TED's stage, one speaker at a time.
The featured speaker changes from episode to episode. Some give a prepared talk to a live room, and others answer an interviewer's questions on stage. Subjects range from AI agency and trade tensions with China to vegan restaurants, surplus bread and writers who are paid directly by their readers.
PRESS PLAY
TED Talks Daily (SD video) collects appearances from the TED stage, and each episode is built around a featured speaker. Range is the main appeal. One run of titles goes from AI safety to vegan restaurants to the slang of seventh graders, and the format changes with the subject. Some episodes are prepared talks aimed at a live room. Others are onstage conversations in which an interviewer guides a guest through their story. Artificial intelligence is one clear strand. Yoshua Bengio begins with a story about his young son learning to read from letter blocks. He then turns to what worries him most: AI systems gaining agency, with studies pointing to deception, cheating and self-preservation behavior. Eric Schmidt, in conversation, ranges from a 2016 game move that no one had seen in 2,500 years of play to tariffs, access to chips and China's open-weight models. The two titles make a good pair, since one names 'catastrophic risks' and the other calls the revolution 'underhyped'. A second strand is how platforms reshape culture. Hamish McKenzie, who says he was one of the founders of Substack, calls this the most significant media disruption since the printing press. He argues for a 'garden' model where creators serve their communities instead of advertisers or algorithms. Adam Aleksic follows the word 'unalive' from social feeds into middle-school essays on Hamlet and describes how algorithms sell labels like cottagecore back to people as identities. Both talks treat the feed itself as the subject. A third strand is food and the businesses built around it, told mostly through conversation. Jasmine Crowe-Houston describes surplus food being sorted for hungry people, compost and hog farms. She sums up her company as serving people, planet and profit. Pinky Cole remembers a mother who sang lead in a reggae band, and she explains how she came to make vegan food racy and provocative instead of simply green and healthy. These conversations are loose and warm. Cole jokes that the setting feels like group therapy, and Crowe-Houston jokes about naming her next kid Ted. To get started, listen to the Bengio and Schmidt episodes back to back for two opposing views of AI. Aleksic's talk is the playful choice, and it ends on the line 'Thanks for coming to my TED talk.' Each episode gives a listener one person's case for how some part of the world is changing, made in front of a room that reacts.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes to hear an idea from the person arguing it on stage and is happy to jump from AI safety to food waste to internet slang between episodes.
What sets it apart: It swaps a familiar host voice for range. Prepared talks and onstage interviews sit side by side, so a warning about AI agency can be followed by a restaurant founder's origin story.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading. On this video feed, you'll find TED Talks to inspire, intrigue and stir the imagination from some of the world's leading thinkers and doers, speaking from the stage at TED conferences, TEDx events and partner events around the world. This podcast is also available in high-def video and audio-only formats.
Harrison Ford's digital face can sit beside Haitian family history when your curiosity refuses a lane.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A new Go move opens into a bracing discussion of AI, geopolitics, and proliferation risk.
Eric Schmidt frames the AI turn through AlphaGo's roughly second game, when a move no one had seen in a 2,500-year-old game raised the sharper question of how computers could arrive at ideas people had never found.
Pinky Cole's Baltimore roots shape a bold plant-based brand built on hustle, provocation, and welcome.
Pinky Cole's story traces ambition back to Baltimore, where enterprise was part of the household atmosphere. Her mother worked five jobs while leading a reggae band, and her father, who spent 22 years in prison for something illegal, still became a model of risk and…
From economic pressures to investment consequences.
AI capability meets the work of building.
Daily AI news through the lens of trust, infrastructure, and real-world deployment.
Eric Schmidt argues on TED Talks Daily that AI is underhyped, pointing to AlphaGo's 2016 invented move in a 2,500-year-old Go game and to newer planning systems like OpenAI 03 and DeepSeek R1.
Pinky Cole tells TED Talks Daily how childhood influences in Baltimore, including her mother’s five jobs and her father’s 22 years in prison, shaped her entrepreneurial drive.
Indiana Jones used AI likeness work and CG controls together to make Harrison Ford look younger on screen.
TED Talks Daily host Elise Hu interviews Rich Benjamin about Talk to Me, a memoir rooted in Haiti's 1957 coup and a 12-year family investigation.
On April 29, 2025, Helen Walters asks Ian Bremmer to assess Trump’s first 100 days and the effects of Liberation Day tariffs.
On TED Talks Daily, Tristan Harris argues that AI's current rollout is a choice, not an inevitability.
Aditi Nerurkar distinguishes maladaptive stress from adaptive stress, which she says can motivate events such as a promotion or a new job.
Carol Cadwallader discusses the dangerous alliance between Trump and big tech leaders, arguing it threatens American democracy.
Sam Altman discusses OpenAI's latest AI models, including Sora for image and video generation, and their implications.