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Mapping the Unmappable Aug 14, 2025

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Philipp Kandal is the chief product officer of Grab, an app that serves several countries across Southeast Asia. Two of Grab’s main businesses are delivery and mobility – like a combination between Instacart and Uber. And maps are at the core of its business.

On today’s show, Philipp talks about improving online maps for places like Southeast Asia, where streets are often winding, narrow, and harder to access than those in the US and other developed countries.

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Reinventing Blood Aug 07, 2025

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Dr. Allan Doctor is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Kalocyte, a company that is developing dried red blood cells that can be rehydrated and used in medical emergencies.

On today’s show, Dr. Doctor explains the complex science behind artificial blood, and how this innovation could help save millions of lives.

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The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine Jul 17, 2025

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Jakob Uszkoreit is the CEO and co-founder of Inceptive, a biotech start-up. He’s also a co-author of “Attention is All You Need,” the paper that created transformer models. Today, transformers power chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. They’ve also led to breakthroughs in everything from generating images to predicting the structure of proteins.

On today’s show, Jakob talks about the invention of transformer models. And he discusses how he’s using those models to try to invent new kinds of medicine, with a particular focus on RNA.

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A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal Jul 10, 2025

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Nan Ransohoff is the head of climate at Stripe. The company is known mainly for facilitating online payments, but it’s become a key driver of the nascent carbon-removal industry.

On today’s show, Nan explains how she used a clever economic idea to get companies to spend $1 billion on carbon removal. And she talks about the different approaches startups are pursuing to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

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Giving Old Batteries New Life Jul 03, 2025

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Megan O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle. Megan’s problem is this: How do you create a new system that can both refine the raw metals we need for new batteries and recycle metal from old batteries?

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Engineering the Future of Fusion Jun 26, 2025

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Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. Billions of dollars have flowed into fusion startups in recent years, but reliable, economic fusion power may still be decades away.
Greg Piefer is the founder of a fusion company called Shine, where he’s pursuing a different path. Rather than go straight to fusion as a source of energy, he’s using fusion to pursue more profitable markets right now – with the hope that what he learns today will eventually help lead to cheap, abundant fusion energy.

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Can Robots Fix Recycling? Jun 19, 2025

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Recycling plants take in a huge amount of random (and occasionally hazardous) stuff, which they then have to turn into reliable outputs that their customers will buy. That’s why Rebecca Hu Thrams calls recycling “the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.” Rebecca is the co-founder of Glacier, and her problem is this: Can you use AI and robots to make recycling a somewhat less demented business?

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Inside the Mind of an AI Model Jun 12, 2025

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AI might be the most consequential advancement in the world right now. But – astonishingly – no one fully understands what’s going on inside AI models. Josh Batson is a research scientist at Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, one of the world’s leading language models. Josh’s problem is this: How do we learn how AI works?

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Teaching Robots How to Do Everything Jun 05, 2025

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AI is better than humans at a lot of things, but physical tasks – even seemingly simple ones like folding a shirt – routinely stump AI-powered robots. Chelsea Finn is a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of Physical Intelligence. Chelsea's problem is this: Can you build an AI model that can teach any robot to do any task, anywhere?

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Making a Universal Flu Vaccine May 29, 2025

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Jacob Glanville is the founder and CEO of Centivax. Jacob’s problem is this: Can you create a vaccine that protects people against almost all strains of flu – even strains that haven’t evolved yet?

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