#412 — Better Things & Better People
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Summary
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, journalist, and author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind. He s also the founder of the School for Moral Ambition, which focuses on a new kind of activism: a call to action.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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I am here with Rutger Bregman. Rutger, thanks for joining me.
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Yes, nice to finally connect with you. I've been seeing your stuff for a while and just read your
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book, your newest book, which is Moral Ambition, which is a little bit of a departure in tone,
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but you've also written Utopia for Realists and Humankind. This is much more of a call to action,
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and I want to talk about the call. You've also started the School for Moral Ambition,
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which I want to talk about. But before we jump into the book, how would you summarize your focus
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as a historian and just as someone who comes to all these topics we're going to talk about?
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So my whole career, I've been fascinated by history. I studied history at Utrecht University
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in the Netherlands, and initially I was a bit frustrated by academia. You know, it seemed so
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insulated. I had this dream once of becoming a professor, and then maybe when I was 50 or 60,
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I would finally be allowed to write about the big, interesting questions of history, like,
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why have we conquered the globe? Why did the Industrial Revolution start in England, in the
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West? Why not in India or China, for example? Those were the kind of books that I really loved,
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you know, Jared Diamond, for example, Gernst, Germs, and Steel. But it started to dawn on me that
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I would probably have to, you know, specialize first and, you know, spend four years of my life
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writing a PhD, which on the one hand seemed really interesting. But then on the other hand,
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I looked at all the PhDs that had recently been published at Utrecht University, and I found all
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of them really boring. So I thought, you know what, let's go into journalism. But then I found
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that to be quite frustrating as well. You know, the relentless focus on breaking news, on what happens
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today instead of what happens every day. And then when I was 25, I got my lucky break. It was a new
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journalism platform that was founded in the Netherlands called The Correspondent. And these guys,
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the founders had a bit of a different news philosophy. They wanted to unbreak the news.
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And they said, Rutger, you can come and work here and write about whatever you want and focus
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more on the structural forces that, you know, govern our society. So finally, I could write about all
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kinds of hobbies of mine. For example, universal basic income. That was something that had long
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fascinated me. It seemed to me a really exciting idea that moves beyond the traditional political
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divide of the left versus the right. So as I said, that was my lucky break. That's how I got
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started. And ever since then, The Correspondent was my platform, my little laboratory where I could
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develop my ideas. So that's one of the benefits of not being a native speaker is that you have your
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own focus group, a tiny country that no one gives a shit about. And you can test out ideas, see what
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works, see what doesn't. And so that's how I've been writing my books for the past decade.
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Uh, first as essays for Dutch readers and then, yeah, uh, reiterating, learning, changing my mind.
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And then at some point you're like, yeah, this is a book. Let's write it.
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So again, I think we're going to mostly talk about moral ambition, but, um, big picture,
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how would you describe the state of the world from your point of view? And I mean, there's so much
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is happening in, in American politics. I mean, and it has so many global implications that we've
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basically from, to my eye, we've created an emergency for much of the world, uh, at least,
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uh, at least optically, it's, it remains to be seen what's going to happen. You probably finished
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this book about a year ago, I would imagine. What's your view of the current situation?
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So the first line of my very first book, Utopia for Realists was that in the past,
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everything was worse. You know, when we zoom out, we see that we've made tremendous progress in
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many respects. I mean, you know, this, right? The massive decline of child mortality of extreme
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poverty, especially since the 1980s progress has been speeding up. So that is wonderful news. And
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this was more than a decade ago when I was a bit frustrated that it seemed we had arrived at the
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end of history. And most of my friends on the political left, they mainly knew what they were
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against, against growth, against austerity, against the establishment, but they didn't really
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know what the next big thing was going to be. So in that book, I wanted to say like, come on,
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let's, let's think about what could be the new utopian milestone. There's this beautiful quote
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from Oscar Wilde, who once wrote that, you know, a map without utopia on it is not worth even glancing
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at because it leaves out the one Island where humanity is always landing. Now, I guess I got what
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I wished for. Uh, things are not boring anymore, but not really the direction I had hoped for,
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I guess. So, um, I've always loved this statement from Max Roser from our world and data, uh, you
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know, the fantastic website that collects all the data on, on the state of the world, basically.
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And, um, I think it's just correct that on the one hand, yeah, the world is really bad. We could
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do so much better. The world has become better. That's also true. We have made progress and, um,
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yeah, it's all of that at the same time. I would say I, just like you, I'm really,
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really terrified of what's going on in the United States right now. Things are also happening,
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happening quicker than I expected. And yeah, it's one of the big lessons of history, right?
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There's nothing inevitable about the way we structured our, our society right now. It can
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radically change. And sometimes, sometimes quite quickly, both for the better and for the worse.
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Yeah. Well, we'll come back around to existential concerns because I think one of the ways in which,
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um, the, uh, things are always getting better analysis has left people dissatisfied. I'm thinking
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in particular, the kinds of, uh, criticism and distortion Steven Pinker had to face when he
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released his books on this topic. I mean, Steven certainly was not arguing that progress is
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inevitable. He was just asking us to acknowledge how much progress we've obviously made, uh, very much,
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uh, based on the kinds of data you, you referenced. But many of us perceive more and more acutely
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how much potential energy is stored up in the system and how destructive it could be on so
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many fronts. I mean, you know, AI is the latest wrinkle here, but the idea that we could just
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needlessly destroy the possibility of building a, um, something like a utopia. I mean, that's,
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it certainly seems within reach if we could just iron out our political problems and sideline a few
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prominent sociopaths. But we do seem on the verge of screwing a lot of it up, you know, quite needlessly.
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So we'll talk about that. I'll come back around to that.
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Yeah. I guess if I can say one thing about that, Sam. So the shape of history is just
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really, really weird. So in my, in my new book, Moral Ambition, I have this one
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graph where I asked this simple question, what was the most important thing that happened in
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all of human history? And there are a couple of candidates, right? Maybe it was the birth of the
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Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad. Maybe it was the rise and fall of the great empires, you know,
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the Roman empire, the Aztec empire. Maybe it was the invention of the wheel. Maybe it was the
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invention of the compass. I mean, there are so many candidates, but then you just look at some
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simple graphs, growth of GDP, decline of extreme poverty, growth of carbon emissions. And all these
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graphs have basically the same shape, right? You see the hockey stick that starts in 1750 and it's a
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rocket that has been launched ever since. And it seems to be the case that we are, you know,
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looking at a movie or actually we're participating in a movie and we are nearing the climax, you know,
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when the music is swelling and we have no idea how this is going to end. It could be that the
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rocket totally crashes quite soon and that the story will be over quite soon, or we will break out and
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colonize the Milky Way. And maybe we will be able to build some kind of utopia. And then our ancestors
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will look back on us and say, gosh, these people were the Asians, right? So that is so weird about
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being alive today is that we basically have a front row seat to the greatest show in all of human
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history. And we don't know how it's going to end. Yeah. This is a point you make toward the end of
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the book when you point out, you know, quite accurately that the chronocentrism of past generations,
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the idea that every generation imagines that it's living at an especially significant time has
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almost always been delusional. And yet at this moment, it's very hard to persuade ourselves that
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something isn't unique about this moment. I mean, again, AI is, is the development in recent years
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that has sharpened that up especially, but even prior to that, the pace of change and the kind of
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the asymptotic nature of it. And again, the reference in the graphs, you just, you cited the
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difference between getting things close to right and getting them catastrophically wrong in this
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generation seems especially important. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I find hope in the knowledge
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that we've been in really scary times in our history and also really immoral times in our history
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when there was a countercultural revolt of elites against the prevailing morale, immorality of their
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time. So in the book, I write a lot about the British abolitionists, the late 18th century who
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revolted against the elites who were in power back then. So this was a time of a huge alcoholism in
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parliament, you know, politicians slurring their speeches. One in five women was a prostitute in London.
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You had the Prince of Wales who was an extraordinary prick, even by royal standards.
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And then there was a movement of people like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce who said,
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we are going to make doing good fashionable once again. And abolitionism was just a part of that.
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That was one of the main projects. I think we've seen something similar in the United States with the
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move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You know, again, the Gilded Age, extraordinary
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inequality. These robber barons who had made insane amounts of money with their monopolies
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in railroads, for example, and they started spending the money in the most crazy ways. You know,
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the Vanderbilts, for example, built these huge mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was
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this one mansion where they recreated Venice inside the mansion with the canals, etc. Really bizarre.
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But then again, there was a countercultural movement against it of elites, actually. People like
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Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive president, or people like Louis Brandes, who became the
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people's lawyer and ended up on the Supreme Court. One of my favorite persons from this era is a woman
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called Elva Vanderbilt, who married into this Vanderbilt family and initially really wanted
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to become part of the 400 in New York, like the richest 400 families in New York who spent the most
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money on the most silly things. But then, yeah, she divorced. She had a lot of money and became
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a pretty radical suffragette, an advocate for women's rights, and donated a huge amount of
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money to the women's rights movement, almost a little bit like Mackenzie Scott is doing today,
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the wife of Jeff Bezos. So I guess that's what I'm calling for in this new book is that, again,
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we need a countercultural movement, especially now that things are getting a bit dark and we see so
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many examples of just blatant immorality. I mean, in the U.S., the whole Republican Party is basically
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in a state of moral collapse. You know, I've got two young kids and it's not, for me, it's not really
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left versus right anymore. It's when I think about how I want to raise my kids, it's pretty much the
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opposite of how these people in power are behaving, like so nasty and basically like bullies all the
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time. But as I said, we've been here before and there have been cases in history when we overcame it.
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Don't you know they're making America great again? What about that project don't you like,
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Well, it depends on, yeah, what particular reference you have. I mean, as you know,
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I'm an advocate of tax fairness. I think it's quite unfair that billionaires around the globe
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have lower effective tax rates than working class people and middle class people. I think that this
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can be fixed and that there are beautiful historical examples in history, actually,
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in the 1950s and the 60s, when we had a much more reasonable system of taxation and actually also
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higher growth rates. So, yeah, make America great again. Yeah, I see some inspiration there in the
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Well, let's talk about what is aspirational here. I mean, one of the points you make in the book is that
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moral ambition is contagious, right? What you want is to find a mode of life that is not just
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masochistic, right, and merely moralistic, but you want something that people aspire to because
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it's just obviously good. I mean, it seems to me that the whole point of our being here ultimately is
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to make life worth living. And once we've done that, to continue to refine it and safeguard it and
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just make the possibilities of human happiness more and more beautiful and to spread the wealth
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around, obviously, right? I mean, the thing that is so excruciating is the level of inequality in our
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world and how this inequality, you know, you can, whatever delusions you take on board with respect
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to being self-made. I mean, any, you know, any five-minute analysis of really any one situation
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reveals that it's, at bottom, it really is all a matter of luck. I mean, just people are extraordinarily
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lucky not to be born in some failed state where they have the opportunity only to, you know, get
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killed at an early age or spectacularly injured or to die of some, you know, tropical disease that
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we haven't suffered in the developed world for quite some time. So, so much of your discussion
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here is focused on being motivated by these disparities, to find them morally intolerable,
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very much in the spirit of, in which someone like Peter Singer has argued. I mean, you acknowledge in
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the book that you can't merely castigate people and demand that everyone sacrifice. There's something
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aspirational about this. And I think we need to, to focus on that because there's, you know, even,
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even some of your past pronouncements, I mean, the moments for which you became famous, I mean,
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I think that probably the biggest one was when you were at Davos castigating the billionaires for
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having, you know, all flown there on private jets. I think, I think you said that something like
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1,500 private jets had flown into that meeting. And then they cry when they see David Attenborough's
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film, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. It's quite a funny experience. I was in the auditorium.
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It's on the menu. Yeah. But the, my concern there is that you can be read or heard as
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merely demonizing wealth, you know, in, in the limit, in success, what we want is the wealth to
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be spread around such that the poorest people on earth live the way the richest people do now,
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you know, a hundred years from now. I mean, something like that, whatever is compatible with,
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with physics is something we want to aspire to. So I don't think we want to be saying at the end of
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the day that, that wealth is the problem. Yeah. I can't agree more. And the left used to
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understand that. So social democracy, I see myself as an, as an old fashioned social Democrat. So
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I think in the sixties and the seventies, the left was the party of progress, right? It was the party
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of growth, of innovation, of building. Today you have ideologies like degrowth, for example,
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that to me seem to demonize wealth or luxury or whatever. And I'm like, no, like we're way too
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poor. We should become much richer. And then indeed, as you say, spread it around. The very
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first essay I ever wrote was when I was 16 years old, I had this epiphany as the son of a preacher.
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You know, I grew up in, in the church and you know, this is an age when you start thinking about
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what do I actually believe? Do I agree with all the dogmas that are served to me? And I wrote this
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essay about free will, like came to the conclusion that like doesn't make sense at all. Like surely
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it can't exist. And I, I guess that argument will resonate with you. And I guess ever, ever from a,
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from that young age, that it's also always been something that has driven me. Whenever we talk
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about inequality, I think it's especially important to, to zoom out, right? If you live in a rich country
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like I do in the Netherlands, or I'm currently living in New York, you're already part of the
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richest 3.5% in the world. So when we talk about inequality, we mainly have to talk about
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global inequality and the world needs so much more growth in that respect. Right. And, um,
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I'm, I'm pretty optimistic that we, that, that we can make that happen and that we have already
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made quite a bit of progress in the last couple of decades. But yeah, I, I can't agree more that this
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idea that, I don't know, it's so anti-human in a way that this is quite dominant, maybe also in
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environmental circles, the idea that humans are a plague or something like that, that we are a virus,
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that we are just bad. And that is just something I've always deeply, deeply disagreed with.
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Well, so let's get into the details because I suspect my tolerance for inequality is, is more, um,
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capacious than yours, at least, uh, by tendency. I mean, it's not clear to me that we want, if we
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could spread the wealth around completely immediately, that that would be the right
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solution. I mean, to bring, I mean, this is one of the arguments, really the only argument for open
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borders, the idea that your borders, national borders, and the inequalities they enshrine are
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totally unjustifiable ethically. And so people should be free to move everywhere. And when I look at
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the consequences of that, what I imagine would happen is that, okay, people would move more or
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less everywhere until there was no reason to move anywhere because everywhere was just as mediocre
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as everywhere else. And I, again, this, I come back to this, this notion of aspiration. I do think we
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want societies that are wealthy enough so as to sustain scientific advancement and, you know, artistic
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expression at the highest level and, you know, everything we, we have, we celebrate as technological
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and cultural success in the developed world when we're not distracting ourselves by pointless
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conflict. So the question is how does, if we agree that we wanted to maintain that, you know, if we want
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New York city to be a beautiful, high functioning city, right. And yet Peter Singer's analysis wouldn't
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allow us to prioritize anything in New York today because life in sub-Saharan Africa is so bad. All
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of those resources should obviously go there. How do you square that? How would you, I mean, if you could
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just start allocating funds where they should go, would you follow a Peter Singer or would you have, have
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Uh, quite different. So on the one hand, I, I deeply admire the man. He's one of the great philosophers
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of our time. And there's also a lot to like about the movement that he co-founded, you know, these
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effective altruists. They've gotten a lot of bad, bad press recently, especially since the
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SBF fiasco. But on the other hand, there's a lot to admire about them. I guess as someone who comes
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from the political left, what I like most about them is their moral seriousness, the willingness to
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actually practice what they preach. So if I go to, I don't know, a conference of a bunch of leftists,
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I don't see a lot of people giving a lot of money away. I see a lot of people talking about the need
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for systemic change and overthrowing the patriarchy and, you know, destroying capitalism or whatever.
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But very often they don't take a lot of individual responsibility. But if you go to an effective
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altruist conference, you will meet a lot of people who have donated kidneys to random strangers.
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Now, I got to admit, I still have both of my kidneys, sorry to say, but I admire the people
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who do that and who give a really substantial part of their income to highly effective charities.
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I think just like you, I became a member of Giving What We Can. And that has been a pretty
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transformational experience for me personally. It really changed my outlook on life when I started
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donating a much more substantial part of my income and the money that I had made with my books.
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So that's what I really admire. What I don't really like is, I guess, the focus on guilt. I think EA got
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started in the 2010s when a lot of people who I like to describe as born altruists, people who were
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basically always that way already when they were young, they turned vegan and gave away, you know,
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the money they got from their parents to charity. They basically discovered each other in that era when
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social media got started. And that's how the movement got going. And I think that's beautiful,
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but it's not for most people. So I couldn't take most of my friends to an EA conference because it's
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just too weird, right? It's a lot of people who are somewhere on the spectrum or at least
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neurodiverse, which is great, right? Which is EA should just continue being EA.
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But I think there's a lot of room for a different kind of movement that taps into
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different sources of motivation. I'm personally a pluralist. I care about many things in life.
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I'm motivated by, well, altruism and empathy, definitely, but also motivated by other things,
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maybe enthusiasm, maybe even a bit of vanity. And I think that's fine to be motivated by multiple
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things. What we're trying to do with our organization, the School for Moral Ambition,
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and also what I'm calling for in the book is to once again, make doing good high status to basically
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say like, if you are one of those most talented, ambitious people in the world, then you shouldn't
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work for McKinsey. You shouldn't work for Goldman Sachs. You should be working on the most pressing
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issues we face as a species. And we are trying to ground this movement, not in guilt, right?
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We don't want to see drowning children everywhere. You know, the famous thought experiment from Peter
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Singer, where he said, yeah, the shallow pond. Well, I guess most of your listeners will know
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about that. So I won't repeat the story. But yeah, I've never really liked that. It always came across
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as moral blackmail to me. Like now suddenly I'm supposed to see drowning kids everywhere when I
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take a sip from my coffee, right? That I probably shouldn't have bought because it was too expensive.
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Yeah, I've never really liked that. I would prefer to be part of a movement that is grounded
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in enthusiasm and excitement of, yeah, just the simple fact that we can make this world a wildly
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better place and that it's just really cool to be part of a small group of very dedicated idealists
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who want to take on some of these challenges. All right. So let's take the extreme case here.
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Let's take somebody like Bill Gates, who obviously lives extraordinarily well. He flies around in a
00:23:42.080
private plane, which he almost certainly owns. He probably has more than one. And
00:23:47.900
he spends a fantastic amount of money on himself. He has homes all over the place. Again, I can only
00:23:53.460
presume. I don't actually know Bill. But assuming he lives like most billionaires, he spends a lot of
00:23:58.800
money, you know, more than thousands of people in the developing world, maybe more than tens of
00:24:04.660
thousands of people in the developing world on himself. The question is, how much should we begrudge
00:24:10.560
him or anyone living that way with having amassed those kinds of resources? In Bill's case, I mean,
00:24:18.020
so you can, in the case of a, the prototypically selfish billionaire, I think that we can get to
00:24:24.240
begrudging pretty quickly. But in Bill's case, he's been really probably the most philanthropic person,
00:24:31.060
if not merely of his generation, of any generation. You know, his personal quirks aside,
00:24:36.120
again, I don't know him. I just know what I read. He's done a tremendous amount of good in the world
00:24:41.040
and his, and when I think about what is optimal for Bill, it's hard for me to see that the sight of
00:24:49.180
him struggling to figure out how to check his luggage at the, you know, the Southwest counter of
00:24:53.200
an airport, it's hard to see that, how that's optimal. So do you think he should be flying commercially?
00:24:59.540
Or do you think that if he saves time flying private, uh, where he's free to think about the
00:25:06.800
next thing he wants, next disease he wants to cure, if he, um, found flying commercially as onerous as
00:25:13.180
many people do, uh, if he would be, um, reluctant to travel to that conference, uh, where he might meet
00:25:19.780
the person whose project he would fund, et cetera, et cetera. You see the knock on effects here. I mean,
00:25:24.300
my intuition is we want Bill being Bill as freely and as happily as possible in a way that's
00:25:30.800
commensurate with him being as inspired as possible to help the world in all the ways he's been helping
00:25:36.060
it of late. So there's a lot to say about this. A lot of people indeed will know me for saying some
00:25:41.140
nasty things about billionaires when I went to Davos and also being quite critical of billionaire
00:25:45.500
philanthropy. And I think there's a good reason for that. A lot of philanthropy is just really
00:25:49.880
unimpressive. You know, it's boring people giving a lot of money to have their name on an already
00:25:54.620
well-funded museum or a university or whatever, you know, let's give Harvard more money. And I've
00:26:00.440
always found that pretty sad at the same time as a historian, I know that there are beautiful
00:26:06.080
exceptions. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
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