Aaron Parness is a director of applied science at Amazon Robotics.

His problem is this: How do you build a robot that can put stuff on shelves.

Today on the show, Aaron explains why this is a surprisingly hard problem – and why the solution Aaron’s team came up with may ultimately have uses beyond the warehouse.

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In many places on Earth, there’s steam just below the surface. We don’t know where those places are — but if we could figure it out, we could unlock a lot of clean energy.

Carl Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, a geothermal energy company.

On today’s show, Carl makes the case for geothermal in the energy transition and explains how the company is developing new ways to identify exactly where to dig a geothermal well.

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 Dr. Stephen Waxman is a professor of neurology, neuroscience and pharmacology at Yale. His research on pain helped pave the way for a newly approved, non-addictive pain drug called suzetrigine.

On today’s show, he explains why he thinks suzetrigine is a promising step, but why much more work is needed to develop better pain drugs. He also gets into his work on ion channels—critical to unlocking the pain puzzle— and a rare condition known as Man on Fire syndrome.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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