How We Solve Seemingly Impossible Problems

·38 min·2 clips

The conversation begins with the guest’s origin story in science. The guest says they grew up in Rhode Island. A nurse mother and construction-worker father pushed them toward work they would enjoy and that would leave things a little better. As a kid, the guest was drawn to the X-Files. Mulder and Scully became an early model of science superheroes who solve mysteries together. That fascination even led the guest to imagine becoming a paranormal researcher. A story about the X-Files reaching out for help with lab tubes shows how oddly specific science questions can get. The discussion then turns toward how to choose a problem worth working on. The guest argues for starting with the world you want to create and working backward. That means asking which problems really matter. It also means figuring out what makes them hard right now. Some barriers are scientific. Some are engineering barriers. Some are policy barriers. Some are infrastructure barriers. Fuel cells become the main example. The guest describes them as promising for sustainable aviation and for a broader hydrogen economy. The practical limit is not just the technology itself. Batteries still do not store enough energy for some kinds of flight. Policy has not caught up to the technology. Infrastructure has not caught up either. The guest makes the case that policy has to help drive infrastructure. The conversation then widens to market signaling and how new systems become real. Later, the guest explains a sensor-chip approach for detecting molecules. That method looks at changes in intensity to tell whether a molecule was present and how much of it was there. The same logic can be used to count molecules across sensors on a chip. The host connects that idea back to sharks, agriculture, and engineered organisms. The episode ends on a note of delighted overload, with the host saying the conversation felt like getting a college course in a few hours.

As heard by us

A practical way to break huge problems into pieces that can actually be worked on.

The episode follows the guest from an early X-Files obsession and a Rhode Island childhood into a plainspoken way of thinking about hard problems: start with the world you want, name the actual problem, then split the work across science, engineering, policy, and infrastructure.

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Want a practical way to tackle big problems by working backward from the world you want?

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