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 she was sick on the day of elections. So that desire and that commitment, you know, being part of something that is much greater than you are, that is moral ambition.
A couple, a couple. Look, David, I'm not going to choose. I'm not going to say like, this is the one.
That's what I'm trying to get at, you know? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's just not, I'm not a one issue guy. We live in a world where kids die from easily preventable disease every single day. That's outrageous. We could fix that. We're like more than rich enough to fix that. We live in a world where 85% of the world population lives below the US poverty line.
Half of the world population lives on less than $7 a day. And yes, that is adjusted for purchasing power. So don't talk to me about inflation or blah, blah, blah, or that you can buy more here or there. No, 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.
Can I interrupt that, David? Yeah. So that's not true.
So no, no, no. So if we look at our member base, we now have 7,000 members. It's really people from all walks of life and all ages. So we've got more ambition circles of students. We also have more ambition circles of CEOs of, people who have already retired. It's a very diverse bunch of people.
And sure, it's true that if you're in your 20s, you haven't written the constitution of your whole life yet. So it's a more flexible period. You haven't been sucked up by the Bermuda Triangle of talent yet. You haven't become a strategy consultant yet. So maybe it's easier to make a change. But there are a lot of people out there. And that's when we come in.
That's when the Robin Hoods come in and say, well, we've got a better idea for you.
So I was a very lazy boy in high school. My preferred grade was a 5.5. We have a grading system from 1 to 10, and a 5.5 is a bare pass. So I would have done just enough to pass the class. And when I became a student, when I was 18 years old, I became a member of this small student society with a small fraternity. Most of the other guys, they were quite a bit older than me, 23, 24 years old.
And they took me to lectures about anthropology and philosophy. I discovered people like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And that was the first time in my life that my definition of success changed. And I became super curious. I wanted to read everything. In our student house, I built this system that you could listen to classes from professors, even when you were taking a shower, right?
So there was a cable going from my room through the attic, then through the ceiling to the shower. And then I would always annoy people by... Putting on lectures from Maarten van Rossum, who's a famous Dutch historian. But I guess my definition of success changed once again, once I achieved those first dreams. Like, I honestly, I mean, I wanted to become a bestselling author.
I wanted to write big books. But then you've done that and you've written a big book about human nature and you're in your early 30s and you're like, okay, what's the next ladder? And how can I use what I have to do much more good? Honestly, it was also the experience of becoming a bit more wealthy. I mean... I'm not a billionaire, but I am a bestselling author.
So I became much richer than I ever expected I would. At first, I thought I would just become a history teacher or something like that. So that also caused me to question like, okay, but then what do I actually do with this? I need to invest it in something. I already have a house. We have a car. I don't need two cars. I can only drive one car at a time. I guess that also led me on this journey.
Yeah.
Well, Bertrand Russell certainly had his cynical moments, and I totally understand that. In the fervor of the First World War, where even so many people, you know, who may have described themselves as pacifists not that much earlier, were swept up in this fervor. Yeah, it's a dark truth about humanity, is that we can go nuts. Sometimes pretty quickly. Look, I don't know where we'll go from here.
I guess where I find hope is that I know of historical examples, eras in which things got really dark as well, eras that were incredibly immoral, incredibly unequal, where we just had elites that were incredibly irresponsible and selfish. And then there was a counter movement, a cultural revolution that was actually started by elites. And I think we desperately need that today.
Someone said this to me recently. If you are watching the news right now and you're not terrified for yourself, you still have some measure of comfort because you have some savings, because you have a nice job.
then you are the person who needs to stand up right now and we see an enormous amount of cowardice sadly but i guess i found hope in the simple knowledge that it only takes a small group of people to start spreading a different story and a different mentality and i like to see some signs here and there that that may be happening and i just want to put more oil in that fire
So it's pretty simple. It's a combination of two things. It's the idealism of an activist, on the one hand, and the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it's the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable and to really devote your career, your precious time on this earth, to make this world a much better place.
Showing 81–100 of 273 · page 5 of 14
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