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? How do you use AI to stop deadly infections before they spread? We hear a lot these days about how the world is getting worse. What's Your Problem? learns from the thinkers and doers trying to make our future better. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.
Episodes
Ed Conway is an economics journalist and author of the book “Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization.”
On today’s show, Ed reveals how three of those often-overlooked materials—iron, copper, and sand—shaped human advancement from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution to the digital age. And he talks about what they mean for our future.
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 permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And can you do it cheaply enough to have a global impact?
On today’s show, Shashank explains why he believes rocks could be the backbone of carbon capture, how his childhood in India shaped his outlook on climate change, and how gov...
Today we're sharing an episode from another Pushkin podcast, Smart Talks with IBM. Scuderia Ferrari and IBM are redefining fan engagement with AI-driven insights, and cutting-edge digital tools. Learn how IBM is helping Scuderia Ferrari deepen connections with its almost 400 million fans worldwide, driving innovation and community in the digital age.
This is a paid advertisement from IBM. The conversations on this podcast don't nec...
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.
Today on the show, Aaron explains why this is a surprisingly hard problem – and why the solution Aaron’s team came up with may ultimately have uses beyond the warehouse.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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 lot of clean energy.
Carl Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, a geothermal energy company.
On today’s show, Carl makes the case for geothermal in the energy transition and explains how the company is developing new ways to identify exac...
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, non-addictive pain drug called suzetrigine.
On today’s show, he explains why he thinks suzetrigine is a promising step, but why much more work is needed to develop better pain drugs. He also gets into his work on ion channels—critical to unlocking the pain puzzle— a...
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 delivery and mobility – like a combination between Instacart and Uber. And maps are at the core of its business.
On today’s show, Philipp talks about improving online maps for places like Southeast Asia, where streets are often winding, narrow, and harder to access tha...
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 and used in medical emergencies.
On today’s show, Dr. Doctor explains the complex science behind artificial blood, and how this innovation could help save millions of lives.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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 created transformer models. Today, transformers power chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. They’ve also led to breakthroughs in everything from generating images to predicting the structure of proteins.
On today’s show, Jakob talks about the invention of transfor...
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 nascent carbon-removal industry.
On today’s show, Nan explains how she used a clever economic idea to get companies to spend $1 billion on carbon removal. And she talks about the different approaches startups are pursuing to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
See omnyst...
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 need for new batteries and recycle metal from old batteries?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. Billions of dollars have flowed into fusion startups in recent years, but reliable, economic fusion power may still be decades away.
Greg Piefer is the founder of a fusion company called Shine, where he’s pursuing a different path. Rather than go straight to fusion as a so...
Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their customers will buy. That’s why Rebecca Hu Thrams calls recycling “the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.” Rebecca is the co-founder of Glacier, and her problem is this: Can you use AI and robots to make recycling a somewhat less demented business?
AI might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s going on inside AI models. Josh Batson is a research scientist at Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, one of the world’s leading language models. Josh’s problem is this: How do we learn how AI works?
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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. Chelsea Finn is a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of Physical Intelligence. Chelsea's problem is this: Can you build an AI model that can teach any robot to do any task, anywhere?
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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 of flu – even strains that haven’t evolved yet?
Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bon...
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 fused his job at Google with his childhood obsession: Osmo is using AI to teach computers to smell.
The company is getting into the perfume business, and it plans eventually to use scent to diagnose disease and detect security risks.
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 therapist. After a few false starts, they seem to be on to something.
Note: This episode contains references to self harm.
Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ...
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 future. They talk about how likely humans are to be misled by rogue AI, and whether current conflicts between the US and China will affect the way this all unfolds. Plus, Nate talks about the feedback he gave the AI 2027 writers after reading an early draft of their forecast, and reveal...
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 of sound – and that makes economic sense?
Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all...
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