatX is betting on combining HBM and SRAM to solve it, and the massive logistical challenge of manufacturing chips at scale with TSMC. Reiner also shares his predictions for AI in 2027, why he prefers Rust for hardware design, and why the best iteration loops happen in your head before writing a line of code. Timestamps(00:00:15) Google’s AI revival (00:07:54) MatX (00:17:11) AI supply chain (00:21:48) Designing chips (00:37:11) TSMC (00:44:17) Token pricing (00:44:55) RL-ing chip design (00:49:26) Design to production (00:56:05) MatX culture (01:02:57) Rust (01:05:21) Cuckoo hashing (01:09:35) Unexplored model architectures

The internet economy accelerated in 2025. The fastest-growing companies got even faster, agentic commerce and stablecoin payments started to kick into gear, and total payment volume on Stripe grew by a third as our customers continued to prosper. Our annual letter covers the trends that we think are worth paying close attention to as the pace of change accelerates. Timestamps(01:48) The sorting machine (05:45) Global by default (09:01) Stable progress (12:14) Working capital’s working. Capital! (15:09) Escaping from low revenue mode (18:33) The five levels of agentic commerce (23:52) A Republic of Permissions

Eric Glyman is the cofounder and CEO of Ramp, the finance automation platform that now powers over 2% of all corporate spend in the US. He sits down with John and co-host Alex Rampell to discuss how Ramp scaled to over $1 billion in revenue in just seven years, and why the future of fintech is "selling time, not money." They cover the "SaaS apocalypse" (and why lines of code are becoming a liability), how Ramp uses AI agents to review 100,000 expenses a day with 99% accuracy, and why their internal data suggests the US economy is much stronger than the Census Bureau reports. Timestamps(00:00:21) Ramp business today (00:04:27) The *correct* expense policy (00:11:07) Bill Pay (00:16:52) AI and software (00:32:23) Stablecoin-backed cards (00:33:06) Ramp data (00:36:25) How to cut your expenses (00:41:13) Ramp strategy (00:57:08) Capital One (01:06:34) Treasury

Ben Thompson, the internet’s premier tech analyst, joins John for a wide-ranging conversation on the mechanics of the internet economy. They discuss the origins of Stratechery and the "1,000 true fans" model, why Taiwan is the most convenient place to live (and the best Uber Eats market), and why the public markets are wrong to think SaaS is "canceled." Ben also explains why the US failure to control the TikTok algorithm is a disaster, why he’s a "crypto defender" in an age of infinite AI content, and gives John some very direct feedback on Stripe’s ACH implementation. Timestamps (00:00:20) Visiting Taiwan (00:04:59) Aggregation and AI (00:23:53) TikTok/Bytedance (00:29:58) Aggregation and AI redux (00:35:31) Agentic commerce (00:45:08) Is SaaS canceled? (00:52:21) Stratechery (01:03:36) How Ben uses AI (01:06:06) The TSMC break (01:13:53) Rapid fire (01:20:53) Feedback on Stripe

John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel sit down with Elon Musk to discuss why the future of AI isn’t on Earth, but in the "always sunny" vacuum of space. Between pints, they discuss the brutal physics of scaling—from the "farcically cheap" solar cells coming out of China to switching Starship from carbon fiber to stainless steel—as well as the “infinite money glitch” of humanoid robots, China, and DOGE. Timestamps 00:00:23 Space GPUs 00:35:39 Alignment 00:58:48 xAI 01:15:01 Optimus 01:28:03 China 01:40:46 Management 02:16:38 DOGE 02:34:58 Space GPUs redux