What's Your Problem? Pushkin
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- Business
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Every week on What’s Your Problem, entrepreneurs and engineers talk about the future they’re trying to build – and the problems they have to solve to get there.
How do you take a drone delivery service you’ve built in Rwanda and make it work in North Carolina? How do you convince people to buy a house on the Internet? How do you sell thousands of dog ramps to weiner dogs all across America when a pandemic breaks the global supply chain?
Hosted by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, What’s Your Problem helps listeners understand the problems really smart people are trying to solve right now.
iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.
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Making Palm Oil Without Palm Trees
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 producing so much palm oil is really bad for the planet. Shara Ticku is the co-founder and CEO of C16 Biosciences. Shara's problem is this: Can you get yeast to make an oil that is just as useful as palm oil – without clearing land to grow palm trees?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Pushkin+ Early Listen: When the Robots Take Over… from Cautionary Tales
You can hear this episode for free starting Thursday, June 6th. To learn more about Pushkin+ offerings, like ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and early access, visit pushkin.fm or the show page on Apple.
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 does correlation imply causation? And what will Tim and Jacob do when the robot overlords come for their jobs? Enjoy this episode from Cautionary Tales, another Pushkin podcast. -
Fighting Cancer with CRISPR
Last year, the FDA approved a treatment for sickle cell disease using a revolutionary new gene editing technology called CRISPR. Rachel Haurwitz conducted pioneering research on CRISPR as a graduate student. Now she’s the co-founder and CEO of Caribou Biosciences. Rachel's problem is this: How can you improve CRISPR and use it to engineer human immune cells to fight cancer?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
How to Start 40 Companies (and Counting)
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. -
The Cutting Edge of Energy Storage: Rust
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. -
The First Pig to Human Kidney Transplant
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.
Customer Reviews
Love it!
One of my favorite podcasts!
Very fun podcast
this podcast started slowly, but it has turned into one of my faves!
Spurious associations don’t make a logical chain
Get a lot of data, like Skynet . That worked out well, didn’t it?
Jacob gets so many things wrong (SBF, for instance, but to his credit he admitted it and did a good self-analysis). Unhedged is just awful, and anyone promoting it probably doesn’t have a good grasp on reality. Unfortunately, the whole Pushkin brand is dissonant and tarnishes the reputation of Alexander Pushkin. The question is whether Pushkin should survive or die. It should and must die. I cannot believe how simplistic Jacob’s questions are and how racist his characterization of the employment rate is.