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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Up until the 70s, we were using a lot of our increased productivity, our economic growth to work less. And back then, a lot of sociologists and psychologists were saying, oh, my God, the great challenge of the future is going to be boredom. Like, what are people going to do with all that leisure time? Like, we've got to find out what is the good life.
And I would say that possibility is still there for us, especially now with another wave of automation that is about to happen. At the same time, we should never underestimate capitalism's extraordinary ability to come up with more BS jobs. Right? I cite one poll that found that around 25% of people in rich countries think that their own job is socially useless.
Well, there's no reason why that can't go up to 30%, to 40%, to 50%. I guess my point in this long rant is that there's not just a dystopian possibility. There's also a beautiful utopian possibility of how we use our technological capabilities to make a much, much better world. Just like, honestly, we've done in the past.
I think people find it really uncomfortable to acknowledge that there are these massive differences in how effective people are and how talented they are. This is something Peter Thiel talks about in his book, that there's this power law distribution going on. So some people are really 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 times as effective as others.
So then it makes a lot of sense to be hunting for those really talented entrepreneurial people who can get so much done. And I think that is sometimes uncomfortable for people who really like to believe that we're always in this together and everyone is equal and we can all contribute in our own little small ways. I think that quite a few people in my bubble don't.
they find it hard to acknowledge. And they say, oh, that's the great man theory of history. That's been debunked long ago, right? That's that patriarchal, maybe even almost like racist idea that a couple of white men, that they changed the world. Well, it's obviously not just a couple of white men. It's like everyone can be morally ambitious in that regard.
But it is often a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens and not everyone. I think that at the point, at the same time, we got to acknowledge that it's very hard to predict in advance. Who's going to be that big builder? And moral ambition can be contagious. But I think that Peter Thiel is basically right, that there are very clear power laws in the distribution of talent.
This is the world we live in. It's incredibly unequal. And we could fix that. And even in wealthy countries, we're just at the beginning of history. We have so much progress ahead of us, possibly, but it's up to us. Hey, David.
Well, as always with these interviews, you've got a long list of things like, oh, I wish I would have said that, and why didn't I say this, and blah, blah, blah. But this is great. We have a rematch. No, no, no.
No, it doesn't feel like that.
I like that. So I think this is going to be the last book for quite some time, actually, that I'll write. As you know, books are a great excuse to go on a publicity tour. And if you're starting something like the School for Moral Ambition, then yes, a book is very useful to have, right? It's like this banner, a rallying cry that helps to bring a lot of people together.
But the main reason why we co-founded the school is indeed we wanted to find the Thomas Clarksons of our time to work on some of the most pressing issues that we face. And if you ask me, like, okay, what is the moral equivalent of... fighting slavery today, I guess I would say fighting factory farming. And a couple of years ago, that's actually what I envisioned doing.
So here I was, a relatively successful author, and I was like, okay, people like me. I want to burn my reputation on something that's important. So I spent quite some time in the Netherlands going on talk shows, advocating for farm animals. And at some point I was like, is this really the most effective thing? Right.
Maybe I could build something much bigger and really scale it up because now I'm just a one man's army and people like Thomas Clarkson, they got a lot done because they brought many more people into the movement. So I honestly feel that I'm doing the most ambitious thing I could be doing. But if you have better ideas, David, then please push me.
It surprised me a lot as well, honestly. So I didn't come up with this cause area. We went to our researchers and we asked them to come up with a list of some of the most tractable, neglected and important issues that we face as a species. And yeah, in Europe, fighting big tobacco came out on top.
A lot of people think that we've already won this fight, that that was something we did in the 90s, which is not true at all. The cigarette is the deadliest artifact that humans have ever invented, deadlier than atomic bombs or the machine guns. So... Maybe it's not very sexy. Maybe it's like, oh, it's a little bit weird. Like, why would you choose that? But for us, that's sort of the point.
That's how you can make much more impact, by convincing people to work on things that may not be most in fashion, but that are actually super important and very neglected.
Yeah, yeah, sure. So climate change, I would say, is super tractable. We've got the research, we've got the solutions, and luckily we've got many millions of people working on it right now. I would advise people to really look for the most neglected bits of the fight against climate change. That's why we chose to work on the food transition, because this is extraordinarily neglected.
So look, the fact that it's got to be tractable, that you need to have some idea on how to actually make progress, that does not mean that it needs to be easy.
Actually, if you think you can achieve your goals in this lifetime, then you're not thinking big enough. That is really what inspires me about the abolitionists, the suffragettes. I mean, of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls in 1848, the first women's right convention in the United States, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote across the country.
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