What's Your Problem?

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 subscr...

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 u...

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 futur...

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 futu...

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 fo...

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...

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 “...

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...

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...

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 ne...

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...

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 pod...

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 everythin...

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...

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...

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 b...

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. If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this...

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? 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 .  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy in...

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 ha...

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 quiltin...

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 the...

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...

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? If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podc...

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? 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 . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 m...