What's Your Problem?

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? Se...

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 tran...

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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...

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? See omnystudio.com/...

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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...

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 bet...

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 gen...

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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? See omnystudio.com/li...

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 p...

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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? See o...

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?  See omnystudio.com/lis...

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? See omnystudio.com/listener f...

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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...

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 r...

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 r...