IBM CEO Arvind Krishna: Creating Smarter Business with AI and Quantum
Host Malcolm Gladwell interviews IBM CEO and chairman Arvind Krishna in front of a live audience at IBM's New York City office about IBM's role in solving complex business problems through technology. Krishna reflects on his early technical career, his predictive bets on networking and streaming, his strategic decision to acquire Red Hat instead of chasing hyperscale cloud, and his views on how enterprises should pragmatically deploy AI. He also explains why he believes quantum computing is a third, fundamentally different form of computation on par with the semiconductor revolution and outlines a near-term timeline for impactful quantum applications.
How AI is unearthing hidden scientific knowledge | Sara Beery
Ecologist and AI researcher Sarah Beery explains how vast ecological databases like iNaturalist contain far more information than simple species sightings, including individual identification, species interactions, vegetation, and food webs. She describes how her team at MIT built an AI-powered system called Inquire that lets scientists search millions of images using natural language queries to rapidly extract research-ready datasets, dramatically accelerating ecological discovery. The talk closes with a call for widespread citizen participation in data collection to help build a more complete, actionable picture of life on Earth and support conservation in the face of the biodiversity crisis.
Introducing Business History: How Free Whisky, Hot Pants and Low Fares Led to Southwest's Success
Hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith trace the rise of Southwest Airlines from a Texas intrastate startup sketched on a cocktail napkin to one of the most consistently profitable airlines in U.S. history. They explain how regulatory structures, low fares, aggressive legal battles, operational innovations, and a deliberately unglamorous business strategy gave Southwest a durable edge in a notoriously bad industry. The episode then examines how those same strengths later exposed vulnerabilities, culminating in the 737 MAX grounding, a holiday meltdown, activist investor pressure, and strategic changes like adding assigned seating.
TIP768: Best Quality Stock Idea Q4 2025 w/ Clay Finck
Host Clay Finck presents Interactive Brokers (IBKR) as his quarterly best quality stock idea, analyzing its business model, economics, and long‑term growth prospects. He covers the firm's history and founder Thomas Pederphy's automation-focused culture, its revenue drivers like commissions and net interest income, and its unique low-cost, tech-heavy positioning versus competitors such as Charles Schwab and Robinhood. The episode also explores IBKR's competitive advantages, management incentives, valuation, key risks, and why Clay holds a 2% personal position in the stock.
Sunday Pick: Tech Solutions (#1): The affordable tech that will revolutionize farming (with Samir Ibrahim and Josephine Waweru)
This episode of TED Tech, part of a special mini-series recorded at the TED Countdown Climate Summit in Nairobi, explores how affordable solar-powered water pumps are transforming smallholder farming. Host Cheryl Dorsey speaks with Sun Culture CEO Samir Ibrahim about building a farmer-centered business that has driven down the cost of solar irrigation through both engineering and business model innovation, while navigating investors and climate-related priorities. Coffee farmer Josephine Waweru then shares how installing a solar pump on her Kenyan farm solved her water challenges, enabled her to expand her crops and income, and inspired her to encourage other farmers and young people to see farming as a viable, growth-oriented business.
Everything you need to know about AI agents | Swami Sivasubramanian
In this TED Talk featured on TED Talks Daily, Swami Sivasubramanian explains what AI agents are, how they differ from chatbots, and why they could be one of the most transformative technology shifts of our time. He outlines three key milestones needed for agents to change how we work: transforming software development, establishing trust through automated reasoning, and enabling non-programmers to build and collaborate with agents. Drawing from his own journey and examples from Amazon and Prime Video, he describes a future where human-agent collaboration lowers barriers to creation and makes powerful tools widely accessible.
Are Two C.E.O.s Better Than One? (Update)
Stephen Dubner revisits the question of whether companies run by co-CEOs perform better than those with a single chief, exploring both supportive evidence and strong skepticism. CEO advisor Mark Feigen and several current and former co-CEOs describe the benefits and pitfalls of shared leadership, while Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld critiques the model as creating role confusion and undermining decisive authority. Computer scientist Lori Williams adds evidence from pair programming, showing how working in pairs can improve quality and satisfaction, raising the broader question of when two leaders might truly be better than one.
What if you could talk to your favorite character in a movie? | Christoph Lassner
AI engineer Christoph Lassner introduces a taxonomy of digital content he calls Content 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and explains how generative AI is enabling the next phase. He describes Content 3.0 as media that is dynamically generated with and for each individual viewer, allowing them to co-create stories, interact with characters, and explore worlds without preset narrative boundaries. He also discusses the technical underpinnings, creative possibilities, and economic implications of this shift for storytellers and the entertainment industry.
TIP761: Tesla Stock Deep Dive w/ Clay Finck
Host Clay Finck delivers a solo deep dive on Tesla, examining its evolution from a misunderstood EV startup into a trillion‑dollar company and a potential AI, robotics, and energy powerhouse. He covers disruptive innovation, Elon Musk's leadership and controversial compensation plan, Tesla's automotive and energy businesses, emerging bets like Optimus and robo‑taxis, intensifying global competition (especially from BYD), and both the bullish optionality and key bear risks around execution, governance, and valuation.
Inside India's astonishing solar revolution | Kanika Chawla
Energy expert Kanika Chawla explains how India transformed an audacious 2014 commitment to install 100 gigawatts of solar power into reality, reaching the goal by February 2025 and unlocking $90 billion in investment and 300,000 new solar jobs. She argues that India's success was driven less by ideology and more by economic logic, backed by innovations in business models, market design, and planning. Drawing on examples from India, Ghana, sub-Saharan Africa, and Kenya, she outlines how planning, innovation, and localization can help developing countries lead an irreversible global energy transition.
TECH002: Jensen Huang & NVIDIA w/ Seb Bunney - Review of The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt
The episode is a book-club style discussion of Stephen Witt's "The Thinking Machine," focusing on how NVIDIA evolved from a niche gaming graphics company into a central player in the AI revolution. Preston and Seb trace the technical and strategic milestones behind NVIDIA's rise-parallel processing, GPUs, CUDA, and neural networks-while examining Jensen Huang's leadership style, culture-building, and obsession with speed and iteration. They also touch on the implications and risks of AI, Huang's reluctance to address them directly, and preview their next book on OpenAI and Sam Altman.
647. China Is Run by Engineers. America Is Run by Lawyers.
Host Stephen Dubner speaks with analyst and author Dan Wong about his framework for understanding the U.S. and China as, respectively, a "lawyerly society" and an "engineering state." Wong explains how China's engineer-dominated leadership prioritizes rapid infrastructure building, technological capacity, and even social engineering, while the U.S. legal culture emphasizes procedure, litigation, and blocking harmful as well as beneficial projects. Drawing on his years living in China, his family's history, and his book "Breakneck," Wong discusses zero-COVID, the one-child policy, manufacturing and process knowledge, China's global ambitions, and what each country could learn from the other.
TIP754: Rule Breaker Investing w/ David Gardner
Host Clay interviews David Gardner, co-founder of The Motley Fool, about his new book "Rule Breaker Investing" and the distinctive growth-oriented philosophy that produced multiple 100-bagger stock picks like Amazon, Netflix, and NVIDIA. Gardner explains why he diverged from Warren Buffett-style value investing, embraces losses as part of a venture-capital-like approach, and focuses on qualitative factors such as leadership, culture, and brand that traditional valuation metrics ignore. The conversation also covers his six traits of Rule Breaker stocks, six habits of Rule Breaker investors, conscious capitalism, the importance of optimism, and several current companies he believes embody his framework.