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iHeartPodcasts and Pushkin Industries

Every week on What's Your Problem?, former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks with entrepreneurs and engineers tackling the biggest challenges at the forefront of technology. How do you make a trip to space as routine as a plane flight? How do you turn solar energy into clean fuel? How do you use AI to stop deadly infections before they spread? We hear a lot these days about how the world is getting worse. What's Your Problem? learns from the thinkers and doers trying to make our future better.

iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.

What's Your Problem?

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 building boom.

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Could Autonomous Diggers Unleash a Building Boom?

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 scale, what’s going on across the cultivated and plant-based meat industries, and how new state bans on cultivated foods are shaping the future of his business.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Growing Meat from Cells

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 future.

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The Ordinary Stuff Behind Technological Breakthroughs

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 change, and how government policy is shaping today’s direct air capture industry.

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Carbon Capture at Rock-Bottom Prices

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.

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Why Amazon Built a Spatula-Wielding Robot

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 ways to identify exactly where to dig a geothermal well.

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Drilling Smarter Wells to Unleash Geothermal Energy

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 unlocking the pain puzzle— and a rare condition known as Man on Fire syndrome.

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Inventing a Better Pain Pill

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 winding, narrow, and harder to access than those in the US and other developed countries.

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Mapping the Unmappable

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.

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Reinventing Blood

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 talks about the invention of transformer models. And he discusses how he’s using those models to try to invent new kinds of medicine, with a particular focus on RNA. 

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The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine

There are moments in history when people make huge technological advances all of a sudden. Think of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, or, more recently, generative AI. But what do these moments have in common? Is there some set of conditions that lead to massive technological leaps?
 
Byrne Hobart is the author of a finance newsletter called The Diff, and the co-author of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation. In the book, Bryne makes the case for one thing that is really helpful if you want to make a wild technological leap: a bubble.

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How Bubbles Power Breakthroughs

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