Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.

How I decided what to say — and what not to

I’m excited to share my TED talk. Here I want to share the story of how the talk came to be, and the three biggest decisions I struggled with in drafting it.

The backstory

Last fall, I posted on X about Trump’s new Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, vowing to undo state bans on the sale of pork from crated pigs. I included an image of a pig in a crate.

Liv Boeree, a poker champion and past TED speaker, saw that post and was haunted by it. She told me that she couldn’t get the image of the crated pig out of her head. She resolved that if she won prize money at her next poker tournament she’d give 20% of it away to help factory-farmed animals.

She won $2.8 million. And she not only donated 20% of it, she also started posting to her many followers about factory farming, invited me on her podcast … and then invited me to speak at TED. (She was a guest curator at this year’s conference.)

This was a huge opportunity. I don’t think the main TED stage has ever had a talk solely about factory farming before. (TED’s head Chris Anderson told me later that he regretted that TED hadn’t tackled the topic until now.) So I really didn’t want to mess it up.

I knew what I wanted to convey: the moral urgency that we address factory farming. But I didn’t know how best to convey it. In particular, I struggled with three questions: how to talk about a moral atrocity, what my big idea would be, and what to ask for.

Everyone likes an origin story. Thankfully my parents still had this stereotypically-New Zealand photo of me on our small sheep farm growing up. I was always more into the picnics than the farm work. Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED.

How to talk about a moral atrocity?

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face in trying to get people to think about factory farming is that so many people don’t want to.

Cass Sunstein recently wrote about this challenge: “Many nonhuman animals are suffering for this reason: Countless human beings do not want to know that those animals are suffering, and countless human beings want not to know that they are suffering.”

Sunstein explains that some people simply “do not want to know,” seeing no pers...

Top Animal Welfare posts 2025