What's Your Problem? Podcast
1) Why Amazon Built a Spatula-Wielding Robot
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 surprisin...Show More
2) Drilling Smarter Wells to Unleash Geothermal Energy
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 Hoilan...Show More
3) Inventing a Better Pain Pill
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 tod...Show More
4) Mapping the Unmappable
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 combinatio...Show More
5) Reinventing Blood
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 More
6) The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine
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, tr...Show More
7) A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal
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’...Show More
8) Giving Old Batteries New Life
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 met...Show More
9) Engineering the Future of Fusion
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 startup...Show More
10) Can Robots Fix Recycling?
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 Thram...Show More