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  • Drilling Smarter Wells to Unleash Geothermal Energy

    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…


  • Inventing a Better Pain Pill

     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…


  • Mapping the Unmappable

     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.…


  • Reinventing Blood

    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…


  • The AI Pioneer Developing New Kinds of Medicine

    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…


  • A Billion-Dollar Bet on Carbon Removal

    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…


  • Giving Old Batteries New Life

    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…


  • Engineering the Future of Fusion

    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…


  • Can Robots Fix Recycling?

    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…


  • Warlords, Espionage, and Disinformation | Introducing Hot Money: Agent of Chaos

    In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a 2 billion euro fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, it was just the…