Rutger Bregman
speaker
273 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Rutger Bregman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I thought that was very convincing, just by looking at the numbers. Because, like... The total number of people who ever lived is estimated at 117 billion. The total number of animals that we slaughter every year is 80 billion. So it takes us just a year and a half to slaughter as many animals as the amount of people that ever lived.
And then if you look at the latest science, like every other week, there's a new paper coming out about how sentient, how sensitive, how intelligent chickens are, cows are. And I also felt so ignorant once I started digging into it. Like, for example, the fact that cows give milk. I was like, yeah, cows give milk. That's what they do. Well, actually, they have to be pregnant every year.
They have to be pregnant, basically. And then we take away all these calves, which is like... a product that we very often can't use. So we, we abuse those calves in a terrible way as well. Yeah.
So there's a famous philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, in the late 18th century who already made the point. It's not about how smart animals are. It's not about can they talk, can they reason. It's about can they suffer. I like that. That's the essential point. There was a recent scientific committee who published this big report about when you cook crabs alive, well, they suffer immensely, right? Yeah.
I think that matters. Look, I'm not fundamentally against eating meat. Not at all. What I'm against is factory farming. And I think it's really important to acknowledge as a consumer in the world today is that, what is it, 95, 98% of all meat comes from factory farms.
So if you say, well, I'm radically going to cut down the amount of meat I eat, you know, I'm just going to eat meat that was hunted or something like that, or that was really raised in an ethical way. I mean, that's fine. But then please also acknowledge that you will have to eat 5% as much or something.
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 important things. And what happens in the Netherlands, if you pitch something new like that, you know, like 90% of the people there will say, ah, is that going to work? Ah, probably don't bother. And then if it doesn't work, then they're like, I see you told you so.
I recently had a dinner like that here in New York where someone invited me to talk to a bunch of journalists and entrepreneurs and blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, I have this idea for starting an organization that helps as many talented people as possible to work on the most pressing issues of our time. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. That's going to work.
Yeah, you're going to build this huge global movement of ambitious idealists. And I can't see why it's not going to work. Go you. And actually, if you're building something new, if you're trying something new, That is really what you want. Yeah, you want that push in the back. That's what you want. Exactly.
So no, I'm not like... This whole debate about socialism versus capitalism, it's like a dichotomy that doesn't exist. Sweden is a capitalist country, right? Denmark is capitalist. It's like... You can be a pluralist. You can have rules. You can have a flourishing economy where billionaires actually pay their taxes.
And the fact that we think we have to choose between either or, that it's either Elon Musk paying very little in taxes, taking over the government, or the Netherlands or Denmark where you can fall asleep on the street and it's very hard to be an entrepreneur. There's something in the middle, probably.
Okay, let me try and find a way to get back to Davos because I'm actually going to say something nice about billionaires. Oh, here we go. I don't think I've ever done that on a podcast, but here I go. So I was studying the history of malaria, as you may have noticed. I know we recently developed these amazing vaccines for the first time in history. We've got them.
This has been one of the most deadliest diseases in all of world history. And it took us decades and decades to finally get the vaccine. And I was wondering, why did it take so long? It turns out that actually in the early 80s, scientists already understood that we could develop a vaccine. The problem was that it was mostly poor people in poor countries who were dying from it, and a lot.
So between 1980 and 2020, around 40 million people died from malaria, which is about as much as how many people died in Europe during the Second World War. And for HIV-AIDS, there was a massive movement in wealthy countries because also wealthy people were dying from HIV-AIDS. So we developed amazing medicines against that, but not for malaria. Yeah.
The tragic thing and the embarrassing thing is that it took a tech billionaire, in this case Bill Gates, in the year 2000 to say, okay, well, let's actually finance the research that is necessary, that governments are not doing it. And also not like the liberal governments, like socialist government. Denmark wasn't doing it. The Netherlands wasn't doing it. And...
I think that is something where sometimes philanthropy can play a role to do that stuff that is so neglected because it's so unpopular to do. And yeah, I think like someone like Bill Gates deserves an enormous amount of credit for it. He really changed the course of history in that respect. So, okay, that's it.
So I guess one of the problems with Progressive these days is that they have all these rules of life that are basically about how you live your own personal life. So you're not supposed to fly. You're not supposed to eat meat. You're not supposed to have kids. You're not supposed to use plastic straws. And yeah, to really limit your environmental footprint.
I think the problem with that kind of reasoning is that in the best possible scenario, if you've done everything right, then you have an environmental footprint of zero and you might as well not have existed, right? So then death is the highest ideal. You might as well just kill yourself.
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