What's Your Problem?

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

July 3, 2025 35 mins

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...

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June 19, 2025 32 mins

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?


G...

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June 12, 2025 43 mins

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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June 5, 2025 37 mins

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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May 29, 2025 38 mins

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...

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May 22, 2025 36 mins

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.


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April 24, 2025 45 mins

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.


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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...

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April 17, 2025 41 mins

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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April 10, 2025 25 mins

Fiorenzo Omenetto is a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University and the director of Silklab. Fiorenzo's problem is this: How do you turn a material people have been using for thousands of years into useful, cutting edge tools that  improve everything from vaccine delivery to food waste?


Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushk...

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A few years ago, a ransomware gang called LockBit rose from obscurity to extort over $100 million from organizations around the world. A security strategist named Jon DiMaggio wanted to understand how the organization worked. So he used the techniques of World War II-era spycraft to make contact with the hackers.

On today’s show, Jon tells the story of LockBit – from the way it borrowed techniques from mainstream...

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April 3, 2025 55 mins

Christopher Kirchhoff helped launch a Defense Department office that aimed to bring Silicon Valley technology to the US military.  Christopher’s problem is this: How can the giant bureaucracy that is the US military keep up with technological change?


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, f...

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March 13, 2025 27 mins

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 medicine that people will actually take to help prevent HIV?

There’s already a daily pill that reduces the risk of getting HIV, but a majority of people who are at high risk are unwilling or unable to take it.

So Jared and his colleagues are developing a new drug, lenacap...

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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, widespread, and profitable as drilling for oil or gas? The answer involves digging deeper into the Earth than anyone has ever dug before.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 a computer with only their thoughts – without damaging their brain?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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February 20, 2025 45 mins

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?

In the short term, Apptronik’s robots will work in factories. But Jeff’s long-term goal – based on the experience of his own grandparents – is to build robots that can help care for the elderly.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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February 13, 2025 43 mins

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 in underground caverns when energy is abundant, then blowing it back out to create energy when you need it. It’s an old idea, but it has some fundamental problems.

Curtis VanWalleghem, the co-founder and CEO of Hydrostor, thinks his company has solved those problems...

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February 6, 2025 54 mins

There are moments in history when people make huge technological advances all of a sudden. Think of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, or, more recently, generative AI. But what do these moments have in common? Is there some set of conditions that lead to massive technological leaps?

Byrne Hobart is the author of a finance newsletter called The Diff, and the co-author of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation. In the book...

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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 the physical world – and as a result, AI doesn’t work as well there… yet.

 Edward Mehr is the co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. Edward's problem is this: How can you use AI to turn robots from dumb, inflexible machines into skilled, versatile craftsme...

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