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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?

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 Goldstein answer more of your questions. Enjoy this episode from Cautionary Tales, another Pushkin Podcast.

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RoboPod and the Perpetual Money Machine – Cautionary Questions 2… from Cautionary Tales

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 and creates effects far more dramatic than a rash and fever. For this episode we’re joined by Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist now at eMed, who helped discover how measles was causing “immune amnesia.” Our second guest is Stephen Russell, a former Mayo Clinic researcher who co-founded a company called Vyriad. Russell is trying to use the measles virus to treat cancer. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.

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Measles: The Cancer Killer?... from Incubation

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 MIT. But what exactly did Claude Shannon figure out, and why is it so important?

To answer that question, Jacob talked with David Tse, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford who studied under one of Shannon’s students, and who teaches Shannon to his own students today. David used Shannon's work to make a breakthrough in wireless communication that underpins every phone call we make today.

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What Claude Shannon Figured Out

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 boom. But where did the company come from, and why are NVIDIA chips the ones that dominate AI? 

Tae Kim is the author of a new book called The Nvidia Way. In his book, he tells the story of how NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, set NVIDIA on the path to becoming what it is today.

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NVIDIA: At the Heart of the AI Boom

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 data set for the physical world – and as a result, AI doesn’t work as well there… yet.
 
 Edward Mehr is the co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. Edward's problem is this: How can you use AI to turn robots from dumb, inflexible machines into skilled, versatile craftsmen?

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Teaching AI to Build Stuff in the Physical World

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

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 underground caverns when energy is abundant, then blowing it back out to create energy when you need it. It’s an old idea, but it has some fundamental problems. 

Curtis VanWalleghem, the co-founder and CEO of Hydrostor, thinks his company has solved those problems with a new approach. If he’s right, his firm will help fix the biggest bottleneck slowing down the adoption of solar and wind power.

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Solving Solar’s Biggest Problem

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 $50,000?
 
In the short term, Apptronik’s robots will work in factories. But Jeff’s long-term goal – based on the experience of his own grandparents – is to build robots that can help care for the elderly.

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Building a Mass Market Robot

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 a computer with only their thoughts – without damaging their brain?

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The Brain Implant That Could Change Medicine

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, widespread, and profitable as drilling for oil or gas? The answer involves digging deeper into the Earth than anyone has ever dug before.

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Harnessing the Heat Deep Beneath Our Feet

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

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