My TED Talk: How to end factory farming

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.

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 personal benefit to learning about animal suffering. Others go further and actively “want not to know,” fearing it will make them feel sad or guilty about eating animals.

I tried a few things to address this. First, I told my personal story. I explained how, as a teenager, I stumbled into a live animal market in Vietnam, making me curious about the treatment of animals everywhere. I hoped to spark curiosity and empathy in place of defensiveness.

Second, I tried to show, not tell. I got the strongest audience reactions not from anything I said, but from the images I showed — of a gestation crate, a battery cage, and a trash can full of baby chicks. I’m grateful to Liv and Chris Anderson for backing me to show this cruelty on the TED stage, where others were hesitant.

Third, I explained that we’re all on the same side. Regardless of what we eat, we almost all deplore these abuses. We can also all demand that our corporations and politicians end these abuses. I tried to invoke our common humanity, instead of our disparate diets.

What’s the big idea?

TED talks are meant to have one big idea, which they call a “throughline.” Stereotypically, these throughlines are counterintuitive (“Vulnerability isn’t weakness — it’s strength”) and overblown (“This one idea will change everything…”). I was tempted to follow the genre, and ChatGPT had some helpful ideas:

Freeing caged hens is just the first step to freeing our caged consciousness.

By ending factory farming, we can finally end factory thinking.

By reimagining the pig crate, we can reimagine civilization itself.

But the truth is that I don’t think that ending the worst abuses of factory farming will end our other social ills. I think it will “just” end the suffering of countless animals.

How to make people care about those animals’ suffering? My first thought was to tell the story of our dog Hope, herself a former farm animal rescued from a dog meat farm. But I worried that people would just think we really shouldn’t farm dogs.

I next thought of highlighting what farm animals share in common with us: pigs can play video games, chickens may feel empathy, and fish may get depressed. But for me the question has never been can they reason but can they suffer, and I think few people today doubt they can.

So I instead focused on the inverse: what makes us uniquely human. And in particular on a paradox: that we are the only species to inflict so much suffering on so many other animals — and the only species to protect so many animals from cruelty. Our species is both uniquely cruel and uniquely compassionate.

And, as far as we know, we are the only species capable of moral progress — the ability to reflect on our moral norms and improve on them over time. It is this ability that has enabled humanity’s greatest moral triumphs: banning slavery, reducing war, and lifting billions of people out of poverty. And it is this ability that will enable to us end the worst abuses of factory farming.

So my idea ultimately became that factory farming is a test of our humanity. Here’s how I ended the talk:

Humanity has amassed unprecedented wealth and power. Soon advances in AI will make us yet more powerful.

And we will face a choice … a test of our humanity. Will we use that power to factory farm ever more animals?

Or will we use it to end this cruelty?

Humans are animals too. What separates us from the chickens and the pigs is our ability to make moral progress.

We should use it.

What to ask for?

I struggled most with the “ask.” Several audience members told me afterward that I’d missed the obvious one — though they couldn’t on agree whether that was to ask people to eat only pasture-based meat or to go vegan.

I’m sympathetic to both options as personal solutions. I tried to only eat pasture-raised animal products for five years, and I haven’t eaten animal products for the last 20 years.

But as society-wide solutions I think both have largely failed. That’s through no fault of their advocates. Almost all efforts at permanent consumer boycotts — whether of blood diamonds, sweatshop clothing, or palm oil — have met a similar fate.

Instead, I wanted to engage the audience as citizens, not just consumers. Here’s what I ultimately said:

So what can you do to help? You can advocate, donate, or even dedicate your career to this cause.

But if you do just one thing, I’d ask this: talk about factory farming.

Tell the corporations you buy from, the politicians you vote for, that you expect them to adopt basic, common-sense policies to end the worst practices. And tell everyone what you’ve learned about factory farming.

On the advocacy and donation “asks,” I was thinking of the biggest levers of change we’ve seen to date. On the “talk about” it “ask,” I was thinking of another recent Cass Sunstein piece, in which he wrote:

Here is the point: Many human beings think that on moral grounds, it is not possible to justify current treatment of nonhuman animals. […]

But they shut up, because they think that some other people, or many other people, will laugh at them, think less of them, see them as zealots, ostracize them, or just think of them as part of some group of fools, sentimentalists, or radicals.

[...] That is a problem, but it is also a terrific opportunity.

When people believe that something is not right, or is wrong, but silence themselves, all they need is a green light or a permission slip. When they start to get it, things can change, possibly in a hurry. We see cascade effects, in which small trickles become floods.

I hope that this talk can be one small step in giving people the green light to talk more about the worst abuses of factory farming — and the need to end them. If you agree, I hope you’ll consider sharing it.