What's Your Problem?

What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History . How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the guy who invented the movies? On Business History, Jacob and fellow former Planet Money host Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of businesses big and small and find...

 Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors. On today’s show, Mike talks about how a garage-built prototype became an FDA-approved machine; changing the company’s story after a failed clinical trial; and why he loves being a salesman but hates most sales pitches. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information...

Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company trying to bring autonomous driving to commercial trucking. Chris led a team at the 2004 DARPA challenge that launched the autonomous vehicle industry. Then he held a senior role at Google’s self-driving car project, which later became Waymo. On the show today, he talks about the long arc of autonomous driving, why he left Google, an...

Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer of OceanWell. Michael's problem is this: How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the ocean – and deliver it to land at a cost that’s competitive with other sources of fresh water? On today’s show, Michael explains how he built OceanWell’s prototype in his kitchen, what it takes to make a system that’s less disruptiv...

Justin Lopas is the COO and co-founder of Base Power, a battery and power company based in Texas. Justin’s problem is this:  How can you deliver more energy to more people without having to build so much more grid? On today’s show, Justin explains why the grid needs a major upgrade, and how putting batteries next to homes could help. Also: what Texas’ embrace of renewable energy...

Fletcher Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of  Throne Labs. Fletcher’s problem is this: How can you create public toilets that people actually want to use? On today’s show, Fletcher explains how his company is trying to make public bathrooms cleaner, safer and more accessible. The conversation also points to a bigger idea: why it’s so hard for cities to build and maintain pretty m...

Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics. Boris' problem is this: How do you teach machines not just to drive, but also to work: to grade roads, move heavy objects and dig big holes at construction sites.  On today’s show, Boris talks about how his work at Waymo led him to found Bedrock, and he explains how autonomous construction equipment could help unleash an American bu...

Justin Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a company making seafood without killing fish. Their first product is cultivated salmon, which is made from real salmon cells that are grown in a stainless steel vat. Justin's problem is this: How to sell no-kill, vat-grown salmon for the same price, or better, as wild-caught salmon? On today’s show, Justin explains how Wildtype will scal...

 Ed Conway is an economics journalist and author of the book “Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization.” On today’s show, Ed reveals how three of those often-overlooked materials—iron, copper, and sand—shaped human advancement from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution to the digital age. And he talks about what they mean for our fut...

Shashank Samala is the CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, a carbon capture start-up. His problem is this: Can you use crushed up rocks to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere? And can you do it cheaply enough to have a global impact? On today’s show, Shashank explains why he believes rocks could be the backbone of carbon capture, how his childhood in India shaped his outlook on climate...

Aaron Parness is a director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. His problem is this: How do you build a robot that can put stuff on shelves. Today on the show, Aaron explains why this is a surprisingly hard problem – and why the solution Aaron’s team came up with may ultimately have uses beyond the warehouse. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In many places on Earth, there’s steam just below the surface. We don’t know where those places are — but if we could figure it out, we could unlock a lot of clean energy. Carl Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, a geothermal energy company. On today’s show, Carl makes the case for geothermal in the energy transition and explains how the company is developing new...

 Dr. Stephen Waxman is a professor of neurology, neuroscience and pharmacology at Yale. His research on pain helped pave the way for a newly approved, non-addictive pain drug called suzetrigine. On today’s show, he explains why he thinks suzetrigine is a promising step, but why much more work is needed to develop better pain drugs. He also gets into his work on ion channels—critical to...

 Philipp Kandal is the chief product officer of Grab, an app that serves several countries across Southeast Asia. Two of Grab’s main businesses are delivery and mobility – like a combination between Instacart and Uber. And maps are at the core of its business. On today’s show, Philipp talks about improving online maps for places like Southeast Asia, where streets are often windin...

Dr. Allan Doctor is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Kalocyte, a company that is developing dried red blood cells that can be rehydrated and used in medical emergencies. On today’s show, Dr. Doctor explains the complex science behind artificial blood, and how this innovation could help save millions of lives. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jakob Uszkoreit is the CEO and co-founder of Inceptive, a biotech start-up. He’s also a co-author of “Attention is All You Need,” the paper that created transformer models. Today, transformers power chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. They’ve also led to breakthroughs in everything from generating images to predicting the structure of proteins. On today’s show, Jakob ta...

Nan Ransohoff is the head of climate at Stripe. The company is known mainly for facilitating online payments, but it’s become a key driver of the nascent carbon-removal industry. On today’s show, Nan explains how she used a clever economic idea to get companies to spend $1 billion on carbon removal. And she talks about the different approaches startups are pursuing to pull carbon dioxi...

Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle. Megan’s problem is this: How do you create a new system that can both refine the raw metals we need for new batteries and recycle metal from old batteries? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. Billions of dollars have flowed into fusion startups in recent years, but reliable, economic fusion power may still be decades away. Greg Piefer is the founder of a fusion company called Shine , where he’s pursuing a different path. Rather than...

Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their customers will buy. That’s why Rebecca Hu Thrams calls recycling “the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.” Rebecca is the co-founder of Glacier, and her problem is this: Can you use AI and robots to make recycling a some...

AI  might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s going on inside AI models. Josh Batson is a research scientist at Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, one of the world’s leading language models. Josh’s problem is this: How do we learn how AI works? Get early, ad-free access to episodes o...

AI is better than humans at a lot of things, but physical tasks – even seemingly simple ones like folding a shirt – routinely stump AI-powered robots. Chelsea Finn is a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of Physical Intelligence. Chelsea's problem is this: Can you build an AI model that  can teach any robot to do any task, anywhere? Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's...

Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centivax. Jacob’s problem is this: Can you create a vaccine that protects people against almost all strains of flu – even strains that haven’t evolved yet? Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm . Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiob...

Alex Wiltschko got obsessed with perfume when he was 12 years old. He grew up to be an AI researcher at Google. Then he started Osmo, a company that fused his job at Google with his childhood obsession: Osmo is using AI to teach computers to smell. The company is getting into the perfume business, and it plans eventually to use scent to diagnose disease and detect security risks. Get early, ad-fre...

Nick Jacobson and his team at Dartmouth medical school spent over 100,000 hours trying to build an AI chatbot that can serve as a safe, effective therapist. After a few false starts, they seem to be on to something. Note: This episode contains references to self harm. Get early, ad-free access to episodes of What's Your Problem? by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm . Pushkin+...