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?

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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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? 

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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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).

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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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.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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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."

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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This bonus episode is from Hot Money, a new podcast from Pushkin and the Financial Times.

When Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson started digging into the porn industry, she made a shocking discovery: Nobody knew who controlled the biggest porn company in the world. Now, Nilsson and her editor, Alex Barker, have figured out who the guy was, and much more.

In this episode, the fourth in the series, Patricia and Alex wonder how it's legal for porn sites to host millions of videos uploaded by users. The answer is in the story of an Ohio family in the early 1990s.

It involves a family IT business, an FBI raid and a court case that set the precedent for porn – and for tech giants like Facebook and Twitter.

You can hear more Hot Money episodes at https://link.chtbl.com/dbhotmoney.

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Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. His problem: How do you turn sending stuff into outer space into something that seems as boring and predictable as mailing a package?

Later this month, one of the company's rockets will launch the NASA-funded Capstone mission to the moon. A mission to Venus is also in the works. And the company has already sent over 100 satellites into orbit.

It's a conversation about space, but also about how technological change drives down prices -- and creates new possibilities.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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On this bonus episode of What’s Your Problem? Jacob Goldstein talks with Eddie Alterman, former editor of Car and Driver and host of the new podcast Car Show!

In this episode, Eddie investigates the Lunar Rover. Why did we send a car to the moon? How did we design something for an environment we knew nothing about? Also: A look at the new lunar rover engineers are working on now.

You can find more episodes of Car Show! with Eddie Alterman at https://link.chtbl.com/wypcarshow

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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.

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Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX. His problem: How to spend billions of dollars to save humanity.

Sam is one of the most interesting people in crypto -- in large part because he doesn't think crypto is the most interesting thing in the world. He got into the business because he wanted to make as much money as possible in order to give almost all of it away.

He's now worth over $20 billion, and he's already donated hundreds of millions. In the next few years, he could give away billions more.

On today's show, he lists a few of the causes he's supporting -- and explains why he's likely to make massive political donations in 2024.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list. 

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Katherine Sizov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech.

Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer.

Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device.

Next up: Avocados.

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Anna Katrina Shedletsky is co-founder and CEO of Instrumental. Her problem: How do you make electronics manufacturing more efficient and less wasteful? 

Anna started her career as a design engineer at Apple. It was her job to visit the factory when a new device was about to go into production and try to figure out all of the potential manufacturing problems that might arise.

She realized this was an almost impossible task that relied on hope and luck -- and that it led to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manufacturing process.

So she started a new company, Instrumental, to try to come up with a better way to figure out what's likely to go wrong, and how to fix it.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Today we're sharing a preview from another podcast we love, Slate Money. Every week, Felix Salmon of Axios is joined by Emily Peck, also of Axios, and Slate Pay Dirt columnist Elizabeth Spiers to chat about the latest in business and finance news.

In this episode, Felix and Emily sit down with Alexandra Roberts, professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Peirce School of Law. They talk about everything trademarks, from social media to counterfeits and parodies. They also talk about trying to fix racist logos and what happened when Mastercard tried to low key change its logo.

Hear more episodes of Slate Money wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reshma Shetty is co-founder and chief operations officer of Ginkgo Bioworks. Her problem: How do you turn cutting-edge science into a sustainable business?

Ginkgo is a synthetic biology company. The idea is to make industrial products -- fragrances, or food, or whatever -- by genetically engineering DNA, sticking it into a yeast or bacteria, and getting the yeast or bacteria to produce the thing you want.

Creating a profitable synthetic biology business is a really hard problem. But if it does work, it could be massive -- like an industrial revolution with cells instead of machines.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet, a private company with a fleet of tiny satellites that takes photos of the entire Earth every day. Will’s problem: How do you turn all those images into useful data?

In today’s episode we talk about shooting smartphones into space, turning a million-dollar antenna into a thousand-dollar paperclip, and how to count every tree in the Amazon.

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Joy and Raft Hollingsworth run The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company. Their problem: How do you help more Black people get into the legal weed industry?

They faced this problem from the very beginning as they tried to start a marijuana farm from scratch in rural Washington. The Hollingsworths lived their entire lives in downtown Seattle and didn’t know anything about farming.

It's a story that includes a paper bag full of cash, dinner with Anthony Bourdain, and hundreds of millions of dollars in weed taxes.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Noubar Afeyan is the co-founder of Moderna and the founder of Flagship Pioneering. His problem: How do you turn the chaotic hero's journey of entrepreneurship into a repeatable, systematic process?

Noubar created Flagship Pioneering to solve the problems he saw with entrepreneurship. Flagship's mission: To create new companies in a systematic, repeatable way. On today's show, Noubar explains how that system led to the creation of Moderna, a company that developed a COVID vaccine and saved millions of lives.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Rafael Ilishayev is the co-founder of the instant delivery company Gopuff. His problem: How do you deliver everything from bananas to hot coffee in around 30 minutes -- and still make a profit?

On today's show, Jacob Goldstein surprises Rafael with a live Gopuff order. And they discuss the problems the company is working on in real time as they wait to see if the order will arrive on time and in good shape.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Luis von Ahn is the founder and CEO of the language app DuoLingo. His problem: How do you teach people to speak a language -- really speak it -- using only an iPhone app?

On the surface, DuoLingo looks warm and fuzzy. Underneath the hood, it's a serious tech company built on artificial intelligence. But the best machine learning in the world still isn't good enough to really teach people how to fluently speak in a new language. Luis is trying to change that.

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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?

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Aicha Evans is the CEO of Zoox. Her problem: Designing a car that knows what to do when it pulls up to a 4-way stop.

AI is transforming the way cars work. But AI still struggles with predicting the behavior of human drivers. To build a car that can truly drive itself, Aicha and the rest of the industry will have to solve this problem. How do you teach self-driving cars to understand people?

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Keenan Wyrobek is the co-founder of Zipline. His problem: How do you fill the skies with delivery drones and keep them from crashing into each other?

Zipline’s drones already make hundreds of deliveries a day in Ghana and Rwanda. But to expand to the U.S. he has to solve a fundamental problem. Americans’ love of freedom and the open skies makes it hard to build a drone business here.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to subscribe to our email list.

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Ramon van Meer is the CEO of Alpha Paw. His problem: How do you grow a niche business (ramps for weiner dogs!) when a pandemic blows up your supply chain and Apple ruins your targeted ads?

Ramon has sold over $30 million worth of dog ramps. That’s a lot of dog ramps. But in order to do so he has to deal with some of the biggest companies on earth. On today’s show, we talk about how he has built his company on top of the tech giants – and how they threaten his very existence.

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Former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein talks to entrepreneurs and engineers about how they'll change the world -- once they solve a few problems. Coming March 17th.

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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? 

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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?

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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.

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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?

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Imagine picking up your phone and ordering something from Walmart. Fifteen minutes later, a drone hovers over your yard, lowers your order down to you, and zips away. Adam Woodworth wants this to be so boring you don't even notice. He’s the CEO of Wing, a drone delivery company. His problem is this: How do you turn a flashy idea like a delivery drone into something as ubiquitous as a shopping cart?

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Psychedelics are going mainstream. The FDA has approved ketamine for certain patients with depression, and may soon approve MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But a fundamental question remains unclear: How do psychedelics work?

Gul Dolen is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. In a series of experiments, Gul has found evidence of a common mechanism that a wide range of psychedelics use to affect the brain. If Gul is correct, these drugs may be useful not only for people suffering from mental illness, but also for people dealing with neurological problems like strokes.

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Kai Marshland is the co-founder and chief product officer at WindBorne Systems. Kai's problem is this: How do you build weather balloons that can stay in the air for months at a time, and pair the data gathered by the balloons with AI to make weather forecasts that are way better than anything we have today?

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Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day. 

Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.

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Jonathan Hurst is a professor at Oregon State University, and co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. Jonathan's problem is this: How do you design a robot that can walk and do useful tasks that companies will pay for? The solution begins with trying to understand how birds walk.

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What does sickness sound like? Sometimes it’s obvious, like a cough, sniffle, or stuffy nose. But some conditions cause subtle changes that only a trained ear – or AI – can detect. Dr. Yael Bensoussan is a professor of otolaryngology and the director of the Health Voice Center at the University of South Florida. Her problem is this: How do you build a giant, public database of thousands of voice recordings, and use it to train AI tools that can hear when people are getting sick?

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Cement is, almost literally, everywhere. It is extraordinarily useful, which is why humanity makes 4 billion metric tons of it every year. But cement is also extremely carbon intensive to produce. Leah Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Sublime Systems. Her problem is this: How can you make cement, at scale, without emitting carbon dioxide?

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Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a company that makes induction stoves, with a clever twist. Sam’s problem is this: How do you build an electric cooktop that works just as well as gas, and can be installed without having to rewire the house? The solution that Sam found could eventually help transform not only kitchens, but the way homes draw power from the electrical grid. 

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Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space, a company with a unique approach to manufacturing rockets. Tim’s problem is this: How can you use 3D printing to make rockets more efficiently? Eventually, Tim wants to send a rocket – and printer – to Mars to build the first Martian industrial base. 

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Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of hospital patients die of preventable causes. For many of these patients, warning signs are subtle and easy for doctors to miss. Suchi Saria is the founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, and a professor at Johns Hopkins where she runs a lab focused on machine learning and healthcare. Suchi’s problem is this: How can you use AI to detect when hospital patients are at risk of potentially deadly complications – and how can you get doctors to listen?

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Gia Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Natel Energy, a company that is trying to transform the way hydroelectric power works. Gia’s problem is this: how do you draw hydropower from rivers without damaging the ecosystem? As it turns out, we have a lot to learn from nature’s furriest engineers – beavers.

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Peter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Covariant. Peter’s problem is this: How do you take the AI breakthroughs of the past decade or so, and make them work in robots? Peter was one of the first employees at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. On the show, he talks about how AI has evolved, and why it's so difficult to teach a robot to fold a towel.

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Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford computer scientist and the former chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning at Google Cloud. When Li entered the field of AI in the 2000s, researchers were making slow progress, optimizing algorithms to incrementally improve outcomes. Li saw that the problem wasn’t the algorithm, but the size of the datasets being used. So she built a massive database of images called ImageNet. It was a huge breakthrough, and helped lead the emergence of modern AI.

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Tim Latimer is the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, a company that is using a new approach to produce carbon-free geothermal energy. Tim and his company are drawing on innovations from the oil and gas industry to expand geothermal energy production to new places like the Utah desert, and maybe one day, to Mars.

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As generative AI tools improve, it is becoming easier to digitally manipulate content and harder to tell when it has been tampered with. Today we are talking to someone on the front lines of this battle. Ali Shahriyari is the co-founder and CTO of Reality Defender. Ali's problem is this: How do you build a set of models to distinguish between reality and AI-generated deepfakes?

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Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works in computational biology, taking giant datasets relating to genetics and health outcomes and tries to understand what’s going on.

Manolis’ research focuses on genomics, and a related field called epigenomics. Manolis’ problem is this: What are the cellular mechanisms of a disease? And how can we intervene to keep people healthy?

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After working as a chef for decades, Anthony Strong’s dream came true: He opened his own restaurant. His problem was a classic one: Restaurants are bad businesses. So he set out to open a new kind of restaurant, with a new business model. In this episode, he tells us about how he accomplished that with his latest venture, Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco.

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