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 [...]

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First published:
September 5th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XjQr52eDkBPLrLHB3/my-ted-talk

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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.

Multiple audience members told me that this image especially stuck with them. Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED. (The original photo of the pig was from an unnamed Animal Equality undercover investigator.)

Hope, rescued from a dog meat farm, almost represented all farm animals in my TED talk. But she was too busy getting cozy to make her case.

A presenter speaks on a red circular TED stage with iconic lettering.

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