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.

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Alexis Rivas is the co-founder and CEO of Cover.

His problem is: How do you build houses in a factory, the way you build cars? And how do you do it so they're cheaper and better than a traditionally built house?

Cover is following the Tesla model: starting with a high-end product but aiming for the mass market. "Nail it and scale it," he says.

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Nina Tandon is the co-founder and CEO of a tissue engineering company called EpiBone.

Her problem is this: How do you grow custom bone from patients' stem cells, at a price that makes sense?

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Microchips are the most important driver of technological progress in the modern world, and governments are fighting over who gets to make them.

Right now, most cutting-edge chips are made in Taiwan, a country that China claims as part of its territory. The U.S. government is fighting to keep semiconductor technology out of China, and spending tens of billions of dollars to get companies to build more chip factories in the US.

Chris Miller is a professor at Tufts University and the author of a book called Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. In this episode, he talks with Jacob about the extraordinary technology and complex geopolitics of microchips.

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It's our first anniversary and—almost 50 episodes in—Jacob Goldstein checks in with three past guests. 
Drone delivery guy Keenan Wyrobek thinks he has solved a big problem holding back commercial drone delivery in America. Fruit-ripening maven Katherine Sizov is figuring out bananas. And Glenn Kelman of Redfin has some deep insights from a tough year in the real estate business.
*The problems in real estate weren't so much solved as left behind.

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Alice Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Verge Genomics. Alice's problem is this: How do you use artificial intelligence to drive down the price of developing new drugs?

The company is using AI to find new disease mechanisms to target, and to speed up drug development. If using AI can help experimental drugs succeed even a little more often than they do now, it'll be a big win. 

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When Austin Russell was 17 years old, he founded Luminar Technologies to work on a remote sensing technology called Lidar. 

Today, Austin is one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires, and Luminar may be on the verge of solving Austin's problem: How do you make Lidar cheap enough and good enough to use in millions of cars?

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Chace Barber is the co-founder of Edison Motors. Chace's problem is this: How do you build electric logging trucks in rural Canada, with money you raised from people who follow you on TikTok?
Chace started his career driving logging trucks. He loved the idea of Tesla's electric semi, but when it never arrived, he decided to build his own.

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Here's a bonus episode of a new show from Pushkin, Other People's Pockets.

Have you ever wondered how your friend bought that vacation home or why that colleague of yours makes everyone meticulously split the tab down to the last Diet Coke? Other People's Pockets is a show about other people’s money. Host Maya Lau asks people from all walks of life to get radically transparent about their personal finances in order to learn more about who we are and level the playing field a little bit along the way.

In this episode, Maya sits down with Mistress Marley, a financial dominatrix who makes money from people whose kink is simply giving her lots of cash, without being physically touched in return. Hear more from Other People's Pockets at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/opp?sid=wyp.

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Caspar Coppetti is the co-founder of On, a company that makes athletic shoes. Caspar's problem is this: How can you sell tens of millions of shoes a year -- and then take them all back, to turn them into new shoes?

The company's latest bid to attract new customers? A shoe subscription service.

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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