Merge Club Podcast

Humanity has long accepted death as inevitable, but advances in cryogenics and biopreservation are challenging that idea. Once confined to science fiction, the prospect of preserving life—or even intelligence—is becoming a serious scientific pursuit. Few are actively pushing the boundaries of this field. Kyrylo is one of them. Listen to our conversation with Kyrylo, who is working on freezing hims...

Young people are growing up in a world that is finally coming to terms with humanity’s disregard for the impact we have the climate. Record breaking temperatures, unprecedented wildfires, loss of biodiversity, the list goes on. Most understand the problem, few are actively working to solve it. Marta is one of those few. Listen to our conversation with Marta Bernardino - a 19-year-old trying to sol...

What would you do if you were tasked with solving the youth mental health crisis in America? I’m personally not sure I’d know where to start — but Alex Mathew has some ideas. Listen to our conversation with Alex Mathew - a 16-year-old trying to solve this very problem with AI plushies. You can watch on YouTube (or Spotify / Apple ) - Like and Subscribe so more people can discover Merge! Alex’s sto...

You wake up and you’re 16 again. You decide you want to conquer the world and kickstart your career and jump into private equity, AI, energy and climate tech. How do you go about it? Luckily, Theodore can give you a lot of those answers because for the past couple years, he’s been figuring out exactly that. Listen to our conversation with Theodore Grether-Murray - very possibly the most ambitious...

Have you ever been flown out to meet the co-founder of a $25B company to pitch your project as a high school student? No? Me neither, but Tehseen has. Listen to our conversation with Tehseen Dahya - a teenager obsessed with finding 3rd door paths to awesome outcomes. You can watch on YouTube (or Spotify / Apple ) - Like and Subscribe so more people can discover Merge! Tehseen’s story is unconventi...

Watch on YouTube - Like and Subscribe so more people can discover Merge! Today we’re diving into the awesome story of Aaryan Harshith. From using light waves to detect cancer in cells at 14 to creating the world’s largest database of Phages as a Stanford researcher, Aaryan’s story is a must-listen. He shares the largely untold story of Phages: the world’s most underrated organism — with applicatio...

Alex started a nonprofit at 14 to teach English to students in rural China, scaling to 1,500 students across 20 schools while in high school. He dropped out of college to pursue a nutrition startup before pivoting to join one of the most exciting EdTech startups of the past few years, Mentava . Now, at Mentava, he's working to revolutionize education by giving agency back to students and parents....

Today we welcome Ivoine Strachan to the podcast. He has an incredible story - growing up in the Bahamas with limited access to electricity and internet, he became a chess champion so he could get access to computers and wifi. He learned how to build and fix electronics, how to code using only his phone, and then managed to fundraise for a solo trip to San Francisco at just 16 years old where he in...

Today we welcome Robert Tolan to the podcast. He received a grant from Emergent Ventures to start a think tank on Irish housing policy. He was a founding fellow in the Polaris Fellowship and is now working on an LLM job matching system for the Irish tech industry. (02:55) Leveraging cold emails as an “outsider”(13:59) Housing Theory of Everything(25:01) The Polaris Fellowship and getting a grant f...

Today, we’re welcoming Merger Brad Cox to the podcast. Brad shares his journey from student to entrepreneur, telling us how his frustration with exam preparation in Australia led him to create Exam Insights . He discusses lessons learned from a failed initial idea, insight into the Australian tech scene, his experience with non-dilutive funding, and his vision for the future of his EdTech startup....

Today, we’re welcoming Merger Sasha Przybylski to the podcast. Sasha tells us about what it was like getting her start at The Knowledge Society, how a book on sports science kicked off her obsession with material science and chemistry, and what she learned after spending 5 months building an extended kalman filter to estimate battery state of charge from the ground up.  Enjoy the conversation. Fin...

Today, we’re welcoming Merger Kai Goodall to the podcast. Kai got his start at The Knowledge Society, a STEM accelerator program for teens. There, he discovered his love for propulsion tech and rocket science. At just 16 years old, he landed a job designing satellites at Telesat, the largest satellite company in Canada. Kai tells us about his approach to learning, cold emailing experts on LinkedIn...

Today, we’re welcoming Andrew Nijmeh to the podcast. Andrew got his start coding at a startup when he was just 12 years old and recently received a grant from Tyler Cowen at Emergent Ventures to build his first company, focused on solving traffic using AI and reinforcement learning. A quick note: the audio on this recording leaves something to be desired, but I assure you the conversation does not...

Today we’re welcoming Merger, Sohi Patel to the podcast. Sohi got her start at school science fairs where she discovered her love of chemistry, material sciences, and engineering. She and her co-founder recently received a grant from Tyler Cowen at Emergent Ventures to build their new company, Organ, focused on recording hyper-personalized health context, at the molecular level. On the show today,...