What's Your Problem?
Episodes
Introducing Rapid Response: Logitech's CEO treats AI like a board member
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we’re sharing an episode of the Rapid Response podcast. Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business lead...
Can the US Break China's Grip on Rare Earths?
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Rare earth elements are inside pretty much everything with an on-off switch: Phones, laptops, cars. Even missiles. And China controls the world’...
How Quantum Computers Could Change the World
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Bloom is the co-founder and CEO of Atom Computing, a company building quantum computers out of individual atoms. Ben’s problem is this: How ...
Fighting Wildfires from Space
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Jonny Dyer is the founder and CEO of a satellite company called Muon Space. The company’s first big project is a satellite constellation called ...
The Killer We Refused to See
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
After bacteria were discovered, it took scientists 200 years to figure out that they cause disease. If scientists had made the link sooner, hundreds o...
The Startup Run by AI Agents
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Evan Ratliff co-founded a publishing startup in 2011. Now he hosts a podcast called Shell Game. In the latest season of the show, Evan creates a compa...
Can AI Help Solve Alzheimer’s?
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Patrick Hsu is the co-founder of Arc Institute, which is integrating AI models and biological research. Patrick’s problem is this: How can you u...
The New Science of Preventing Heart Attacks
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, medical research has fundamentally changed how we think about heart disease. This fresh understanding has opened up new ways to pre...
From Solar Pumps to Everything: Building a Market from Scratch
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Samir Ibrahim is the co-founder and CEO of SunCulture. When he started the company, he thought he was solving a simple problem: How do you sell solar-...
Mass-Producing Stem Cells to Cure Disease
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Nabiha Saklayen is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino. Nabiha’s problem is this: How can you make personalized stem cell therapies quickly and ch...
From Kill Switch: The Glassholes Are Back
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we're sharing an episode of a show that explores the problems that new technology is creating and how we navigate living in the future. It's ca...
Building a Self-Driving Tractor to Change the Future of Food
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Please take our survey https://tinyurl.com/wyplistenersurvey about the show! Tell us what you want to hear, and what would make it better. Tim Bu...
We’re Going to Need a Better Boat
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mitch Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Arc Boats. Mitch's problem is this: How do you build competitively priced electric boats?On today’s show,...
How to Experience the Joy of Giving Right Now: A Giving Tuesday Special from The Happiness Lab
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
According to the science, it really is better to give than receive. Donating a dollar; sharing a kind word or lending someone a hand changes lives, bu...
The Big Short Companion from Against the Rules: How the Financial Crisis Broke Wall Street
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re sharing another podcast we think you’ll enjoy, The Big Short Companion from Against the Rules, hosted by fellow Pushkin podcast host...
The App Where Strangers Lend Each Other Money
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Bloom Money. Nina’s problem is this: How do you build an app to help immigrants manage their money? On to...
Introducing Business History: The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History. How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What g...
Using Sound Waves to Destroy Tumors
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors.On today’s show, Mike tal...
From Desert Robots to Driverless Trucks
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company trying to bring autonomous driving to commercial trucking.Chris led a team at the 2004 DAR...
Is the Future of Fresh Water Under the Sea?
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Porter is the Chief Technology Officer of OceanWell.Michael's problem is this: How can you desalinate water at the bottom of the ocean –...
Could Home Batteries Save the Grid?
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Justin Lopas is the COO and co-founder of Base Power, a battery and power company based in Texas. Justin’s problem is this: How can you deliv...
Building a Better Public Bathroom
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fletcher Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Throne Labs.Fletcher’s problem is this: How can you create public toilets that people actually w...
Could Autonomous Diggers Unleash a Building Boom?
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Growing Meat from Cells
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Justin Kolbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a company making seafood without killing fish. Their first product is cultivated salmon, which i...
The Ordinary Stuff Behind Technological Breakthroughs
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ed Conway is an economics journalist and author of the book “Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization.” On ...
Carbon Capture at Rock-Bottom Prices
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 suc...
Why Amazon Built a Spatula-Wielding Robot
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Drilling Smarter Wells to Unleash Geothermal Energy
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
Inventing a Better Pain Pill
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Stephen Waxman is a professor of neurology, neuroscience and pharmacology at Yale. His research on pain helped pave the way for a newly approve...
Mapping the Unmappable
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Philipp Kandal is the chief product officer of Grab, an app that serves several countries across Southeast Asia. Two of Grab’s main businesse...
Reinventing Blood
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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,” th...
A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Giving Old Batteries New Life
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ra...
Engineering the Future of Fusion
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. B...
Can Robots Fix Recycling?
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their cus...
Inside the Mind of an AI Model
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s goin...
Teaching Robots How to Do Everything
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is better than humans at a lot of things, but physical tasks – even seemingly simple ones like folding a shirt – routinely stump AI-pow...
Making a Universal Flu Vaccine
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centivax. Jacob’s problem is this: Can you create a vaccine that protects people against almost all st...
Teaching Computers to Smell
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Wiltschko got obsessed with perfume when he was 12 years old. He grew up to be an AI researcher at Google. Then he started Osmo, a company that f...
Can a Chatbot Treat Depression?
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Jacobson and his team at Dartmouth medical school spent over 100,000 hours trying to build an AI chatbot that can serve as a safe, effective ther...
Will AI Radically Change the World by 2027?... from Risky Business
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Nate and Maria discuss AI 2027, a new report from the AI Futures Project that lays out some pretty doom-y scenarios for our near-term AI fu...
Is the Future of Flight Supersonic?
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake's problem is this: Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed ...
The Secrets of Silk
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fiorenzo Omenetto is a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University and the director of Silklab. Fiorenzo's problem is this: How do you tur...
Infiltrating an International Ransomware Gang
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, a ransomware gang called LockBit rose from obscurity to extort over $100 million from organizations around the world. A security stra...
Preparing for the Future of War
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Kirchhoff helped launch a Defense Department office that aimed to bring Silicon Valley technology to the US military. Christopher&rsquo...
Stopping HIV Without a Vaccine
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jared Baeten is senior vice president in virology at Gilead Sciences. Jared's problem is this: In a world without a vaccine, how do you make a medicin...
Harnessing the Heat Deep Beneath Our Feet
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Carlos Araque is the co-founder and CEO of Quaise Energy. Carlos' problem is this: How do you make drilling for geothermal energy as routine, widespre...
The Brain Implant That Could Change Medicine
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Rapoport is the co-founder and CSO of Precision Neuroscience. Ben's problem is this: Can you build a device that allows a paralyzed person to use ...
Building a Mass Market Robot
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik. Jeff's problem is this: Can you make a safe, reliable humanoid robot – for less than $50,0...
Solving Solar’s Biggest Problem
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We need better, cheaper ways to store solar and wind energy when it’s dark out and the wind isn’t blowing. One option: Compressing air in ...
How Bubbles Power Breakthroughs
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are moments in history when people make huge technological advances all of a sudden. Think of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, or, mo...
Teaching AI to Build Stuff in the Physical World
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI works well in the virtual world. That’s partly because the internet provides so much data to train AI models. But there’s no analogous ...
NVIDIA: At the Heart of the AI Boom
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the past few years, NVIDIA has become one of the most valuable and important companies in the world by making GPUs, the chips powering the AI bo...
What Claude Shannon Figured Out
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Shannon is a major figure in the history of technology. Known as the father of information theory, Shannon spent decades at Bell Labs and MI...
Measles: The Cancer Killer?... from Incubation
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We thought we knew everything there was to know about measles. But in recent years, new research has revealed that the virus attacks the immune system...
RoboPod and the Perpetual Money Machine – Cautionary Questions 2… from Cautionary Tales
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What really drove the 2008 financial crash? What’s a shadow bank? And what’s the connection between NIMBYs and BANANAs? Tim Harford and Jacob Gold...
Turning Solar Energy Into Fuel (The Solar Era, Part 3)
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Solar power and batteries are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. Great. But there are problems batteries can’t solve – like fueling ships and planes. ...
Can Hot Bricks Save the World? (The Solar Era, Part 2)
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second of three episodes about the solar-power revolution. Last week, we talked about how solar power got so cheap. This week, we’re tal...
How the Sun Won (The Solar Era, Part 1)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the past 20 years, the price of solar panels has fallen by more than 97 percent. This extraordinary decline is good news for the world – and it’...
Drugs in Space
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Reichert is a research scientist at Merck, working on improvements to how we administer drugs to patients. Paul's problem is this: How can you ru...
The World Is Getting Better (Really)
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the F...
Rabies: When Monsters are Real…from Incubation
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why has rabies invaded our nightmares for centuries? Author and veterinarian Monica Murphy tells us about the cultural history of rabies (which involv...
Using Gene Therapy to Help the Blind See
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After decades of research, gene therapy is starting to work. Shannon Boye is a professor of cellular and molecular therapeutics at the University of F...
Bringing Back Mammoths and Dodos*
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
*Or at least, sort of bringing back mammoths and dodos.Beth Shapiro is the chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences and the author of How to C...
What Elevators Teach Us About Technology, Design, and Human Behavior
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The elevator made the modern city possible: No elevators, no skyscrapers. Today, people are working on entirely new kinds of elevators that can go hig...
Can the Plant Microbiome Revolutionize Farming?
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Turning Pollution into Jet Fuel
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Reinventing Mining to Power the World
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 K...
Inventing a Vaccine for Bees
05 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. The...
A Better Way to Make the Chemicals in Everything
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
How Refrigeration Changed the World
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day. Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells t...
Detecting Deepfakes With AI
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Turning Old Cans Into Clean Energy
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 an...
Moneyball, Soccer, and the Gap Between Analytics and the Real World
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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: ...
Using Computer Vision to See What Coaches Can’t
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Scanning Every Muscle to Help Olympians Get Stronger
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Making Blood Vessels in a Factory
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 p...
Creating the Second Atomic Age
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ene...
Lifetime Terms, Lifetime Bans, and the Return of Roaring Kitty from Risky Business
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Risky Business, Nate and Maria discuss whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire, the perils of sports betting among pr...
When the Robots Take Over… from Cautionary Tales
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 doe...
Making Palm Oil Without Palm Trees
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 produ...
Fighting Cancer with CRISPR
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, the FDA approved a treatment for sickle cell disease using a revolutionary new gene editing technology called CRISPR. Rachel Haurwitz condu...
How to Start 40 Companies (and Counting)
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Langer has co-founded dozens of companies, holds over a thousand patents, and is a pioneering figure in drug delivery and tissue engineering. R...
The Cutting Edge of Energy Storage: Rust
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 pow...
The First Pig to Human Kidney Transplant
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 compan...
Designing a Drone That Delivers
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
How Do Psychedelics Work?
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Psychedelics are going mainstream. The FDA has approved ketamine for certain patients with depression, and may soon approve MDMA for post-traumatic st...
Building Boundary-Breaking Balloons
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Building a Robot That Can Walk the Walk
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Can Your Phone Tell When You're Getting Sick?
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
The High-Stakes Quest to Reinvent Cement
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cement is, almost literally, everywhere. It is extraordinarily useful, which is why humanity makes 4 billion metric tons of it every year. But cement ...
How a Battery-Powered Stove Could Electrify America
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 bu...
3D Printing a Better Rocket
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 y...
Using AI to Help Doctors Save Lives
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 eas...
Making Dam Good Hydropower
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Using AI to Build Better Robots
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Teaching Computers to See
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford computer scientist and the former chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning at Google Cloud. When Li entere...
Using Oil-Industry Tech to Create Clean Energy
18 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 co...
Understanding Obesity and Alzheimer’s via Epigenomics
28 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works in computational biology, taking giant datase...