Human-Kind or Human Evil with Rutger Bregman

Historian and author Rutger Bregman joins Trevor and Christiana to debate ethics and the possibility of a better world. Are human beings innately good? Innately selfish? Which is better to move the human race forward? Which sows the seeds of our own demise?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Trevor Noah?

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• 0:35Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 1:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34Trevor Noah?

  I'd watch that, by the way.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Great TV show.

• 1:36Trevor Noah?

  That's great. I'm just like, that's great TV. We need to make that a show.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Sounds like a Japanese TV show, like The Toddler and the Pig.

• 1:42Trevor Noah?

  Toddler versus Pig.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Which one shops better?

• 1:44Trevor Noah?

  I'm actually in for the show. Yeah, we're gonna make this show, Toddler versus Pig.

• 1:54Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.

• 2:06Trevor Noah?

  Rucka, welcome to the podcast. I was thinking about, you know, having you on and I was like, do you get invited back anyway? This is the thing I found myself asking.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Well, you invited me back, Trevor.

• 2:18Trevor Noah?

  Well, I mean, yeah, but I don't think you've ever said anything against me. And I was just thinking, you're the guy who went to Davos and told all the billionaires who were there, like literally everyone, you sat there and you basically said, you guys are a bunch of hypocrites. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but what I think they heard was, you guys are hypocrites, you are not paying your fair share, and you're acting high and mighty when, you know, avoiding the elephants in the room. You went to TED and you told everyone there they should be giving away their money. And everyone in the room is like the 1%, and like, you know, poor people are actually right and like the rich people are wrong for the way they're doing it. So I really wondered, like, do you get invited back to places? Like, has, how did, like, did Davos ever invite you back?

• 3:00Trevor Noah?

  Did TED, like, where do you find that you have the best recidivism rates?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, no, I didn't, 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 when I was in this show. But apart from that, you know, yeah, people invite me back.

• 3:19Trevor Noah?

  Wait, but okay, help me out with the Tucker one. I thought that you and him would have been on the same page for what he's been saying. Where was the big divergence?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this was just after I had gone to Davos and indeed I had said some nasty things about billionaires.

• 3:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:43Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So then Tucker Carlson invited me on his show because apparently he liked it that I had, you know, stuck it to the globalists or something like that.

• 3:52Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Love it. Where's your cut up point? Like, what's the income where you won't throw shade? I'm very curious about that. What's the number?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yes, you do.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I guess that depends. But it's easy to forget how wealthy people are when they're, when they live in rich countries. So where I'm from, the Netherlands, if you have just a median income, which is about, what is it? Thirty five thousand euros annually. So what is that? Forty thousand dollars 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%? Well, actually, from a global perspective, very often the people, you know, who say that stuff on TikTok or Instagram, you know, they're actually part of the top 5%.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  But you know, I completely agree because I'm from England. And you know, well, whenever I go home, I'm like, this country is so poor. And I'm going to say that because Americans like skew your perception of what money is, right? Because there's just so much money here. Everything is so expensive. There's some, there was a piece in the New York Times recently about how they are giving financial aid to families that make eight hundred thousand dollars a year to attend private school. Because even though they have eight hundred thousand dollars a year, they cannot afford to send their kids to these private schools, which cost about seventy thousand dollars a year. And if you have two, three kids, do the numbers. And that's kind of the class that does pay taxes.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And sometimes it's just you live in a place where even though in the abstract, you know, you're like among the wealthiest in the world. You're like, how am I going to pay for gas? How am I going to pay for my accommodation? How am I going to give my kids a better life? So you can be rich here and feel really poor.

• 5:53Trevor Noah?

  Well, actually then, maybe that's, that's, that's a good place to sort of jump into. Like when we talk about people being in a 1% and in a 99% and et cetera, et cetera. Is it fair to do that to people when they're not living in the globe? And I mean this because I sometimes think about like how people see their lives. You know, politicians will always talk to people and say, "Your lives are better than ever, the mortality rate is lower than..." And someone's like, "Yeah, I'm broke, I'm poor." You know, someone will be like, "Oh, white privilege." And then there's a white guy working in like the Appalachian Mountains somewhere vibes and he's going, Where? "Where's my white privilege?" Like, "I want this white privilege you're telling me about." And then you have to get academic and explain it to him. If you were black, your situation would be way worse.

• 6:36Trevor Noah?

  What are we actually trying to do when we tell people that they're in the 1%? Are we trying to get them to give more? Or are we trying to get them to feel guilty about having more?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  So I do think it's valuable of people, you know, who are really privileged, who went to a fancy Ivy League university or something like that, that they really realize that they are very privileged. Uh, maybe you guys remember from 2016 when, when Trump was first elected, we had this big round of soul searching in the United States and elsewhere as well. All about how is this possible? And we were trying to get into the minds of the Trump voters.

• 7:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Or in Germany, into the minds of the AFD voters, or in the Netherlands, uh, into the minds of the Geert Wilders voters. Um, and you know what? Now that Trump has been elected again, I think, can we please not do that again? You know, so not another round of soul searching and looking inward and like, oh, we, all these, 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 making this world a better place, right? You've got so many of these Ivy League graduates, like Harvard. Forty-five percent of Harvard graduates go into consultancy in finance. What do they do for a living? Do they really, you know, contribute to society?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Well, you can ask them, um, and quite a few polls find out that they're often very likely to consider their own job socially useless. So I, I, I really consider that the big betrayal, uh, that, that kind of hypocrisy, where people claim the moral high ground.

• 8:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  But don't actually live up to it.

• 8:13Trevor Noah?

  So. But let's talk about, let's talk about this through the lens of different countries. I actually love the fact that all three of us come from a place where we're all experiencing the world slightly differently. And obviously, we all now live in the US. But we've all seen the idea of poverty and the idea of suffering expressed and maybe even experienced differently, you know? So when I think of the Netherlands, I think of a place where things are going well. You know, every time I'm in the Netherlands, I'm just like, wow, your roads are great and the, everything seems to be working and things are good. But then I see people voting the same way that, let's say, what a quote unquote typical Trump supporter would vote like in the US. And they, and they're saying the same things, oh, you know, our lives are getting worse, things are getting worse.

• 8:57Trevor Noah?

  I go to the UK. Now, the UK doesn't seem as up to date as, let's say, the Netherlands. You know, London might be great, but as soon as you get a little bit out, even when I went to Brixton, I was like, okay, okay.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Not too much now, Trevor.

• 9:09Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, it's true, it's true. Yeah, but there's like a part of Brixton that's super nice.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and then you cross, you go past the chief station, you're like, what's going on here?

• 9:17Trevor Noah?

  Exactly, there's always one station.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:19Trevor Noah?

  But even then, when I'm in the UK, I'm like, oh, wow, this is, I understand that for your country, you're having a tough time. But the people there are really like, wow, this is the worst experience we're having, it's all going down. And then in South Africa, it's the same thing at a different standard or quality of living. And so it almost, it almost makes me wonder, I go, what is more important? What's actually happening to people or how they feel about what is happening to them? Do you, do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what you think, in the UK, do you think how they feel matches up with their lives? Or do you think they just notice their lives depending on how they feel?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  You know, it's interesting, maybe because now I compare the US to the UK a lot more now. I've lived here for like nearly ten years.

• 9:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And, you know, when I go back to the UK, everyone's like, oh, my God, the guns.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  They're like, oh, the guns and healthcare and obviously Trump and the other lady that was trying to be president. They're like, you live in a crazy place. But the thing I have noticed is kind of like this, because of austerity, I don't know how much you know about the Tory government. It's kind of like this urban, suburban, rural blight. You can see the lack of investment.

• 10:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you can.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  In people and the country. And.

• 10:24Trevor Noah?

  Stores are boarded up.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Stores are boarded up.

• 10:27Trevor Noah?

  Delapidated.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the where I used to work, I used to work in this department store called Alders, which is now closed in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon. And if you go to the Whitgift Centre now, it used to be this like bustling kind of shopping mall. And now you're like, it's like a ghost town, right? Like this NHS, which is like brilliant, free healthcare, but people are like, I'm on a list for two years to get a knee replacement.

• 10:48Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  And when I go into central London, a lot of the wealth I see is foreign wealth. I don't necessarily come across people like I was born and raised in London and I made my dream come true here. So, you know, I see the, I just see this have, the gap between the have and the have not seems to be getting wider everywhere. But in America, it's more acute because there's just so much money here, if that makes sense.

• 11:09Trevor Noah?

  That makes a lot of sense. Raka, I, I want to know, like, when I think of you, and I think maybe this is probably how most people see you in the world who are familiar with your work, you know? They, they see the historian, they see somebody who's a journalist, and I think in many ways, they also see somebody who is really adept at looking at studies and the way the world actually works versus how we think it works. So when you look at three different places where people have the same feeling, even though they're having a different experience, what do you think it tells us about how people are experiencing the world?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  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 realise, oh, wow, so it's not, there are different ways to doing things, right? And that's just like history. I think the main lesson of studying history is that things can be different. There's nothing inevitable about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. I've personally also always been fascinated by, by this question of how radical ideas, seemingly crazy ideas, can over the years and decades become reality, both for, for better and for worse. Um, actually, I, I spend about a year studying the abolitionist movement, mainly the British abolitionist movement, because that was the most successful one.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And what you realise, if you go back to, say, the year seventeen fifty, 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, you know, that that could never happen and we really need this, you know, this is like 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.

• 12:56Trevor Noah?

  What did they do well? Like, what was it that made their movement as successful as it was?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  You know, you could write a very long book about that. I think that actually

• 13:04Trevor Noah?

  I mean, that's what you do. It's exactly what you do.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So as I was studying, in particular, the British abolitionist movement, I was like, this is a almost like a self-help book for modern day activists and revolutionaries. Because there are so many lessons we can learn from it. One of the first big lessons is that it takes a coalition. So very often these days, people are, I think, too purist about their ideals, right? They only want to work together with people who are exactly on the same side. But then you study some of these great movements and you realize that they were actually coalitions of people who very often disagree vehemently about, you know, pretty fundamental things.

• 13:42Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn.

• 13:43Speaker 01

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

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And from a modern day perspective, you would say, well, obviously, your most powerful argument is that this is the most immoral system that ever existed, right? It is The historians of the future will judge us very harshly for this. Well, actually, that didn't work at all. What Thomas Clarkson did discover is that once he started advocating for the suffering of white sailors on these ships, who were dying in droves. Then all the politicians were suddenly paying attention, right? And that was a really powerful political argument.

• 14:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I mean, this is something I'll chat to friends about when I think about movements or ideas. I go, oftentimes, we think, because we live in the age of the most morality. We think that morality is what moves people. But most of the time, it's an incentive that's, you know, just attached to the other person. Oftentimes, it's financial, but when it's not, it's literally directly attached to them. And so you think of like Martin Luther King. It's amazing how the boycott was really like, you know, one of the biggest tools in his arsenal. It was like, oh, hey, black people are not going to ride on your buses. We're not going to like, you know, support your businesses. And then people are like, ah, okay. Apartheid in South Africa. As much as it was like, yeah, shame and this and that, it was the world saying, yeah,

• 15:33Trevor Noah?

  we're not going to buy your stuff and we're not going to sell you stuff. And then at some point, the apartheid government says, this is not, this is not sustainable for us. We can't, we can't keep doing this. And so then it makes me wonder, like, with your work, you know, you talk about like humans being kind and being good, et cetera. But then the work that you study seems to suggest that kindness isn't necessarily the thing that moves us in the right direction. So how do you deal with the paradox in your own work?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  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, you know, which is called a universal basic income? Can't we abolish your borders around the globe? Can't we move to a much more participatory form of democracy? And at some point, I started to think, you know, what do all these crazy ideas have in common? Well, it's a different way of looking at humans. It's a more hopeful and more optimistic view of human nature. There's this old theory which says that humans, deep down, are just fundamentally selfish, right? It's often called veneer theory, you know, the idea that civilization is just a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature. And I think the problem with that theory.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  It's it's not just that I think it's wrong. The the biggest problem is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 16:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Because once you start assuming the worst in other people, that's how you're going to design your whole society, right? You're going to have a society with a lot of bureaucracies, with a lot of cameras, with a lot of police. And you're going to bring out the worst in people. You're you're going to create the kind of people that your theory presupposed. So obviously, you know, humans are capable of the of the most terrible atrocities. We do things that penguins would never think of doing, right? Concentration camps, genocides, apartheid, you name it. But then, on the other hand, we're also capable of incredible altruism. And I think that, you know, shifting that perspective a little bit and assume and assuming the best in people

• 17:32Speaker 01

  and also designing our our systems of government, of of companies, you name it, around that,

• 17:38Speaker 01

  could be a great way of making this world a much better place.

• 17:40Trevor Noah?

  I actually think animals are as capable as we are. I think, maybe I'm in the minority here. I think animals are literally just like us.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Oh, you know.

• 17:50Trevor Noah?

  I just don't think they have like the systems.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, I have a vendetta against dolphins.

• 17:54Trevor Noah?

  Wait, tell me more.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Dolphins are like rapists. They're like the most evil.

• 17:57Trevor Noah?

  No, I don't, okay, I don't agree with this, nope.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Dolphins?

• 17:59Trevor Noah?

  Tell your story.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  Dolphins like seduce people.

• 18:02Trevor Noah?

  Tell, tell your story.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Just read up on the stuff that dolphins do.

• 18:05Trevor Noah?

  Tell me what you've read up on, and then we will fight about this. I don't like this anti dolphin, please go.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I am very anti dolphin.

• 18:12Trevor Noah?

  Tell me what you've read.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  I know that dolphins are capable of rape. They often do rape.

• 18:16Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Just like male cats.

• 18:17Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  And pigs are incredibly intelligent.

• 18:21Trevor Noah?

  Let's stick with dolphins. Don't run away from dolphins, Cristiano.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  No, but my point is, no, because like every, at The Daily Show, it's like a bit about how much I hate dolphins. And I seem like a weirdo because I hate dolphins. But I'm just saying that there are some animals.

• 18:35Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  That are capable of like being incredibly cruel.

• 18:38Trevor Noah?

  Here's, here's the, I agree with, I look, I'm on the same page. Animals, I think, can be as, what we consider cruel.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:45Trevor Noah?

  As.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  For sport, just for pleasure.

• 18:47Trevor Noah?

  As we can.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:48Trevor Noah?

  I will say this, however, about dolphins. We take for granted how intelligent dolphins are, right? We take for granted that dolphins do things for pleasure. They they have many of the aptitudes that humans have, right? So they'll even like smoke pufferfish, right? Like a lot of people don't know that. They'll literally smoke pufferfish and get high, right? They poke it, it blows up, then they they have the toxin, okay? So if dolphins are as smart as we are, how do we know that they aren't engaging in S and M the way humans do? And we are watching it from the outside. If you watched Fifty Shades of Grey as an animal, you would be like, this is this is torture. This is a terrible story of torture. Because you don't understand what they're saying. You don't understand. You're just watching somebody tie another person up and whip them.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Okay, but I'm I'm I'm but what I'm trying to say, I'm actually disagreeing with our friend Rutgers here, like belief that things can be eternally good or bad.

• 19:42Trevor Noah?

  I agree with you. I think animals, we are. And what I mean by that is I go, I think every animal does the most terrible things. But because they don't have systems, they haven't figured out ways to to like expand them outward. Do you know what I mean, Rutgers? Like, I like, okay, for instance, I I'm bad with like specific troops and what the names of the different chimps or monkeys are. So don't correct me on this. Chimp Twitter, chimp TikTok, monkey crew, whatever. I know it's wrong, but I know they do it. There's a group of monkeys or whatever they are somewhere. And what they'll often do is they'll invade the territory of other chimpanzees or monkeys, and they'll slaughter all of them, no reason. They just like slaughter them.

• 20:25Trevor Noah?

  And then they'll like play around with the entrails everywhere. And then they'll just leave.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Well, here's an interesting story, Trevor. So there are two species of primates who are like ninety nine percent genetically similar to us. On the one hand, you've got the chimpanzees, who indeed behave pretty much like you just described. So like a tribe of chimpanzees meets another tribe of chimpanzees that they never met before, you know, and it can get pretty violent. Now, we also have the bonobos and they're pretty much the opposite. So if like two groups of bonobos meet each other, what they'll have is an orgy. You know, that's their, basically their way of saying hi. So this has been a question that's, that's, that's been asked by primatologists for a long time. Like, are we the chimpanzees or the bonobos?

• 21:12Trevor Noah?

  Maybe we're both.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  I think men are the chimpanzees. You know, I want all the restraints on men and everyone else is fine. We already know, like, I'm a messandrist in the making.

• 21:20Trevor Noah?

  Wow, you're just gonna throw us all under the bus at the same time.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, men are predators. Men are scary. I don't speak to men after 5pm. They aren't like my husband or Trevor or my dad. That's my general rule.

• 21:31Trevor Noah?

  After 5pm.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  They aren't like, they have to be vetted like Trevor or like my husband and my son.

• 21:36Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  And my life has never been better, never been better.

• 21:40Trevor Noah?

  Actually, Rokka, how do you respond to this? So as the person who writes a book talking about how humans are kind, how do you respond to people who say to you, well, then what about murders? Well, then what about serial killers? Well, then what about, like, there's many bad things that happen in the world. How do you respond to them and what data do you use to support it?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the problem. If you write a book about human decency is that you have to go on for hundreds of pages about all the terrible things we do. Look, for me, it all starts with this question. How have we conquered the globe, right? Why have humans been so successful compared to, to other species? And for a long time, we like to believe that it is because we are so smart, right? Because we have these huge brains that take up, what is it, 20, 25% of our energy? But then, you know, scientists started studying other animals. And again, as you, as you just said, they're, they're pretty similar to us in many respects. There, there's now a new group of scientists who think that what is made as special as a species is something called survival of the friendliest. It's, 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

• 22:45Speaker 01

  to the next generation, because that basically helped people to work together on a skill 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? Sheep 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 is in their genetic profile, but they also get like these um, these floppy ears or white spots in their fur. And most importantly, they look a little bit more childlike and they also become more playful. Now, what's so interesting, if you study the skeletons of humans over the past, you know, thousands of years,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  what you see is the puppification of humanity. Uh, so we, we literally look much like friendlier, more, more childish than we look fifty thousand.

• 23:38Trevor Noah?

  Humans have become cuter over time.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So this is my grand theory of, of human nature. I called homo puppy. That's the term I hope to be remembered for in the analysis of science. But it's very, very much contrary to the way people often think about, you know, how we have conquered the globe, right? That we, you know, we, we

• 23:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  We murdered all the Neanderthals or something like that. Well, actually, modern scientists think pretty much the opposite.

• 24:01Trevor Noah?

  So I believe that theory. And the reason I believe it is because I drive. I know a lot of people who are anti-humans and they'll be like, you can't trust humans, you can't. Then I go, but you drive. If you spend any time driving, you believe humankind is good.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  No, I drive perpetually terrified.

• 24:15Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but you drive.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Because I, I live in Los Angeles.

• 24:18Trevor Noah?

  No, but you drive. If you drive, you are inherently believing that every other person on the road who's driving is going to respect a painted white line. This is literally what separates you.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  That's not morality, that's just a reason. I believe humans are rational.

• 24:33Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but what I'm saying is that's what I believe in. I think we have made it all about like kindness.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:38Trevor Noah?

  When really, most of humankind is rational. And so in our rationality, I believe we are rational enough to realize that it's not a zero-sum game. And so when you see somebody else's child fall, you'll pick them up most times.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 24:52Trevor Noah?

  No, but I, I think that's, that's why we exist as people.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Have you been to a park recently, Trevor?

• 24:56Trevor Noah?

  Have I been to? Yeah, but now, now you modern parents, you're not even allowed to like, look at another person's child or help them. When I grew up, when I grew, even in South Africa now, people can still be like friendly and help you with your child. You're talking about a very specific, like sad thing that's happened in America. I argue for the most part, human beings. And I think it's demonstrated in our very nature, right? We get on a plane, we trust, we don't even know the pilot. We've never even seen this guy's certificate, right? We just, we just fly. It's this weird system where we, because the trust is so latent and the, the morality is so latent, we then notice the anomalies in society.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:32Trevor Noah?

  And then we go, look how bad we are.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so I understand what you're both saying, R- Raghav, Trevor.

• 25:38Trevor Noah?

  She's very pessimistic, Raghav.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Like, Raghav, I, I mean, I object to your work because you don't like Hobbes, and I agree with Hobbes. I have a very like dismal view of human nature.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  You've got a picture of him on.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Near your bed or something.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yes, leviathan.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  The old British philosopher.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I have a leviathan poster in my bedroom. No, but I, I think, and maybe it's, I think actually becoming a parent has probably deepened my, not pessimism, it's fear. That's where I'm speaking from. And a lot of people have this genuine fear of, of other human beings, of systems, of institutions right now. And I think a pronounced version of that is like the Trump voter who's like, I want the wall. I don't want immigrants.

• 26:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Or it's like a mother like myself who like doesn't believe in sleepovers because I'm like, I don't want my kid getting molested. And everyone's like, everyone's like to me, you're crazy. And I'm like, well, child molesters everywhere. They're like, are they really? But like, I think for a lot of people who are afraid for valid reasons, or, you know, you'll read a newspaper and they'll say crime is down. But like, people feel like crime is up, like women won't jog in a park at night, you know? So it's really hard, I think, for myself and for a lot of people to reconcile this idea of like a good world and people being kind with like your lived experience, I guess. And I think as a parent, I feel that acutely because I'm like, everywhere I go, I like grab my kids' hands.

• 27:02Trevor Noah?

  Raghav, you recently became, you, you recently became a parent. I, I want to know if your views have changed because you were the person who was, and, and please correct me at any point, but I mean, like, you were very much the person who's willing to like experiment and say, let's have open borders. Let's give everybody universal basic income. This is the world we should be living in. It's, open it up a lot more than you think we should because we will actually be good to each other. I want to know if you noticed any changes in yourself once you became a parent. Did you become more or less conservative in your own eyes?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. So often people say, oh, becoming a parent really make 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.

• 27:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, but you feel it, though. It's pulling you then.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's fine. You know, this discussion really reminds me of that, 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. Well, in Denmark, where she's from, you know, that's like entirely normal to do.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's standard.

• 28:20Trevor Noah?

  I mean, that's life.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think what I'm struggling with is I grew up in a very like communal culture. So there was a lot of trust with like.

• 28:29Trevor Noah?

  Leave your baby outside.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Leaving your leaving your baby at people's houses and you're like, I have to work. I do the night shift. I'm going to come pick up my kid when I can. Like, it's that type of culture. And I think in like this like hyper capitalist weird world where there are no communal bonds, like, you don't even know the names of your neighbors. It becomes really hard to be like, well, your neighbor is probably trustworthy and kind. And somebody that is as valuable as yourself. Do you know, like, I think that like our atomization is contributing to like this very real fear of other people. And people just hoarding their resources. Like, so I it kind of becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy in a way. But the way we live our lives, I think, informs it a lot.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and important that it's in the interests of those in power for us to be cynical about human nature, right? Because that justifies the hierarchy, that justifies all these power differences. You know, I was, 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 spent most of their. Their their careers, their days, writing about what goes wrong, right? So people who actually are more tuned into the news, who are addicted to the news, they're often much more cynical. And I got most praise, actually, I received a lot of emails from hitchhikers.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  There's this one, I forgot his name, this guy who like is the professional hitchhiker. He's been really going everywhere.

• 30:03Trevor Noah?

  I didn't know they still exist.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  You can go everywhere, 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 it's it's the water we swim in. It's very easy to miss because you're just used to it.

• 30:31Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And by the way, one final thing, I I had a pretty different experience, actually, moving to New York. So I mean, I like my neighbors in the Netherlands, but in the Netherlands, right? Our social circle is much more closed off. But I, you know, I I moved there to Brooklyn and everyone's so friendly. Everyone's so kind. It was like, no, welcoming to the neighborhood. Like, like, 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.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I think your experience is also like informed by the body you're in, you know? So my experience as a black woman, when I go to Nigeria and they kind of clock me as a Westerner means they're like, we can get money.

• 31:12Trevor Noah?

  You're a white woman.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  I can get money out of this world. You know, may vary in certain parts of Los Angeles and, you know, so maybe lots of people in the world are like, you know what? When I come into a space, people aren't welcoming. And then that reinforces this idea of like.

• 31:27Trevor Noah?

  Then it makes you feel like, huh.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Are are humans really kind? Are groups really kind?

• 31:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  And as you said, it benefits these billionaires.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Sometimes I get this question, maybe you get that as well, Trevor, but maybe it's particularly true for me. Well, people ask me, so Rutger, do you get any abuse on Twitter or, you know, on socials? And I'm like, hmm, not really. I mean, not really anything that hurts. I'm I'm white, I'm heterosexual, I'm I'm a man. So that's my advice. If you don't want to get abuse online, you know?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Be a man, be heterosexual. It works incredibly well. So yeah, you're absolutely, you're absolutely right that. 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? You know, is it a telling fact that I wrote that book?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 32:25Trevor Noah?

  But I, can I, can I interject with one thought here? You actually are the person who made me realize this one day. You said to me, oh, Trevor, of course you think that that's possible because of, you know, how you see the world or how the world treats you. And it's funny, Raghav, Christiana and I always have this back and forth. And I will say, yes, I am the way I am because of how the world treats me. But I'm also the way I am, or the world is the way it is to me because of how I treat it. And I don't know when the cycle begins, to be honest with you, right? I think it is easier to be optimistic when things have gone right or when you remember things going right, because sometimes I think it's more about your perception than the reality, right?

• 33:08Trevor Noah?

  And so even when I think about jogging or not jogging, I don't have kids. But the, the one thing I will say is, I think of how many parents, let's say in America, are terrified at the idea of their child being kidnapped when the data does not support it, it just does not. And I think it's very difficult in life. But we are often times at the mercy of the things that have happened to us. And so we, that becomes part of how we see the world. I think very exceptional individuals are able to see the world beyond how it happened to them and rather how they wish it to be.

• 33:49Trevor Noah?

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

• 34:21Speaker 02

  I want to preface this, I'm actually an abolitionist, you know, I'm not, I don't even believe in police. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that, like, the way my perception is shaped as a woman is that, like, the violence.

• 34:33Trevor Noah?

  Completely.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  It's not, I'm not, I'm afraid of straight, you know, I don't like men in general.

• 34:37Trevor Noah?

  No, no, complete, that's why the table is like this size, I mean, we, just to keep you.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  It's it's it's often, it's it's not just strange men, it's familiar men, right? And so it's just like, I think for some groups, it's really, I find tremendous safety in other women. Now, if it was a world where it's just like my community of women and my friends around me, they're who I lean on the most. And I'm like, oh, if the world was them, I'd feel differently. And I say that as someone that's like generally very optimistic about myself, I wouldn't have moved to America if I wasn't an optimistic person. But I've had these like core experiences that have shown me that, I guess it was a lot of racism, people are wicked. And it was, it was just, it was a racism I received as like a child in the classroom.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  I'm raising my children to be like, it's a world out there and I have a son and I'm like, at a certain age, your your boyhood ends much earlier than a kid with blonde hair and blue eyes. Um, so there's certain things, you know, you can't do in public, like you can't throw attention past ten because someone may call law enforcement. So I think like that the idealized worldview often comes, can come when you're kind of like a person who is automatically given the benefit of the doubt. And I think for people like myself and people that are like in far worse positions, that doesn't happen. And so you don't necessarily experience the kind world, even if you put kindness out there.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with all of that.

• 36:00Trevor Noah?

  Wait, with all of it?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 36:03Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what? No, don't, no, don't come here. Don't, no, no, no, don't do that. No, no, no, no, no. All of it?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  But you know, but this is what I do think. Can I say something? I think the light bearers like Rutger, the nice white people should go out there and do this type of work. I think what he's doing is very important because he is the type of person people listen to. You can have the ear of an entrepreneur and an activist because of your position. You're listened to and respected and you're using your white privilege, male privilege for good. I think it's like, this is actually the ideal. This is what you should use it for.

• 36:38Trevor Noah?

  That I agree with.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 36:39Trevor Noah?

  That I agree with. But I, I don't, look, we, this is, Rutger, I forgive you. You've stepped into a, this is a, a fundamental friend.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Ten year fucking history of disagreeing.

• 36:51Trevor Noah?

  This is us. You know, and it's good. We keep each other on each other's toes.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  I say Trevor's optimistic because he's like, he's like the chosen one, like Obama of South Africa. Everything's gone right.

• 37:01Trevor Noah?

  Everything has gone.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  You were born right at the perfect, he's like mixed race, apartheid fault, he's, you know.

• 37:06Trevor Noah?

  Everything has gone right for me.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Jon Stewart quits, he's full, like, I just feel like he's like, got this like, good karma.

• 37:12Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? So I'd be optimistic about Trevor. Yeah, I'd love the world.

• 37:16Trevor Noah?

  But this is the thing, this is the thing that I believe.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:19Trevor Noah?

  Everything you're saying is true. However, every negative thing I've also experienced. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:26Trevor Noah?

  So I grew up in a house with domestic abuse. I grew up in a country where my people couldn't work or do anything. My mother herself wasn't allowed to go. My grandmother.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:35Trevor Noah?

  So like, you, you, do you know how you've, what kind of life you've lived? When a flushing toilet was like a thing you were excited for? That's the kind of life I lived. And I'm not even saying this like a woe is me thing. I'm just like, I remember being like, yeah, flushing toilet today. Ah, no flushing toilet this month. And then flushing toilet another time. And then like you, you have your techniques. You start learning which newspapers you prefer to wipe your ass with. This is life, right? So I'm not, I never say this to diminish another person's experience. I really don't.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  No, I don't think you do.

• 38:05Trevor Noah?

  But I, but I, but I think, and you know, it's some of what you say in, in, in your book, Rutger, and when you speak. I think some of the time, it's so hard, but some of the time, the way we are perceiving something.

• 38:19Trevor Noah?

  Affects our ability to not live in that world because we are perceiving it as being that way, right?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:27Trevor Noah?

  And so, I mean, I've even learned this in therapy. I think we sometimes think, and maybe that's because I wasn't raised this way, we sometimes think it's happening to us and us alone, and we're the victims, and we're the only ones, and we're, that's why I genuinely have never worn it. I don't wear it as a cape of anything because I go, my friends had parents, mothers, who were abused.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:49Trevor Noah?

  So, in our community, this was a thing that was normal, and over time in South Africa, we fought against gender-based violence, and we continue to.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:56Trevor Noah?

  But I, because I was never taught that, no, Trevor, this is happening to you, I then didn't think that it's happening to the world, and I didn't think that I was like, suffering because of it.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:05Trevor Noah?

  You, you know what I mean?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:06Trevor Noah?

  So that's why I come back to the car analogy of it all. The reason I say I don't agree with you on all of it, but you know, I agree with you on most of it, is I go, there are still hundreds of thousands of women who do run at 5 a.m. There are still hundreds of thousands of women who do run at 10 p.m.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  You know, I carry a box cutter, cutter in my handbag.

• 39:25Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, I.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  You run with like, ever spread.

• 39:26Trevor Noah?

  No, I understand this, but this, this is what I mean. This is, this is like, one of the hardest things. In fact, you know what? Let's take it away from a personal injury in that way, and let's think of it through the lens of crime, because in, in South Africa, we deal with this. South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world, right? But it is not happening to most of the people most of the time, and most people have not been affected by that crime, but they do get affected by it, and if it does actually happen to you, it is the only thing that is true in your world.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:54Trevor Noah?

  And I cannot say to anybody who has been affected, ah, no, it's not as bad as you think, because to them, it is the full version of what they think.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 40:01Trevor Noah?

  Do, do you know what I'm saying?

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:03Trevor Noah?

  So what I'm always trying to do, and this is why I fight with my friend, because I go, I don't ever want us to live in a world where we think, like, like you said, you can only hold one thought. Some people will say, my parents didn't love me, they were abusive. I'm like, or, your parents grew up in a world where they beat you, and all kids were beaten.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:24Trevor Noah?

  And, yeah, now we don't believe that that's the right thing, and now they think it's like timeouts and conversations, but to Rutger's point, maybe in like, 15 years, maybe in 20 years, they'll be like, hey, actually, timeouts are worse on a child's mental health.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  It's already happening.

• 40:38Trevor Noah?

  Oh, well, there you go.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  There's an anti-timeout.

• 40:39Trevor Noah?

  Well, there you go.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Right now.

• 40:41Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? So I, I think there's a, there's a, there's a difficulty in processing how kind humans are. Versus how bad hu- human beings individual can be and how much, how much harm they can do versus the, you know what I mean?

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:57Trevor Noah?

  One person can kill many people and now all of us feel like the world is full of killers. But we forget that like when one person was shooting in a crowd, everyone was running.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:05Trevor Noah?

  So there's more runners than there are shooters.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  I know, I do believe, listen, I, I wanna be clear so everyone doesn't think like I'm complete pessimist.

• 41:13Trevor Noah?

  No, no, I don't think you are. I think you're a secret optimist. I think you challenge us.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I'm optimistic about myself. I keep telling you guys, but everyone, I just, um, I, um, cause you know, I, I, there's so many people in my life I love because of their kindness, right? So it'd be like ridiculous for me to say. It's just, I struggle with the idea of humanity as kind, um, cause of the way, where we are right now. But that can change. I'm open to my mind being changed.

• 41:40Trevor Noah?

  So Rokka, what, if you had to throw a Hail Mary?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 41:43Trevor Noah?

  What is one thing? One, like, I know it's hard, but just like one example, story, study, data, anything where you'd go, this is how you can believe that humankind is kind?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  My favorite story in the book is about this moment in 1965 when six boys shipwrecked on an island near Tonga. Um, I had asked myself the question if there, there'd 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. Um, 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, you know, totally forgotten, uninhabited. And they

• 42:42Speaker 01

  survived there for 15 months. Um, 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. Um, now what's happening there? I think it's really a Combination of things. Obviously, it's Tongon culture, right? Which is a very cooperative culture with very essential skills where kids learn to swim, you know, basically in their first year already. So that's obviously essential. I also think, though, that it is a part of human nature, what we see expressed there. As I said, survival of the friendliest. It's kids working together and exhibiting traits that are also very much part of who we are as a species.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  So, 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.

• 43:42Trevor Noah?

  I think I realized because of your work, the Lord of the Flies has had more impact on how we see humankind

• 43:50Trevor Noah?

  than the real story, which it wasn't based on, obviously, but I'm saying the Lord of the Flies is how people, people think it's a real thing. They're like, well, I guess this is Lord of the Flies. And you're like, that's a fiction. We have based our reality on a fiction, and yet the realities never seem to be able to create the fictions that we want to live in or want to create.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  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, you know? The most famous case here is Katrina, two thousand and five, 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 sixty, seventy years of empirical evidence of anthropologists, sociologists going into these places and actually interviewing people, doing the rigorous empirical research.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  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, if 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. 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.

• 45:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. And I think a lot of that becomes how we see the world. If we are told the world is a way, then it does become that way. You know, so I, I, I, I, that's why I appreciate, honestly, I, I love what you do. Like I say, you don't tell us the world is perfect, but you tell us that humankind is inherently kind. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long-form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium.

• 46:01Trevor Noah?

  I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads. You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watched. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going.

• 46:42Trevor Noah?

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• 47:27Trevor Noah?

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• 48:10Trevor Noah?

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• 48:45Trevor Noah?

  So, actually, Raghav, let me ask you this.

• 48:49Trevor Noah?

  As a historian, you look at the world differently because you have to. Are things better or worse?

• 48:57Trevor Noah?

  Because I have people phoning me and texting me now, and they'll say to me, they'll lead every conversation with, "Hi Trevor, hope you're well, all things considered." Or they'll be like, "Hi Trevor, hope everything's going good, considering the world we're in right now." And I understand where they're coming from, but then, there's a part of me that goes, "But when was it not bad in some way?"

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I would say the answer's pretty simple. In the past, everything was worse. If you zoom out far enough, at least.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  You know, we've seen incredible progress in the fight against poverty. For example, it's just like in 1980, 50% of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Now that's less than 10%.

• 49:39Trevor Noah?

  50%.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:53Trevor Noah?

  Our World in Data.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:55Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, tell us about it. What is it?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  It's a, it's really a great website with the, like, has the best collection of data on what's going on in the world.

• 50:02Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And the guy who founded that is a statistician called Max Roser. And he always says that there are three statements that are true at the same time. So the first statement is the world is bad. I mean, that is true. There are millions of kids dying from easily preventable diseases every single day. There are billions of animals being tortured in factory farms right now. Autocracy is on the rise, so there are lots of bad things. The second statement is also true, that the world is much better. We have made extraordinary progress and you won't see that if you just follow the news because the news is about what happens today instead of about what happens every single day. You know, 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.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  You know, if you, 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. You know, we should already have abolished most terrible diseases, like the fact that malaria still exists, that tuberculosis still exists. I mean, that's, that's just an outrage. So, yeah, as you, as you can see, I've got mixed feelings about this.

• 51:07Trevor Noah?

  So when you, when you look at the world we're in now, how do you think the historian version of you in 200 years will look at you slash us? This is something I always think about.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 51:18Trevor Noah?

  When I, when I think of the time I'm living in or even everything that happens, right? An election comes and then people are like, oh, it's, this is the worst result. I can't believe, but then literally half of the country, let's say in America are like, oh, thank God, reprieve. We are now finally on the right track. And in moments where there's no chaos, I just sit there and I go. How do we know which one actually is?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 51:43Trevor Noah?

  And how do you know how the future will view us in this? Are we the good guys of this time?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 52:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  That they are on the right side of history. So the Romans, for example, thought that they were so civilized because they didn't sacrifice children for the gods.

• 52:15Trevor Noah?

  That's a good move.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Then they did have the Colosseum, you know, and they did throw naked women for the lions, et cetera. But that was just good entertainment during lunchtime.

• 52:24Trevor Noah?

  Not a good move, okay?

• 52:26Speaker 01

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

• 53:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:19Trevor Noah?

  They're gonna look at us.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  What the hell, yeah, what the hell were these people thinking? How could they unthinkingly keep participating in that incredibly cruel system?

• 53:28Trevor Noah?

  They're gonna be on the news with their co-host who's a cow. Because animals will be talking in the future. Let's be clear on this, everybody.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  They're already talking.

• 53:36Trevor Noah?

  And then, yeah, literally.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  That we don't understand them yet.

• 53:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and then they're gonna ask the cow, they'd be like, what are you thinking? And be like, whoa, man, the things you people, you humans used to them. The human will be like, I wasn't around back then. Those were my grandparents. You can't judge me for their actions. So are you a vegan?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay. Have you always been a vegan?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I was a quite fanatic carnivore.

• 53:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, well, then what changed?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I guess, reading. So I think the final nudge came from Yuval Noah Harari. You had him on a 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 like, doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever. So he talks about the Nazis and he's like, I don't know, describing it as, you know, just another culture, right? Just another way of, of, you know, the way humans can behave. And then at the end of the book, he talks about the way we treat animals. And he has to, has this offhand remark where he says, well, this is probably the biggest crime in all of human history.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  And I thought that was very convincing, just, 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. 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, every year.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I actually love veganism, like as a way of life. It's just like, I love leather.

• 55:44Trevor Noah?

  I think it's crazy.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  I like Chanel bags.

• 55:46Trevor Noah?

  I think it's crazy. I'll, I'll be on the record and say, I think it's crazy. I think, I think, I have fights with my friends about this all the time. So actually, Raghav, let me ask you this. For a few reasons. One, the the way we inflict pain on them is unnecessary oftentimes. And we waste. We throw away so many of the animals that we've killed that I'm like, people, what are we doing here? Do you know what I mean? If you're going to inflict pain on somebody, at least like, use it, eat it. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you're gonna kill me and my family, eat us, is how I think, even as a human. Yeah. And I'm not a pig or a cow, but I don't like. The white spotted. Yeah, and I'm guilty of it too. Please don't get me wrong. I don't like the intelligence argument at all. I don't like that at all, because I find myself going.

• 56:28Trevor Noah?

  If people are telling us that we should not be eating animals because they are sentient and they think and they feel. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. So now we're making this a moral thing. So we should or shouldn't eat things that are closest to us as humans. And then the things that are not, we shouldn't treat accordingly. I don't want to live in a world where we are making that type of judgment based on what we think or how close we think something is to us. Because that's also the the argument we use to inflict pain and suffering on other people. Do you know what I mean? So we'll be like, oh, no, they're they're not as intelligent as we, therefore they can be slaves. Therefore, they can be punished and beaten and put in prison. And I I think that's like the same argument, just the other way around.

• 57:09Trevor Noah?

  So I go, if you're gonna eat something, eat it with respect. Do you know what I mean? Be like, yeah, like, I don't think a lion looks down on a zebra. You know what I mean? I don't think a lion is like this stupid zebra. That's why I'm eating it. It's just like, no, no, this is how I live. And I caught you and I eat you. Some of the indigenous cultures I bumped into traveling around the world. They have a very respectful thing, even in South African culture, you know, a lot of it. When you slaughter a a sheep or a cow, and it's meant to be an auspicious occasion, by the way, because. You know, there's this there's this misconception people have about Africans and eating meat. And the truth is Africans didn't used to eat that much meat. You would only slaughter an animal for a big occasion. It was like you were giving away your daughter to another tribe. What a loss of life, what a loss of a future.

• 57:53Trevor Noah?

  And so you would you would have this moment and in that they would teach you when you're slaughtering the animal, you first go and speak to it, you'd say thank you, you would have this acknowledgement. And so I genuinely, I don't mind like vegan or not, I think everyone should be able to do what they can, but I don't like it when we make it about intelligence or not. It's like, no. So we're saying like dumb things deserve to be killed.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:27Trevor Noah?

  Ah, I like that.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  That's the essential point. There was a recent scientific committee who published this big report about when you cook crabs alive, well, they suffer immensely, right? I think that matters. Look, I'm not fundamentally against eating meat, not at all. What I'm against is factory farming. And I think it's really important to acknowledge as a as a consumer in the world today is that, what is it, 95, 98% of all meat comes from factory farms. So if you say, well, I'm radically kind of kind of cut down the the amount of meat I eat, you know, I'm just going to eat meat that was hunted or something like that, or

• 59:10Speaker 01

  that was really raised in an ethical way, I mean, that that's fine. But then please also acknowledge that you will have to eat 5% as much or something.

• 59:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, which I think is necessary. I think we have too much of it. I want to know what you think about it through the lens of, let's say, capitalism. When I told some of my friends you were coming on the podcast, the first thing some of them said was, oh, it's the guy who hates capitalism, I love him. You know, they were like, he hates, he hates business and he hates capital, I love him. Then I was like, I don't know, does he think of himself that way? And I wondered, and I still do, do you think there's such a thing as good capitalism? Do you think companies can do good? You know, you talk about humans being kind, but in your research and in your work, do you think that can be extended to companies?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  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. So actually, one thing I like about having moved to the United States is that, yeah, some cliches are really true. There's a much more entrepreneurial culture here. So a couple of my friends launched this journalism platform in Amsterdam a decade ago, and they had this night where they presented the plan, right? We want to revolutionize journalism. We want to really change it, not focus on all the bad news, but focus on the structural

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  important things. And what happens in the Netherlands, if you pitch something new like that, you know, like 90% of the people there will say, ah, is that going to work? Ah, probably don't bother. And then if it doesn't work, then they're like, I see you told you so. I recently had a dinner like that here in New York, where someone invited me to talk to a bunch of journalists and entrepreneurs and blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, I have this idea for starting an organization that helps as many talented people as possible to work on the most pressing issues of our time. And it was like, yeah, absolutely, that's going to work. Yeah, you're going to build this huge global movement of ambitious idealists. And I can't see why it's not going to work. Go you. And actually, if you're building something new, if you're trying something new, that is really what you want. So.

• 1:01:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you want, you want, you want that push in the back. That's what you want.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, no, I'm, I'm not like, this whole debate about socialism versus capitalism, it's like a dichotomy that doesn't exist. Sweden is a capitalist country, right? Denmark is capitalist. It's like, you can be a pluralist. You can have rules. You can have a flourishing economy where billionaires actually pay their taxes. And the fact that we think we have to choose between either or, that it's either, you know, Elon Musk paying very little in taxes, taking over the government, or, you know, the Netherlands or Denmark, where you can fall asleep on street and it's very hard to be an entrepreneur. There's something in the middle, probably.

• 1:02:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I think we are living in a world where everything's being distilled. You and I talk about this a lot. It's like, it feels like the world is becoming less and less tolerant of people holding multiple ideas, even if those ideas aren't in conflict.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Trevor Noah?

  Like, people will say to you, no, you can't think that. And you're like, but why can I not think that? That because you think something else. And I'm like, yes, but these two things are not separate. They're not even in conflict with with one another. And I think if we lose that as people, we then become one dimensional in our thinking, in our problem solving. And then we, I think we experience fractures in society that aren't necessarily real. Does that make sense?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I guess my thing is on the billionaire front. I think the fact that these billionaires exist seems like a profound failure.

• 1:02:52Trevor Noah?

  I agree, no, but I, but I agree with, no, no, no, I agree with that.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  I'm just like, a billion of a thing is a lot. It's just like one billion.

• 1:03:00Trevor Noah?

  I think.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:19Trevor Noah?

  But you don't mean the people. We are going to state that for the record. She just means that.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Not the people.

• 1:03:23Trevor Noah?

  The financial thing.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  I love all the founders.

• 1:03:26Trevor Noah?

  Yes, she doesn't mean, she just means the people.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  No, but I just honestly believe that, like, that's an expression, like, you know, you say intensive farming.

• 1:03:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  It's a failure of imagination. I'm, I believe like the fact that we're like.

• 1:03:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but let me throw this at you. What if I told you you can live in a world where there's billionaires? And the issue isn't that there are aren't billionaires. The issue is where the water level is at the bottom. I think that it's more important to think about where a person who is never going to be a billionaire sits. So if somebody has a good education, and Raghav, you speak about this with like, let's say, just income and basic income and a guaranteed income. Like, I think if we lived in a world where. We're focusing on making sure that everyone at the bottom has a good time. The top doesn't really bother us that much. Then it's like, all right, there's always going to be somebody at the top. But the question is, where are you in relation to them? Does that make sense?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just could think with, to be a billionaire, you have to hoard. And I don't believe in wealth hoarding. I think it's because, like to you speaking about Occupy World Street. The thing that bothered people is that like, the gap between the have and the have nots has widened so much. And it's been at the benefit of this billionaire class. So I can't, I can't just imagine any world where we're like, we're okay with having that. If somebody makes five or seven thousand dollars more a year. Like, so I'm basically telling you, next time you go to Davos, you should be like,

• 1:04:48Trevor Noah?

  He's never going back.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Forget paying more taxes.

• 1:04:51Trevor Noah?

  Men's is never.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  You guys need to give all your money away.

• 1:04:53Trevor Noah?

  Men's is never going back. Unless you've got a billion, you're not going anywhere.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Okay, let me try and, and find a way to get back to Davos. Because I'm actually going to say something nice about billionaires.

• 1:05:04Trevor Noah?

  Oh, here we go.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  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 know, may know, we, we recently developed these amazing vaccines. Like, for the first time in history, we've got them. This has been one of the most deadliest diseases in all of world history. And it took us decades and decades to finally get the vaccine. And I was wondering, like, why did it take so long? Turns out that actually, in the early eighties, scientists already understood that we could very, yeah, 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, so between nineteen eighty and twenty twenty, around forty million people died from malaria, which is about as much as how many people died in Europe during the Second World War.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  And for HIV/AIDS, there was a massive movement in wealthy countries, because also wealthy people were dying from HIV/AIDS. So we developed amazing medicines against that, but not for malaria. The tragic thing, and the embarrassing thing is that it took a tech billionaire, in this case, Bill Gates, in the year two thousand, to say, okay, well, let's actually finance the research that is necessary, that governments are not doing it. And, and also not like the liberal governments, like socialist government Denmark wasn't doing it, the Netherlands wasn't doing it. And. I think that is, 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.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  And yeah, I think like someone like Bill Gates deserves an enormous amount of credit for it. He really changed the course of history in that respect. So, okay, that's it, that's the one nice thing I've.

• 1:06:42Trevor Noah?

  We've got a pro billionaire statement out of rock. I mean, this is, um, this is, this is massive. Don't go anywhere because we've got more what now after this. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before.

• 1:07:26Trevor Noah?

  You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads. You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watched. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply, cancel anytime.

• 1:08:08Trevor Noah?

  Therapy is one of those things lots of people talk themselves out of without even realizing it. Like it's too expensive or it's too overwhelming figuring out even where you're gonna start. But Rula is one way to make that first step feel a lot more doable, offering accessible, affordable therapy that fits your needs. Sign up in just a few minutes and get matched with a therapist who fits what you're looking for. Need to talk to someone quickly? Appointments are often available as soon as the next day. And with insurance, sessions average around a $15 copay. You can also see estimated costs upfront, so there's a lot more clarity going in. And in terms of outcomes, 93% of Rula patients report symptom improvement.

• 1:08:53Trevor Noah?

  If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

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• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Raga, I'm really curious, but for people at home who have some sort of moral ambition, but don't know how to channel it, and they don't necessarily want to go vegan, what can you do in your little patch of the world to make it better?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  So I guess one of the problems with progressives these days is that they have all these rules of life that are about, um, basically about how you live your own personal life. So you're not supposed to fly, you're not supposed to eat meat, you're not supposed to have kids, you're not supposed to use plastic straws. And yeah, to really limit your environmental footprint. I think the problem with that kind of reasoning is that in the best possible If you've done everything right, then you have a environmental footprint of zero and you might as well not have existed, right? So then death is the highest ideal. You might just might as well just kill yourself. I think we got to talk much more about the

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  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. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. So I guess we need like safe spaces for 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, that's, I guess, my most important advice. Find those bubbles, those cults, maybe, of of people who are actually like, yeah, we're not cynical. We're actually going to do something. We're actually going to build something.

• 1:11:24Trevor Noah?

  Tell us a little bit about about your, you know, it's, it sounds like you're assembling like a suicide squad of of experts to change the world, which I I love this idea. And I think I've I've loved it because I think of it through a different lens. So I've I've felt, I think, for most of my adult life, that it's sad that we funnel people into parts of life where they will have the most income, but not the most impact, you know, or the impact that they'll have won't affect or impact the most people positively, right? And it's not even because of them. It's just what we do.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Trevor Noah?

  Raka, you're going for like everyone, just like the math geniuses, the statisticians, the all these people, like, what are you aiming for? And what do you hope to achieve?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Well, take a look at all these Ivy League universities, read the college essays of the students when they come in. And it's all about the big problems they want to solve, you know, they want to work at the UN, solving world hunger, they want to fight the next pandemic, they want to fight the tobacco industry, create beautiful new innovations that make this world a much better place. And then the years go by and McKinsey knocks on their door and they end up, you know, being a strategy consultant, or a corporate lawyer, or a banker, and something is lost along the way. And I think that waste of talent. Is really one of the greatest wastes of our time. I would love to live in a society where the most ambitious, talented, driven people

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  who've been given a lot also work on the most pressing and important issues. So that's, that's actually why I've moved to New York. We were kickstarting the US chapter of the School for Moral Ambition. That's what my next book is called. So Moral Ambition is the combination of the idealism of an activist plus the ambition of an entrepreneur.

• 1:13:14Trevor Noah?

  Moral ambition, okay.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  We, 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. 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.

• 1:13:44Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, make future historians proud. That seems like a hat for some reason. Seems like a hat and I don't know what color it would be, but it's, but it, but it seems like one. I know this is going to sound like a weird question, but should we care about what the future would think of us? And, and what I mean by that is we don't know how we will be perceived by the future. We look back on many great people now and we're like, nope, they're terrible.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Gandhi.

• 1:14:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah. And for many different reasons, for me, you know what I mean? But we do it, we, we just do it, right? Rightly or wrongly, we do it. And so I sometimes wonder, I go, should we even care about the historians of the future? Or should we just be like, we're just trying to do what's good for now and then, hey, man, you future people will judge us all you want, but we're not here. What do you think?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  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, on Harvard and have it named after them.

• 1:14:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  The message is like, no one's going to remember you for that. No one's going to give a shit a hundred years from now that your name is on it. They'll have to ask ChatGPT if that so exists, like who the fuck is this guy?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  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, 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 gonna build a legacy that actually matters. If they, you know, would just have been rich or like 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.

• 1:15:43Trevor Noah?

  So essentially, you're appealing to the ego.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  It's a mixture. I think it's fine that people are motivated by, again, multiple things.

• 1:15:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  It can be a little bit of vanity. I mean, if you, if you look back, you know, one of your shows on Netflix, some part of you must think like, oh, this is pretty cool, right?

• 1:16:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  When I have, you know, my new book in my hands, like, oh, this is awesome.

• 1:16:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  That's fine. That's a completely natural motivation. At the same time, yeah, I do also genuinely care about the suffering of those who are oppressed, of the animals, all the things that we've talked about. I think it's fine to be motivated by multiple things at the same time.

• 1:16:22Trevor Noah?

  I wanna have a conversation with you after you've lived in New York for a year or two. I don't wish this on you, please let me be clear, I really don't. But I think like the amateur scientist in me does. And I would love to see how much your worldview is going to be shifted, or how, I know it will be, but I'd love to know how it will be shifted by you existing in a place that is going to push every theory that you have. You come from a place where people are looked after. You know, you come from a place where healthcare and, you know, people think about how much time you work and how much maternity leave, paternity leave, schools, what's in your food? Yeah. And I would love to speak to you in like a year or two and just see like, have

• 1:17:08Trevor Noah?

  you become more hopeful, more curmudgeonly? Have you lost hope? Or are you just like now Roderick Bregman, the billionaire? Just being like, let me just get a billion and then we'll continue this journey. I, do you, do you, do you think, how resilient do you think you are to the press that comes from living in a place? That sort of hasn't fostered your ideas.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  So I think the way to be morally resilient is to make commitments in public. I mean, that's the point of things like like marriage, for example, right? You say in public, you know, I'm marrying this person.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  And the same is true for things like, I don't know, sticking to veganism. I just said on this podcast, right? Yeah, I'm a vegan. So I guess that makes it much more difficult now for me to not be a vegan in public.

• 1:17:57Trevor Noah?

  So shame.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:18Trevor Noah?

  I like that. So you're pre giving the money away?

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. And it's.

• 1:18:24Trevor Noah?

  You know what? This actually makes me think of, we have a friend, a mutual friend in common. We've worked with, but you know, from South Africa, his name is David Kibuka. And David would always say the same thing to us. He'd always go, he would be like, I don't understand why America gives you your money and then asks you for it back. He's like, that's why people hate taxes. They don't hate taxes because they're paying taxes. They're paying taxes because they just take the money from me. You know what the tax is supposed to be? Just don't make me give it to you twice.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  He's also a guy that gives away tons of money all the time without even thinking about it.

• 1:18:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no, he does.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Gives everyone money.

• 1:18:56Trevor Noah?

  Maybe that's, do you think this would work in our society? Like, so David's side of it, I actually agree with. I think sometimes people just are resistant to the idea of giving the money. But if it was taken before they knew, they'd be like, whatever. Even the idea of tax. I know that you say taxes, taxes, taxes, and people must pay more taxes. But a lot of people will say, yeah, you know what, Radha? I pay my taxes and then the government doesn't use the tax correctly. And I don't see the roads improving and I don't see the schools improving. Oh, but you know what I see improving? I see bombs. I see more bombs. I see more fighter jets. Wow, Radha, you're telling me to pay more tax and the more tax I pay, the more missiles are made. And I think a lot of people are struggling with now, obviously, some people just want to keep their money. Don't get me wrong.

• 1:19:41Trevor Noah?

  But there are many people who feel like they're funding the worst, but not the best. And this is moving, by the way, across political lines. This is not like a Republican or Democrat thing. This is just people across the line saying, why do we have money for a bomb? But we don't have money for a road or a school. How do you like, how do you respond to that? Because it it seems like you're sort of telling people to do something that has caused a lot of the problems as opposed to the solutions.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  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. 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 it takes a day in Texas to deploy as much solar energy as it would take a year in in California.

• 1:20:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there's a lot of nimbyism in the blue states.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  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 this progressive hypocrisy where you occupy the moral high ground, but you don't actually deliver. So I I totally understand that. When a government doesn't deliver, it does make people more skeptical of paying their taxes. On the other hand, why has government been, you know, not been as effective as it used to be? Well, also because it's funding constraint. So it's like this, you get into this.

• 1:21:22Trevor Noah?

  It's a cycle that goes around.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Vicious cycle, right? Yeah.

• 1:21:26Trevor Noah?

  I think I think we we should use what you spoke about with universities. This might be a solution.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:32Trevor Noah?

  Moral ambition, right? Somebody's hunger, whether it's ego based or whether it's, you know, eternity, whatever it might be. We what what I think we should do is we take people's taxes and the more tax you pay, the more things get named after you. Because nobody likes.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:21:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, nobody likes things being like, everybody loves it.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  You get a bench in the park.

• 1:21:55Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, benches is nothing. Bench is like, that's like, that's like if you paid a little bit of tax. I'm talking like, I'm talking like highways. Like you paid the most tax this year, we're now driving on the Jeff Bezos highway. But, but, but it must be, it must be, it's not about like the money, because that's where the trick comes in. It must be about the percentage of your income that you paid. Because that's where the trick is, right?

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Trevor Noah?

  And so you go, an average working person and they, you find their tax rate or a twenty something percent. That person, we go, okay, Jonathan Maids, there's your road. And then we just get like digital billboards, we switch the things up. I think it could work.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  I, I really like the idea. One, one other thing that might be easier to implement and to actually do.

• 1:22:33Trevor Noah?

  I don't do easy, I just do good.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  But, but maybe, maybe some magazine could have like the Forbes four hundred version of doing good. Right? Where like the, the entrepreneurs who, yeah, really improved the most people's lives that year. Because we know that many of these billionaires and entrepreneurs, they are ego driven. You know, they're driven by that vanity. So can't we use that, 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 higher.

• 1:23:12Trevor Noah?

  The secret is the club. I secretly believe that most of the world is just governed by how well people are treated in club environments. And if you just go like, this way, Mr. Bezos, then he's like, oh, I'm doing something right. But if you're like, sorry, Jeff, you're not getting in. Why? Yeah, your tax rate, buddy. You know, and then just be like, oh, Mrs. Chowalski, come on in. I think, I think we could, we could switch something up. We could, we could make it really interesting.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  It is, 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, in a society? One thing that I found out when, when I was studying these British abolitionists is that they were actually part of a broader cultural shift. So the main British abolitionist was a guy called William Wilberforce. One of those evangelicals and he actually said that it was his life's mission to make doing good more fashionable. On his deathbed, when he was being asked, like, what are you most proud of? He didn't talk about his leading role in abolishing the slave trade. He said, he talked about his missionary activities in India. For him, abolitionism was just a part of something bigger, you know?

• 1:24:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  And I think honestly, that's what we need today. We've got to redefine what it means to be successful. And it's fine if people then do it for, yeah, a yearning for a certain kind of status. But yeah, the way we define success today, I think is ruining us.

• 1:24:37Trevor Noah?

  I like this. So you're starting a new journey. We know what you're going to be doing. You know, we know what your what now is. I would love to issue out a challenge to you, just for you to yourself. What do you think we should check back in on with you in a year to see if it's changed or shifted? What do you, what's the most shaky thing in your life right now? Where you're like, oh, man, this, this might, this might shift?

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  In my personal life?

• 1:25:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  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. And after 10 years of doing that, I became quite fed up with myself. I experienced this emotion, 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.

• 1:25:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  And you're like, God, I wish I was like them, right? I wish I was also actually having some skin in the game and actually taking a risk and not just being on the sidelines.

• 1:25:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Giving my opinion. There's this beautiful quote from Theodore Roosevelt about, you know, that it's, it's, it's, it's really about the people who are in the arena, you know, not about the people who stand on the sidelines and just share their opinions. So yeah, that's, that's the journey I'm on right now. I've basically quit my career as a writer, I guess. It will take a long time to write another book. And I'm now, you know, trying to kickstart this organization and to really turn it into a global movement and to help as many people as possible to, to join the fight against the next pandemic, against the breakdown of democracy, against the tobacco industry, you name it.

• 1:26:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  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 listen, people listen to. But you know, maybe actually. Yeah, improving people's lives in a tangible way, that'd be great.

• 1:26:30Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like that for you. Well, you know what? I will still hopefully be in the business of bringing awareness to people who are bringing awareness, I hope.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  And a good laugh. I mean, life is about many things. It's not just about doing good.

• 1:26:42Trevor Noah?

  Definitely. Yeah, man, I agree with that. But thank you, Radha. Thanks for joining us and good luck. I think one of the things I've always loved about talking to you is you present like a it's a very sober view of what we're actually trying to do, you know? So some people have an idea of you that's based on clips, which is the world we live in.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Trevor Noah?

  So they think you are the guy who hates billionaires, or they think you're the guy who hates capitalism, or they think you are the guy who thinks everything is fixable tomorrow. But what I like about sitting down with you, reading your books, whatever it is, is that it's a it's a really sober look at what we could and should do in the world, you know, to try and make it a better place for everyone. So thank you again. Good luck with the with the baby life. We appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:27:28Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.