Win-Win Came to Life on the TED stage!

Chris Anderson and a very excited me

I just got home from a week at the annual TED conference, where I was lucky enough to be one of seven new curators to be given a full hour of stage time to fill with speakers of my choice.

Naturally, my theme was Win-Win… specifically, “how can we upgrade the civilizational games we play to make them more win-win?”. A solid choice because not only would doing this be very useful for society; it’s also sufficiently broad that a newbie curator could cram it with all the game topics she cares most about.

My outfit for the session. Who said coordination problems couldn’t be fun?

My opening speaker was Tristan Harris on the AI race. I wanted someone who groks the technology game deeply; not only the “how does MY company win” game… but also the game of “how do we build a better meta-environment for tech development in general so that we don’t end up either enslaved by giant corporations or driven off a cliff by them because they went so fast they didn’t build a steering wheel in time” game.

And as someone who was successful at both the first (he successfully sold his company Apture to Google)… AND the second game (he became a design ethicist at Google before quitting to start the excellent Center for Humane Technology ), Tristan was an obvious choice. And he absolutely crushed it. I expect his talk to be released very soon.

Tristan Harris bringing the memes

Next was Cate Hall. Cate - follow her at Useful Fictions - is one of my dearest friends from poker, who has an incredible story of recovering her personal agency; she went from hotshot (but unhappy) D.C. lawyer, to top professional poker player, to rock bottom isolated drug addict on the verge of death, to a happily married CEO of one of the most valuable and ambitious non-profits in America.

Why, you may wonder, is her story a win-win? Because if we can teach even the destitute how to recover and harness their own agency, it’s a huge step towards solving many of our societal ills. And given how readily we are outsourcing our agency to digital tools and artificial intelligences, it’s even more important we find new ways to keep our agency muscles strong.

Cate is amazing and you should follow her

Next up was something truly experimental: the first ever live performance of a Faces of X ! Faces of X is a unique series of videos where one person acts out the different perspectives of a hotly debated culture war topic like capitalism, or race, or gender etc, and tries to find a synthesis. To see what I mean, here’s the original “Faces of Capitalism” video starring yours truly:

…but because my acting is thoroughly mediocre at best, for this live rendition we brought on the brilliant professional actor Bill Heck to bring it life. We then heard from its creator, the brilliant Stephanie Lepp. Once again, they both ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED IT.

Bill Heck yes

Steph Lepp

Next up things got real: factory farming. As you probably know, factory farming has been a top of mind issue for me, especially since my World Series of Poker win last year.

Given that, I wanted to bring on a leading expert on the topic Lewis Bollard —Lewis has worked nearly his whole life on bringing relief to the billions of animals suffering yearly on the worst farms, and he threaded the delicate needle between horror and hope on this tough topic with class. After all, how can we have a win-win world if we aren’t willing to look at the most lose-lose parts of humanity? And factory farming is surely one of the biggest omni-loses for humans, animals and planet going. So if you end up only watching one talk from my session when it gets published, please make it this one.

look, Lewis is a tall man, okay

To round the session out was someone who is the living definition of a game-changer: Boyan Slat. Boyan, if you don’t know him, is the founder of The Ocean Cleanup — you know, that little non-profit that is singlehandedly reversing the nightmare that is ocean plastic pollution by filtering it from rivers and sucking it back out the Pacific before it breaks down into microplastics that end up lodged permanently in our brains.

Boyan Slat, the hero of our times

IMO Boyan and his team are worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, because this is one of the few times in history that a disgustingly hard tragedy of the commons is being solved both retroactively and for the future, and as the crowd watched his footage of hundreds of tonnes of plastic being fished OUT the ocean instead of into it, he received not one but TWO standing ovations, including likely the first ever *mid-speech* standing ovation in TED history. That’s how powerful his talk was. That’s how much of a game-changer Boyan and the Ocean Cleanup is. And I am so proud and grateful that he got to be a part of my session.

I’m also so grateful to TED, and particularly Chris Anderson, for taking this gamble. It can’t be easy to hand over such an established and respected platform as their stage to an outsider, and especially on such spicy topics as these. But they did it, and made me feel as welcome and heard as any long-time patron. And I’m so grateful to my speakers, who worked so hard and all knocked it out the park. There are few more hectic experiences than stepping out onto that red circle, and if any of you readers get the chance, take it.

In the meantime, watch this space for the talks to get published!