I Attract Miracles

Professor of Physical Chemistry, Humboldt University Berlin. Sodium-ion batteries with Prussian blue electrodes — built from abundant, cheap materials, without lithium or cobalt. The energy storage breakthrough that makes the transition democratically available.
Philipp Adelhelm stayed with batteries when they were a dead topic. A Stuttgart kid who read Al Gore and watched his father throw sodium into water, he chose chemistry that might help with climate change, back when everyone else was betting on hydrogen.
Decades later the bet is paying off. Sodium-ion swaps lithium for an element vastly more abundant: no cobalt, no copper, no supply chain a single country can choke. Think of a battery as a parking lot for ions, and we have learned to build the cheap, durable kind.
Asked to picture a Tuesday in 2040, Adelhelm keeps it grounded: batteries so long-lived they go invisible, cheap enough for everyone, streets gone quiet and clean as combustion engines disappear, the car downstairs quietly storing the day's sun. Pushed on whether solved energy means utopia, he refuses to pretend he knows.
Episode 1 of The Sovereign Stack.

Creators and Guests

Host
Ivo Betke
Host of I Attract Miracles
NH
Producer
Nicolai Haas
Guest
Prof. Dr. Adelhelm
Professor at Humboldt-University Berlin

What is I Attract Miracles?

I Attract Miracles — The Speculative Science Podcast
We sit down with the architects of the next decade: scientists, founders, and inventors building the technology that sounds impossible until it isn't. Each episode follows one breakthrough through three movements. The Origin, where curiosity turned a researcher into a founder. The Mechanism, where we make the science visceral. And The Dispatch, where the guest steps five to fifteen years into the future and describes, from the inside out, a day in the world their work is creating.
This is speculative non-fiction in the spirit of Verne and Gibson: nothing invented, only the present recombined into the plausible adjacent worlds it's already pointing toward. Technology arrives faster than we can imagine living inside it. We close that gap.
Hosted by Ivo Betke. Executive Producer Nicolai Haas.