What's Your Problem?
Every week on What’s Your Problem, entrepreneurs and engineers talk about the future they’re trying to build – and the problems they have to solve to get there. How do you take a drone delivery service you’ve built in Rwanda and make it work in North Carolina? How do you convince people to buy a house on the Internet? How do you sell thousands of dog ramps to weiner dogs all across America when a pandemic breaks the global supply chain? Hosted by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, What’s Your Problem helps listeners understand the problems really smart people are trying to solve right now. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.
Episodes
Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?
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Does flying have to be bad for the environment? Val Miftakhov, the founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, doesn’t think so. His company built a plane that’s powered by hydrogen fuel, which produces zero carbon emissions. It had a successful test flight earlier this year and Miftakhov hopes it will be ready for commercial use by 2025.
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Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Descript's software has made editing audio and video much simpler.
The company recently received a large investment from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It's a sign that Descript is moving toward using generative AI to generate words and pictures. What will that mean for the people who currently do that work?
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Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy.
Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite.
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Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are the cofounders of Huue.
Their problem is this: how do you get bacteria to produce indigo dye? And how do you do it cheaply and reliably enough to replace the toxic petrochemical process that's currently used to dye billions of pairs of jeans a year?
They're working with denim brands to commercialize their bacteria-produced dye.
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Today's show is about a problem people have been trying to solve for a hundred years: how can we mass produce houses, like we do cars?
Listen for a house that looks like a UFO, a giant mobile home boom, and a visit to a 21st-century construction site where workers are putting up a factory-built house. This episode's a co-production with our friends at Planet Money, and a follow-up to last week's interview with the founder of Cover...
Alexis Rivas is the co-founder and CEO of Cover.
His problem is: How do you build houses in a factory, the way you build cars? And how do you do it so they're cheaper and better than a traditionally built house?
Cover is following the Tesla model: starting with a high-end product but aiming for the mass market. "Nail it and scale it," he says.
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Nina Tandon is the co-founder and CEO of a tissue engineering company called EpiBone.
Her problem is this: How do you grow custom bone from patients' stem cells, at a price that makes sense?
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Microchips are the most important driver of technological progress in the modern world, and governments are fighting over who gets to make them.
Right now, most cutting-edge chips are made in Taiwan, a country that China claims as part of its territory. The U.S. government is fighting to keep semiconductor technology out of China, and spending tens of billions of dollars to get companies to build more chi...
It's our first anniversary and—almost 50 episodes in—Jacob Goldstein checks in with three past guests.
Drone delivery guy Keenan Wyrobek thinks he has solved a big problem holding back commercial drone delivery in America. Fruit-ripening maven Katherine Sizov is figuring out bananas. And Glenn Kelman of Redfin has some deep insights from a tough year in the real estate business.
*The problems in real estate weren't so much s...
Alice Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Verge Genomics. Alice's problem is this: How do you use artificial intelligence to drive down the price of developing new drugs?
The company is using AI to find new disease mechanisms to target, and to speed up drug development. If using AI can help experimental drugs succeed even a little more often than they do now, it'll be a big win.
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When Austin Russell was 17 years old, he founded Luminar Technologies to work on a remote sensing technology called Lidar.
Today, Austin is one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires, and Luminar may be on the verge of solving Austin's problem: How do you make Lidar cheap enough and good enough to use in millions of cars?
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Chace Barber is the co-founder of Edison Motors. Chace's problem is this: How do you build electric logging trucks in rural Canada, with money you raised from people who follow you on TikTok?
Chace started his career driving logging trucks. He loved the idea of Tesla's electric semi, but when it never arrived, he decided to build his own.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts b...
Here's a bonus episode of a new show from Pushkin, Other People's Pockets.
Have you ever wondered how your friend bought that vacation home or why that colleague of yours makes everyone meticulously split the tab down to the last Diet Coke? Other People's Pockets is a show about other people’s money. Host Maya Lau asks people from all walks of life to get radically transparent about their personal finances in order to learn more a...
Caspar Coppetti is the co-founder of On, a company that makes athletic shoes. Caspar's problem is this: How can you sell tens of millions of shoes a year -- and then take them all back, to turn them into new shoes?
The company's latest bid to attract new customers? A shoe subscription service.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.
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After a historic 355 days in orbit, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth on March 30, 2022, breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by an American. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Vande Hei discuss conducting experiments in space, the impact of extended spaceflight on humans, and the spiciness of space chili peppers.
This is a paid advertisement from IBM.
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Matt Rogers is the co-founder of Mill. Matt's problem is this: How do you turn garbage into food?
Before Mill, Matt co-founded Nest, a smart thermostat company. Now, he wants to take on the garbage in our kitchens with a high tech garbage can that can transform food waste.
This is the fourth and last episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
Jacob Goldstein co-hosts today's show with Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful. Jacob and Dan eat their way through the history of fake meat -- from Gardenburger hockey pucks, to meatier Impossible burgers. And they get a report from the fake-meat frontier, where scientists are trying to make lab-grown chicken breasts.
This is the third episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
Pat Brown is the founder of Impossible Foods. Pat's problem is this: How can you make meat without animals?
Pat's goal isn't to make better burgers for vegetarians; he wants to sell to meat eaters. To succeed, he'll have to figure out how to make fake meat that is at least as good -- and as cheap -- as the real thing.
This is the second episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
Ilir Sela is the co-founder and CEO of Slice. His problem: How do you bring the technological revolution to thousands of tiny mom and pop pizza shops?
Most local pizza shops haven't adapted well to consumers' appetites for online ordering. Ilir's mission is to make sure that the technology powering Big Pizza can also benefit smaller businesses.
This is the first episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of f...
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