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