What's Your Problem?

Psychedelics are going mainstream. The FDA has approved ketamine for certain patients with depression, and may soon approve MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But a fundamental question remains unclear: How do psychedelics work?

Gul Dolen is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. In a series of experiments, Gul has found evidence of a common mechanism that a wide range of psychedelics use to affect the brain. If Gul is correct, these drugs may be useful not only for people suffering from mental illness, but also for people dealing with neurological problems like strokes.

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Kai Marshland is the co-founder and chief product officer at WindBorne Systems. Kai's problem is this: How do you build weather balloons that can stay in the air for months at a time, and pair the data gathered by the balloons with AI to make weather forecasts that are way better than anything we have today?

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The 2008 Global Financial Crisis was hard for almost everyone. Fuquan Bilal remembers it like it was yesterday. A real estate investor, among other things, he came home to the news of the crash and the sharp realization that he lost $2 million overnight. That could have been the end with advisors telling him to file for bankruptcy. 

Join Ben and Tanya as they chat with Fuquan about how he fought to keep his companies afloat. Discover how he brought his business back from the dead, ignoring common sense, for his own gut instincts, his investments to diversify his income, and back into better communities for all. These are The Unshakeables.   

The Unshakeables is brought to you by Chase for Business and Ruby Studio by iHeartMedia

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Jonathan Hurst is a professor at Oregon State University, and co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. Jonathan's problem is this: How do you design a robot that can walk and do useful tasks that companies will pay for? The solution begins with trying to understand how birds walk.

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What does sickness sound like? Sometimes it’s obvious, like a cough, sniffle, or stuffy nose. But some conditions cause subtle changes that only a trained ear – or AI – can detect. Dr. Yael Bensoussan is a professor of otolaryngology and the director of the Health Voice Center at the University of South Florida. Her problem is this: How do you build a giant, public database of thousands of voice recordings, and use it to train AI tools that can hear when people are getting sick?

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Cement is, almost literally, everywhere. It is extraordinarily useful, which is why humanity makes 4 billion metric tons of it every year. But cement is also extremely carbon intensive to produce. Leah Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Sublime Systems. Her problem is this: How can you make cement, at scale, without emitting carbon dioxide?

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Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a company that makes induction stoves, with a clever twist. Sam’s problem is this: How do you build an electric cooktop that works just as well as gas, and can be installed without having to rewire the house? The solution that Sam found could eventually help transform not only kitchens, but the way homes draw power from the electrical grid. 

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Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space, a company with a unique approach to manufacturing rockets. Tim’s problem is this: How can you use 3D printing to make rockets more efficiently? Eventually, Tim wants to send a rocket – and printer – to Mars to build the first Martian industrial base. 

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Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of hospital patients die of preventable causes. For many of these patients, warning signs are subtle and easy for doctors to miss. Suchi Saria is the founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, and a professor at Johns Hopkins where she runs a lab focused on machine learning and healthcare. Suchi’s problem is this: How can you use AI to detect when hospital patients are at risk of potentially deadly complications – and how can you get doctors to listen?

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Gia Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Natel Energy, a company that is trying to transform the way hydroelectric power works. Gia’s problem is this: how do you draw hydropower from rivers without damaging the ecosystem? As it turns out, we have a lot to learn from nature’s furriest engineers – beavers.

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Peter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Covariant. Peter’s problem is this: How do you take the AI breakthroughs of the past decade or so, and make them work in robots? Peter was one of the first employees at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. On the show, he talks about how AI has evolved, and why it's so difficult to teach a robot to fold a towel.

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Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford computer scientist and the former chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning at Google Cloud. When Li entered the field of AI in the 2000s, researchers were making slow progress, optimizing algorithms to incrementally improve outcomes. Li saw that the problem wasn’t the algorithm, but the size of the datasets being used. So she built a massive database of images called ImageNet. It was a huge breakthrough, and helped lead the emergence of modern AI.

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Tim Latimer is the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, a company that is using a new approach to produce carbon-free geothermal energy. Tim and his company are drawing on innovations from the oil and gas industry to expand geothermal energy production to new places like the Utah desert, and maybe one day, to Mars.

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Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works in computational biology, taking giant datasets relating to genetics and health outcomes and tries to understand what’s going on.

Manolis’ research focuses on genomics, and a related field called epigenomics. Manolis’ problem is this: What are the cellular mechanisms of a disease? And how can we intervene to keep people healthy?

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After working as a chef for decades, Anthony Strong’s dream came true: He opened his own restaurant. His problem was a classic one: Restaurants are bad businesses. So he set out to open a new kind of restaurant, with a new business model. In this episode, he tells us about how he accomplished that with his latest venture, Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco.

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Selling hydrogen to make fertilizer is a huge business. It also drives tons of carbon emissions. Rob Hanson, the co-founder and CEO of a company called Monolith is trying to create hydrogen without emissions -- and to do it at scale, at a competitive price. A key tool he’s using: The biggest plasma torch ever built.

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Frances Frei and Anne Morriss are the co-founders of a training and consulting company called The Leadership Consortium. Together they specialize in helping leaders build trust within their companies. They also co-host a podcast called Fixable, which is a TED show produced by Pushkin Industries. Also, Frances is a professor at Harvard Business School.

In today’s show, Frances and Anne share the story of their work with Uber. It started back in 2017, when a Harvard Business School alum who was working at Uber came to Frances and said the company needed her help.

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When a Dutch crime reporter makes an unbelievable discovery, a small-town murder case begins to look like an international assassination plot. Enjoy this episode from Hot Money: The New Narcos, a podcast from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times. 

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A few weeks ago, Jacob Goldstein sat down with a writer and a composer on a stage in Chicago to talk about artificial intelligence. The conversation, which was part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, aimed to answer a big question: will AI kill creativity?

The writer, Stephen Marche, is the author of several nonfiction books and novels. Earlier this year he tried something new: he used AI to help him write a novel called Death of an Author. (That book was published in audio form by Pushkin Industries.)

The composer, Lucas Cantor, has won two Emmys for his work scoring the Olympics for NBC and co-produced a Lorde song that was in one of the Hunger Games movies. And he used AI to help him write an end to Schubert’s unfinished symphony.

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Jigar Shah is the director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Last year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for Jigar’s office to lend out.

The loans are supposed to go to companies that are helping the U.S. economy move away from fossil fuels. That can mean everything from building new nuclear plants to creating a giant hydrogen battery in an underground salt cavern.

Jigar’s problem is this: What’s the best way to lend out all that money – and do it fast enough for the U.S. to meet its climate goals.

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Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of research at DeepMind, an AI research group that is part of Google.

Every protein has a unique shape. And understanding a protein’s shape is key to understanding how proteins work to keep us healthy, and what goes wrong when we get sick. But, for decades, figuring out the shape of a protein was a hard problem that could take years of work.

Then Pushmeet and his colleagues built an AI model called AlphaFold that could accurately predict the shape of hundreds of millions of proteins. It’s one of the most impressive real-world AI success stories that we’ve seen so far. And it turns out that the lessons of AlphaFold also hold broader lessons for solving problems with AI.

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Forrest Meyen is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Lunar Outpost, a company that builds machines that go to places like Mars and, if everything goes according to plan, the moon. The company is betting that the private space boom of the past decade will soon go beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon and beyond.

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Brannin McBee is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave.

A few years ago, he and a few friends started buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency. It turns out, the same hardware -- chips known as GPUs -- is essential for running state-of-the-art AI models. Today, Brannin and his friends have turned their hobby into a company that’s competing against some of the biggest companies in the world to provide the hardware and computing power to run AI.

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul, is on trial for fraud. On today’s show, we talk to Lidia Jean Kott, who is covering the trial for another Pushkin show, about a dramatic day in court. Caroline Ellison, former co-CEO of Alameda Research and Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, took the stand. She recently pleaded guilty to fraud, and is cooperating with the prosecution.

Hear Against the Rules with Michael Lewis: The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried wherever you get your podcasts.

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Christina Smolke is the co-founder and CEO of Antheia. Antheia is a synthetic biology company -- they’re in the business of genetically engineering microorganisms to produce commercial products.

Christina’s problem is this: How do you turn yeast cells into tiny factories to create the active ingredients in generic drugs. If Christina and her team solve this problem, they won’t solve the drug shortage problem entirely. But they might help make it better.

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Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a company that is developing an automated make line. Stephen's problem is this: How do you make restaurant food from fresh ingredients... cheaper?

Chipotle invested in Hyphen, whose automated system could soon be preparing online orders at thousands of Chipotle outlets.

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Simon Johnson is an MIT economist and the co-author of a new book called “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity”.

Simon’s problem is this: How do you create the conditions for technological change to benefit many people, rather than just a powerful few?

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Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal’s problem is this: How do you design an AI that can give students the kind of benefits they’d get from working with a human tutor?

Earlier this year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an AI tutor built on top of GPT4.  The idea is to use AI to give more kids access to one-on-one tutoring, and help human teachers with their work as well.

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What can we learn from the centuries-long quest to eradicate smallpox, once the scourge of humanity? And how did it set the stage for all vaccines to come? First we meet Edward Jenner, a doctor in 18th century Britain who learned about the folk practice of “variolation” and found a safer way to inoculate people against smallpox. Then, Donald Hopkins of the Carter Center takes us back to the 1960s in Sierra Leone, where he discovered that successfully eradicating smallpox could be a feasible goal worldwide. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.

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Allon Bloch is the co-founder and CEO of K Health. Allon’s problem is this: Can you use AI to make seeing a doctor easier and more helpful?

Today, thousands of patients a month are treated through K Health. The company has an AI-based patient interface and it employs about 150 doctors. And K Health has plans to expand beyond primary care -- and they just raised another 50 million dollars to help them get there.

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Sonia Kastner is the founder and CEO of Pano. Sonia’s problem is this: How do you use data and machine learning to mitigate the damage caused by climate change?

Pano mounts cameras on remote mountaintop towers, then sends images from the cameras to an AI model trained to spot wildfire smoke. The goal is to alert fire crews early, before the fire spreads.

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Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar. Narvar works with companies such as Sephora, Lululemon and Home Depot to manage the post-purchase phase of online shopping — tracking, alerts and returns. Around 10 percent of online purchases are returned and every return cuts into retailers’ profits.

Amit’s problem is this: consumers have learned to love free returns, but can retailers afford them?

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Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle’s problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative?

Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work.

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Yaron Singer is the founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence. Yaron’s problem is this: How do you reduce AI’s security and reliability risks?

Yaron was a computer science professor at Harvard and worked at Google before starting Robust Intelligence. The company’s software tests AI models and datasets for problems with performance and security.

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Chris Monroe is the co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ. Chris’s problem is this: How do you build a quantum computer that will actually work? Quantum computing has the potential to transform fields from drug development to clean energy to cybersecurity, but so far no one has been able to build a quantum computer that can reliably outperform existing computers.

Monroe is also a physics professor at Duke University, and he talks Jacob through the principles that make quantum computing possible.

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Seven stocks are powering the market: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. How will they do in the second half of this year? Ethan Wu hosts as Rob ‘Value This’ Armstrong takes on Elaine ‘The Lex Flex’ Moore. In three rounds they pick their winners for the second half of 2023, and tell us why they chose them. If you enjoyed this preview of the new podcast Unhedged, subscribe to the show now: https://apple.co/478A3VS

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Charles Fisher is the co-founder and CEO of Unlearn AI. Charles’ problem is this: How do you build an AI model that can predict human health?

Charles and his colleagues have built a predictive model of health that is already being used in clinical trials, and might one day be deployed to predict individuals’ health outcomes.

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Laura Modi is the founder and CEO of Bobbie, a company that makes baby formula and sells it directly to parents. Laura’s problem is this: how do you launch a startup in a highly regulated industry that has pretty much been a duopoly for decades?

Part of Laura’s answer is marketing, which raises another question: how do you get people to consider formula despite so much messaging that breastfeeding is better?

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Xiao Wang is the founder of a company called Boundless. Xiao’s problem is this: How do you make it cheaper and easier for people to navigate the U.S. immigration system?

Xiao moved to the U.S. from China when he was three years-old. For many years, he took for granted that immigration was slow, complicated, and expensive to navigate. With Boundless, he’s built a platform to help people who try to figure out that system every year.

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Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he’s still pushing the frontier.

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One of the most amazing things about ChatGPT and other, similar AI models: Nobody really understands what they can do. Not even the people who build them. On today’s show, we talk with Sam Bowman about some of the mysteries at the heart of so-called large language models. Sam is on the faculty at NYU, he runs a research group at the AI company Anthropic and he is the author of the illuminating paper Eight Things to Know About Large Language Models.

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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.

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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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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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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 chip factories in the US.

Chris Miller is a professor at Tufts University and the author of a book called Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. In this episode, he talks with Jacob about the extraordinary technology and complex geopolitics of microchips.

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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 solved as left behind.

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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 be sure to subscribe to our email list. 

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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 about who we are and level the playing field a little bit along the way.

In this episode, Maya sits down with Mistress Marley, a financial dominatrix who makes money from people whose kink is simply giving her lots of cash, without being physically touched in return. Hear more from Other People's Pockets at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/opp?sid=wyp.

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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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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. 

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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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. 

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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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. 

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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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 food. 

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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Tim Mundon is chief technology officer at Oscilla Power. Tim's problem is this: How do you turn waves into electrical power?

You can see the power of the ocean in every wave, but the complex churm and swirl of the surf has made it difficult to translate that movement into something useful. Tim Mundon and his colleagues have been working on the problem for more than a decade, and are about to test a new electric generator in the big waves off the coast of Oahu. 

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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While we’re off celebrating the new year, here’s an episode from another Pushkin show: Some of My Best Friends Are…

Hosts Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ben Austen, two best friends from the South Side of Chicago, invite listeners into unfiltered conversations about growing up together in a deeply-divided country, and navigating that divide today.

On this episode, Khalil and Ben find out how Sherman “Dilla” Thomas has become the face of Chicago history on TikTok, TV and in tours. We hear how Thomas was influenced by stories told by his father, a Chicago police officer, and hometown Black politicians making history right in front of him. 

You can hear more episodes at https://link.chtbl.com/Wypbestfriends

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Anders Forslund is the co-founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace. Anders' problem is this: How do you build a commercial airplane that can fly on battery power -- and win the approval of regulators around the world?

As other sectors are decarbonizing, emissions from aviation are projected to triple by 2050. This is partly because figuring out how to build a commercial plane that doesn't burn jet fuel is a very, very hard problem that Anders has been trying to solve for years.

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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Bayard Winthrop is the founder and CEO of American Giant. Bayard's problem is this: How do you make clothes in America -- and compete in a global economy?

Today's show is about the future of American manufacturing. But it is also about something very simple: A sweatshirt made in America. It costs $138, and it is wildly popular.

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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Farzad Mostashari is the co-founder and CEO of Aledade. Farzad's problem is this: How can we pay doctors to keep us healthy, rather than treating us after we get sick?

People have been struggling to solve this problem for decades. But for a bunch of reasons you'll hear about on the show, Farzad and his colleagues may be the ones to finally solve it.

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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This bonus episode is from Story of the Week with Joel Stein, a new Pushkin podcast. On Story of the Week, journalist Joel Stein chooses an article that fascinates him, convinces the writer to tell him about it, and then interrupts a good conversation by talking about himself.  

This episode is about the Medium story “Survival of the Richest” by Douglas Rushkoff. In it, Rushkoff discovers a whole industry catering to billionaires looking to buy things to prepare for the apocalypse. 

You can read the full story here: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

And you can subscribe to Story of the Week here: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/story-of-the-week 

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Sallie Krawcheck is the founder and CEO of Ellevest, an investment firm for women that has over $1 billion in assets under management.

In her career in finance, Sallie was often one of the only women in the room. But even she had to be convinced that women would benefit from an investment firm created just for them.

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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In May of this year, we interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, the young billionaire philanthropist who started the crypto exchange FTX.

Last week, in a matter of a few days, FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, and Sam resigned. It's unclear if customers or investors will ever get their money back.

In light of the news, we are replaying the episode -- and trying to figure out what to make of everything Sam told us earlier this year.

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Stacey Vanek Smith is the author of "Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace." Her problem is this: How do women get ahead in a workplace that is stacked against them?

Stacey is my old co-host from Planet Money. Today, she brings us strategies from the 16th-century writer for how to thrive in an unjust world. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience.

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Cathy Edwards is vice president and GM of Search at Google. Cathy's problem is this: how do you teach computers to tell people what they want to know, even if they don't know how to ask?

Google's last leap: Moving from search results based on keywords to search results based on concepts. The next step: Figuring out how to let people search using not just words, but combinations of words and images.

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Matt Duesterberg is co-founder and president of OhmConnect.

Matt's problem: How do you build a business around getting people to save energy? Not all that much. And not all the time. But just enough, at just the right time. OhmConnect is paying customers to reduce their household's energy usage at times of high demand. The company is a window into the bizarre world of energy markets -- and human behavior.

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Chris Best is co-founder and CEO of Substack.

Chris's problem: How do you help writers make a living from a thousand true fans?

Substack is a company that helps writers send subscription-based email newsletters. Which, as Chris says, is a very simple idea, built on top of some very grandiose beliefs about culture and ideas and commerce.

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Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify. He may love entrepreneurship more than anyone we've ever met.

Harley’s problem: How do you aggregate the power of millions of small businesses to help them compete against giants?

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Shaun Kinetic is co-founder and chief scientist of Charm Industrial. Shaun’s problem: How do you put billions of tons of carbon back into the ground?

Charm Industrial is fighting climate change in a giant but kind of overlooked corner of the economy: Agriculture. Fields of corn and wheat and soybeans absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year. But then, once the crops are harvested, the leaves and the stalks decompose -- and send a lot of that carbon back into the air.

Shaun's company is trying to grab that carbon and get it back into the ground.

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Al Doan is the executive chairman of the Missouri Star Quilt company.

Al's problem is this: How do you combine low tech and high tech to turn a niche hobby into a wildly successful company?

In 2008, Al and his siblings helped their mom open a quilt shop in Hamilton, Missouri. Now, the business has grown to over 100 million a year in revenue and Jenny Doan, Al's mom, has become the YouTube quilting star. 

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Chris Severn is the co-founder and CEO of Turquoise Health.

Chris's problem is this: How do you figure out the real price trip of a trip to the hospital -- before it happens?

People have been trying to solve this problem for decades, but there's a good reason to think that this time is different. In 2019, the federal government issued a new rule that said insurers and hospitals have to publish their prices. Not just the fake list prices that nobody pays. But the actual, real, negotiated prices. This rule is just starting to take effect. Its impact could be huge.

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Mariana Matus is co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics. Her problem: How do you turn sewage into useful public health data?

When she and her co-founder launched the company, wastewater epidemiology was a niche field nobody paid much attention to. The Covid pandemic changed that. Studying wastewater has become one of the most important tools for tracking the pandemic. And Mariana's company, Biobot Analytics, has become a global leader in the field, with tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

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Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the open-source software that powers more than 40% of all the websites in the world.

He's also the founder of a for-profit company called Automattic.

Matt's problem is this: How do you build a multibillion-dollar company on top of software that your competitors can use for free?

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Mohammed Ashour is the co-founder and CEO of Aspire Food Group. The company just built the biggest cricket factory in the history of the world.

His problem: How do you sell billions of bugs a year?

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We put man on the moon before we invented the wheeled suitcase. Why did it take so long? Find out in this episode of Patented: History of Inventions, where host Dallas Campbell is joined by expert Katrine Marçal, whose research has revealed an intriguing hidden chapter in the invention story of rolling luggage.

If you're interested in the stories behind the world's greatest inventions — from the mighty steam train to the humble condom - subscribe to Patented: History of Inventions, created by our friends over at History Hit.

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Rajiv Maheswaran is the co-founder and president of Second Spectrum. Rajiv and his company figured out how to turn raw sports data into useful information for coaches. Today, the company works with basketball and soccer teams in the NBA, the Premier League and Major League Soccer.

Rajiv's problem: How do you teach a computer to understand sports?

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David Neeleman has founded five airlines, including JetBlue. He recently launched a new airline, called Breeze.

His problem: How do you use technology to bring down the cost of airfares?

He's been working on that problem for decades -- from inventing ticketless travel in the 1980s, to building a 21st century airline where customers never need to call customer service to ask for help.

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Bill Shufelt is the founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing Company.

His problem: How do you turn non-alcoholic beer from a punchline into something people drink all the time?

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John Green is the author of The Fault in Our Stars and six other novels. He also co-founded a company that makes educational videos that have been viewed billions of times.

John's problem: How do you make videos that actually help people make it through college?

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Luana Lopes Lara is the co-founder of Kalshi, an exchange that lets ordinary people bet on everything from the path of inflation to what bills Congress will pass by the end of the year.

Her problem: How to you build a market like the New York Stock Exchange that lets people bet on real-world events? 

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A special preview of the podcast, Unsung Science with David Pogue from CBS News. Journalist and author David Pogue finds the untold creation stories behind the most mind-blowing advances in science and tech—and hears from the characters involved—from their first inspiration to the times they almost gave up. This episode looks at the bad guys who used software bots to sign up for millions of fake email accounts—for sending out spam. Then, PhD student Luis Von Ahn stopped them. He invented the CAPTCHA, that website login test where you have to decipher the distorted image of a word. Or you have to find the traffic lights or fire hydrants in a grid of nine blurry photos. Those tests help to keep down the volume of spam, spyware, and misinformation; they advance the clarity of digitized books and the intelligence of self-driving cars; and, by the way, they made a handsome profit. The only problem: We HATE those tests! Guest: Luis Von Ahn, co-inventor of CAPTCHA, co-inventor and CEO of Duolingo. Hear more episodes of Unsung Science at https://unsungscience.com/.

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Shimon Elkabetz is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow.io.

His problem: How do you build a weather forecasting company from scratch? The company already sells weather intelligence to companies like JetBlue, Uber and the NFL. 

Their next move: Send the first private constellation of weather satellites to space (without running out of money).

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Emily Leproust is the co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience. Her problem: How do you store data in DNA -- and make it cheap enough to work in the real world.

The cells in our bodies contain an incredible data storage system: DNA. Now, scientists have figured out how to use DNA as a digital storage device that is stable and incredibly compact. If you stored all the data on the Internet in DNA, it would fit in a shoebox. 

But there's a problem: It's still too expensive to work in the real world. On today's show, Emily Leproust explains how DNA storage works, and what it will take to bring it to market.

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Glenn Kelman is the CEO of the real estate company Redfin. His problem: With the housing market teetering, how do you sell houses online?

Redfin has a website where you can look at houses for sale, just like Zillow. But Redfin also employs real estate agents all over the country to help people buy and sell houses. Recently, Redfin has started to buy houses and flip them for a profit and that new business is risky.

"I'm worried about the economy," Glenn says. "I'm worried about the war in Ukraine, worried about the stock market, worried about consumer confidence and mortgage interest rates. So lions and tigers and bears, it might be a scary summer."

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This bonus episode is from Hot Money, a new podcast from Pushkin and the Financial Times.

When Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson started digging into the porn industry, she made a shocking discovery: Nobody knew who controlled the biggest porn company in the world. Now, Nilsson and her editor, Alex Barker, have figured out who the guy was, and much more.

In this episode, the fourth in the series, Patricia and Alex wonder how it's legal for porn sites to host millions of videos uploaded by users. The answer is in the story of an Ohio family in the early 1990s.

It involves a family IT business, an FBI raid and a court case that set the precedent for porn – and for tech giants like Facebook and Twitter.

You can hear more Hot Money episodes at https://link.chtbl.com/dbhotmoney.

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Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. His problem: How do you turn sending stuff into outer space into something that seems as boring and predictable as mailing a package?

Later this month, one of the company's rockets will launch the NASA-funded Capstone mission to the moon. A mission to Venus is also in the works. And the company has already sent over 100 satellites into orbit.

It's a conversation about space, but also about how technological change drives down prices -- and creates new possibilities.

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On this bonus episode of What’s Your Problem? Jacob Goldstein talks with Eddie Alterman, former editor of Car and Driver and host of the new podcast Car Show!

In this episode, Eddie investigates the Lunar Rover. Why did we send a car to the moon? How did we design something for an environment we knew nothing about? Also: A look at the new lunar rover engineers are working on now.

You can find more episodes of Car Show! with Eddie Alterman at https://link.chtbl.com/wypcarshow

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Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX. His problem: How to spend billions of dollars to save humanity.

Sam is one of the most interesting people in crypto -- in large part because he doesn't think crypto is the most interesting thing in the world. He got into the business because he wanted to make as much money as possible in order to give almost all of it away.

He's now worth over $20 billion, and he's already donated hundreds of millions. In the next few years, he could give away billions more.

On today's show, he lists a few of the causes he's supporting -- and explains why he's likely to make massive political donations in 2024.

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Katherine Sizov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech.

Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer.

Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device.

Next up: Avocados.

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Anna Katrina Shedletsky is co-founder and CEO of Instrumental. Her problem: How do you make electronics manufacturing more efficient and less wasteful? 

Anna started her career as a design engineer at Apple. It was her job to visit the factory when a new device was about to go into production and try to figure out all of the potential manufacturing problems that might arise.

She realized this was an almost impossible task that relied on hope and luck -- and that it led to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manufacturing process.

So she started a new company, Instrumental, to try to come up with a better way to figure out what's likely to go wrong, and how to fix it.

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Today we're sharing a preview from another podcast we love, Slate Money. Every week, Felix Salmon of Axios is joined by Emily Peck, also of Axios, and Slate Pay Dirt columnist Elizabeth Spiers to chat about the latest in business and finance news.

In this episode, Felix and Emily sit down with Alexandra Roberts, professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Peirce School of Law. They talk about everything trademarks, from social media to counterfeits and parodies. They also talk about trying to fix racist logos and what happened when Mastercard tried to low key change its logo.

Hear more episodes of Slate Money wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reshma Shetty is co-founder and chief operations officer of Ginkgo Bioworks. Her problem: How do you turn cutting-edge science into a sustainable business?

Ginkgo is a synthetic biology company. The idea is to make industrial products -- fragrances, or food, or whatever -- by genetically engineering DNA, sticking it into a yeast or bacteria, and getting the yeast or bacteria to produce the thing you want.

Creating a profitable synthetic biology business is a really hard problem. But if it does work, it could be massive -- like an industrial revolution with cells instead of machines.

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Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet, a private company with a fleet of tiny satellites that takes photos of the entire Earth every day. Will’s problem: How do you turn all those images into useful data?

In today’s episode we talk about shooting smartphones into space, turning a million-dollar antenna into a thousand-dollar paperclip, and how to count every tree in the Amazon.

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