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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I mean, in the Netherlands at the time, yeah, it's pretty sad. There was a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were mainly interested in their own moral purity. They didn't get much done.
Exactly. I remember that. And we've seen the same thing in the U.S., actually. The move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. And now back again. But we could then go back again to perhaps another progressive era. I do see signs of that.
Look, I'm a guy who comes from the political left, so I'm all about systemic analysis. You know, I'm the guy who loves to shout, like, change the system. But then writing this book, at some point, I got this feeling that perhaps, you know, this can become a kind of excuse as well, right? You can keep shouting, like, everything's wrong with the system, but... Systems, they consist of people, right?
There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Mead, who once said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. And actually, people on the right wing side of the political spectrum, they understand that very well. You know, Trump didn't come out of nowhere. This was a 50 year project.
It started in the early 70s, probably with the Powell memo, for example, you know, this corporate lawyer from, you know, that was on the board of Philip Morris. And it was like, you know, let's build this whole movement to take over And then they created the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute. You need some perseverance.
Yeah. So I co-founded an organization as well called the School for Moral Ambition. Everything I earn with the book is going into that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We like to see ourselves as sort of the Robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away the money.
Okay, well, there you go. For those who didn't know. And... I mean, that's a worthwhile endeavor, right? But you also need to take the talent. What we've seen in this country since the 60s and the 70s is that a lot of people used to go and work in those socially meaningful jobs.
In academia, for example, or in government, they went to Wall Street creating BS financial products or Silicon Valley creating these apps that make us all addicted. We need a talent shift. as well as a wealth distribution.
Yeah, so people who are really cynical would say, like, look, it's all about the money, right? These people are just selling out. And I think that's probably true for some of them. But for, you know, back to those Harvard kids, for a lot of them, it's also the status, you know, of doing something that is actually cool, that is interesting.
Because let's be honest, working at McKinsey is really boring, you know, creating the same PowerPoint every day. Right, right. I don't work there, so I don't know what they're like. OK. I've heard. So, yeah, I think it's not just about the money. People are mixed bags, right?
So status and what society values, like the kind of people we put in the spotlight who get invited to shows like this, all that matters, obviously.
Can I push back on that? Please. Again, Dutch people push back so nicely. Well, it can be different as well. I mean, there is this tendency to say things like less is more and small is beautiful. I mean, in environmental circles, they have all these modern commandments like don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have kids, don't use plastic straws.
But then if you really focus on that individualist aspect of improving your life, like in the best
possible scenario you will have reduced your environmental footprint to zero you've basically turned yourself into a compost heap it's not very ambitious and if i look at some of these great pioneers like also like people like rosa parks like they didn't think small they thought big they were ambitious um so i've looked into the research and it turns out that more is actually more so if you help one person that's great if you help two that's twice as much right mathematics so
That's basically it, yeah. Oh, okay.
One of the things we're doing is we're starting a tax fairness fellowship. So, right. I mean, it was nice to shout to the billionaires, you know, taxes, taxes, taxes. Now we're actually trying to recruit, you know, some of the best wealth managers, the best bankers, the best fiscal lawyers.
I mean, that is like a thin layer of corporate responsibility over a corrupt, broken business model. I mean, come on, we've got to be much more ambitious here. We're not living in 2015 anymore where you can say, oh, I'm doing good by doing well. Ah, 2015. And let's do a TED Talk about it.
Yeah, no, that's not, I mean, this is 2025. We have one side of the political spectrum is a total moral collapse. I mean, democratic black sliding happening everywhere. Right. Especially people who have some privilege, you know, whether it's talent, whether it's, you know, wealth, whether it's your network, use it. I mean, people on the left, for so long, things like, check your privilege.
Yes, check it. And then use it. You know, have some skin in the game. Right, right.
Showing 121–140 of 273 · page 7 of 14
← Previous
Next →