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World Changing Ideas

Latest episodes

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Apr 5, 2023 • 23min

Flashback: How we can prevent food waste and change our food system for the better

A look back on a conversation between Talib Visram and Full Harvest Founder and CEO Christine Moseley about her passion for the environment, affordable healthy food, and efficiencies.
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Mar 29, 2023 • 28min

Flashback: How the trucking industry can reduce its carbon footprint

We're looking back on our conversation with Convoy's Head of Sustainability Jennifer Wong about the company's efficiency methods and decarbonizing the supply chain.
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Mar 22, 2023 • 34min

Flashback: Building 3D homes on the moon

Rewind to our chat with Jason Ballard, CEO and co-founder of ICON, a digital construction company that 3D-prints houses... that might end up on the moon someday.
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Mar 15, 2023 • 33min

Flashback: Rethinking our democracy from elections to lotteries

Rewind to Season 1 when we chatted with ofbyfor about an alternative way to structure democracy from elections to lotteries.
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Mar 1, 2023 • 37min

Let's stop fighting the water and learn how to live with it

We’ve looked at a whole bunch of amazing ideas this season. We’ve met people tackling global problems, including rising temperatures, water shortages, rainforest destruction, and greenhouse-gas emissions. But one environmental challenge we can’t skip over is rising sea levels. Global warming has caused unprecedented levels of ice and glacier melt over the last few decades. No matter how much we reduce our carbon emissions, sea levels are on course to rise at least a foot by 2050. That’s a scary statistic even before we think about the fact that almost three-quarters of the world’s population live within 50km (or less than 1 mile) of the sea. On this episode, we dive into water homes—how they’re built and when we’ll be able to move into one! Koen Olthuis is the cofounder and principal architect of Waterstudio Grant Romundt is the cofounder and CEO of OceanBuilders
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Feb 22, 2023 • 14min

The future of the brain is here with a brain-computer-interface implant

This week, we're taking a look at the brain and a world-changing idea that could overhaul how we approach brain surgery.A company called Synchron is investigating how you restore, treat, and map the electrical activities of the human brain. And they’ve developed the first brain-computer-interface implant in the United States. It’s called a Stentrode, and when the device gets implanted, it can allow severely paralyzed patients to control personal devices without using their hands.Producer Avery Miles sat down with Peter Yoo, Synchron’s director of Neuroscience, at last year’s Fast Company Innovation Festival to learn more about how this technology works.
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Feb 15, 2023 • 35min

How biohacking can build a more inclusive future and help gain agency over our bodies

We spend our whole lives living in human bodies, but even in 2023, there is so much that science doesn’t understand about how our body works, how it’s programmed, how it heals itself . . . or doesn’t. Despite all of our technological innovation, human life expectancy seems to have plateaued. In the U.S alone, it’s actually gone down for the past 2 years.Biohackers around the world are making it their mission to optimize the body for its longest, healthiest life possible. In today’s episode, we follow one woman’s journey as she finds out how to heal her body using modern technology that borrows from age-old practices. We also found out how one company is bridging the gender health gap, and how tiny robots could help locate tumors and dissolve blood clots before they became fatal. Emma Wheylin, video producer of Fast Company's "Future Me" biohacking series Alicia Chong Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Bloomer Tech Dr. Bradley Nelson, professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich
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Feb 8, 2023 • 31min

Collecting water from fog clouds - is it sci fi or a real solution?

Protecting our most important resources is becoming a global problem that affects all of us. The impact of climate change and the demands of urban living are threatening so many of our essential sources of life. Water is one of the most precious commodities available to us. But we'll have to find some innovative approaches to collecting it. That's where fog catching comes into play. We also found out what one group is doing to protect the Amazon rainforest, its biodiversity and indigenous inhabitants. Jamila Bargach, executive director of Foundation Dar Si Hmad Tadzio MacGregor, co-founder of the Javari Project
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Feb 1, 2023 • 25min

Decarbonization startups are in! Meet three of our favorites

Despite a dip in carbon emissions during the pandemic, the U.S is still the world’s second largest polluter. The country produced 5.6 bn metric tons of CO2 in 2022, and that’s up from last year.So who’s got some world-changing ideas when it comes to decarbonization? We’ve found three pretty cool characters this week. And each one of them has gone all in on the power of plants. Adam Taylor, CEO of Brilliant Planet, a company that grows massive amounts of microalgae on coastal deserts in order to store carbon at a grand scale. Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, cofounder and co-CEO of Notpla, which is using seaweed to take plastic out of packaging. Christian Kroll, founder and CEO of Ecosia, the internet search engine that will plant trees using people's searches.
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Jan 25, 2023 • 32min

Can the Metaverse ever compete with social media?

There are lots of different definitions of what the Metaverse is or could be. At the moment, the whole thing is looking quite fragmented. You get all these buzzwords being thrown around like immersive, virtual reality, avatars and headsets, but it’s not really clear yet how this new virtual space will change the way we interact with each other.On today's episode, we chatted with two people who are tapped into the scene, and they gave us their insights. Cathy Hackl, founder and Chief Metaverse Officer at Journey Matt Navarra, podcaster and social media consultant

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