What's Your Problem?
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What's Your Problem?
Every week on What's Your Problem?, former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks with entrepreneurs and engineers tackling the biggest challenges at the forefront of technology. How do you make a trip to space as routine as a plane flight? How do you turn solar energy into clean fuel? Ho...
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Introducing Business History: The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About
What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History.
How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies...
Using Sound Waves to Destroy Tumors
Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors.
On today’s show, Mi...
From Desert Robots to Driverless Trucks
Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company trying to bring autonomous driving to commercial trucking.
Chris led a team a...
Is the Future of Fresh Water Under the Sea?
Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer of OceanWell.
Michael's problem is this: How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the...
Could Home Batteries Save the Grid?
Justin Lopas is the COO and co-founder of Base Power, a battery and power company based in Texas.
Justin’s problem is this: How can you...
Building a Better Public Bathroom
Fletcher Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Throne Labs.
Fletcher’s problem is this: How can you create public toilets that people actu...
Could Autonomous Diggers Unleash a Building Boom?
Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics.
Boris' problem is this: How do you teach machines not just to drive, but als...
Growing Meat from Cells
Justin Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a company making seafood without killing fish.
Their first product is cultivated s...
The Ordinary Stuff Behind Technological Breakthroughs
Ed Conway is an economics journalist and author of the book “Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization.”
On...
Carbon Capture at Rock-Bottom Prices
Shashank Samala is the CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, a carbon capture start-up.
His problem is this: Can you use crushed up rocks to p...
Ferrari Fandom, Supercharged by AI from Smart Talks with IBM
Today we're sharing an episode from another Pushkin podcast, Smart Talks with IBM. Scuderia Ferrari and IBM are redefining fan engagement with AI-driv...
Why Amazon Built a Spatula-Wielding Robot
Aaron Parness is a director of applied science at Amazon Robotics.
His problem is this: How do you build a robot that can put stuff on shelves.<...
Drilling Smarter Wells to Unleash Geothermal Energy
In many places on Earth, there’s steam just below the surface. We don’t know where those places are — but if we could figure it out, we could unlock a...
Inventing a Better Pain Pill
Dr. Stephen Waxman is a professor of neurology, neuroscience and pharmacology at Yale. His research on pain helped pave the way for a newly approved,...
Mapping the Unmappable
Philipp Kandal is the chief product officer of Grab, an app that serves several countries across Southeast Asia. Two of Grab’s main businesses are de...
Reinventing Blood
Dr. Allan Doctor is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Kalocyte, a company that is developing dried red blood cells that can be rehydrated...
The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine
Jakob Uszkoreit is the CEO and co-founder of Inceptive, a biotech start-up. He’s also a co-author of “Attention is All You Need,” the paper that creat...
A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal
Nan Ransohoff is the head of climate at Stripe. The company is known mainly for facilitating online payments, but it’s become a key driver of the nasc...
Giving Old Batteries New Life
Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle. Megan’s problem is this: How do you create a new system that can both refine the raw metals we...
Engineering the Future of Fusion
Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. Billion...
Can Robots Fix Recycling?
Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their cus...
Inside the Mind of an AI Model
AI might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s going on inside AI model...
Teaching Robots How to Do Everything
AI is better than humans at a lot of things, but physical tasks – even seemingly simple ones like folding a shirt – routinely stump AI-powered robots....
Making a Universal Flu Vaccine
Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centivax. Jacob’s problem is this: Can you create a vaccine that protects people against almost all strains...
Teaching Computers to Smell
Alex Wiltschko got obsessed with perfume when he was 12 years old. He grew up to be an AI researcher at Google. Then he started Osmo, a company that f...
Can a Chatbot Treat Depression?
Nick Jacobson and his team at Dartmouth medical school spent over 100,000 hours trying to build an AI chatbot that can serve as a safe, effective ther...
Will AI Radically Change the World by 2027?... from Risky Business
This week, Nate and Maria discuss AI 2027, a new report from the AI Futures Project that lays out some pretty doom-y scenarios for our near-term AI fu...
Is the Future of Flight Supersonic?
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake's problem is this: Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed...
The Secrets of Silk
Fiorenzo Omenetto is a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University and the director of Silklab. Fiorenzo's problem is this: How do you tur...
Infiltrating an International Ransomware Gang
A few years ago, a ransomware gang called LockBit rose from obscurity to extort over $100 million from organizations around the world. A security stra...
Preparing for the Future of War
Christopher Kirchhoff helped launch a Defense Department office that aimed to bring Silicon Valley technology to the US military. Christopher’s probl...
Stopping HIV Without a Vaccine
Jared Baeten is senior vice president in virology at Gilead Sciences. Jared's problem is this: In a world without a vaccine, how do you make a medicin...
Harnessing the Heat Deep Beneath Our Feet
Carlos Araque is the co-founder and CEO of Quaise Energy. Carlos' problem is this: How do you make drilling for geothermal energy as routine, widespre...
The Brain Implant That Could Change Medicine
Ben Rapoport is the co-founder and CSO of Precision Neuroscience. Ben's problem is this: Can you build a device that allows a paralyzed person to use...
Building a Mass Market Robot
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik. Jeff's problem is this: Can you make a safe, reliable humanoid robot – for less than $50,000?
Solving Solar’s Biggest Problem
We need better, cheaper ways to store solar and wind energy when it’s dark out and the wind isn’t blowing.
One option: Compressing air i...
How Bubbles Power Breakthroughs
There are moments in history when people make huge technological advances all of a sudden. Think of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, or, mo...
Teaching AI to Build Stuff in the Physical World
AI works well in the virtual world. That’s partly because the internet provides so much data to train AI models. But there’s no analogous data set for...
NVIDIA: At the Heart of the AI Boom
In the past few years, NVIDIA has become one of the most valuable and important companies in the world by making GPUs, the chips powering the AI boom...
What Claude Shannon Figured Out
Claude Shannon is a major figure in the history of technology. Known as the father of information theory, Shannon spent decades at Bell Labs and MIT....