What's Your Problem?

It's the season of giving: colorful paper and shiny bows, sure, and charitable giving, too. In this special episode, Jacob Goldstein, the host of What's Your Problem, gets smart about donating.

Did you know that spending money on others makes you happier than spending money on yourself? Or that altruistic nerds have discovered four of the most impactful charities in the world (per dollar spent)? Have you ever wondered how poker players think about giving?

Dr. Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab, Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, and Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business talk about how to maximize your giving – and why you’ll be happy you did.

Link to donate: https://givingmultiplier.org/happinesslab

Listen to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Listen to Risky Business

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This is the second of three episodes about the solar-power revolution. Last week, we talked about how solar power got so cheap. This week, we’re talking with someone who is building giant plants around the world to take advantage of all that cheap, intermittent energy.

John O'Donnell is the co-founder of Rondo Energy. John’s problem is this: How do you turn intermittent energy into the cheap, reliable, intense heat that companies around the world need to make everything from steel beams to t-shirts?

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In the past 20 years, the price of solar panels has fallen by more than 97 percent. This extraordinary decline is good news for the world – and it’s transforming the way energy is produced and consumed.

For the next few episodes, we’ll be talking to people who are in the middle of this solar power revolution to find out how it happened, and what it will mean for the world.

Today, Jenny Chase, the author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, tells the story of how solar power got so cheap and where it’s exploding today, and she explains what problems we still need to solve to pull off a worldwide energy transition. 

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Paul Reichert is a research scientist at Merck, working on improvements to how we administer drugs to patients. Paul's problem is this: How can you run experiments in space to learn how to make better drugs on Earth?

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Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Hannah’s problem is this: How do you use data to get past the doomsday headlines and solve big problems to achieve sustainability?

Check out Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/

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Why has rabies invaded our nightmares for centuries? Author and veterinarian Monica Murphy tells us about the cultural history of rabies (which involves vampires and werewolves!) and how our long nightmare with the disease came to an end. Then, wildlife biologist Kathy Nelson tells us about a surprising program that works to control raccoon rabies… from the sky. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast. 

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After decades of research, gene therapy is starting to work. Shannon Boye is a professor of cellular and molecular therapeutics at the University of Florida. She is also the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Atsena Therapeutics. Shannon’s problem is this: How do you use gene therapy to cure certain forms of blindness? 

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*Or at least, sort of bringing back mammoths and dodos.

Beth Shapiro is the chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences and the author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction. Beth's problem is this: How do you use the tools of modern biology – and hundreds of millions of dollars – to bring back species that have been extinct for centuries? And on another level, Beth’s problem is explaining to the world what it really means (and doesn’t mean) to bring back an extinct species.

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The elevator made the modern city possible: No elevators, no skyscrapers. Today, people are working on entirely new kinds of elevators that can go higher and faster than ever. On today’s show, we talk about those innovations with Lee Gray, who is possibly the world’s leading elevator historian and definitely a professor of architectural history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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The invention of synthetic fertilizer was one of the key breakthroughs of the 20th century. It’s the reason we can grow enough food to feed billions of people. It’s also super energy intensive. Karsten Temme is the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Pivot Bio. Karsten's problem is this: How can you use the tools of gene editing to get microbes in soil to provide more nitrogen for crops?

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Jennifer Holmgren is the CEO of LanzaTech. Her problem is this: How do you capture pollution from factories, feed it to bacteria, and get the bacteria to produce ethanol, which can become everything from polyester to jet fuel?

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Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy will require huge amounts of copper, lithium, and other metals. Kurt House is the co-founder and CEO of KoBold Metals. The company recently made a huge copper discovery in Zambia, and is looking for other metals in other places. Kurt's problem is this: How do you use AI – machine learning, data science – to find the metals we'll need for the energy transition?

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Dalial Freitak and Annette Kleiser are the co-founders of Dalan Animal Health, a company that has brought to market the first vaccine for insects. Their problem is this: How do you turn a discovery about insect immune systems into a vaccine that can protect the bees we need to grow everything from almonds to blueberries?

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Sean Hunt is the co-founder and CTO of Solugen, a company that sells around $100 million a year of industrial chemicals. Sean's problem is this: How do you make the chemicals that go into everything around us -- our food, our clothes, our cars -- without using fossil fuels?

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Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day. 

Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.

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As generative AI tools improve, it is becoming easier to digitally manipulate content and harder to tell when it has been tampered with. Today we are talking to someone on the front lines of this battle. Ali Shahriyari is the co-founder and CTO of Reality Defender. Ali's problem is this: How do you build a set of models to distinguish between reality and AI-generated deepfakes?

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Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and surprisingly energy dense. Peter Godart is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy. Peter's problem is this: How can you use aluminum as a source of clean, renewable energy?

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Sarah Rudd is the co-founder and CEO of the soccer analytics company src | ftbl (It’s pronounced “Source Football.”) Sarah’s problem is this: How do you model a sport as fluid and complex as soccer and translate the analytical insights from the model into meaningful changes on the pitch? 

This is the third and final episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.

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Jimmy Buffi is the CEO and co-founder of Reboot Motion, which uses biomechanics to help athletes in Major League Baseball and the NBA. Jimmy's problem is this: How do you turn data about how professional athletes move into knowledge that helps them perform better?

This is the second episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.

Music: Let's Have Some Fruit (The Fruit Song) by J Buffi

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On the next few episodes of What's Your Problem, Jacob Goldstein is talking with people working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.

Today’s guest is Silvia Blemker, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of Springbok Analytics.

Silvia's problem is this: How do you combine MRI scans and artificial intelligence to generate new insights that can help both elite athletes and people suffering from diseases that affect the muscles.

Springbok's sports clients include medical researchers, Olympic athletes, Major League Baseball and several professional basketball and soccer teams.

This summer, a bunch of Pushkin podcasts are coming out with Olympics-inspired shows. Revisionist History has a series about America's decision to participate in Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936. The Happiness Lab has an interview with a coach who coaches coaches. And Cautionary Tales tells the story of the family feud that gave us both Puma and Adidas.

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Laura Niklason is the co-founder and CEO of Humacyte. Laura's problem is this: How can you use human cells to create blood vessels that surgeons can pull out of a bag and implant into patients? Although still awaiting FDA approval in the U.S., Humacyte's vessels have already been used to treat wounded soldiers in Ukraine.

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As demand for clean energy grows, engineers around the U.S. are working on a new generation of nuclear reactors. These designs reflect how nuclear energy could fit into the power grid – and our lives – in new ways. Yasir Arafat is the Chief Technology Officer at Aalo Atomics. Yasir’s problem is this: How do you mass produce nuclear reactors that are safe, scalable, and cheap?

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This week on Risky Business, Nate and Maria discuss whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire, the perils of sports betting among professional athletes, and what the return of Roaring Kitty means for traditional market analysis. 

Further Reading:

“Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now” from The Atlantic

“Should Sonia Sotomayor Retire?” from Slate

“MLB bans Padres’ Tucupita Marcano permanently for betting on baseball” from the NYT

“Lifetime bans and careers in tatters – recent sports betting scandals show how fringe players are vulnerable” from CBC

For more from Nate and Maria, subscribe to their newsletters:

“The Leap” from Maria Konnikova

“Silver Bulletin” from Nate Silver

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Tim Harford is joined by Jacob Goldstein to answer your questions. Does winning the lottery make you unhappy? Is Bitcoin bad for the economy? When does correlation imply causation? And what will Tim and Jacob do when the robot overlords come for their jobs? Enjoy this episode from Cautionary Tales, another Pushkin podcast.

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Palm oil is a cheap and remarkably versatile vegetable oil. It’s in a ton of products, from food to cosmetics, detergent, and chewing gum. But producing so much palm oil is really bad for the planet. Shara Ticku is the co-founder and CEO of C16 Biosciences. Shara's problem is this: Can you get yeast to make an oil that is just as useful as palm oil – without clearing land to grow palm trees?

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Last year, the FDA approved a treatment for sickle cell disease using a revolutionary new gene editing technology called CRISPR. Rachel Haurwitz conducted pioneering research on CRISPR as a graduate student. Now she’s the co-founder and CEO of Caribou Biosciences. Rachel's problem is this: How can you improve CRISPR and use it to engineer human immune cells to fight cancer? 

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Robert Langer has co-founded dozens of companies, holds over a thousand patents, and is a pioneering figure in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Robert has solved a lot of problems, and is working on many more with his lab at MIT. But there is one big problem that has stuck with Robert his whole career: How do you get discoveries out of the lab and into the world?

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Mateo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy. Mateo’s problem is this: How do you build batteries that can provide affordable backup power to the grid for days at a time? As it turns out, the basic technology was developed – and then mostly ignored – over 50 years ago.

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This March, doctors successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a person for the first time in history. Mike Curtis is the CEO of eGenesis, the company that raised the pig whose kidney was used for the procedure. Mike's problem is this: How do you genetically engineer pigs to provide organs – kidneys, hearts, livers – for people?

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Imagine picking up your phone and ordering something from Walmart. Fifteen minutes later, a drone hovers over your yard, lowers your order down to you, and zips away. Adam Woodworth wants this to be so boring you don't even notice. He’s the CEO of Wing, a drone delivery company. His problem is this: How do you turn a flashy idea like a delivery drone into something as ubiquitous as a shopping cart?

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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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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.

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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