
66 episodes

What's Your Problem? Pushkin
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- Business
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4.5 • 186 Ratings
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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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Scrubbing Carbon from the Air
Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Building a Plane to Help Save the World
Does flying have to be bad for the environment? Val Miftakhov, the founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, doesn’t think so. His company built a plane that’s powered by hydrogen fuel, which produces zero carbon emissions. It had a successful test flight earlier this year and Miftakhov hopes it will be ready for commercial use by 2025.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The AI that Might Take My Job (And Yours)
Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Descript's software has made editing audio and video much simpler.
The company recently received a large investment from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It's a sign that Descript is moving toward using generative AI to generate words and pictures. What will that mean for the people who currently do that work?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Hottest Thing In Energy Storage
Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy.
Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
Using Bacteria to Dye Jeans
Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are the cofounders of Huue.
Their problem is this: how do you get bacteria to produce indigo dye? And how do you do it cheaply and reliably enough to replace the toxic petrochemical process that's currently used to dye billions of pairs of jeans a year?
They're working with denim brands to commercialize their bacteria-produced dye.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. -
The Quest for the Factory-Built House
Today's show is about a problem people have been trying to solve for a hundred years: how can we mass produce houses, like we do cars?
Listen for a house that looks like a UFO, a giant mobile home boom, and a visit to a 21st-century construction site where workers are putting up a factory-built house. This episode's a co-production with our friends at Planet Money, and a follow-up to last week's interview with the founder of Cover.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Customer Reviews
Love the show, hate the ads!
The ads are back?!? For the last several episodes, my subscriber edition episodes are no longer commercial free. Please sort this out!
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Been listening since the beginning, loving the content but bristling at the ads as a Pushkin+ subscriber. Tuned in today, and guess what - no more ads! Woohoo!!!
Great Podcast!
Recently discovered and I’m hooked. Love hearing about the tough issues and the brilliant folks trying to solve them. Gives me hope for the future. Thank you!
One of my favorites!
Excellent show.
Very interesting topics.
Great host.
Just listened to the episode where they brought previous guest back for a check-in. Very interesting.
Highly recommend!