Cheeky Pint

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