Rutger Bregman
Appearances
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Okay, so there's a lot to be said about that. So our daughter was born almost four years ago now. So obviously we bought all these lovely books about, you know, modern feminism and girls are smart, girls are powerful, girls are great, girls can be anything. And I loved all of that. Now, four months ago, our son was born, our second.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And I was like, okay, now I want all the books about what young men can become, right? And yeah, you really see that there's a lack of that. We all know about toxic masculinity, which is very real. I mean, we know about people like Andrew Tate, but then what is the opposite of that? I think there is something like that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I would call it heroic masculinity, you know, using what you have, your power, your privilege, whatever, to help others, you know, to help those who need you. Who would examples be? Well, I would say that, you know, we've got a lot of older stories about this. Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Hero's Journey, that inspired Star Wars. You know, think about the Frodo's, the Luke Skywalker's.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Okay. Well, or take Thomas Clarkson, you know, young men who are motivated by a mix of vanity and idealism, but then do the work. And I think, yeah, those stories are very powerful and we should get much better at telling them on TikTok to young men because Andrew Tate is giving them a very different definition of success.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yeah, well, here it is so important to be intellectually honest. And if you're really morally serious, then you don't care about your own purity or your own opinions. No, you actually want to do good. So you always got to be open to the reality that you're working on the wrong things or your solutions don't work.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I've got one example of a charity that after a big RCT, a randomized controlled trial, had to conclude that it just wasn't working. And so they abandoned the project, which is like very courageous and happens not nearly enough. I think there should be an annual award gala for people, you know, who made the biggest mistakes, but we're honest enough to admit it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
At the same time, we also shouldn't lose ourselves in moral relativism. I think that there are some things that are pretty obvious. So the way we treat animals, to me, it's quite striking. If you ask people from the left to the right today about, well, don't you think the way we treat animals might be one of the great moral catastrophes of our time?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I'm always surprised how little pushback you get, even from people who eat meat. and eat a lot of meat. But then they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably true. And then they lean back in their chair.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So that is like, for me, one of those clear examples where we've got so much knowledge now about how much suffering is going on in factory farms, how huge this industry is, 70 billion animals slaughtered every year. At some point, you got to make a choice and be like, okay, well, this is pretty clear.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
In the fight against injustice, winning is a moral duty. So you've got to recognize that building coalitions is absolutely essential to getting things done. And that is something, again, that leftists and progressives today really need to understand. I mean, I was posting on social media about, you know, the great speech that Cory Booker gave.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And then the comments are full of people, well, actually, he's like pro-Israel. And like, well, look, people, we can keep going on like this, you know, in our little bubbles. But that's really not the way... how we win next time. So if you look at the abolitionist movement, initially it was mainly driven by these Quakers who were very weird.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
You know, they had this deep belief in the equality of people. They believe that there's something of God in each and every one of us. So they were also the first who allowed women actually to speak in their meeting houses, their churches. And they didn't get much done, to be honest, because they weren't taken seriously. It was only when they started working together with the evangelicals
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
that it really became a juggernaut for change. Now these people, you know, they had to bite their tongue quite often, actually, because they disagreed on so many things. But that's what it means to be morally serious.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yeah, it's really a totally different zeitgeist. I mean, I was a millennial writing, indeed, my first book and being mainly frustrated by the fact that politics, and maybe particularly so in the country where I was growing up, in the Netherlands, had become so boring. It didn't seem like we had big utopian visions anymore.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Every milestone of civilization, the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women. I mean, all these things were utopian fantasies once. And I was like, well, what's the next thing, right? Can we abolish poverty maybe with the universal basic income? Can we move towards a much shorter working week? Like, come on, give me a bigger vision. And yeah, I guess I got what I wished for.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But it's been moving a little bit in the other direction. I think that still the arguments holds that very often idealists mainly know what they're against. You know, they're against Trump. They're against autocracy. They're against austerity. They're against the establishment. But what are we actually for?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Oh, that's a good question. Like, what are the big utopian visions? A couple of things. So, obviously, I believe we can totally abolish poverty. Like, we're more than rich enough right now, especially with the rise of AI. And I think we should use the bounty of AI and distribute it equally. That will be a dividend for all of us. It's a little bit like what Alaska has been doing since the 80s.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Oh, the sovereign wealth fund? Yes, exactly. So they recognize that the oil in the ground is owned by everyone in Alaska, right? And so they've been giving a basic income to everyone ever since. And I think we should do that in many other respects as well. And yeah, I think we should revive the dream of moving towards a much shorter working week as well.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Up until the 70s, we were using a lot of our increased productivity, our economic growth to work less. And back then, a lot of sociologists and psychologists were saying, oh, my God, the great challenge of the future is going to be boredom. Like, what are people going to do with all that leisure time? Like, we've got to find out what is the good life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And I would say that possibility is still there for us, especially now with another wave of automation that is about to happen. At the same time, we should never underestimate capitalism's extraordinary ability to come up with more BS jobs. Right? I cite one poll that found that around 25% of people in rich countries think that their own job is socially useless.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, there's no reason why that can't go up to 30%, to 40%, to 50%. I guess my point in this long rant is that there's not just a dystopian possibility. There's also a beautiful utopian possibility of how we use our technological capabilities to make a much, much better world. Just like, honestly, we've done in the past.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I think people find it really uncomfortable to acknowledge that there are these massive differences in how effective people are and how talented they are. This is something Peter Thiel talks about in his book, that there's this power law distribution going on. So some people are really 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 times as effective as others.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, look, the reason I wrote this book was that I actually became a little bit frustrated with myself. I had a little bit of an early midlife crisis because I was mainly spending time in this quote-unquote awareness business.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So then it makes a lot of sense to be hunting for those really talented entrepreneurial people who can get so much done. And I think that is sometimes uncomfortable for people who really like to believe that we're always in this together and everyone is equal and we can all contribute in our own little small ways. I think that quite a few people in my bubble don't.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
they find it hard to acknowledge. And they say, oh, that's the great man theory of history. That's been debunked long ago, right? That's that patriarchal, maybe even almost like racist idea that a couple of white men, that they changed the world. Well, it's obviously not just a couple of white men. It's like everyone can be morally ambitious in that regard.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But it is often a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens and not everyone. I think that at the point, at the same time, we got to acknowledge that it's very hard to predict in advance. Who's going to be that big builder? And moral ambition can be contagious. But I think that Peter Thiel is basically right, that there are very clear power laws in the distribution of talent.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
This is the world we live in. It's incredibly unequal. And we could fix that. And even in wealthy countries, we're just at the beginning of history. We have so much progress ahead of us, possibly, but it's up to us. Hey, David.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
You know, you write articles, you write books, you try to convince people of certain opinions, and then you hope that some other people do the actual work of making the world a better place. And at the time, I was... working on a new book about the great moral pioneers of the past, you know, the abolitionists, the suffragettes. I wanted to learn more about them.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, as always with these interviews, you've got a long list of things like, oh, I wish I would have said that, and why didn't I say this, and blah, blah, blah. But this is great. We have a rematch. No, no, no.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
No, it doesn't feel like that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I like that. So I think this is going to be the last book for quite some time, actually, that I'll write. As you know, books are a great excuse to go on a publicity tour. And if you're starting something like the School for Moral Ambition, then yes, a book is very useful to have, right? It's like this banner, a rallying cry that helps to bring a lot of people together.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But the main reason why we co-founded the school is indeed we wanted to find the Thomas Clarksons of our time to work on some of the most pressing issues that we face. And if you ask me, like, okay, what is the moral equivalent of... fighting slavery today, I guess I would say fighting factory farming. And a couple of years ago, that's actually what I envisioned doing.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So here I was, a relatively successful author, and I was like, okay, people like me. I want to burn my reputation on something that's important. So I spent quite some time in the Netherlands going on talk shows, advocating for farm animals. And at some point I was like, is this really the most effective thing? Right.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Maybe I could build something much bigger and really scale it up because now I'm just a one man's army and people like Thomas Clarkson, they got a lot done because they brought many more people into the movement. So I honestly feel that I'm doing the most ambitious thing I could be doing. But if you have better ideas, David, then please push me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But as I was studying some of their biographies, I experienced this emotion that I sometimes like to describe as moral envy, where you're just standing on the sidelines and you're just wishing like, gosh, Wouldn't it be awesome to actually be in the arena, to actually have some skin in the game?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
It surprised me a lot as well, honestly. So I didn't come up with this cause area. We went to our researchers and we asked them to come up with a list of some of the most tractable, neglected and important issues that we face as a species. And yeah, in Europe, fighting big tobacco came out on top.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
A lot of people think that we've already won this fight, that that was something we did in the 90s, which is not true at all. The cigarette is the deadliest artifact that humans have ever invented, deadlier than atomic bombs or the machine guns. So... Maybe it's not very sexy. Maybe it's like, oh, it's a little bit weird. Like, why would you choose that? But for us, that's sort of the point.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
That's how you can make much more impact, by convincing people to work on things that may not be most in fashion, but that are actually super important and very neglected.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yeah, yeah, sure. So climate change, I would say, is super tractable. We've got the research, we've got the solutions, and luckily we've got many millions of people working on it right now. I would advise people to really look for the most neglected bits of the fight against climate change. That's why we chose to work on the food transition, because this is extraordinarily neglected.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So look, the fact that it's got to be tractable, that you need to have some idea on how to actually make progress, that does not mean that it needs to be easy.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Actually, if you think you can achieve your goals in this lifetime, then you're not thinking big enough. That is really what inspires me about the abolitionists, the suffragettes. I mean, of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls in 1848, the first women's right convention in the United States, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote across the country.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And she was sick on the day of elections. So that desire and that commitment, you know, being part of something that is much greater than you are, that is moral ambition.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So that's when I quit that project and was like, okay, I'm going to write almost like a self-help book that will make my own life more difficult. Because once I've finished it, you know, I'm going to be the first person who will actually follow its guidance.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
A couple, a couple. Look, David, I'm not going to choose. I'm not going to say like, this is the one.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
That's what I'm trying to get at, you know? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's just not, I'm not a one issue guy. We live in a world where kids die from easily preventable disease every single day. That's outrageous. We could fix that. We're like more than rich enough to fix that. We live in a world where 85% of the world population lives below the US poverty line.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Half of the world population lives on less than $7 a day. And yes, that is adjusted for purchasing power. So don't talk to me about inflation or blah, blah, blah, or that you can buy more here or there. No, this is the world we live in. It's incredibly unequal. And we could fix that. And even in wealthy countries, we're just at the beginning of history.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
We have so much progress ahead of us, possibly, but it's up to us.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Can I interrupt that, David? Yeah. So that's not true.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So no, no, no. So if we look at our member base, we now have 7,000 members. It's really people from all walks of life and all ages. So we've got more ambition circles of students. We also have more ambition circles of CEOs of, people who have already retired. It's a very diverse bunch of people.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And sure, it's true that if you're in your 20s, you haven't written the constitution of your whole life yet. So it's a more flexible period. You haven't been sucked up by the Bermuda Triangle of talent yet. You haven't become a strategy consultant yet. So maybe it's easier to make a change. But there are a lot of people out there. And that's when we come in.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
That's when the Robin Hoods come in and say, well, we've got a better idea for you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So I was a very lazy boy in high school. My preferred grade was a 5.5. We have a grading system from 1 to 10, and a 5.5 is a bare pass. So I would have done just enough to pass the class. And when I became a student, when I was 18 years old, I became a member of this small student society with a small fraternity. Most of the other guys, they were quite a bit older than me, 23, 24 years old.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And they took me to lectures about anthropology and philosophy. I discovered people like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And that was the first time in my life that my definition of success changed. And I became super curious. I wanted to read everything. In our student house, I built this system that you could listen to classes from professors, even when you were taking a shower, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So there was a cable going from my room through the attic, then through the ceiling to the shower. And then I would always annoy people by... Putting on lectures from Maarten van Rossum, who's a famous Dutch historian. But I guess my definition of success changed once again, once I achieved those first dreams. Like, I honestly, I mean, I wanted to become a bestselling author.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, I basically quit my job. So I'm now an entrepreneur. I co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, which is an organization that helps as many people as possible to devote their career to some of the most pressing challenges we face as a species. So we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. Robin Hood famously took away the money from the rich.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I wanted to write big books. But then you've done that and you've written a big book about human nature and you're in your early 30s and you're like, okay, what's the next ladder? And how can I use what I have to do much more good? Honestly, it was also the experience of becoming a bit more wealthy. I mean... I'm not a billionaire, but I am a bestselling author.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So I became much richer than I ever expected I would. At first, I thought I would just become a history teacher or something like that. So that also caused me to question like, okay, but then what do I actually do with this? I need to invest it in something. I already have a house. We have a car. I don't need two cars. I can only drive one car at a time. I guess that also led me on this journey.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, Bertrand Russell certainly had his cynical moments, and I totally understand that. In the fervor of the First World War, where even so many people, you know, who may have described themselves as pacifists not that much earlier, were swept up in this fervor. Yeah, it's a dark truth about humanity, is that we can go nuts. Sometimes pretty quickly. Look, I don't know where we'll go from here.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
I guess where I find hope is that I know of historical examples, eras in which things got really dark as well, eras that were incredibly immoral, incredibly unequal, where we just had elites that were incredibly irresponsible and selfish. And then there was a counter movement, a cultural revolution that was actually started by elites. And I think we desperately need that today.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Someone said this to me recently. If you are watching the news right now and you're not terrified for yourself, you still have some measure of comfort because you have some savings, because you have a nice job.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, we take away the talent from the rich. So yeah, for example, we were recently invited by a couple of students at Harvard who are excited to start a Harvard chapter around the idea of moral ambition. And I think that's quite fitting because like, okay, here you have the most prestigious university in the world and 45% of graduates end up in consultancy or finance, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
then you are the person who needs to stand up right now and we see an enormous amount of cowardice sadly but i guess i found hope in the simple knowledge that it only takes a small group of people to start spreading a different story and a different mentality and i like to see some signs here and there that that may be happening and i just want to put more oil in that fire
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
It's an extraordinary waste of talent.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yeah, well, look, it's a free country. So if people really desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing as often as possible and to have that nice little cottage on the beach, Sure, fine. People have the right to be a little bit boring.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But I think there are quite a few people out there who indeed may be working at, say, Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who have this dang feeling, who are looking for a way out. One of the case studies in the book is about the British abolitionists.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And it was really surprising for me when I discovered that of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, there were 12 founders and 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. So these were people who had climbed the traditional ladder of success. They were quite wealthy. They were successful. But the reason we remember them today is because they became very morally ambitious.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And there's another period where this happened in the U.S. The move from the Gilded Era to the Progressive Era is, I think, a really good example where you really had some figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, obviously, Louis Brandes, or I was recently reading about Elva Vanderbilt, fascinating character, who at first was this very decadent, woman, incredibly rich.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But then later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, she became a pretty radical suffragette and one of the main financiers of the women's right movement. She reminded me a little bit of someone like Mackenzie Scott today, you know, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S.,
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So like a decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege, right? Which is important. It's important to be aware of how privileged you are. But I think it's also very important to actually use it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, it works quite well, David. Does it? Yeah. So it's been funny. I've gotten most pushback actually from people on the left on this book and not so much from, you know, these people stuck in a corporate job. They very quickly agree, actually. These are people, you know, who... wrote these application essays about how they were going to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
You know, they wanted to work at the UN solving world hunger. But then something happened along the way. And many of them really wonder, how do I get out? What has gone wrong here? And look, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role here, but it's not the only thing. And I would even argue that it's not the most important thing.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So if you go back a couple of decades in American history, students had a very different attitude. So there's this study called the American Freshman Survey. It's been done since the late 60s. And at that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90% said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was their most important life goal.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And today, that's just 50%. Now, in the 60s, only 50% said making as much money as possible was a really important life goal to them. Today, that's 80% to 90%. So the numbers have basically reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change. And there are examples in history where it has changed. So that makes me hopeful that we can do it again.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So it begins with selecting cause areas. In Europe, we started with fighting the tobacco industry, which was a big surprise for me, actually. But our researchers convinced us that this is one of the most neglected challenges we face. So it's the single largest preventable cause of disease, 8 million deaths still every year.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And the number is going up in quite a few lower income countries or middle income countries. And there are very few people working on it. So, yeah, what does success look like? Well, making a substantial difference, of course. Smoking rates got to go down. We need stricter, better regulation.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So we did start last year in Brussels and we send, yeah, like two small SWAT teams of dedicated lobbyists, lawyers, campaigners to make a big difference there. And now the plan is to do the same thing here in the US and in Canada.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Hmm. So one of the main characters in the book is this guy called Thomas Clarkson. Yeah, a British abolitionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's become sort of my personal hero, even though he's now dead for two centuries. He participated in an essay contest at Cambridge University. And just by chance, he had to answer this question, is it okay to own other human beings?
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
He had never really thought about the question, did his research, won first prize. And then after he attended the prize ceremony in Cambridge, he went back on his horse to London where he lived. And he was still thinking about the essay and was like, if this is actually true, then shouldn't someone do something about it? And he steps off his horse and he's like,
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Well, maybe I got to be the one to do it. And you can clearly see this mix of idealism and vanity within him. On the one hand, yes, he deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people. But yeah, he's also, you know, a little bit of a vain man. You know, he likes to see himself as that historical hero who devotes his life to this great quest of abolishing slavery.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And in the first seven years, he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom on horse,
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So after seven years of doing that, he had an utter and total nervous breakdown, what we would call a burnout today. So he was really gone, basically. And when I read that, I was like, okay, Thomas, you should have done your breathing exercises, right? So, yeah, he took it a little bit too far. But let's be honest. Today, a lot of people get a burnout while they do jobs they love.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
don't really like all that much or that don't really contribute all that much to the welfare of the world. So if we're going to get a burnout anyway, we might as well do something useful.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yeah, yeah. I come back to this quote from Margaret Mead again and again. You know, the very famous quote, never doubt the power of a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And that quote is usually being used by starry-eyed idealists who say, look, we can do this. It's only a few of us now, but we can make a difference.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
But I always felt that it's a really brutal quote. Why? Because she's basically saying that the vast majority of people don't change the world. the vast majority of people are just living their lives and not doing all that much. Look, I used to think about this quite differently. I used to have a more Marxist approach to history.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
If you would have asked me something like, oh, why was slavery abolished in the end? I would have said, well, yeah, probably the Industrial Revolution, right? Probably it wasn't profitable anymore. Well, to the contrary, it was actually abolished at the height of its profitability and it was incredibly contingent.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And if a couple of people like Thomas Clarkson would have fallen off their horse in the year 1786 or a little bit earlier, then that would have been very bad news. The history could have looked very differently.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Oh, absolutely.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
So I've got one chapter in the book about Nader's Raiders, you know, Ralph Nader in the late sixties and the seventies built this incredible movement of young people who were like, we're not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We're going to go to Washington to lobby for the good cause.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And there's one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on at least 25 pieces of federal legislation. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act that saved, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives. It's really a beautiful example of what moral ambition can mean in practice.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And at some point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader to just go and work 100 hours a week for a pretty small salary because it was just the very coolest thing you could do. Now, right-wingers looked at that model very carefully.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And yeah, some historians would argue that that was like the beginning of the corporate takeover of America, where they built this huge network of think tanks, you know, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and the Super PACs and you name it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
And I think it's pretty clear that I disagree with most of their goals, but I'm somewhat in awe of that perseverance because that is really what it takes to Take the movement against Roe v. Wade. They built a whole network of 5,000 clerks and lawyers and did so many, you know, strategic lawsuits. And that all culminated in the moment of the Dobbs decision, of course. I mean, that's what it takes.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
It's about building a whole ecosystem.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Yes. So I think there's a real lack of ambition among progressives and the left these days. Take the environmental movement, for example. You've got so many people who are obsessed with their own footprint. And so there are all these commandments. You don't eat meat. You don't fly. You don't even have kids. You don't use plastic straws. But then in the
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
best possible scenario, you will have reduced your footprint to zero and you might as well not have existed, right? And then death is the highest ideal, not very ambitious in my view. And the same is true for those who are called quote-unquote woke. Often accused of going too far, right? These people. Well, I think they don't go nearly far enough.
The Daily
'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
They're mainly obsessed with policing language and using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world. And they're very good at going viral, you know, tax the rich and kill the patriarchy. Gets you a lot of likes on Instagram, I guess. But do you actually achieve anything?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
So it's pretty simple. It's a combination of two things. It's the idealism of an activist, on the one hand, and the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it's the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable and to really devote your career, your precious time on this earth, to make this world a much better place.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
You're trying to step into the footsteps of the great moral pioneers who came before you, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah, yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah, well... Look, I mean, he meditated for 60,000 hours, and then researchers put him in a brain scanner and declared him the happiest man alive, you know, because he had so much positive things going on there. And I read about that story, and I was really angry. It was like, 60,000 hours in your own head, and the world is burning? I mean, come on. There are problems to solve here.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
And look, I mean, Mathieu Ricard, that's the Buddhist monk's name. He's actually a fantastic guy, pretty morally ambitious. So people got to read the epilogue as well. But...
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Anyway, the point is, I mean, there are a huge amount of self-help books out there that will teach you how to be more mindful, more relaxed, you know, be more happy. My previous book, Humankind, was an attempt to restore people's faith in humanity. And at some point, I saw these pictures on Instagram of people reading the book saying, you know, life is wonderful. Don't worry.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
You know, stop following the news and just relax. And I was like, oh, I've created a monster. Right. This is not. So if my previous book was like a warm hug, then this is a cold shower. Refreshing cold shower.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
So look, a couple of things.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Oh, you people are just f***ing up. Okay, so a lot of people will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires. You know, I went to Davos. You went to Davos?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Basically, you know, stop talking about your BS philanthropy and pay your taxes instead. Which was... Wait, by the way, wait over break. You get invited back every year now, right? Is that? Not really. Not really. But that was obviously, you know, nice to experience. But you got to ask yourself, like, does this make a difference?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
In the book, I come to the conclusion that awareness is vastly overrated, right? It's easy to go viral shouting tax the rich or, you know, destroy capitalism, kill the patriarchy. But the point is to actually do something about it, right? To really translate your ideas into actual action and then results.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
And I think too often on the left side of the political spectrum, we see this obsession with moral purity and then also a certain kind of political irrelevance, right? What it really takes to change the world is to build a coalition, right? All these great movements, the abolitionists, the civil right campaigners, they were coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another. Right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
So I guess that's one of the pieces of advice I have here is if people agree with you for 80% of their time, they're not your enemy, but they're your ally.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
On the other hand, we have huge amounts of people, educated elites, you know, who went to nice universities, who have fancy resumes. If they go on strike, very often not all that much happens. You know, I've got one study in the book from two Dutch economists, actually.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
They studied 40 countries and found that around 25 percent of people in the modern workforce think that their own job is socially meaningless. These are, by the way, mostly people. Wait, how many? 25 percent. Yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Well, it's quite a lot, John. It's five times the unemployment rate. Is it really? Yeah, yeah. One out of four jobs. Yeah, exactly. And these people, I mean, last week I was at Harvard. Well, look at you. It's an interesting example where you meet a lot of bright young students, right, who are generally idealistic.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
But then at the same time, you know that about half of them will end up in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent. So you've got consultancy, you've got corporate law, you've got finance, this gaping black hole that sucks up so many talented people who should actually work on these big problems. So look, I am not here to preach at people already in those essential jobs.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
I am actually preaching at sort of my own people because I'm quite angry at them.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
People, you know, who went to university, who had some education, you know, who feel this responsibility to use their skill set to make a difference.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
There are places in history. I mean... Was that depressing? This actually gives me hope. This is what's so great about my job. In the book, I talk a lot about the British abolitionists. They were the most successful abolitionists. They built this huge movement in the late 18th century. And they considered their project to be part of a bit of a cultural revolution.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
They wanted to make doing good fashionable once again. What really fascinated me about them is that they were mostly entrepreneurs. So 10 out of 12 of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, they were entrepreneurs. who had built their own companies, who had skilled them. They knew how to get things done.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
I mean, in the Netherlands at the time, yeah, it's pretty sad. There was a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were mainly interested in their own moral purity. They didn't get much done.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Exactly. I remember that. And we've seen the same thing in the U.S., actually. The move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. And now back again. But we could then go back again to perhaps another progressive era. I do see signs of that.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Look, I'm a guy who comes from the political left, so I'm all about systemic analysis. You know, I'm the guy who loves to shout, like, change the system. But then writing this book, at some point, I got this feeling that perhaps, you know, this can become a kind of excuse as well, right? You can keep shouting, like, everything's wrong with the system, but... Systems, they consist of people, right?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Mead, who once said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. And actually, people on the right wing side of the political spectrum, they understand that very well. You know, Trump didn't come out of nowhere. This was a 50 year project.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
It started in the early 70s, probably with the Powell memo, for example, you know, this corporate lawyer from, you know, that was on the board of Philip Morris. And it was like, you know, let's build this whole movement to take over And then they created the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute. You need some perseverance.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah. So I co-founded an organization as well called the School for Moral Ambition. Everything I earn with the book is going into that.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We like to see ourselves as sort of the Robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away the money.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Okay, well, there you go. For those who didn't know. And... I mean, that's a worthwhile endeavor, right? But you also need to take the talent. What we've seen in this country since the 60s and the 70s is that a lot of people used to go and work in those socially meaningful jobs.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
In academia, for example, or in government, they went to Wall Street creating BS financial products or Silicon Valley creating these apps that make us all addicted. We need a talent shift. as well as a wealth distribution.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah, so people who are really cynical would say, like, look, it's all about the money, right? These people are just selling out. And I think that's probably true for some of them. But for, you know, back to those Harvard kids, for a lot of them, it's also the status, you know, of doing something that is actually cool, that is interesting.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Because let's be honest, working at McKinsey is really boring, you know, creating the same PowerPoint every day. Right, right. I don't work there, so I don't know what they're like. OK. I've heard. So, yeah, I think it's not just about the money. People are mixed bags, right?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
So status and what society values, like the kind of people we put in the spotlight who get invited to shows like this, all that matters, obviously.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Can I push back on that? Please. Again, Dutch people push back so nicely. Well, it can be different as well. I mean, there is this tendency to say things like less is more and small is beautiful. I mean, in environmental circles, they have all these modern commandments like don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have kids, don't use plastic straws.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
But then if you really focus on that individualist aspect of improving your life, like in the best
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
possible scenario you will have reduced your environmental footprint to zero you've basically turned yourself into a compost heap it's not very ambitious and if i look at some of these great pioneers like also like people like rosa parks like they didn't think small they thought big they were ambitious um so i've looked into the research and it turns out that more is actually more so if you help one person that's great if you help two that's twice as much right mathematics so
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
That's basically it, yeah. Oh, okay.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
One of the things we're doing is we're starting a tax fairness fellowship. So, right. I mean, it was nice to shout to the billionaires, you know, taxes, taxes, taxes. Now we're actually trying to recruit, you know, some of the best wealth managers, the best bankers, the best fiscal lawyers.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
I mean, that is like a thin layer of corporate responsibility over a corrupt, broken business model. I mean, come on, we've got to be much more ambitious here. We're not living in 2015 anymore where you can say, oh, I'm doing good by doing well. Ah, 2015. And let's do a TED Talk about it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yeah, no, that's not, I mean, this is 2025. We have one side of the political spectrum is a total moral collapse. I mean, democratic black sliding happening everywhere. Right. Especially people who have some privilege, you know, whether it's talent, whether it's, you know, wealth, whether it's your network, use it. I mean, people on the left, for so long, things like, check your privilege.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Yes, check it. And then use it. You know, have some skin in the game. Right, right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
I think so, yeah. It is.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
There's no tuition. We pay people to quit their job. That's how it works. For real? Yes.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Well, I mean, currently we're paying like an average Dutch salary. It's enough to live on for a couple of months. And then obviously, I mean, we help people to pivot.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Thank you. Thank you. No, it's honestly quite exciting. We have now 24 people in Europe who quit their job to fight big tobacco, for example. It's the most evil legal industry out there. They've created the deadliest product in the history of humanity. I mean, today we have this moral outrage about smartphones, right? Smartphones that make you addicted. TikTok on it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
Imagine a smartphone that is so addictive and also kills you. That's a cigarette. So anyway, we've recruited. It's terrible, isn't it? Yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
But the point is, actually, one of our fellows in our cohort is someone who used to work for Big Tobacco. She switched sides, and she knows everything about effective marketing, and now she's using that skills to fight the industry. Right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman
No, no, no. We're starting here. You're starting here. Yeah, I came to New York in September. We're building out here. It's really getting started now. We're launching our first fellowships, as I said. Fantastic. The Tax Fairness Fellowship. And do you have some people that are lined up? Well, people can apply. So go to moralambition.org if you want to quit your job and do something useful work.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
You're going to create the kind of people that your theory presupposed. So...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
obviously you know humans are capable of the of the most terrible atrocities we do things that penguins would never think of doing right um concentration camps genocides apartheid you name it but then on the other hand we're also um capable of incredible altruism and i think that you know shifting that perspective a little bit and assume and assuming the best in people and also designing our our systems of government of companies you name it around that um
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
could be a great way of making this world a much better place.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Well, you invited me back, Trevor.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Well, here's an interesting story, Trevor. So there are two species of primates who are like 99% 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
We also have the bonobos, and they're pretty much the opposite. So if two groups of bonobos meet each other, what they'll have is an orgy. That's basically their way of saying hi. So this has been a question that's been asked by primatologists for a long time. Are we the chimpanzees or the bonobos? Maybe we're both.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 other species? And for a long time, we like to believe that it is because we are so smart, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Because we have these huge brains 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Seep 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Now, what's so interesting, if you study the skeletons of humans over the past thousands of years, what you see is the popification of humanity. So we literally look much friendlier, more childish than we look 50,000 years ago. Humans have become cuter over time. Exactly, exactly. So... This is my grand theory of human nature. I call it homo puppy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
That's the term I hope to be remembered for in the annals 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
You've got a picture of him on... Of course! ...near your bed or something.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I think it's fine. You know, this discussion really reminds me of this news 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
While in Denmark, where she's from, you know, that's like entirely normal to do. I mean, that's life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
You know, as I was 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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. And he's like, yeah, that's my experience. You can go everywhere.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
You can go 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
It's very easy to miss because you're just used to it. And by the way, one final thing. I had a pretty different experience actually moving to New York. Yeah. 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Everyone's like, no, welcoming 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Be a man, be heterosexual. It works incredibly well. So yeah, you're absolutely right. 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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So then Tucker Carlson invited me on his show because apparently he liked it that I had, you know, stuck it to the global issue or something like that. 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 he didn't like that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with all of that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
It'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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I guess that depends. But it's easy to forget how wealthy people are when they live in rich countries.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Where I'm from, the Netherlands, if you have just a median income, which is about, what is it, 35,000 euros annually. So what is that, $40,000 or something? You're part of the richest 3.5% in the world. So... Remember Occupy Wall Street where people were saying we are the 99% and they are the 1%?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
My favorite story in 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
And 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
And it's a real example of survival of the friendliest, because if they were really like 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 thin veneer, and people very quickly turn into animals, beasts, barbarians. They start raping, looting, plundering. And that's also how the press often behaves.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Well, actually, from a global perspective, very often the people who say that stuff on TikTok or Instagram, they're actually part of the top 5% in terms of income.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Sure, 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
And you won't see that if you just follow the news, because the news is about what happens today instead about 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. So yeah, as you can see, I've got mixed feelings about this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So the Romans, for example, thought that they were so civilized because they didn't sacrifice children for the gods. That's a good move. Yeah. Then they did have the Colosseum, you know, and they did throw naked women for the lions, etc. But that was just good entertainment during lunchtime.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Okay. So today we like to see ourselves as really civilized because we've, you know, officially abolished slavery and the slave trade. We've got, you know, universal suffrage. In many countries we now have gay marriage. So surely we got to be the most civilized, right? Yeah. Well, that would be very coincidental if we turn out to be that one civilization who got it all figured out.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
But keep eating factory farmed 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. What the hell were these people thinking? How could they unthinkingly keep participating in that crisis?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I was a quite fanatic carnivore. Yeah, well, then what changed? I guess reading. So I think the final notch 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 last hundreds of thousands of years. And in that book, he doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So he talks about the Nazis and he's like, I don't know, describing it as... You know, just another culture, right? Just another way 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
And I thought that was very convincing, just by looking at the numbers. Because, like... 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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, they have to be pregnant every year.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
They have to be pregnant, basically. And then we take away all these calves, which is like... a product that we very often can't use. So we, we abuse those calves in a terrible way as well. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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? Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
Oh, absolutely. You know, I'm a pretty old fashioned European social Democrat. So 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. You know, they're probably going to be really bad at it. Just look at the Soviet Union.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
And the fact that we think we have to choose between either or, that it's either Elon Musk paying very little in taxes, taking over the government, or the Netherlands or Denmark where you can fall asleep on the street and it's very hard to be an entrepreneur. There's something in the middle, probably.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 noticed. I know we recently developed these amazing vaccines for the first time in history. We've got them.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So 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. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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, okay, 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...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I think that is 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So I guess one of the problems with Progressive these days is that they have all these rules of life that are 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So I do think it's valuable of people who are really privileged, who went to a fancy Ivy League university or something like that, that they really realize that they are very privileged. Maybe you guys remember from 2016 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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 an 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I think we've got to talk much more about the actual positive things we can do to make this world a 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
We're actually going to do something. We're actually going to build something.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. We're kickstarting the US chapter of the school for moral ambition. That's what my next book is called.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 got to redefine what it means to be successful.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. into 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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
What do you think? Well, I think that meaning is created by humans. And I guess one of our messages to all these, you know, privileged and wealthy people, some of them, you know, who get so rich that they can buy a building on Harvard and have it named after them. The message is like, no one's going to remember you for that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
No one's going to give a shit 100 years from now that your name on is on it. They'll have to ask Chet GPT if that still exists. Like, who the fuck is this guy? And, 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
If they would 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
It's a mixture. I think it's fine that people are motivated by, again, multiple things. It can be a little bit of vanity. I mean, 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, you know, my new book in my hands, I'm like, oh... This is awesome. That's fine. That's a completely natural motivation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 and elsewhere has not been a lack of empathy, but a lack of actually contributing to to making this world a better place, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So I guess that makes it much more difficult now for me to not be a vegan in public. 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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. Oh, man, I like that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
It 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 improve the most people's lives that year. Because we know that many of these billionaires and entrepreneurs, they are ego driven.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 year.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
This is like the most fundamental currency of society. It's not money, but it's 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 said he talked about his missionary activities in India. For him, abolitionism was just a part of something bigger, you know? Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 it's ruining us.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
In my personal life? Yeah. Well, apart from just becoming a father again. Yeah, so I 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 tech conference. And then you just hope that some other people will do the actual work of making the world a better place.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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. So, yeah, that's the journey I'm on right now.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
So 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 maybe actually... yeah, improving people's lives in a tangible way, that'd be great.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
I mean, life is about many things. It's not just about doing good.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. I've personally 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.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman [VIDEO]
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 like…
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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fundamental to our economy and then 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 how the crazy can become inevitable what did they do well like what was it that made their movement as successful as it was
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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.
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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.
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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. This was in the day when evangelicals were not just on TV trying to make money. So that's one really important lesson.
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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. And He was trying to make the argument in Westminster, in the British Parliament, that the slave trade ought to be abolished.
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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? 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...
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who were dying in droves. Then all the politicians were suddenly paying attention, right? And that was a really powerful political argument.
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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, what do all these crazy ideas have in common?
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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. It's often called veneer theory, 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 is...
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It's not just that I think it's wrong. The biggest problem is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because once you start assuming the worst in other people, that's how you're going to design your whole society. 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.