What's Your Problem? – Details, episodes & analysis

Dalial Freitak and Annette Kleiser are the co-founders of Dalan Animal Health, a company that has brought to market the first vaccine for insects. Their problem is this: How do you turn a discovery about insect immune systems into a vaccine that can protect the bees we need to grow everything from almonds to blueberries?

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Sean Hunt is the co-founder and CTO of Solugen, a company that sells around $100 million a year of industrial chemicals. Sean's problem is this: How do you make the chemicals that go into everything around us -- our food, our clothes, our cars -- without using fossil fuels?

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This week on Risky Business, Nate and Maria discuss whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire, the perils of sports betting among professional athletes, and what the return of Roaring Kitty means for traditional market analysis. 

Further Reading:

“Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now” from The Atlantic

“Should Sonia Sotomayor Retire?” from Slate

“MLB bans Padres’ Tucupita Marcano permanently for betting on baseball” from the NYT

“Lifetime bans and careers in tatters – recent sports betting scandals show how fringe players are vulnerable” from CBC

For more from Nate and Maria, subscribe to their newsletters:

“The Leap” from Maria Konnikova

“Silver Bulletin” from Nate Silver

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Bill Shufelt is the founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing Company.

His problem: How do you turn non-alcoholic beer from a punchline into something people drink all the time?

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John Green is the author of The Fault in Our Stars and six other novels. He also co-founded a company that makes educational videos that have been viewed billions of times.

John's problem: How do you make videos that actually help people make it through college?

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Luana Lopes Lara is the co-founder of Kalshi, an exchange that lets ordinary people bet on everything from the path of inflation to what bills Congress will pass by the end of the year.

Her problem: How to you build a market like the New York Stock Exchange that lets people bet on real-world events? 

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A special preview of the podcast, Unsung Science with David Pogue from CBS News. Journalist and author David Pogue finds the untold creation stories behind the most mind-blowing advances in science and tech—and hears from the characters involved—from their first inspiration to the times they almost gave up. This episode looks at the bad guys who used software bots to sign up for millions of fake email accounts—for sending out spam. Then, PhD student Luis Von Ahn stopped them. He invented the CAPTCHA, that website login test where you have to decipher the distorted image of a word. Or you have to find the traffic lights or fire hydrants in a grid of nine blurry photos. Those tests help to keep down the volume of spam, spyware, and misinformation; they advance the clarity of digitized books and the intelligence of self-driving cars; and, by the way, they made a handsome profit. The only problem: We HATE those tests! Guest: Luis Von Ahn, co-inventor of CAPTCHA, co-inventor and CEO of Duolingo. Hear more episodes of Unsung Science at https://unsungscience.com/.

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Shimon Elkabetz is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow.io.

His problem: How do you build a weather forecasting company from scratch? The company already sells weather intelligence to companies like JetBlue, Uber and the NFL. 

Their next move: Send the first private constellation of weather satellites to space (without running out of money).

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Emily Leproust is the co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience. Her problem: How do you store data in DNA -- and make it cheap enough to work in the real world.

The cells in our bodies contain an incredible data storage system: DNA. Now, scientists have figured out how to use DNA as a digital storage device that is stable and incredibly compact. If you stored all the data on the Internet in DNA, it would fit in a shoebox. 

But there's a problem: It's still too expensive to work in the real world. On today's show, Emily Leproust explains how DNA storage works, and what it will take to bring it to market.

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Glenn Kelman is the CEO of the real estate company Redfin. His problem: With the housing market teetering, how do you sell houses online?

Redfin has a website where you can look at houses for sale, just like Zillow. But Redfin also employs real estate agents all over the country to help people buy and sell houses. Recently, Redfin has started to buy houses and flip them for a profit and that new business is risky.

"I'm worried about the economy," Glenn says. "I'm worried about the war in Ukraine, worried about the stock market, worried about consumer confidence and mortgage interest rates. So lions and tigers and bears, it might be a scary summer."

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