What's Your Problem?

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 for privacy information.

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?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 range of psychedelics use to affect the brain. If Gul is correct, these drugs may be useful not only for people suffering from mental illness, but also for people dealing with neurological problems like strokes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis was hard for almost everyone. Fuquan Bilal remembers it like it was yesterday. A real estate investor, among other things, he came home to the news of the crash and the sharp realization that he lost $2 million overnight. That could have been the end with advisors telling him to file for bankruptcy.    Join Ben and Tanya as they chat with Fuquan about how he fought to keep his companies afloat. Discover how he brought his business back from the dead, ignoring common sense, for his own gut instincts, his investments to diversify his income, and back into better communities for all. These are The Unshakeables.      The Unshakeables is brought to you by Chase for Business and Ruby Studio by iHeartMediaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Happiness Lab's Dr. Laurie Santos brings together other Pushkin hosts to mark the International Day of Happiness. Revisionist History's Malcolm Gladwell talks about the benefits of the misery of running in a Canadian winter. Dr. Maya Shankar from A Slight Change of Plans talks about quieting her mental chatter. And Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford surprises everyone with the happiness lessons to be learned from a colonoscopy. Hear more of The Happiness Lab HERE.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 recordings, and use it to train AI tools that can hear when people are getting sick?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cement is, almost literally, everywhere. It is extraordinarily useful, which is why humanity makes 4 billion metric tons of it every year. But cement is also extremely carbon intensive to produce. Leah Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Sublime Systems. Her problem is this: How can you make cement, at scale, without emitting carbon dioxide?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a company that makes induction stoves, with a clever twist. Sam's problem is this: How do you build an electric cooktop that works just as well as gas, and can be installed without having to rewire the house? The solution that Sam found could eventually help transform not only kitchens, but the way homes draw power from the electrical grid. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space, a company with a unique approach to manufacturing rockets. Tim's problem is this: How can you use 3D printing to make rockets more efficiently? Eventually, Tim wants to send a rocket – and printer – to Mars to build the first Martian industrial base. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of hospital patients die of preventable causes. For many of these patients, warning signs are subtle and easy for doctors to miss. Suchi Saria is the founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, and a professor at Johns Hopkins where she runs a lab focused on machine learning and healthcare. Suchi's problem is this: How can you use AI to detect when hospital patients are at risk of potentially deadly complications – and how can you get doctors to listen?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gia Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Natel Energy, a company that is trying to transform the way hydroelectric power works. Gia's problem is this: how do you draw hydropower from rivers without damaging the ecosystem? As it turns out, we have a lot to learn from nature's furriest engineers – beavers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Covariant. Peter's problem is this: How do you take the AI breakthroughs of the past decade or so, and make them work in robots? Peter was one of the first employees at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. On the show, he talks about how AI has evolved, and why it's so difficult to teach a robot to fold a towel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford computer scientist and the former chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning at Google Cloud. When Li entered the field of AI in the 2000s, researchers were making slow progress, optimizing algorithms to incrementally improve outcomes. Li saw that the problem wasn't the algorithm, but the size of the datasets being used. So she built a massive database of images called ImageNet. It was a huge breakthrough, and helped lead the emergence of modern AI.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tim Latimer is the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, a company that is using a new approach to produce carbon-free geothermal energy. Tim and his company are drawing on innovations from the oil and gas industry to expand geothermal energy production to new places like the Utah desert, and maybe one day, to Mars.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works in computational biology, taking giant datasets relating to genetics and health outcomes and tries to understand what's going on. Manolis' research focuses on genomics, and a related field called epigenomics. Manolis' problem is this: What are the cellular mechanisms of a disease? And how can we intervene to keep people healthy?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After working as a chef for decades, Anthony Strong's dream came true: He opened his own restaurant. His problem was a classic one: Restaurants are bad businesses. So he set out to open a new kind of restaurant, with a new business model. In this episode, he tells us about how he accomplished that with his latest venture, Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Selling hydrogen to make fertilizer is a huge business. It also drives tons of carbon emissions. Rob Hanson, the co-founder and CEO of a company called Monolith is trying to create hydrogen without emissions -- and to do it at scale, at a competitive price. A key tool he's using: The biggest plasma torch ever built.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss are the co-founders of a training and consulting company called The Leadership Consortium. Together they specialize in helping leaders build trust within their companies. They also co-host a podcast called Fixable, which is a TED show produced by Pushkin Industries. Also, Frances is a professor at Harvard Business School. In today's show, Frances and Anne share the story of their work with Uber. It started back in 2017, when a Harvard Business School alum who was working at Uber came to Frances and said the company needed her help.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When a Dutch crime reporter makes an unbelievable discovery, a small-town murder case begins to look like an international assassination plot. Enjoy this episode from Hot Money: The New Narcos, a podcast from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A few weeks ago, Jacob Goldstein sat down with a writer and a composer on a stage in Chicago to talk about artificial intelligence. The conversation, which was part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, aimed to answer a big question: will AI kill creativity? The writer, Stephen Marche, is the author of several nonfiction books and novels. Earlier this year he tried something new: he used AI to help him write a novel called Death of an Author. (That book was published in audio form by Pushkin Industries.) The composer, Lucas Cantor, has won two Emmys for his work scoring the Olympics for NBC and co-produced a Lorde song that was in one of the Hunger Games movies. And he used AI to help him write an end to Schubert's unfinished symphony.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jigar Shah is the director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Last year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for Jigar's office to lend out. The loans are supposed to go to companies that are helping the U.S. economy move away from fossil fuels. That can mean everything from building new nuclear plants to creating a giant hydrogen battery in an underground salt cavern. Jigar's problem is this: What's the best way to lend out all that money – and do it fast enough for the U.S. to meet its climate goals.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of research at DeepMind, an AI research group that is part of Google. Every protein has a unique shape. And understanding a protein's shape is key to understanding how proteins work to keep us healthy, and what goes wrong when we get sick. But, for decades, figuring out the shape of a protein was a hard problem that could take years of work. Then Pushmeet and his colleagues built an AI model called AlphaFold that could accurately predict the shape of hundreds of millions of proteins. It's one of the most impressive real-world AI success stories that we've seen so far. And it turns out that the lessons of AlphaFold also hold broader lessons for solving problems with AI.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Forrest Meyen is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Lunar Outpost, a company that builds machines that go to places like Mars and, if everything goes according to plan, the moon. The company is betting that the private space boom of the past decade will soon go beyond Earth's orbit to the moon and beyond.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brannin McBee is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave. A few years ago, he and a few friends started buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency. It turns out, the same hardware -- chips known as GPUs -- is essential for running state-of-the-art AI models. Today, Brannin and his friends have turned their hobby into a company that's competing against some of the biggest companies in the world to provide the hardware and computing power to run AI.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul, is on trial for fraud. On today's show, we talk to Lidia Jean Kott, who is covering the trial for another Pushkin show, about a dramatic day in court. Caroline Ellison, former co-CEO of Alameda Research and Sam Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend, took the stand. She recently pleaded guilty to fraud, and is cooperating with the prosecution. Hear Against the Rules with Michael Lewis: The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christina Smolke is the co-founder and CEO of Antheia. Antheia is a synthetic biology company -- they're in the business of genetically engineering microorganisms to produce commercial products. Christina's problem is this: How do you turn yeast cells into tiny factories to create the active ingredients in generic drugs. If Christina and her team solve this problem, they won't solve the drug shortage problem entirely. But they might help make it better.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research often reshape the design and utility of AI in both business and society. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Goldstein explore the conceptual underpinnings of modern AI with Dr. David Cox, VP of AI Models at IBM Research. They talk foundation models, self-supervised machine learning, and the practical applications of AI and data platforms like watsonx in business and technology. Enjoy this episode from Smart Talks with IBM (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/smart-talks-with-ibm/id1558889546) Visit us at: https://www.ibm.com/smarttalks/Learn more about watsonx: https://www.ibm.com/watsonx This is a paid advertisement from IBM.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a company that is developing an automated make line. Stephen's problem is this: How do you make restaurant food from fresh ingredients... cheaper? Chipotle invested in Hyphen, whose automated system could soon be preparing online orders at thousands of Chipotle outlets.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Simon Johnson is an MIT economist and the co-author of a new book called “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity”. Simon's problem is this: How do you create the conditions for technological change to benefit many people, rather than just a powerful few?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal's problem is this: How do you design an AI that can give students the kind of benefits they'd get from working with a human tutor? Earlier this year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an AI tutor built on top of GPT4.  The idea is to use AI to give more kids access to one-on-one tutoring, and help human teachers with their work as well.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What can we learn from the centuries-long quest to eradicate smallpox, once the scourge of humanity? And how did it set the stage for all vaccines to come? First we meet Edward Jenner, a doctor in 18th century Britain who learned about the folk practice of “variolation” and found a safer way to inoculate people against smallpox. Then, Donald Hopkins of the Carter Center takes us back to the 1960s in Sierra Leone, where he discovered that successfully eradicating smallpox could be a feasible goal worldwide. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Allon Bloch is the co-founder and CEO of K Health. Allon's problem is this: Can you use AI to make seeing a doctor easier and more helpful? Today, thousands of patients a month are treated through K Health. The company has an AI-based patient interface and it employs about 150 doctors. And K Health has plans to expand beyond primary care -- and they just raised another 50 million dollars to help them get there.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sonia Kastner is the founder and CEO of Pano. Sonia's problem is this: How do you use data and machine learning to mitigate the damage caused by climate change? Pano mounts cameras on remote mountaintop towers, then sends images from the cameras to an AI model trained to spot wildfire smoke. The goal is to alert fire crews early, before the fire spreads.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar. Narvar works with companies such as Sephora, Lululemon and Home Depot to manage the post-purchase phase of online shopping — tracking, alerts and returns. Around 10 percent of online purchases are returned and every return cuts into retailers' profits. Amit's problem is this: consumers have learned to love free returns, but can retailers afford them?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle's problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative? Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Yaron Singer is the founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence. Yaron's problem is this: How do you reduce AI's security and reliability risks? Yaron was a computer science professor at Harvard and worked at Google before starting Robust Intelligence. The company's software tests AI models and datasets for problems with performance and security.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chris Monroe is the co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ. Chris's problem is this: How do you build a quantum computer that will actually work? Quantum computing has the potential to transform fields from drug development to clean energy to cybersecurity, but so far no one has been able to build a quantum computer that can reliably outperform existing computers. Monroe is also a physics professor at Duke University, and he talks Jacob through the principles that make quantum computing possible. Take the Pushkin Audience Survey and receive a code to redeem a free audiobook: https://bit.ly/3pAAQxZSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Seven stocks are powering the market: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. How will they do in the second half of this year? Ethan Wu hosts as Rob ‘Value This' Armstrong takes on Elaine ‘The Lex Flex' Moore. In three rounds they pick their winners for the second half of 2023, and tell us why they chose them. If you enjoyed this preview of the new podcast Unhedged, subscribe to the show now: https://apple.co/478A3VSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles Fisher is the co-founder and CEO of Unlearn AI. Charles' problem is this: How do you build an AI model that can predict human health? Charles and his colleagues have built a predictive model of health that is already being used in clinical trials, and might one day be deployed to predict individuals' health outcomes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Laura Modi is the founder and CEO of Bobbie, a company that makes baby formula and sells it directly to parents. Laura's problem is this: how do you launch a startup in a highly regulated industry that has pretty much been a duopoly for decades? Part of Laura's answer is marketing, which raises another question: how do you get people to consider formula despite so much messaging that breastfeeding is better?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Xiao Wang is the founder of a company called Boundless. Xiao's problem is this: How do you make it cheaper and easier for people to navigate the U.S. immigration system? Xiao moved to the U.S. from China when he was three years-old. For many years, he took for granted that immigration was slow, complicated, and expensive to navigate. With Boundless, he's built a platform to help people who try to figure out that system every year.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he's still pushing the frontier.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the most amazing things about ChatGPT and other, similar AI models: Nobody really understands what they can do. Not even the people who build them. On today's show, we talk with Sam Bowman about some of the mysteries at the heart of so-called large language models. Sam is on the faculty at NYU, he runs a research group at the AI company Anthropic and he is the author of the illuminating paper Eight Things to Know About Large Language Models.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Dan's problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Does flying have to be bad for the environment? Val Miftakhov, the founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, doesn't think so. His company built a plane that's powered by hydrogen fuel, which produces zero carbon emissions. It had a successful test flight earlier this year and Miftakhov hopes it will be ready for commercial use by 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Descript's software has made editing audio and video much simpler.  The company recently received a large investment from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It's a sign that Descript is moving toward using generative AI to generate words and pictures. What will that mean for the people who currently do that work?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy.  Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.