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
You're trying to step into the footsteps of the great moral pioneers who came before you, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well... Look, I mean, he meditated for 60,000 hours, and then researchers put him in a brain scanner and declared him the happiest man alive, you know, because he had so much positive things going on there. And I read about that story, and I was really angry. It was like, 60,000 hours in your own head, and the world is burning? I mean, come on. There are problems to solve here.
And look, I mean, Mathieu Ricard, that's the Buddhist monk's name. He's actually a fantastic guy, pretty morally ambitious. So people got to read the epilogue as well. But...
Anyway, the point is, I mean, there are a huge amount of self-help books out there that will teach you how to be more mindful, more relaxed, you know, be more happy. My previous book, Humankind, was an attempt to restore people's faith in humanity. And at some point, I saw these pictures on Instagram of people reading the book saying, you know, life is wonderful. Don't worry.
You know, stop following the news and just relax. And I was like, oh, I've created a monster. Right. This is not. So if my previous book was like a warm hug, then this is a cold shower. Refreshing cold shower.
So look, a couple of things.
Oh, you people are just f***ing up. Okay, so a lot of people will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires. You know, I went to Davos. You went to Davos?
Basically, you know, stop talking about your BS philanthropy and pay your taxes instead. Which was... Wait, by the way, wait over break. You get invited back every year now, right? Is that? Not really. Not really. But that was obviously, you know, nice to experience. But you got to ask yourself, like, does this make a difference?
In the book, I come to the conclusion that awareness is vastly overrated, right? It's easy to go viral shouting tax the rich or, you know, destroy capitalism, kill the patriarchy. But the point is to actually do something about it, right? To really translate your ideas into actual action and then results.
And I think too often on the left side of the political spectrum, we see this obsession with moral purity and then also a certain kind of political irrelevance, right? What it really takes to change the world is to build a coalition, right? All these great movements, the abolitionists, the civil right campaigners, they were coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another. Right.
So I guess that's one of the pieces of advice I have here is if people agree with you for 80% of their time, they're not your enemy, but they're your ally.
On the other hand, we have huge amounts of people, educated elites, you know, who went to nice universities, who have fancy resumes. If they go on strike, very often not all that much happens. You know, I've got one study in the book from two Dutch economists, actually.
They studied 40 countries and found that around 25 percent of people in the modern workforce think that their own job is socially meaningless. These are, by the way, mostly people. Wait, how many? 25 percent. Yeah.
Well, it's quite a lot, John. It's five times the unemployment rate. Is it really? Yeah, yeah. One out of four jobs. Yeah, exactly. And these people, I mean, last week I was at Harvard. Well, look at you. It's an interesting example where you meet a lot of bright young students, right, who are generally idealistic.
But then at the same time, you know that about half of them will end up in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent. So you've got consultancy, you've got corporate law, you've got finance, this gaping black hole that sucks up so many talented people who should actually work on these big problems. So look, I am not here to preach at people already in those essential jobs.
I am actually preaching at sort of my own people because I'm quite angry at them.
People, you know, who went to university, who had some education, you know, who feel this responsibility to use their skill set to make a difference.
There are places in history. I mean... Was that depressing? This actually gives me hope. This is what's so great about my job. In the book, I talk a lot about the British abolitionists. They were the most successful abolitionists. They built this huge movement in the late 18th century. And they considered their project to be part of a bit of a cultural revolution.
They wanted to make doing good fashionable once again. What really fascinated me about them is that they were mostly entrepreneurs. So 10 out of 12 of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, they were entrepreneurs. who had built their own companies, who had skilled them. They knew how to get things done.
Showing 101–120 of 273 · page 6 of 14
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