Jacob Ward
Author, Former NBC News and Al Jazeera Technology Correspondent, Host of PBS's Hacking Your Mind
Jacob Ward has spent more than a decade covering AI, human behavior, and corporate power from the inside—as a correspondent for NBC News, CNN, PBS, BBC, and Al Jazeera, as the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science, and as the author of The Loop, which predicted our current AI crisis nearly a year before ChatGPT arrived. He’s sat at dinner tables where addiction scientists offered their expertise to app makers looking to hook users. He’s been with families whose housing and food were cut off by automated systems that no one could explain or override. He’s interviewed the CEOs who compare the harm their products cause to a bad muffin in a batch of ten thousand, and then visited the real bakeries that actually run every product through a metal detector because they know a single failure is unacceptable. What makes Jacob different from the thousands of new voices in the AI speaker space is not a framework or a set of productivity tips. It’s a track record of bearing witness—years of front-line reporting across six continents—combined with a rare emotional honesty about what this technology is doing to us. He speaks openly about his own flaws, his own struggles, and why he believes the best defense against AI’s most dangerous tendencies is understanding our own.
Jacob Ward is a dynamic, grounded, vulnerable, and in-demand speaker on AI, technology, and our shared future. Audiences in his keynotes don’t just learn about AI. They feel something shift. Educators leave his talks with a renewed sense of purpose about defending critical thinking and creativity in their students. Business leaders leave understanding why replacing entry-level workers with AI today means losing institutional knowledge, relationship skills, and leadership capacity in two or three years. Parents leave with language for talking to their kids about the difference between what they want in life and what their brain’s instincts are pulling them toward.
His presentations are high-energy, story-driven, and grounded in real reporting—not abstractions. Audiences consistently describe him as warm, vulnerable, funny, and deeply moving. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. He’s figuring this out alongside everyone else. And that honesty is exactly what makes his message land.
Jacob is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change. He’s currently reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, writing about cutting-edge innovation and pioneering forms of restraint, and a strategic advisor on the deployment of AI for companies large and small. From 2018 to 2024 he was technology correspondent for NBC News, reporting for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, and MSNBC. He is the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, and was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018.
He is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, and was a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he began writing The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back (Hachette Book Group). The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts, and predicted the AI psychosis in which society is currently mired.
Jacob has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. In addition to hosting documentaries for Nat Geo and Discovery, he’s the host and co-writer of the landmark four-hour PBS television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision-making, behavioral economics, and political manipulation. His weekly podcast The Rip Current covers the big, hidden forces at work in our lives, and he speaks to an audience of more than 250,000 viewers on TikTok, on podcast appearances, and on This Week in Tech, where he’s a regular co-host.