Invent

Tara Lemméy
  • 4.8 (20)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Biweekly

Invent is about how to make things that don't exist yet. A man in a chicken suit at a Padres game. A pathologist in Perth who saw something in a stomach that couldn't be there. Two scientists who went looking in the sludge outside a recycling plant. Every week, somebody who saw a thing everyone agreed was impossible and found the way through. I'm Tara Lemméy. I invent things that don't exist — my biggest inventions were never patentable, like architecting the intelligence sharing system still used across the US intelligence community. Inventors see the world sideways, and sideways is where the answer is. Featured on Apple Podcasts, March 2026. New episodes Mondays.

  1. 3d ago

    How to Invent 4 Million Jobs

    A man sits down at a desk in Washington with no staff, no system, and no plan. He has a phone, and until spring to put four million people to work. He starts making calls. Harry Hopkins, the Civil Works Administration, and how four million jobs got built inside government with a telephone and a list of governors.

  2. Sep 7

    How to Eat Plastic

    We made a material so good at lasting that nothing alive could eat it. That was the design. We wanted it. We got it.Then, in a puddle outside a recycling plant in Japan, something ate it anyway.I've watched plastic wash up on three shorelines — Lima, San Francisco, the Great Barrier Reef — and every time I thought the same thing everybody thinks. That's permanent now. That's just the world we made. I was wrong, and not about the plastic. In 2016 two scientists in Japan didn't ask how to build something that could eat PET. They asked whether anything was eating it already — and if so, where it would be. Then they went and looked.

  3. Jun 15

    Enter Laughing

    Two pirates sail to an island looking for treasure. They find none. So one of them bans the letter O — first from speech, then from objects, then from existence. And slowly, the island forgets how to rebel. You can outlaw a word, a book, a name — but it's hard to outlaw the thing that makes people laugh. The joke carries the idea past the guard. The laugh is how it survives long enough to matter. This is an episode about the people who kept freedom alive by keeping us laughing — and who understood that you can't invent in a place that's afraid to speak. The first act of invention is language. A Fourth of July episode about laughter, words, and the freedom to imagine what doesn't exist yet.

  4. May 31

    What's an Enemy, Really?

    In CPR training they give you a song. Not a number — a song. Dr. Alson Inaba figured out that the beat that saves a life is the same beat across disco, country, and funk. Sheldon Kaplan understood the same principle. He just came at it from a different direction. In 1973 the Pentagon needed a solution for soldiers. Fast. No training. Works through clothing. A soldier alone, seconds to act, no help coming. Kaplan built it. Then he looked at what he’d made and asked a different question. A peanut. A bee sting. A latex glove. Same mechanism. Different enemy. Same solution. He called it the EpiPen. He never collected a penny in royalties. The drug inside costs about a dollar. This is Invent. How to make things that don’t exist yet.

  5. May 18

    The Map Is Not the Territory

    When I moved to San Francisco I had to find the water all over again. So I bought a Thomas Guide. Street by street, grid by grid, I built the city out. After about a year I didn’t need the book. San Francisco was inside me. George Coupland Thomas made the Thomas Guide in Oakland in 1915. The map transferred. It got inside you. The best tools build the person

  6. May 4

    Jane Jacobs — Witnessing Is Inventing

    I sit at restaurant window tables for a reason. I watch what's happening out there. I make up stories. Kids do this too. Jane Jacobs was a journalist with three kids on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. One night she's up with a baby, sitting in the dark, listening to the street. She noticed it was never empty. Nobody told those people to be there. Nobody coordinated it. She called it the sidewalk ballet. She spent years working out what she'd seen. Then she wrote it down. The planning profession hated it. She had no degree. The book is still in print. She just watched. uJbio3sbQkcMLl5oR2Dx

  7. Apr 28

    The Cable That Was Already Listening

    My phone screamed at me at 3am. Earthquake alert. I’m NERT-trained. I know what to do. This time it was a 4.6. This time. Nokia Bell Labs was trying to find where undersea cables break. What they found instead: the cable carrying your internet across the Pacific Ocean had been sensing earthquakes, tsunamis, and whales for decades. Nobody had read it yet. This is the story of Mikael Mazur, an excavator, and the invention that just gave the Cascadia Subduction Zone a lot more warning time. The cable was already there. We just learned how to read it.

  8. Apr 14

    Jaws

    For a hundred years of surfing, twenty feet was the limit. Not a rule. Physics. Human arms can’t generate enough speed to catch a wave that fast. In 1992, Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox, and Darrick Doerner had a Zodiac and a rope. One afternoon on the North Shore changed what surfing could ever be. This is a story about what happens when you change the method instead of the effort. How to make things that don’t exist yet. 10 minutes.

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About

Invent is about how to make things that don't exist yet. A man in a chicken suit at a Padres game. A pathologist in Perth who saw something in a stomach that couldn't be there. Two scientists who went looking in the sludge outside a recycling plant. Every week, somebody who saw a thing everyone agreed was impossible and found the way through. I'm Tara Lemméy. I invent things that don't exist — my biggest inventions were never patentable, like architecting the intelligence sharing system still used across the US intelligence community. Inventors see the world sideways, and sideways is where the answer is. Featured on Apple Podcasts, March 2026. New episodes Mondays.

Information

  • Creator
    Tara Lemméy
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Tara Lemméy
  • Show Website
    Invent

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