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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I think we've got to talk much more about the actual positive things we can do to make this world a much better place. And what history teaches me is that that always starts with groups coming together. There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, who said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world.
In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. So I guess we need safe spaces for do-gooders who come together, places where you... Don't have to be embarrassed that you actually believe that some things could be radically improved. So that's, I guess, my most important advice. Find those bubbles, those cults maybe of people who are actually like, yeah, we're not cynical.
We're actually going to do something. We're actually going to build something.
Well, take a look at all these Ivy League universities. Read the college essays of the students when they come in. And it's all about the big problems they want to solve. They want to work at the UN, solving world hunger. They want to fight the next pandemic. They want to fight the tobacco industry, create beautiful new innovations that make this world a much better place.
And then the years go by and McKinsey knocks on their door and they end up being a strategy consultant or a corporate lawyer or a banker. And something is lost along the way. And I think that waste of talent is really one of the greatest wastes of our time.
I would love to live in a society where the most ambitious, talented, driven people who've been given a lot also work on the most pressing and important issues. So that's actually why I've moved to New York. We're kickstarting the US chapter of the school for moral ambition. That's what my next book is called.
So moral ambition is the combination of the idealism of an activist plus the ambition of an entrepreneur. Moral ambition. Okay. We basically want to help as many people as possible to quit those soul crunching, not super socially useful jobs and to work on something that actually matters. I think we 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.
What do you think? Well, I think that meaning is created by humans. And I guess one of our messages to all these, you know, privileged and wealthy people, some of them, you know, who get so rich that they can buy a building on Harvard and have it named after them. The message is like, no one's going to remember you for that.
No one's going to give a shit 100 years from now that your name on is on it. They'll have to ask Chet GPT if that still exists. Like, who the fuck is this guy? And, you know, we talked earlier about the British abolitionists. One thing that struck me is that the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded by 12 individuals. One of them was a writer.
So there is a place for someone like me. One of them was a lawyer. So they can be useful as well. But 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. People had built their own companies. People had scaled their own companies who may have been in the Forbes 400 if that would have existed at the time. But at some point they thought, you know what? I'm going to build a legacy that actually matters.
If they would just have been rich or successful entrepreneurs, no one would have remembered them. It's because they took up the fight against the greatest moral atrocity of their time. That's why we remember them today.
It's a mixture. I think it's fine that people are motivated by, again, multiple things. It can be a little bit of vanity. I mean, if you look back, you know, one of your shows on Netflix, some part of you must think like, oh, this is pretty cool, right? When I have, you know, my new book in my hands, I'm like, oh... This is awesome. That's fine. That's a completely natural motivation.
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.
So I think the way to be morally resilient is to make commitments in public. I mean, that's the point of things like marriage, for example, right? You say in public, you know, I'm marrying this person. And the same is true for things like, I don't know, sticking to veganism. I just said on this podcast, right? Yeah, I'm a vegan.
So I guess that makes it much more difficult now for me to not be a vegan in public. I think we could do the same for similar things. Also with our wealth, for example, one thing I've experienced is that it's much easier to give money away if you don't have it. So for this new book, I actually thought, okay, that's like a great resource that we can use to build this movement. You know what?
I'm giving all of it away in advance because it's so much more difficult once you have the actual money in your bank account. Oh, man, I like that.
Yes, yes, yes.
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 takes a day in Texas to deploy as much solar energy as it would take a year in California.
Showing 241–260 of 273 · page 13 of 14
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