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
Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors.
On today’s show, Mike talks about how a garage-built prototype became an FDA-approved machine; changing the company’s story after a failed clinical trial; and why he loves being a salesman but hates most sales pitches.
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Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company trying to bring autonomous driving to commercial trucking.
Chris led a team at the 2004 DARPA challenge that launched the autonomous vehicle industry. Then he held a senior role at Google’s self-driving car project, which later became Waymo.
On the show today, he talks about the long arc of autonomous driving, why he left Google, and the future of auton...
Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer of OceanWell.
Michael's problem is this: How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the ocean – and deliver it to land at a cost that’s competitive with other sources of fresh water?
On today’s show, Michael explains how he built OceanWell’s prototype in his kitchen, what it takes to make a system that’s less disruptive to marine life, and...
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 deliver more energy to more people without having to build so much more grid?
On today’s show, Justin explains why the grid needs a major upgrade, and how putting batteries next to homes could help. Also: what Texas’ embrace of renewable energy could mean for the f...
Fletcher Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Throne Labs.
Fletcher’s problem is this: How can you create public toilets that people actually want to use?
On today’s show, Fletcher explains how his company is trying to make public bathrooms cleaner, safer and more accessible. The conversation also points to a bigger idea: why it’s so hard for cities to build and maintain pretty much anything.
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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 also to work: to grade roads, move heavy objects and dig big holes at construction sites.
On today’s show, Boris talks about how his work at Waymo led him to found Bedrock, and he explains how autonomous construction equipment could help unleash an American building boom.
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Justin Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a company making seafood without killing fish.
Their first product is cultivated salmon, which is made from real salmon cells that are grown in a stainless steel vat.
Justin's problem is this: How to sell no-kill, vat-grown salmon for the same price, or better, as wild-caught salmon? On today’s show, Justin explains how Wildtype will scale, what’s goin...
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...
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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