What's Your Problem?

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, Mitch explains why water makes electrification so hard, the...

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, but can also hugely boost your happiness. So we're teaming up with...

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 today’s show, Nina talks about bringing a saving and lending practice into...

What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History. How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the...

Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors. On today’s show, Mike talks about how a garage-built prototype became an FDA-approved machine...

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 DARPA challenge that launched the autonomous vehicle industry. Then he...

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 – and deliver it to land at a cost that’s competitive with other sources of...

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 deliver more energy to more people without having to build so much more grid? On...

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 want to use? On today’s show, Fletcher explains how his company is trying to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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’s show, Nan explains how she...

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 metal from old batteries? See...

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 startups in recent years, but...

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 Thrams calls recycling “the...

AI might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s going on inside AI models. Josh Batson is a research scientist at Anthropic, the AI company...

AI is better than humans at a lot of things, but physical tasks – even seemingly simple ones like folding a shirt – routinely stump AI-powered robots. Chelsea Finn is a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of...