TED talks -- of which there are nearly 2,000 and growing at the rate of one each weekday -- are billed as an opportunity for the some of the world's smartest and most interesting people to "give the talk of their lives," presenting the great insights of their life's work in 18 minutes or fewer. The TED conference used to be private only to the smarty-pants speakers and a select few guests; now, they're posting all the official TED talks online and adding others from "TEDx" events, which are locally-hosted mini-TEDs not supervised by TED itself.
So here we go. I'm planning a five-day series, and it's going to go something like this: I'll write a short intro to each talk, embed the video in the blog (just push play, and expand to full-screen view if you like with the little icon in the top-right corner) and then offer a few concluding thoughts. I'm so invested in this that I'll actually try to keep the posts to a semi-digestible length! As you're watching/reading, I ask a few things: 1) I chose these five for a reason -- I think they kind of tell a story if you're able to make the connections between them, and they cover some of the areas of life/policy/ethics/whatever that I'm most interested in. Here's your chance to get a look at the kind of stuff that fuels my brain and this blog! 2) Please please please share these. You'll get so much more out of them if you share them with friends or, best of all, devote 30 minutes a night over the next five nights (or whenever's convenient) to watch them with your family/friends. Just like movie night, only shorter and smarter! Talk about them afterwards; you'll be amazed at how much you get out of them if you process them with others. 3) Intrigued? Visit TED.com and get watchin'! I've been banging on about adding a half-hour or so of "brain time" to your day for a while now, and TED talks are a great way to do this. Better than solitaire during your lunch break, that's for sure. There's loads of great ones out there; I highly encourage you to explore for yourselves and/or email me for recommendations...
TALK ONE: Michael Pollan, "A Plant's-Eye View." Some of you probably know Pollan from his immensely popular books on food and nutrition (The Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.). The books are indeed great, and I encourage reading them. But this talk gives a pretty good 18-minute encapsulation of his thesis: agriculture and food are fecked, and it's long past time we did something about it. After all, we've most of the answers already at hand.
But Pollan's biggest point in this talk -- and the one I want you to remember throughout the week and beyond -- is his insight that we're still stuck in this zero-sum Cartesian mind-set, and it's literally killing us. Once upon a time, we lived in a zero-sum world of economic mercantilism and scientific Cartesianism. In this mindset, you have to lose in order for me to win: my empire has to exploit the New World for gold and silver better and faster than yours, since there's only so much gold in the world; in order for me to "win" food through agriculture, it follows that nature should "lose," etc.
Think about that for a minute: although the ideas of Smith and Darwin have been around for hundreds of years, the zero-sum mind-set still persists more than we like to let on. The fundamental insight of those two gentlemen was that the world is a win-win scenario, not a win-lose one. The butcher slaughters animals, the miller grinds wheat, the baker bakes, then everyone trades and benefits by trading his best wares for his neighbors'. That's a much rosier view of capitalism than we're seeing on today's front pages, no? Meanwhile, Darwin's theory of evolution allowed us to see nature as win-win as well. This is Pollan's point: we "know" that nature likes a win-win equilibrium in the sense that we've had Darwin's work for a bit over a century and a half, but we've yet to really internalize it. Hence the "concentrated animal feeding operation" and industrial agriculture: we force nature to lose so that we may gain more and more yields from our agricultural inputs.
But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if the world could be, as The Office memorably put it, a "win-win-win" equation? Watch the talk and see what this might mean in the realm of food and agriculture:
OK. Hopefully you've learned something about food and/or Darwin, but now let's think about the wider implications of this insight. As a little personal challenge, before opening your newspaper tomorrow morning, close your eyes for a moment and think: Darwinism. Win-win-win. Corny, yes. But see how the news matches up: "Corporate cash holdings up, labor earnings down," etc. If 400 people in this country control more of our national wealth than the rest of us combined (scary but true), do we appear to be in more of a Darwinian/Smithian win-win-win utopia, or a Cartesian liquidity trap? Thought so.
To the greatest extent possible, keep thinking your corny little Darwin-thought as you go about your daily life and process the news. As it sinks in, you'll probably start noticing latent Cartesianism (bad!) more and more: business or environment; labor or capital; revenue increases or across-the-board budget cuts, etc. All of this is emblematic of the Cartesian "bigotry of low expectations" regarding our own capabilities: why couldn't we have a booming carbon-neutral or (necessary) negative-carbon economy? Instead of patting ourselves on the back with "moon shot" tropes and "we'll always be a triple-A nation" soccer-mom bullshit, why not try to envision a new and Darwinian future in which we the people of the United States can prosper alongside and in concert with they the people of the rest of the world and Mother Nature? As they say, a crisis -- particularly one of the current magnitude -- is too good an opportunity to let it go to waste: let's use the present one to imagine ourselves into a new, Darwin[-win-win]ian world order. It's the only way forward, and it's past time to nut up and start working in that direction.
Finally, keep this Darwinian insight in mind as you watch the rest of the videos in this week's cycle. The more you've internalized Darwinism, the more you'll hear echos of it in the talks to follow. Enjoy!
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EXTRA CREDIT: Matt Ridley, "When Ideas Have Sex." Need I say more? This is a nice little look into the evolutionary history of your own mind, as well as the theory that undergirds this whole project.
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