Invent — how to make things that don’t exist yet.
Hosted by Tara Lemméy — inventor, founder of LENS, architect of the post-9/11 intelligence sharing system still running across US agencies. Each episode is the actual work of invention: where impossible problems hide their solutions. 15 minutes. Featured on Apple Podcasts.
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Episodes
What’s an Enemy, Really? · May 31
In CPR training they give you a song, not a number — because Dr. Alson Inaba found the beat that saves a life is the same across disco, country, and funk. Sheldon Kaplan came at the same principle from another direction: in 1973 the Pentagon needed something a soldier could use alone, through clothing, in seconds. Then Kaplan asked a different question. A peanut. A bee sting. A latex glove. Same mechanism, different enemy. He called it the EpiPen — and never collected a penny in royalties. 5 min.
The Map Is Not the Territory · May 18
When I moved to San Francisco I had to find the water all over again. So I bought a Thomas Guide and built the city out grid by grid — until a year later I didn’t need the book. The city was inside me. George Coupland Thomas made that guide in Oakland in 1915. The best tools don’t just get used. They get inside you, and build the person. 8 min.
The Cable That Was Already Listening · April 28
My phone screamed at me at 3am. Earthquake alert. This time it was a 4.6 — this time. Nokia Bell Labs was only trying to find where undersea cables break. What they found instead: the cable carrying your internet across the Pacific had been sensing earthquakes, tsunamis, and whales for decades. Nobody had read it yet. The cable was already there. We just learned how to read it. 7 min.
Jaws · April 14
For a hundred years of surfing, twenty feet was the limit — not a rule, physics. Human arms can’t generate enough speed to catch a wave that fast. In 1992, Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox, and Darrick Doerner had a Zodiac and a rope. One afternoon on the North Shore changed what surfing could ever be. This is what happens when you change the method instead of the effort. 10 min.
The Salt Window · April 2
There’s a salt shaker on your breakfast table — and in it, the raw material that could free the energy transition from a single supply chain. China makes 80% of the world’s battery cells. The chemistry to change that is already solved. The materials are in Wyoming, Kenya, Turkey. The window to build something different is open, and it won’t wait. 8 min.
The Swamp Cooler What Your Environment Already Wants to Do · March 20
There’s a box on almost every roof in Tucson. No compressor. No refrigerant. Eighty percent less energy than air conditioning. Oscar Palmer built it in 1908, and it still runs in 200,000 buildings. He didn’t invent a new principle — he stopped fighting his environment long enough to ask what it already wanted to do. 6 min.
The Ulcer — The Answer Was There the Whole Time · March 12
In 1979, a pathologist in Perth saw something in a gastric biopsy that couldn’t be there. The stomach is sterile — everyone knew that. He wrote it down anyway. Then Barry Marshall drank it. The cure for ulcers had been sitting on the stomach lining since 1892, seen and dismissed three times. It wasn’t ignorance that kept it from patients for a century. It was a load-bearing wall nobody wanted to touch. 8 min.
The Silent Stadium: Required · March 6
Before the game starts, the referee speaks — not to the athletes, to you. Keep quiet when the ball is in play. The game breaks without you. The players are blind; they navigate by sound, and the crowd isn’t just watching — they’re part of the machine. Someone figured out how to build that. In 1946. From nothing. 8 min · Goalball.
The Fish Skin That Healed Everything · February 22
Dr. Edmar Maciel watched his burn patients scream through dressing changes every 48 hours. A million burns a year in Brazil, supplies running out. He stopped asking how to make the treatment better and asked whether the bandage needed changing at all. Tilapia skin — fish waste the hospital was throwing away — has collagen almost identical to human skin. Stays on a wound 10–12 days. 75% cheaper. The solution was in the discard pile. 6 min.
The Woman Who Proved Newton Wrong · February 22
In 1749, the best scientists in Europe couldn’t answer the most basic question in physics: what is energy? Émilie du Châtelet was 42 and pregnant — and she knew what that meant in the 18th century. She worked 18 hours a day anyway. Dropped brass balls into clay, did the math: velocity squared. She was right. Newton was wrong. She finished her manuscript on September 10, 1749, and died that day. Her proof is inside E=mc² two hundred years later. 10 min · Apple featured, International Women’s Day 2026.
The Chicken Suit · February 2
March 1974. A guy in a chicken suit at a Padres game figures out what to do during the timeouts — and makes 47,000 people forget their team is terrible. Eleven percent of fans start coming just to see him. Fifty years later, every mascot you’ve ever seen is doing what Ted Giannoulas invented. The breakthrough: downtime is opportunity. 10 min.
Playing Bridge with Warren Buffett · January 7
I won breakfast with Warren Buffett at a bridge tournament. He told me: “Your expression changes so much you have no tell. All noise, no signal.” Before Buffett, annual reports were dense legal documents nobody read. He wrote like he was talking to his sister — plain English, admitted mistakes, taught you how to think. Every CEO copied it. 9 min · The Exchange.
Japan’s Hometown Tax: Weird Wins · December 23
Give you 30 seconds: how would you solve rural decline? Japan’s answer was mystery boxes of premium beef and sake. Sounds insane — but 7.4 million people are doing it, moving $6.3 billion annually. You browse towns online like shopping, pick one, they send you stuff, and your tax money goes there instead of to your city. One town of 5,000 people in Hokkaido received more in donations in a single year than its entire annual tax revenue — and used it to make childcare free for a decade. Someone in 2008 made tax allocation delightful instead of dutiful. That’s the invention. 9 min.
Despair is the Enemy of Invention · December 5
Everyone’s in despair about climate. I looked at the data. We bent the curve. Solar is 41% cheaper than fossil fuels. Wind is 53% cheaper. 91% of new renewable projects beat fossil alternatives on cost. Clean energy got $2 trillion in investment — $800 billion more than fossil fuels. Not solved. But measurably different. So why the despair? Because we set an impossible target, didn’t hit it, and declared failure. When you can’t see what’s working, you can’t see what to invent next. 16 min.
Whale or Cheetah? · December 15
Every company needs an “AI strategy.” That’s like saying you need a “mammal strategy” without knowing if you need a whale or a cheetah. LLMs generate content. Machine learning classifies patterns. Optimization algorithms manage grids. Each solves different problems with different physics. Blur them together and you can’t see which tool you need — or what comes next. The first act of invention is naming. Right now, “AI” is killing the naming. 12 min.
The Meter Problem · November 27
Pearl Street Station opened September 4, 1882. The lights worked. Edison lost money for two years. No way to charge customers. He gave electricity away free for 16 months while J.P. Morgan ran 106 lightbulbs from 3pm to 6am every night — why turn them off if you’re paying a flat rate? The technology worked on day one. The business took two years to fix. System problems are harder than technology problems. That’s what Edison learned. 13 min.
Invent. Why Bamboo Beat Platinum · November 5
Edison tested 6,000 materials for his lightbulb filament and picked carbonized bamboo — not because it was perfect, but because it lasted 1,200 hours AND he could source it at scale. Platinum burned out in hours. Cotton worked but wasn’t consistent. Bamboo solved both problems at once. The lab question and the scale question are different questions. Everyone asks “what’s the best material?” Better question: what can we actually build with? 10 min.
