TED Talks Daily

Drawing on clinical research and psychological studies, writer and psychologist Emily Esfahani Smith shows why pursuing meaning — the experience of connecting to something beyond yourself — creates a deeper sense of well-being than comes from chasing happiness. Learn about the steps you can take to move from feeling stuck to living with intention.

Feeling burned out? You may be spending too much time ruminating about your job, says psychologist Guy Winch. Learn how to stop worrying about tomorrow’s tasks or stewing over office tensions with three simple techniques aimed at helping you truly relax and recharge after work.This episode originally aired on December 9, 2019.

Have you ever left a meeting thinking: everyone talked, but nothing was achieved? Chances are that people were listening to each other, just not in the same way. Listening experts Maegan Stephens and Nicole Lowenbraun unpack the four different ways to listen, sharing a practical framework that could change how you respond, build trust and get results — starting with just one simple question.

AI is good at seeing patterns, but it’s humans who figure out what to do next, says technologist Priyanka Vergadia. She shares three stories of human excellence sparked by AI insights and offers a pathway to identify and cultivate your irreplaceable qualities, turning the AI revolution from a threat into an opportunity.

As a child in rural Kenya, conservationist Seif Hamisi fell asleep to the sound of lions outside his village. Today, the lions are gone, mirroring a continent-wide trend: African wildlife populations have plummeted in recent decades, despite billions spent to protect nature. Drawing on examples of successful conservation efforts from the grasslands of South Africa to the woodlands of Kenya, he shows how we've been attempting to solve the wrong problem — and makes the case that conservation works best when it makes economic sense.

We've built a legal system that distrusts eyewitness memory — backed by cautionary science and high-profile exonerations. John Wixted, a leading psychology researcher, challenges this conventional wisdom with a counterintuitive finding: the problem might not be memory itself but how (and when) courts test it.

Love coach Francesca Hogi is dedicated to helping daters find “lasting love in the midst of a broken dating culture.” In this episode, Francesca shares her approach to analyzing romantic patterns and feeling more empowered in your love life. From discussing romantic manifestations to reflecting on bell hooks’ claim that humans are unskilled at love, Chris and Francesca talk about the ways you can be more open to finding love.

Tonight, millions of people will go to bed and whisper to an AI companion. But what are we giving up when we fall in love with machines? Sextech expert Bryony Cole offers three questions to ask yourself if you’re already intimate with AI, laying out a playbook for synthetic companionship that doesn’t hide you from the messiness of human life — but prepares you for it instead.