A dead baby albatross is a tough act to follow.

Nike’s Lorrie Vogel took the stage at Poptech this week to talk about the company’s sustainable product design efforts.

Immediately preceding her was an devastating presentation from photographer Chris Jordan, who shared a series of photographs from Midway Atoll of baby albatrosses who had died from ingesting plastic from the massive Pacific Garbage Patch.

Have you ever seen 500 people stunned into a complete and devastated silence?

Photographer Chris Jordan shared a sobering tale of his journey to Midway Atoll with the Poptech conference on Thursday, where he captured horrifying images of baby birds killed by plastic from the Pacific Trash Gyre. The crowd, which had been listening to a day of Big Ideas, was dumbstruck.

Can’t get enough of behavioral economist Dan Ariely? That certainly seems to be a common condition at the Poptech conference in Camden, ME this week.

Ariely gave a mind-bending talk about the counter-intuitive notion that paying people more can actually make them perform more poorly — at almost the exact moment that Obama’s pay czar was unveiling plans to slash the bonuses of top banking and automotive executives by about 90 percent.

UPDATE: Watch a Reuters video interview with Ariely.

What do turn of the century lab rats, clutch NBA players like Michael Jordan, and Wall Street’s highest-paid executives have in common? Dan Ariely has some ideas.

“We study the irrationality of people and markets. 2008 was a very good year for us,” the behavioral economist noted wryly at the Poptech conference on Thursday.

Reuters will be covering the PopTech conference, dedicated to “world-changing people, projects and ideas,” from Oct 21-25, including interviews with food writer Michael Pollan, Nike sustainability expert Lorrie Vogel, and many more.

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