Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]

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So I've got a toddler of three years old, and if my toddler would compete with a pig with quite a few tasks where intelligence is being measured, you know, the toddler would actually lose. I'd watch that, by the way. Great TV. That's great. I'm just like, that's great TV. We need to make that a show. Sounds like a Japanese TV show, like The Toddler and the Pig. Toddler versus Pig. Which one shops better? I'm actually in for the show. We're going to make this show. Toddler versus Pig.

This is What Now? with Trevor Noah. Rutger, welcome to the podcast. I was thinking about, you know, having you on and I was like, do you get invited back anyway? This is the thing I found myself asking. You invited me back, Trevor. Well, I mean, yeah, but I don't think you've ever said anything against me.

And I was just thinking, you're the guy who went to Davos and told all the billionaires who were there, like literally everyone, you sat there and you basically said, you guys are a bunch of hypocrites. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. But what I think they heard was, you guys are hypocrites. You are not... paying your fair share and you're acting high and mighty when, you know, avoiding the elephants in the room. You went to TED and you told everyone there they should be giving away their money.

And everyone in the room is like the 1% and like, you know, poor people are actually right and like the rich people are wrong for the way they're doing it. So I really wondered, like, do you get invited back to places? Like, has, how did... Did Davos ever invite you back? Did Ted, where do you find that you have the best recidivism rates?

Well, no, I didn't get another invitation to go to Davos. It was something I said, I guess. Tucker Carlson, I also never heard from him again. But apart from that, you know. Yeah, people invite me back. Wait, but okay, help me out with the Tucker one. I thought that you and him would have been on the same page for what he's been saying. Where was the big divergence?

Well, I mean, this was just after I had gone to Davos. And indeed, I had said some nasty things about billionaires and their massive tax avoidance and their massive tax evasion. And then, you know, how they keep whining about their philanthropy. Well, maybe, you know.

just start with paying your fair share in taxes. Right. So then Tucker Carlson invited me on his show because apparently he liked it that I had, you know, stuck it to the global experience or something like that. Yes. And I was like, well, you know. you're also the elite you know you're part of the problem like you're what is it a millionaire funded by billionaires so oh man like that love it where's your cut up point like what's what's the income where you won't throw shade

I'm very curious about that. What's the number? That's a good question. Depends on where you live, I guess. I mean, I just moved to New York and it feels like you need to be a multimillionaire even to raise kids here. Yes, you do. I guess that depends. But it's easy to forget how wealthy people are when they live in rich countries. So where I'm from, the Netherlands, if you have just a median income, which is about, what is it? $35,000.

000 euros annually so what is that forty thousand dollars or something um you're part of the richest 3.5 percent in the world so remember occupy wall street where people were saying we are the 99 and they are the one percent Well, actually, from a global perspective, very often the people, you know, who say that stuff on TikTok or Instagram, you know, they're actually part of the top 5%. But, you know, I completely agree because I'm from England.

And, you know, well, whenever I go home, I'm like, this country is so poor. And I'm going to say that because Americans can, like, skew your perception of what money is. Right? Because there's just so much money here. Everything is so expensive. There was a piece in the New York Times recently about how they are giving... financial aid to families that make $800,000 a year to attend private school. Because even though they have $800,000 a year...

they cannot afford to send their kids to these private schools, which cost about $70,000 a year. And if you have two, three kids, do the numbers. And that's kind of the class that does pay taxes. And sometimes it's just you live in a place where even though...

In the abstract, you know, you're like among the wealthiest in the world. You're like, how am I going to pay for gas? How am I going to pay for my accommodation? How am I going to give my kids a better life? So you can be rich here and feel really poor. Well, you will actually then maybe that's a good place.

to sort of jump into. Like when we talk about people being in a 1% and in a 99% and et cetera, et cetera, is it fair to do that to people when they're not living in the globe? And I mean this because I sometimes think about like how people see their lives. You know, politicians will always talk to people and say, your lives are better than ever. The mortality rate is lower than, and someone's like, yeah, I'm broke.

I'm poor. You know, someone will be like, oh, white privilege. And then there's a white guy working in like the Appalachian Mountains somewhere vibes. And he's going, where's my white privilege? Like, I want this white privilege you're telling me about.

And then you have to get academic and explain it to him. If you were black, your situation would be way worse. What are we actually trying to do when we tell people that they're in the 1%? Are we trying to get them to give more or are we trying to get them...

to feel guilty about having more so i do think it's valuable of people you know who are really privileged who went to a fancy ivy league university or something like that that they really realized that they are very privileged maybe you guys remember from 2016 when

When Trump was first elected, we had this big round of soul searching in the United States and elsewhere as well, all about how is this possible? And we were trying to get into the minds of the Trump voters or in Germany, into the minds of the AFD voters or in the Netherlands. the minds of the Geert Wilders voters and you know what now that Trump has been elected again I think

Can we please not do that again? You know, so not another round of soul searching and looking inward and like, oh, all these calls for more empathy and compassion. Well, maybe it starts with actually practicing what you preach. I think that the big betrayal of educated elites in this country.

elsewhere has not been a lack of empathy, but a lack of actually contributing to making this world a better place, right? You've got so many of these Ivy League graduates, like Harvard, 45% of Harvard graduates go into consultancy and finance. What do they do for a living? Do they really, you know, contribute to society? Well, you can ask them and quite a few polls find out that they're...

often very likely to consider their own job socially useless. So I really consider that the big betrayal, that kind of hypocrisy where people claim the moral high ground, but don't actually live up to it.

But let's talk about this through the lens of different countries. I actually love the fact that all three of us come from a place where we're all experiencing the world slightly differently. And obviously, we all now live in the US, but we've all seen the idea of... poverty and the idea of suffering expressed and maybe even experienced differently you know so

when i think of the netherlands i think of a place where things are going well you know every time i'm in the netherlands i'm just like wow your roads are great and the everything seems to be working and things are good but then i see people

voting the same way that, let's say, what a quote-unquote typical Trump supporter would vote like in the US. And they're saying the same things. Oh, you know, our lives are getting worse. Things are getting worse. I go to the UK. Now, the UK doesn't seem as... up-to-date as let's say the netherlands you know london might be great but as soon as you get a little bit out even when i went to brixton

I was like, okay, okay. Not too much now, Trevor. No, no, no. It's true. It's true. I'm from Brixton. Yeah, but there's like a part of Brixton that's super nice. Oh, yeah. And then you cross, you go past the tube station. You're like, what's going on here? Exactly. There's always one station. Yeah. But even then.

When I'm in the UK, I'm like, oh, wow, this is, I understand that for your country, you're having a tough time. But the people there are really like, wow, this is the worst experience we're having. It's all going down. And then in South Africa, it's the same thing at a different standard or quality of living.

It almost makes me wonder, I go, what is more important? What's actually happening to people or how they feel about what is happening to them? Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what you think. In the UK, do you think how they feel matches up with their lives? Or do you think they just notice their lives? depending on how they feel. You know, it's interesting maybe because now I compare...

the US to the UK a lot more now. I've lived here for like nearly 10 years. And you know, when I go back to the UK, everyone's like, oh my God, the guns. They're like, oh, the guns and healthcare. And obviously Trump and the other lady that was trying to be president. They're like, you live in a crazy place. But the thing I have noticed is kind of like this because of austerity. I don't know how much you know about the Tory government. It's kind of like this urban, suburban, rural.

You can see the lack of investment in people and the country. Stores are boarded up. Stores are boarded up. They dilapidated. Where I used to work, I used to work in this department store called Alders, which is now closed in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon. And if you go to the Whitgift Centre now, it used to be this like bustling kind of shopping mall. And now you're like, it's like a ghost town, right? Like this NHS, which is like...

brilliant, free healthcare. But people are like, I'm on a list for two years to get a knee replacement. And when I go into central London, a lot of the wealth I see is foreign wealth. I don't necessarily come across people like, I was born and raised in London and I made my dream come. True here. So, you know, I see the, I just see the gap between the have and the have not seems to be getting wider everywhere. But in America, it's more acute because there's just so much money here.

if that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Raka, I want to know, like, when I think of you, and I think maybe this is probably how most people see you in the world who are familiar with your work, you know, they see the historian, they see somebody who's a journalist, and I think in many ways they also see somebody who is...

really adept at looking at studies and the way the world actually works versus how we think it works. So when you look at three different places where people have the same feeling even though they're having a different experience, what do you think it tells us? about how people are experiencing the world so i think that there are two ways to travel you can travel in time obviously or you can travel in space and if you go to another country then very often you realize oh wow so

There are different ways to doing things, right? And that's just like history. I think the main lesson of studying history is that things can be different. There's nothing inevitable about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. I've personally also always... been fascinated by this question of how radical ideas, seemingly crazy ideas,

can, over the years and decades, become reality, both for better and for worse. Actually, I spent about a year studying the abolitionist movement, mainly the British abolitionist movement, because that was the most successful one. And what you realize if you go back to, say, the year 1750, and you would have stood on a street corner in London or Pennsylvania or New York, and you would have said, abolish the slave trade, abolish slavery.

Most people would have said, you're utterly nuts. That could never happen and we really need this. This is fundamental to our economy. Obviously, it took many, many decades, and it started with a small group of really committed black and white abolitionists. But it does happen. So I've always been fascinated by those processes, how the crazy can become inevitable. What did they do well?

Like what was it that made their movement as successful as it was? You know, you could write a very long book about that. I mean, that's what you do. That's exactly what you do. So as I was studying, in particular, the British abolitionist movement, I was like, this is almost like a self-help book for modern day activists and revolutionaries, because there are so many lessons we can learn from it. One of the first big lessons is that... It takes a coalition.

so very often these days people are i think too purist about their ideals right they only want to work together with people who are exactly on the same side but then you study some of these great movements and you realize that they were actually coalitions of people who very often disagreed vehemently about pretty fundamental things. Oh, damn. In this case, it all started with the Quakers, which was a...

very weird, radical Christian sect. They didn't get much done for a long time until they started working together with the evangelicals, right? This was in the day when evangelicals were not just on TV trying to make money. So that's one reason. really important lesson.

Another one that is, I think, very relevant today is that in history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So I really had this epiphany as I was studying the life of Thomas Clarkson, who was one of the main British abolitionists. He was trying to make the argument in Westminster, in the British Parliament, that...

the slave trade ought to be abolished. And from a modern day perspective, you would say, well, obviously your most powerful argument is that this is the most immoral system that ever existed, right? It is... The historians of the future will judge us very harshly for this. Well, actually, that didn't work at all. What Thomas Clarkson did discover is that once he started advocating for the suffering of white sailors on these ships who were...

dying in droves. Then all the politicians were suddenly paying attention, right? And that was a really powerful political argument. Yeah, I mean, this is something I'll chat to friends about when I think about movements or ideas. I go... Oftentimes, we think because we live in the age of the most morality, we think that morality is what moves people. But most of the time, it's an incentive.

that's you know just attached to the other person oftentimes it's financial but when it's not it's literally directly attached to them and so you think of like martin luther king it's amazing how the boycott was really like you know, one of the biggest tools in his arsenal. It was like, okay, black people are not going to ride on your buses. We're not going to like, you know, support your businesses. And then people are like, ah, okay. Apartheid in South Africa.

As much as it was like, yeah, shame and this and that, it was the world saying, yeah, we're not going to buy your stuff and we're not going to sell you stuff. And then at some point, the apartheid government says, this is not sustainable for us. We can't keep doing this. And so then it makes me wonder like...

With your work, you talk about humans being kind and being good, etc. But then the work that you study seems to suggest that kindness isn't necessarily the thing that moves us in the right direction. So how do you deal with the paradox? in your own work yeah so my very first book was called utopia for realists and it was about all these crazy ideas like

Can't we just abolish poverty by giving everyone money, which is called a universal basic income? Can't we abolish all borders around the globe? Can't we move to a much more participatory form of democracy? And at some point I started to think, you know, what do all these crazy ideas have in common? Well, it's a different way of looking at humans. It's a more hopeful and more optimistic view of human nature.

There's this old theory which says that humans deep down are just fundamentally selfish, right? It's often called veneer theory, you know, the idea that civilization is just a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature. And I think the problem with that theory...

It's not just that I think it's wrong. The biggest problem is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. Because once you start assuming the worst in other people, that's how you're going to design your whole society, right? You're going to have a society with a lot of bureaucracies. with a lot of cameras, with a lot of police. And you're going to bring out the worst in people. You're going to create the kind of people that your theory presupposed.

Obviously, humans are capable of the most terrible atrocities. We do things that penguins would never think of doing, right? Concentration camps, genocides, apartheid, you name it. But then, on the other hand, we're also... capable of incredible altruism. And I think that shifting that perspective a little bit and assuming the best in people and also designing our systems of government, of companies, you name it, around that.

could be a great way of making this world a much better place. I actually think animals are as capable as we are. I think, maybe I'm in the minority here. I think animals... are literally just like us. I just don't think they have like the systems. Oh, you know, I have a vendetta against dolphins. Wait, tell me more. Dolphins are like rapists. They're like the most evil, horrible. Okay, I don't agree with this. Nope.

Dolphins? Tell your story. Dolphins seduce people. Tell your story. Just read up on the stuff that dolphins do. Tell me what you've read up on and then we will fight about this. I don't like this anti-dolphin. Please go. I am very anti-dolphin. Tell me the story. Tell me what you've read. that dolphins are capable of rape they often do rape okay just like male cats okay and pigs are incredibly intelligent let's stick with dolphins don't run away from dolphins no my point is no because like

At The Daily Show, it's like a bit about how much I hate dolphins. And I seem like a weirdo because I hate dolphins. But I'm just saying that there are some animals that are capable of being incredibly cruel. Here's the... I agree with... Look, I'm on the same page. Animals, I think, can be as what we consider cruel as we can. I will say this, however, about dolphins. We take for granted how intelligent dolphins are.

We take for granted that dolphins do things for pleasure. They have many of the aptitudes that humans have. So they'll even smoke puffer fish. A lot of people don't know that. They'll literally smoke puffer fish and get high. They poke it, it blows up, then they have the toxin. So if dolphins are as smart as we are, how do we know that they aren't engaging in S&M the way humans do?

And we are watching it from the outside. If you watched Fifty Shades of Grey as an animal, you would be like, this is torture. This is a terrible story of torture. Because you don't understand what they're saying. You don't understand. You're just watching somebody tie another person up and whip them. Okay. But what I'm trying to say, I'm actually disagreeing with our friend Rutgers here.

belief that things can be internally good or bad. I agree with you. I think animals, we are. And what I mean by that is I go... I think every animal does the most terrible things, but because they don't have systems, they haven't figured out ways to expand them outward. Do you know what I mean, Ratka? Okay, for instance.

I'm bad with like specific troops and what the names of the different chimps or monkeys are. So don't correct me on this. Chimp Twitter, chimp TikTok, monkey crew, whatever. I know it's wrong, but I know they do it. There's a group of monkeys or whatever they are somewhere. And what they'll often do is they'll invade the territory of other chimpanzees or monkeys and they'll slaughter all of them. No reason. Just like slaughter them.

And they like play around with the entrails everywhere. And then they just leave. Okay. Well, here's an interesting story, Trevor. So there are two species of primates who are like 90... nine percent genetically similar to us on the one hand you got the chimpanzees who indeed behave pretty much like you just described so like a tribe of chimpanzees meets another tribe of chimpanzees that they never met before you know and it can get pretty violent

Now, we also have the bonobos and they're pretty much the opposite. So if like two groups of bonobos meet each other, what they'll have is an orgy. You know, that's basically their way of saying hi. So this has been a question that's been...

asked by primatologists for a long time. Like, are we the chimpanzees or the bonobos? Maybe we're both. I think men are the chimpanzees. You know, I want all the restraints on men and everyone else is fine. You really know, like, I'm a misandrist in the making. Wow. You're just going to throw us... all under the bus at the same time. Yeah, men are predators. Men are scary. I don't speak to men after 5pm that aren't like my husband or Trevor or my dad. I don't speak to men after 5pm.

That aren't like, they have to be vetted like Trevor or like my husband and my son. Wow. And my life has never been better. Never been better. Actually, Radhika, how do you respond to this? So as the person... who writes a book talking about how humans are kind, how do you respond to people who say to you, well, then what about murders? Well, then what about serial killers? Well, then what about, like, there's many bad things that happen in the world. How do you respond to them and what data?

do you use to support it? Yeah, well, that's the problem if you write a book about human decency is that you have to go on for hundreds of pages about all the terrible things we do. Look, for me, it all starts with this question. How have we conquered the globe? Right. Why have humans been so successful compared to?

to other species and for a long time we like to believe that it is because we are so smart right because we have these huge brains uh that take up what is it 20 25 of our energy but then you know Scientists started studying other animals. And again, as you just said, they're pretty similar to us in many respects.

There's now a new group of scientists who think that what has made us special as a species is something called survival of the friendliest. It's really the case that throughout our history, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. Because that basically helped people to work together on a scale that no other animal has been able to do.

Now, the technical term for this is self-domestication syndrome. We know this with animals that we have domesticated, right? Seeb and dogs, they've turned very friendly. And what Charles Darwin already noted is that these domesticated animals have certain traits in common. You know, you can see that it's in their genetic profile, but they also get like these floppy ears or white spots in their fur. And most importantly, they look a little bit more childlike and they also become more playful.

Now, what's so interesting, if you study the skeletons of humans over the past, you know, thousands of years, what you see is the popification of humanity. So we literally look much... Yeah, like friendlier, more childish than we love 50,000. Humans have become cuter over time. Exactly, exactly. This is my grand theory of human nature. I call it homo puppy. That's the term I hope to be remembered for in the analysis of science. But it's very much contrary to the way people often think about.

how we have conquered the globe, right? That we murdered all the Neanderthals or something like that. Well, actually, modern scientists think pretty much the opposite. So I believe that theory. And the reason I believe it is because I drive.

I know a lot of people who are anti-humans and they'll be like, you can't trust humans. Then I go, but you drive. If you spend any time driving, you believe humankind is good. No, I drive perpetually terrified. Yes, but you drive. Because I live in Los Angeles. No, but you drive. If you... You are inherently believing that every other person on the road who's driving is going to respect a painted white line.

This is literally what separates you That's not morality That's just a reason I believe humans are rational Yes but what I'm saying is That's what I believe in I think we have made it all about like kindness, when really most of humankind is rational. And so in our rationality, I believe we are rational enough to realize that it's not a zero-sum game.

And so when you see somebody else's child fall, you'll pick them up most times. I don't think so. No, but I think that's why we exist as people. Have you been to a park recently, Trevor? Have I been to it? Yeah, but now you modern parents, you're not even allowed to look at another person's child or help them.

When I grew up, even in South Africa now, people can still be friendly and help you with your child. You're talking about a very specific sad thing that's happened in America. I argue, for the most part, human beings. And I think it's demonstrated in our very nature. Right? We get on a plane. We trust. We don't even know the pilot. We've never even seen this guy's certificate. Right? We just fly. It's this weird system where we, because the trust is so latent and...

The morality is so latent. We then notice the anomalies in society. Yeah. And then we go, look how bad we are. Okay, so... I understand what you're both saying, Rutger Trevor. She's very pessimistic, Rutger. I mean, I objected to your work because you don't like Hobbes, and I agree with Hobbes. I have a very dismal view of human nature.

You've got a picture of him near your bed or something like that. The old British philosopher. I have a Leviathan poster in my bedroom. No, but I think, and maybe it's, I think actually becoming a parent has probably deepened my... Not pessimism, it's fear. That's where I'm speaking from. And a lot of people have this genuine fear of other human beings, of systems, of institutions right now. And I think a pronounced version of that is like...

the Trump voter who's like, I want the wall. I don't want immigrants. Or it's like a mother like myself who like...

doesn't believe in sleepovers because I'm like, I keep getting molested. And everyone's like to me, you're crazy. And I'm like, well, child molesters everywhere. They're like, are they really? But like, I think for a lot of people who are... afraid for valid reasons or you know you'll read the newspaper and they'll say crime is down but like people feel like crime is up like women won't jog

in a park at night you know so it's really hard i think for myself and for a lot of people to reconcile this idea of like a good world and people being kind with like what your lived experience i guess and i think as a parent i feel that acutely because i'm

Everywhere I go, I grab my kids' hands. Radka, you recently became a parent. I want to know if your views have changed because you were the person who was, and please correct me at any point, but you were very much the person who's willing to experiment and say,

Let's have open borders. Let's give everybody universal basic income. This is the world we should be living in. Open it up a lot more than you think we should because we will actually be good to each other. I want to know if you noticed any changes in yourself once you became a parent. Did you become... more or less conservative in your own eyes? Hmm. So...

Often people say, oh, becoming a parent really made me more idealistic because, you know, that was the moment when I realized that we really need to take care of future generations. You know, actually quite often I see the opposite is that people, I don't know, maybe turn inward a little bit. So I've been actually trying to fight that. Oh, but you feel it though. It's pulling you then. Yeah, I think it's fine. You know, this discussion. really reminds me of this new story from...

I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, when a Danish woman was arrested in the US because she had parked her stroller with, I think, her baby in it next to a cafe while she was getting takeaway coffee. And she was arrested for child neglect. While in Denmark... where she's from you know that's like entirely normal to do i mean that's life yeah yeah i think what i'm struggling with is i grew up in a very like communal culture so there was a lot of trust with like

Leaving your baby at people's houses and you're like, I have to work. I do the night shift. I'm going to come pick up my kid when I can. It's that type of culture. And I think in this hyper-capitalist weird world where there are no communal... Like, you don't even know the name of your neighbours. It becomes really hard to be like, well, your neighbour is probably trustworthy and kind and somebody that... is as valuable as yourself. I think that our atomization...

is contributing to like this very real fear of other people and people just hoarding their resources. So it kind of becomes like this self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, but the way we live our lives, I think informs it a lot.

Yeah, and important that it's in the interest of those in power for us to be cynical about human nature, right? Because that justifies the hierarchy, that justifies all these power differences. You know, as I was... uh going on a book tour making this argument that humans have evolved to work together and that we are the product of survival of the friendliest what really struck me is that i got most pushback from journalists

And I think it's logical. I mean, journalists spend most of their careers, their days, writing about what goes wrong, right? So people who actually are more tuned into the news, who are addicted to the news, they're often much more cynical. And I got most praise, actually. I received a lot of emails from hitchhikers. There's this one, I forgot his name, this guy who is the professional hitchhiker. He's been...

really going everywhere. I didn't know this still exists. You can go everywhere. You can go to every country. And people are basically friendly to strangers pretty much everywhere. And I was like, well, that is lived experience, right? That is...

Very different from the journalist mindset where you continuously are on the lookout for newsworthy things. It's a problem with the goodness, right? As Trevor said, it's the water we swim in. It's very easy to miss because you're... just used to it yes and by the way one final thing i i had a pretty different experience actually moving to new york so

I mean, I like my neighbors in the Netherlands, but in the Netherlands, right, our social circle is much more closed off. But I, you know, I moved here to Brooklyn and everyone's so friendly. Everyone's so kind. Everyone's like, no, welcome me to the neighborhood. Like my neighbor literally.

said yeah you can have sleepovers you invite people you know in my apartment it's all fine so i don't know maybe that's just brooklyn but my experience was pretty different yeah i think your experience is also like informed by the body you're in So my experience as a Black woman when I go to Nigeria, it may kind of clock me as a Westerner.

Means, like, we can get money. You're a white woman. I can get money out of this one. You know, may vary in certain parts of Los Angeles. And, you know, so maybe lots of people in the world are like, you know what? When I come into a space, people aren't welcoming. And then that reinforces this idea. Oh, yeah. Then it makes you feel like, huh.

Are humans really kind? Are groups really kind? And as you said, it benefits these billionaires. Sometimes I get this question. Maybe you get that as well, Trevor, but maybe it's particularly true for me. People ask me... So Rutger, do you get any abuse on Twitter or on socials? And I'm like, not really. I mean, not really anything that hurts. I'm white. I'm heterosexual.

I'm a man. So that's my advice. If you don't want to get abuse online, you know, be a man, be heterosexual. It works incredibly well. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. that um and part of me wonders this as well as i Think about this book I wrote, Humankind. Is it just one big expression of privilege? Is it a telling fact that I wrote that book? Probably. Can I interject with one thought here?

You actually are the person who made me realize this one day. You said to me, oh, Trevor, of course you think that that's possible because of how you see the world or how the world treats you. It's funny, Rutger, Christiana and I always have this back and forth. And I will say, yes, I am the way I am because of how the world treats me. But I'm also the way I am.

Or the world is the way it is to me because of how I treat it. And I don't know when the cycle begins, to be honest with you, right? I think it is easier to be optimistic. when things have gone right or when you remember things going right. Because sometimes I think it's more about your perception than the reality, right? And so even when I think about jogging or not jogging, I don't have kids. But the one thing I will say is...

I think of how many parents, let's say in America, are terrified at the idea of their child being kidnapped when the data does not support it. It just does not. And I think it's very difficult in life. But we are oftentimes at the mercy of the things that have happened to us. And so...

that becomes part of how we see the world. I think very exceptional individuals are able to see the world beyond how it happened to them and rather how they wish it to be. But most of us, most of us, you get robbed on a certain street.

you probably will never walk on that street ever again. The chances of you getting robbed there again are probably zero depending on where you are. But you just go like, you know what? I'm not going to do that. That street is where people get robbed. And so I... I hear what you're saying, but I sometimes think if every law or if every idea we make is based on the worst instance of what happened, planes wouldn't fly, cars wouldn't drive.

children wouldn't run and play outside. I want to preface this. I'm actually an abolitionist. You know, I don't even believe in police. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that like... the way my perception is shaped as a woman is that like the violence completely it's not I'm not

I'm afraid of straight, you know, I don't like men in general. No, no, complete. That's why the table is like this size. I mean, just to keep you... It's often, it's not just strange men, it's... familiar men right and so it's just like I think for some groups it's really I find tremendous safety in other women now if it was a world where it's just like

My community of women and my friends around me, they're who I lean on the most. And I'm like, oh, if the world was them, I'd feel differently. And I say that as someone that's generally very optimistic about myself, I wouldn't have moved to America if I wasn't an optimistic person. But I've had these like core experiences that have shown me that I guess it was a lot of racism.

people are wicked. It was a racism I received as like a child in the classroom. I'm raising my children to be like, it's a world out there and I have a son and I'm like, at a certain age, your boyhood ends much earlier.

than a kid with blonde hair and blue eyes. So there's certain things, you know, you can't do in public. Like you can't throw attention past 10 because someone may call it law enforcement. So I think like that the idealized worldview often comes, can come when you're kind of like...

a person who is automatically given the benefit of the doubt. And I think for people like myself and people that are like in far worse positions, that doesn't happen. And so you don't necessarily experience the kind world, even if you put kindness out there. absolutely yeah i agree with all of that um wait with all of it

Yeah, absolutely. Wait, what? No. Don't come here. No, no, no. Don't do that. No, no, no, no. All of it? You know, but this is what I do think. Can I say something? All of it. I think the light bearers like Rutger, the nice white people. should go out there and do this type of work. I think what he's doing is very important because he's the type of person people listen to. You can have the ear of an entrepreneur and an activist because of your position.

You're listened to and respected and you're using your white privilege, male privilege for good. I think it's like, this is actually the ideal. This is what you should use it for. That I agree with. You know what I mean? And I agree with, you know, I, I don't look.

We, this is, Ratka, I forgive you. You've stepped into a, this is a fundamental friend. Ten year fucking history of disagreeing. This is us. This is us. You know, and it's good. We keep each other on each other's toes. I say Trevor's optimistic because he's like. He's like the chosen one, like Obama, South Africa.

Everything's gone right for me. Everything has gone right. You were born right at the perfect, he's like mixed race. Everything has gone right for me. He's, you know, funny, good looking. Jon Stewart quits. He's like, I just feel like he's like got this like. Good karma. You know what I mean? So I'd be optimistic about Sheva. I'd love the world. But this is the thing that I believe. Everything you are saying is true. However, every negative thing I've also experienced.

Do you understand what I'm saying? So I grew up in a house with domestic abuse. I grew up in a country where my people couldn't work or do anything. My mother herself wasn't allowed to go. My grandmother. So do you know what kind of life you've lived? when a flushing toilet was like a thing you were excited for. That's the kind of life I lived. And I'm not even saying this like a woe is me thing. I'm just like, I remember being like, yeah.

Flushing toilet today. Ah, no flushing toilet this month. And then flushing toilet another time. And then like you, you have your techniques. You start learning which newspapers you prefer to wipe your ass with. This is life, right? So I never say this to diminish another person's experience. I really don't. No, I don't think you do. But I think, and you know, it's some of what you say in your book, Rutger, and when you speak. I think some of the time, it's so hard.

But some of the time, the way we are perceiving something affects our ability to not live in that world because we are perceiving it as being that way. Right? Yeah. I mean, I've even learned this in therapy. I think we sometimes think, and maybe that's, I wasn't raised this way. We sometimes think it's happening to us and us alone. And we're the victims and we're the only ones.

That's why I genuinely have never worn it. I don't wear it as a cape of anything because I go, my friends had parents, mothers who were abused. So in our community, this was a thing that was normal. And over time in South Africa, we fought against gender-based violence, and we continue to. But because I was never taught that, no, Trevor, this is happening to you, I then didn't think that it's happening to the world, and I didn't think that I was like...

suffering because of it. You know what I mean? So that's where I come back to the car analogy of it all. The reason I say I don't agree with you on all of it, but you know I agree with you on most of it, is I go, there are still... hundreds of thousands of women who do run at 5 a.m. There are still hundreds of thousands of women who do run at 10 p.m. You know I carry a box cutter in my handbag. No, I understand this, but this is what I mean. This is like one of the hardest things.

In fact, you know what? Let's take it away from a personal injury in that way. And let's think of it through the lens of crime. Because in South Africa, we deal with this. South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world, right? But... it is not happening to most of the people most of the time. And most people have not been affected by that crime, but they do get affected by it. And if it does actually happen to you.

It is the only thing that is true in your world. And I cannot say to anybody who has been affected, ah, no, it's not as bad as you think. Because to them, it is the full version of what they think. Do you know what I'm saying? So what I'm always trying to do, and this is why I fight with my friend. Because I go, I don't ever want us to live in a world where we think, like you said, you can only hold one thought. Some people will say, my parents didn't love me. They were abusive. I'm like, or...

Your parents grew up in a world where they beat you and all kids were beaten. And yeah, now we don't believe that that's the right thing. And now they think it's like timeouts and conversations. But to Rutger's point, maybe in like 15 years, maybe in 20 years, they'll be like, hey.

Actually, timeouts are worse on a child's mental health. Oh, it's already happening. Oh, well, there you go. There's an anti-timeout. Well, there you go. Do you know what I mean? So I think there's a difficulty in processing how kind humans are versus...

how bad human beings individual can be and how much, how much harm they can do versus the, you know what I mean? Yeah. One person can kill many people and now all of us feel like the world is full of killers. But we forget that like when one person was shooting in a crowd. Everyone was running.

So there's more runners than there are shooters. I know, I do believe, listen, I want to be clear so everyone doesn't think like I'm a complete pessimist. No, no, I don't think you are. I think you're a secret optimist. I think you challenge us. I'm optimistic about myself. I keep telling you guys. I just, I, because, you know, there's so many people in my life I love because of their kindness, right? So it'd be ridiculous for me to say. It's just I struggle.

with the idea of humanity as kind because of the way where we are right now. But that can change. I'm open to my mind being changed. So, Rutger, if you had to throw a Hail Mary, what is one thing? I know it's hard, but just like one example, story, study, data, anything where you would go, this is how you can believe that humankind is kind. My favorite story.

And the book is about this moment in 1965 when six boys shipwrecked on an island near Tonga. I had asked myself the question if there had ever been a real Lord of the Flies. And it turns out there was. Six boys were at this boarding school in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga. They were really frustrated. They thought school was boring and they were like, let's go on an adventure. They borrowed a boat from a local fisherman.

And then ended up in a storm on the very first night. They drifted for eight days, incredibly hungry, incredibly thirsty, but miraculously survived and then washed up on this island that was totally... forgotten, uninhabited, and they survived there for 15 months. And it's a real example of survival of the friendliest, because if they were really nasty and not working together, well...

We wouldn't be here able to tell their story. Now, what's happening there? I think it's really a combination of things. Obviously, it's Tongan culture. Right. Which is a very cooperative culture with very essential skills where kids learn to swim, you know, basically in their first year already. So that's obviously essential.

I also think, though, that it is a part of human nature, what we see expressed there. As I said, survival of the friendliest. It's kids working together and exhibiting traits that are also very much part of who we are as a species.

You know, to Trevor's point again, this is one of those things where you can hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. Yes, we're incredibly selfish, cruel. We're also one of the most cooperative and altruistic species in the animal kingdom. I think I realized because of your work, the Lord of the Flies has had more impact on how we see humankind than the real story, which it wasn't based on, obviously. But I'm saying...

The Lord of the Flies is how people think it's a real thing. They're like, well, I guess this is Lord of the Flies. And you're like, that's a fiction. We have based our reality on a fiction. And yet the realities...

never seem to be able to create the fictions that we want to live in and want to create. Yeah. And this is particularly the case when you look at natural disasters. So look at how disasters are portrayed in series and movies. And it's the same thing all the time. Civilization is a thing. veneer and people very quickly turn into animals, beasts, barbarians. They start raping, looting, plundering. And that's also how the press often behaves. The most famous case here is Katrina, 2005.

The terrible flooding. And the press was full of these horrible stories of people getting shot, of the looting and the plundering. Well, actually, we have got 60, 70 years of empirical evidence of anthropologists, sociologists. going into these places and actually interviewing people, doing the rigorous empirical research. And time and time again, they found that disasters actually...

Bring out the best in people. So every single time, doesn't matter where it happens, whether it's Japan or the US or South Africa, you get an explosion of altruism. Because once things really get serious like that, people are like, okay, we've got to stick together. We've got to survive together.

there are always some examples that then will get magnified in the press. But like the big headline story should be, oh, people are working together once again. Yeah. And I think a lot of that becomes how we see the world. If we are told the world is a way. then it does become that way. Yeah. You know? So I, that's why I appreciate, honestly, I love what you do. Like I say, you don't tell us the world is perfect, but you tell us that humankind is inherently kind.

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So, actually, Rakan, let me ask you this. As a historian, you look at the world differently because you have to. Are things better or worse? Huh. Because I have people phoning me and texting me now. And they'll say to me, they'll lead every conversation with, hi, Trevor, hope you're well. All things considered. Or they'll be like, hi, Trevor, hope everything's going good.

considering the world we're in right now. And I understand where they're coming from, but then there's a part of me that goes, but when was it not bad in some way? I would say the answer is pretty simple. In the past, everything was worse. If you zoom out far enough, at least. You know, we've seen incredible progress in the fight against poverty, for example. It's just like in 1980.

50% of the whole population lived in extreme poverty. Now that's less than 10%. 50%? Yeah, it's really extraordinary. Child mortality has been declining massively. On the other hand, though, I also understand why people are really scared. In many respects, I'm pretty terrified. Do you guys know this website called Our World in Data? It's my favorite website. Our World in Data.

Yeah. No, no, no. Tell us about it. What is it? It's really a great website that has the best collection of data on what's going on in the world, basically. And the guy who founded that is a statistician called Max Roser. And he always says that there are...

three statements that are true at the same time. So the first statement is the world is bad. I mean, that is true. There are millions of kids dying from easily preventable diseases every single day. There are billions of animals being tortured in factory farms right now. autocracy is on the rise. So there are lots of bad things.

The second statement is also true, that the world is much better. We have made extraordinary progress, and you won't see that if you just follow the news, because the news is about what happens today instead of what happens every single day. It doesn't teach you all that much about the big structural trends.

And the third statement is also true, which is we could do so much better. If you take a look at the resources we have, how many talent we have, how much capital we have, we should already have abolished poverty around the globe. We should already have... abolished most terrible diseases. Like the fact that malaria still exists, that tuberculosis still exists, I mean, that's just an outrage.

Yeah, as you can see, I've got mixed feelings about this. So when you look at the world we're in now, how do you think the historian version of you... In 200 years, we'll look at you slash us. This is something I always think about when I think of the time I'm living in or even everything that happens, right? An election comes.

And then people are like, oh, this is the worst result. I can't believe. But then literally half of the country, let's say in America, are like, oh, thank God, reprieve. We are now finally on the right track. And in moments where there's no chaos, I just sit there and I go. How do we know which one actually is? And how do you know how the future will view us in this? Are we the good guys of this time? I think it's one of the most fascinating questions you can basically ask about.

history. So if you look at all these civilizations we've seen, whether it's the Romans or the Aztecs or people in the Middle Ages... people throughout history have believed that they are the most civilized right yeah that they are on the right side of history so the romans for example thought that they were so civilized because they didn't sacrifice children

uh for the gods that's a good move then then then they did have the coliseum you know and they did throw naked women for the lions etc but that was just good entertainment during lunchtime not a good move okay so today we like to see ourselves as really civilized because we've officially abolished slavery and the slave trade. We've got universal suffrage. In many countries, we now have gay marriage. So surely we got to be the most civilized, right? Well...

That would be very coincidental if we turn out to be that one civilization who got it all figured out. I think it's quite likely that the historians of the future will look back at us. And I'm not just saying like, oh, the MAGA Republicans. No, I'm talking about me. About you, we're probably doing some things that are terrible, like moral catastrophes. And today, we have lots of progressives and liberals who care deeply about human rights and about all the injustices.

but keep eating factory farm meat of animals that have been horribly abused. So that for me is one of those examples where the historians of the future could be like, they're going to look at us. Yeah, what the hell were these people thinking? How could they... unthinkingly keep participating in that incredibly cruel system. They're going to be on the news with their co-host who's a cow. Because animals will be talking in the future. Let's be clear on this, everybody.

They're already talking. And then, yeah, literally. Yeah, and then they're going to ask the cow. They'd be like, what do you think? And be like, whoa, man, the things you people, you humans used to. And the human will be like, I wasn't around back then. Those are my grandparents. You can't judge me for their actions. So are you a vegan? Yeah. Oh, okay. Have you always been a vegan? No, no, no. I was a quite fanatic carnivore. Then what changed? I guess reading.

So I think the final nudge came from Yuval Noah Harari. You had him on the show as well, right? So he wrote this book called Sapiens about, you know, the big picture, right? The history of humanity of the lost. hundreds of thousands of years and in that book he like doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever so he talks about the nazis and he's like i don't know describing it as you know yeah like just another culture right just another way of of

you know, the way humans can behave. And then at the end of the book, he talks about the way we treat animals. And he has this offhand remark where he says, well, this is probably the biggest crime in all of human history. And I thought that was very convincing, just by looking at the numbers. Because the total number of people who ever lived is estimated at 117 billion.

The total number of animals that we slaughter every year is 80 billion. So it takes us just a year and a half to slaughter as many animals as the amount of people that ever lived. And then if you look at the latest science, like every...

Other week, there's a new paper coming out about how sentient, how sensitive, how intelligent chickens are, cows are. And I also felt so... ignorant once i started digging into it like for example the fact that cows give milk i was like yeah cows give milk that's what they do well actually um yeah they have to be pregnant uh every every year they have to be made pregnant basically and then we

We take away all these calves, which is like a product that we very often can't use. So we abuse those calves in a terrible way as well. Yeah. I actually love veganism as a way of life. It's just like, I love leather. I think it's crazy. I like Chanel bags. I think it's crazy. I'll be on the record and say it. I think it's crazy. I think I have fights with my friends about this all the time.

So actually, let me ask you this. For a few reasons. One, the way we inflict pain on them is unnecessary oftentimes. And we waste. We throw away so many of the animals that we've killed that I'm like, people, what are we doing here? Do you know what I mean? If you're going to inflict pain on somebody, at least like use it, eat it.

Do you know what I mean? Like, if you're going to kill me and my family, eat us, is how I think, even as a human. And I'm not a pig or a cow, but I don't like that. Yeah, and I'm guilty of it too. Please don't get me wrong. I don't like the intelligence argument at all. I don't like that at all because I find myself going, if people are telling us that we should not be eating animals because they are sentient and they think and they feel, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So now we're making this a moral thing. So we should or shouldn't eat things that are closest to us as humans. And then the things that are not, we shouldn't treat accordingly. I don't want to live in a world. where we are making that type of judgment based on what we think or how close we think something is to us. Because that's also the argument we use to inflict pain and suffering on other people.

Do you know what I mean? So we'll be like, oh no, they're not as intelligent as we, therefore they can be slaves. Therefore they can be punished and beaten and put in prison.

I think that's like the same argument just the other way around. So I go, if you're going to eat something, eat it with respect. Do you know what I mean? Be like, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't think a lion looks down on a zebra. You know what I mean? I don't think a lion is like this stupid zebra. That's why I'm eating it. It's just like, no, no, no. This is how I live.

and i caught you and i eat you some of the indigenous cultures i bumped into traveling around the world they have a very respectful thing even in south african culture you know a lot of it when you slaughter a sheep or a cow. And it's meant to be an auspicious occasion, by the way, because there's this misconception people have about Africans and eating meat. And the truth is Africans didn't used to eat that much meat.

You would only slaughter an animal for a big occasion. It was like you were giving away your daughter to another tribe. What a loss of life. What a loss of a future. And so you would have this moment. And in that... They would teach you when you're slaughtering the animal, you'd first go and speak to it. You'd say, thank you. You would have this acknowledgement. And so I genuinely, I don't mind like vegan or not. I think everyone should be able to do what they can.

But I don't like it when we make it about intelligence or not. It's like, no. So we're saying like dumb things deserve to be killed. So there's a famous philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, in the late 18th century who already made the point, it's not about how smart animals are. It's not about can they talk, can they reason, it's about can they suffer. I like that. That's the essential point.

There was a recent scientific committee who published this big report about when you cook crabs alive, well, they suffer immensely, right? I think that matters. Look, I'm not fundamentally against eating meat. Not at all. What I'm against is factory farming. And I think it's really important to acknowledge as a consumer in the world today is that...

What is it? 95, 98% of all meat comes from factory farms. So if you say, well, I'm radically going to cut down the amount of meat I eat, you know, I'm just going to eat. meat that was hunted or something like that, or that was really raised in an ethical way. I mean, that's fine. But then please also acknowledge that you will have to eat 5% as much or something. Yeah, which I think is necessary. I think we have too much of it.

I want to know what you think about it through the lens of, let's say, capitalism. When I told some of my friends you were coming on the podcast, the first thing some of them said was, oh, it's the guy who hates capitalism. I love him. They were like, he hates business and he hates capitalism. I love him. Then I was like, I don't know. Does he think of himself that way? And I wondered, and I still do, do you think there's such a thing as good capitalism? Do you think companies can do good?

You know, you talk about humans being kind, but in your research and in your work, do you think that can be extended to companies? Oh, absolutely. You know, I'm a pretty old fashioned European social democrat.

I think that sometimes some tasks are best done by the government, sometimes by civil society, and sometimes by markets, right? I wouldn't want the government to try and invent an iPhone and to market it to customers. They're probably going to be really bad at it. Just look at the Soviet Union. So actually, one thing I like about having moved to the United States is that, yeah, some cliches are really true. There's a much more entrepreneurial culture here.

So a couple of my friends launched this journalism platform in Amsterdam a decade ago, and they had this night where they presented the plan, right? We want to revolutionize journalism. We want to really change it, not focus on all the bad news, but focus on the structural...

important things. And what happens in the Netherlands, if you pitch something new like that, you know, like 90% of the people there will say, ah, is that going to work? Ah, probably don't bother. And then if it doesn't work, then they're like, I see you told you so. I recently had a dinner like that here in New York where...

Someone invited me to talk to a bunch of journalists and entrepreneurs and blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, I have this idea for starting an organization that helps as many talented people as possible to work on the most pressing issues of our time. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. That's going to work.

Yeah, you're going to build this huge global movement of ambitious idealists. And I can't see why it's not going to work. Go you. And actually, if you're building something new, if you're trying something new. That is really what you want. Yeah, you want that push in the back. That's what you want. Exactly. So no, I'm not like, this whole debate about socialism versus capitalism, it's like a dichotomy that doesn't exist. Sweden is a capitalist country. Right. Denmark is capitalist. It's like.

You can be a pluralist. You can have rules. You can have a flourishing economy where billionaires actually pay their taxes. And the fact that we think we have to choose between either or, that it's either, you know... Elon Musk paying very little in taxes, taking over the government, or, you know, the Netherlands or Denmark, where you can fall asleep on street and it's very hard to be an entrepreneur.

There's something in the middle, probably. Yeah, I think we are living in a world where everything's being distilled. You and I talk about this a lot. It feels like the world is becoming less and less tolerant. of people holding multiple ideas, even if those ideas aren't in conflict. Like people will say to you, no, you can't think that. And you're like, but why can I not think that? Because you think something else. And I'm like, yes, but these two things are not separate.

They're not even in conflict with one another. And I think if we lose that as people, we then become one-dimensional in our thinking, in our problem-solving. And then I think we experienced fractures in society that aren't necessarily real. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I guess my thing is on the billionaire front, I think the fact that these billionaires exist seems like a profound failure. I agree, but I agree with that. I'm just like, a billion of a thing is a lot. It's just like...

One billion. How did we get here? That's my question. In any system, because we know that under socialism, there are people that hoard and steal and also have a billion. So I'm like, shouldn't we be in a world where we're like... Do we want billionaires? Like, forget them paying more taxes. Like, I'm even like to the left of you. I'm like, I just don't think they should exist. But you don't mean the people.

We are going to state that for the record. She just means that the financial thing. I love all the founders. She doesn't mean, she just means the people. No, but I just honestly believe that like...

That's an expression, like, you know how you say it, intensive farming. It's a failure of your imagination. I believe the fact that we're like... Yeah, but let me throw this at you. What if I told you you can live in a world where there's billionaires and the issue isn't that there aren't billionaires. The issue is where the water level is at the bottom. I think that it's more important to think about where a person who is never going to be a billionaire sits. So if somebody has...

a good education. And Rodger, you speak about this with like, let's say just income and basic income and a guaranteed income. Like I think if we lived in a world where we're focusing on making sure that everyone at the bottom

has a good time, the top doesn't really bother us that much. There's always going to be somebody at the top. But the question is, where are you in relation to them? Does that make sense? Yeah, I just think to be a billionaire, you have to hoard. And I don't believe in wealth hoarding.

I think it's because like to you speaking about Occupy World Shoot, the thing that bothered people is that like the gap between the have and the have not has widened so much. And it's been at the benefit of this billionaire class. So I can't. I can't just imagine any world where we're like, we're okay with having that if somebody makes five or 7,000.

more a year. So I'm basically telling you, next time you go to Davos, you should be like, forget paying more taxes. You guys need to give all your money. Man's is never going back. Unless you get a billion, you're not going anywhere. Okay, let me try and find a way to get back to Davos because I'm actually going to say something nice about billionaires. Oh, here we go. I don't think I've ever done that on a podcast, but here I go. So I was studying the history of malaria, as you may have known.

You may know we recently developed these amazing vaccines, like for the first time in history, we've got them. This has been one of the most deadliest diseases in all of world history. And it took us decades and decades to finally get the vaccine. And I was wondering.

Why did it take so long? It turns out that actually in the early 80s, scientists already understood that we could develop a vaccine. The problem was that it was mostly poor people in poor countries who were dying from it, and a lot. Between 1980 and 2020, around 40 million people died from malaria, which is about as much as how many people died in Europe during the Second World War.

And for HIV AIDS, there was a massive movement in wealthy countries because also wealthy people were dying from HIV AIDS. So we developed amazing medicines against that, but not for malaria. The tragic thing. And the embarrassing thing is that it took a tech billionaire, in this case, Bill Gates in the year 2000, to say, OK, well, let's actually finance the research that is necessary.

that governments are not doing it. And also not like the liberal governments, like socialist government. Denmark wasn't doing it. The Netherlands wasn't doing it. And I think that is a... something where sometimes philanthropy can play a role to do that stuff that is so neglected because it's so unpopular to do. And yeah, I think like someone like Bill Gates deserves an enormous amount of credit.

for it. He really changed the course of history in that respect. So, okay. That's it. That's one nice thing. We got a pro-billionaire statement out of work. I mean, this is massive. Don't go anywhere, because we've got more What Now after this. who have some sort of moral ambition, but don't know how to channel it, and they don't necessarily want to go vegan, what can you do in your little patch of the world to make it better?

So I guess one of the problems with progressives these days is that they have all these rules of life that are about... Basically about how you live your own personal life. So you're not supposed to fly. You're not supposed to eat meat. You're not supposed to have kids. You're not supposed to use plastic straws.

And yeah, to really limit your environmental footprint. I think the problem with that kind of reasoning is that in the best possible scenario, if you've done everything right, then you have a... environmental footprint of zero, and you might as well not have existed, right? So then death is the highest ideal. You might as well just kill yourself. I think we got to talk much more about the actual positive things we can do to make this world.

much better place. And what history teaches me is that that always starts with groups coming together. There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, who said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world.

In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. So I guess we need safe spaces for do-gooders who come together, places where you don't have to be embarrassed that you actually believe that some things could be radically improved. So that's... I guess my most important advice, find those bubbles, those cults maybe of people who are actually like, yeah, we're not cynical. We're actually going to do something. We're actually going to build something.

Tell us a little bit about your, you know, it sounds like you're assembling like a suicide squad of experts to change the world, which I love this idea. And I think I've loved it. Because I think of it through a different lens. So I've felt, I think for most of my adult life, that it's sad that we funnel people.

into parts of life where they will have the most income but not the most impact. Or the impact that they'll have won't affect or impact the most people positively. And it's not even because of them. It's just what we do. Rutger, you're going for everyone, just like the math geniuses, the statisticians, all these people. What are you aiming for and what do you hope to achieve? Well...

Take a look at all these Ivy League universities. Read the college essays of the students when they come in. And it's all about... the big problems they want to solve. You know, they want to work at the UN solving world hunger. They want to fight the next pandemic. They want to fight the tobacco industry, create beautiful new innovations that make this world a much better place.

And then the years go by and McKinsey knocks on their door and they end up being a strategy consultant or a corporate lawyer or a banker. And something is lost along the way. And I think that waste of talent. is really one of the greatest wastes of our time. I would love to live in a society where the most ambitious, talented, driven people who've been given a lot also work on the most pressing and important issues. So that's actually why I've moved to New York.

kickstarting the US chapter of the school for moral ambition. That's what my next book is called. So moral ambition is the combination of the idealism of an activist plus the ambition of an entrepreneur. Moral ambition. Okay. We basically want to help as many people as possible. to quit those soul-crunching, not super socially useful jobs and to work on something that actually matters. I think we've got to redefine.

what it means to be successful. Successful is not about having that corner office or having that fancy LinkedIn resume. It's about making an actual difference and make future historians proud. That's what being successful really should be about. Hmm. Make future historians proud. That seems like a hat for some reason. Seems like a hat, and I don't know what color it would be, but it seems like one. I know this is going to sound like a weird question, but...

Should we care about what the future would think of us? And what I mean by that is we don't know how we will be perceived by the future. We look back on many great people now and we're like, nope, they're terrible. Gandhi. Yeah, and for many different reasons. You know what I mean? But we do it. We just do it, right? Rightly or wrongly, we do it.

And so I sometimes wonder, I go, should we even care about the historians of the future? Or should we just be like, we're just trying to do what's good for now. And then, hey, man, you future people will judge us all you want, but we're not here. What do you think?

Well, I think that meaning is created by humans. And I guess one of our messages to all these privileged and wealthy people, some of them who get so rich that they can... buy a building on on harvard and have it named after them yeah the message is like no one's going to remember you for that No one's going to give a shit 100 years from now that your name is on it. They'll have to ask Chet GPT if that still exists. Like, who the fuck is this guy?

You know, we talked earlier about the British abolitionists. One thing that struck me is that the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded by 12 individuals. One of them was a writer. So there is a place for someone like me. One of them was a lawyer.

So they can be useful as well. But 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. People had built their own companies. People had scaled their own companies who may have been in the Forbes 400 if that would have existed at the time. But at some point they thought, you know what?

I'm going to build a legacy that actually matters. If they just have been rich or successful entrepreneurs, no one would have remembered them. It's because they took up the fight against the greatest moral atrocity of their time. That's why we remember them today. So essentially you're appealing to the ego. It's a mixture. I think it's fine that people are motivated by, again.

multiple things yeah it can be a little bit of vanity i mean if you if you look back you know one of your shows on netflix some part of you must think like oh This is pretty cool, right? When I have my new book and my hands are like, oh, this is awesome. That's fine. That's a completely natural motivation.

At the same time, yeah, I do also genuinely care about the suffering of those who are oppressed, of the animals, all the things that we've talked about. I think it's fine to be motivated by multiple things at the same time. I want to have a conversation with you after you've lived in New York for a year or two. I don't wish this on you. Please let me be clear. I really don't. But I think like the amateur scientist in me does.

And I would love to see how much your worldview is going to be shifted or how, I know it will be, but I'd love to know how it will be shifted by you existing in a place that is going to push every theory that you have. You come from a place where... people are looked after. You know, you come from a place where healthcare and, you know, people think about how much time you work and how much maternity leave, paternity leave, schools, what's in your food. And I would love to speak to you.

in like a year or two and just see like have you become more hopeful more chromogeny have you lost hope or are you just like now Rutger Bregman the billionaire just being like let me just get a billion and then we'll continue this journey do you think how resilient do you think you are to the press that comes from living in a place that sort of hasn't fostered your ideas? So I think the way to be morally resilient is to...

make commitments in public. I mean, that's the point of things like marriage, for example, right? You say in public, you know, I'm marrying this person. And the same is true for things like, I don't know, sticking to veganism. I just said on this podcast, right? Yeah, I'm a vegan.

So I guess that makes it much more difficult now for me to not be a vegan in public. So shame. I think we could do the same for similar things. Also with our wealth, for example, one thing I've experienced is that it's much easier to give money away if you don't have it.

So for this new book, I actually thought, okay, that's like a great resource that we can use to build this movement. You know what? I'm giving all of it away in advance because it's so much more difficult once you have the actual money in your bank account. I like that.

So you're pre-giving the money away. Yes, yes, yes. You know what this actually makes me think of? We have a friend, a mutual friend in common we've worked with, but, you know, from South Africa. His name is David Kibuka. And David... would always say the same thing to us. He'd always be like, I don't understand why America gives you your money and then asks you for it back.

He's like, that's why people hate taxes. They don't hate taxes because they're paying taxes. They're paying taxes because they just take the money from me. You know what the text is supposed to be. Just don't make me give it to you twice. He's also a guy that gives away tons of money all the time without even thinking about it. He gives everyone money. Maybe that's... Do you think this would work in our society? Like, so...

David's side of it, I actually agree with. I think sometimes people just are reticent to the idea of giving the money. But if it was taken before they knew, they'd be like, whatever. Even the idea of tax. I know that you say taxes, taxes, taxes, and people must pay more taxes. But a lot of people will say, yeah, you know what, Rutger, I pay my taxes. And then the government...

doesn't use the tax correctly. And I don't see the roads improving. And I don't see the schools improving. Oh, but you know what I see improving? I see bombs. I see more bombs. I see more fighter jets. Wow, Ratka, you're telling me to pay more tax? And the more tax I pay, the more missiles are made.

And I think a lot of people are struggling with, now, obviously, some people just want to keep their money. Don't get me wrong. But there are many people who feel like they're funding the worst, but not the best. And this is moving, by the way, across political lines.

This is not like a Republican or Democrat thing. This is just people across the line saying, why do we have money for a bomb, but we don't have money for a road or a school? How do you respond to that? Because it seems like you're sort of telling people to do something that has caused a lot of the problems.

as opposed to the solutions. Yeah, it's another good example where you can believe two things at the same time. So on the one hand, it's important to emphasize that I'm talking about taxing the rich and in the US. For the first time in history, billionaires now have a lower effective tax rate than working class people. So that's if you look at all taxes combined, it's actually lower than working class people. Seems pretty unfair to me. At the same time, Republicans are...

correct in their assessment that government is just not delivering. And especially so in blue states and in blue cities. I think one of the most embarrassing things for Democrats right now is that, I mean, Texas... It takes a day in Texas to deploy as much solar energy as it would take a year in California. Yeah, there's a lot of nimbism in the blue states. Yeah, so many, like the not in my backyard attitude is everywhere there. So this is another example of...

you know, what we talked about at the beginning of the show, this progressive hypocrisy where you occupy the moral high ground, but you don't actually deliver. So I totally understand that. When a government doesn't deliver, it does make people more... skeptical of paying their taxes on the other hand why has government been you know not been as effective as it used to be well also because it's funding constraint so it's like this you get into this it's a cycle that goes around yeah

I think we should use what you spoke about with universities. This might be a solution. Okay. Moral ambition, right? Somebody's... hunger, whether it's ego-based or whether it's, you know, eternity, whatever it might be. What I think we should do is we take people's taxes and the more tax you pay, the more things get named after you.

Because nobody likes... I love that. Yeah, nobody likes things being... Like, everybody loves it. So you get a bench in the park? No, no, no. Benches is nothing. That's like if you paid a little bit of tax. I'm talking like highways. Oh.

Like you paid the most tax this year. We're now driving on the Jeff Bezos highway. But, but, but it must be, it must be, it's not about like the money because that's where the trick comes in. It must be about the percentage of your income that you paid. Because that's where the trick is, right? Yeah. And so you go.

An average working person, and you find their tax rates are over 20-something percent. That person, we go, okay. Jonathan Maids, there's your road. And then we just get like digital billboards. We switch the things up. I think it could work. I really like the idea. One other thing that might be easier to implement and to actually do. I don't do easy, I just do good. But maybe some magazine could have like the Forbes 400 version of doing good, right? Where like...

the entrepreneurs who, yeah, really improved the most people's lives that year. Because we know that many of these billionaires and entrepreneurs, they are ego driven. They're driven by that vanity. So can't we use that energy and that fact of human nature for good?

I would really love to see that because I think it would really drive some of those billionaires out there. It would really drive them nuts if they would be very low on the list. And they'd be like, oh, next year I want to get that. The secret is the club. I secretly believe that most of the world is just governed by how well people are treated in club environments. And if you just go like, this way, Mr. Bezos, then he's like, oh, I'm doing something right. But if you're like, sorry, Jeff.

You're not getting in. Why? Yeah, your tax rate, buddy. And then just be like, oh, Mrs. Chowalski, come on in. I think we could switch something up. We could make it really interesting. This is like the most fundamental currency of society. It's not money, but it is status. It's like, how do you earn respect in a society? One thing that I found out once I was studying these British abolitionists is that they were actually part of a broader cultural shift. So the main...

British abolitionist was a guy called William Wilberforce, one of those evangelicals. And he actually said that it was his life's mission to make doing good more fashionable. On his deathbed, when he was being asked, like, what are you most proud of? He didn't. talk about his leading role in abolishing the slave trade. He talked about his missionary activities in India. For him, abolitionism was just a part of something bigger, you know? And I think, honestly...

That's what we need today. We've got to redefine what it means to be successful. And it's fine if people then do it for, yeah, a yearning for a certain kind of status. But yeah, the way we define success today, I think is ruining us. I like this. So you're starting a new journey. We know what you're going to be doing. We know what your what now is. I would love to issue out a challenge to you, just for you, to yourself. What do you think we should check back in on?

with you in a year to see if it's changed or shifted? What's the most shaky thing in your life right now where you're like, oh man, this might shift?

In my personal life? Yeah. Well, apart from just becoming a father again. Yeah, so I've spent 10 years in what I like to call the awareness business. You know, you write books, you write articles, you stand on stages in Davos or in Vancouver at a TED conference, and then you just... hope that some other people will do the actual work of making the world a better place.

And after 10 years of doing that, I became quite fed up with myself. I experienced this emotion. You could call it moral envy. You know, you study some of those pioneers doing their great work today or some of them in the past. And you're like... God, I wish I was like them, right? I wish I was also actually having some skin in the game and actually taking a risk and not just being on the sidelines giving my opinion. There's this beautiful quote from Theodore Roosevelt about...

It's really about the people who are in the arena, not about the people who stand on the sidelines and just share their opinions.

Yeah, that's the journey I'm on right now. I've basically quit my career as a writer, I guess. It will take a long time to write another book. And I'm now... trying to kickstart this organization and to really turn it into a global movement and to help as many people as possible to join the fight against the next pandemic, against the breakdown of democracy, against the tobacco industry, you name it.

A year from now, I hope to have actually achieved something there that is not just about spreading awareness and being on a podcast that a lot of people listen to. But, you know, maybe actually. yeah, improving people's lives in a tangible way. That'd be great. Oh, I like that for you. Well, you know what? I will still hopefully be in the business of...

bringing awareness to people who are bringing awareness, I hope. And a good laugh. I mean, life is about many things. It's not just about doing good. Definitely. Yeah, man, I agree with that. But thank you, Ratka. Thanks for joining us. And good luck. I think one of the things I've always loved about talking to you is you present like a it's a very sober view of what we're actually trying to do.

You know, so some people have an idea of you that's based on clips, which is the world we live in. So they think you are the guy who hates billionaires or they think you're the guy who hates capitalism or they think you are the guy who thinks everything is fixable tomorrow. But what I like about sitting down with you, reading your books, whatever it is, is that it's a really sober look at what we could and should do in the world, you know, to try and make it a better place for everyone.

Thank you again. Good luck with the baby life. We appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jody Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackl. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now?