Adulting - #99 Following Your Intuition, Diverse Communities & Human Nature with Rutger Bregman

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Hey Podulters! In this week’s episode I speak to Rutger Bregman, he is a historian, author and speaker. I’m sure if you listen to the  podcast regularly you will have heard me mention his book, Utopia For Realists, multiple times. Unlike pretty much anyone else I have spoken to, Rutger said he was pretty happy with everything he had learnt in school 🤣 but that’s mostly because he doesn’t really think our schools are fit for purpose as they are. We discuss following your intuition, the importance of diverse communities and why humans are actually really kind, deep down. I really enjoyed recording this episode and I hope you enjoy listening, Rutger’s latest book, Humankind, covers a lot of what we talk about in the episode! As always please do rate, review and subscribe 💜 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Hey, podleters. I hope you're well. In this week's episode, I speak to Rutger Bregman. He is a historian and author. And I'm sure if you listen to this podcast regularly, you will have heard me mention his book, Utopia for Realists, multiple times. So it really was very exciting to get the chance to pick his brain. And like pretty much anyone else I've interviewed, Rutger said he was pretty happy with everything he'd learned in school. But that's mostly because he doesn't really think our schools are fit for purpose as they are.

And that's something that we discuss in this episode. He did send me over his three things, which were French, German, a bit of mindfulness, and most importantly, more freedom to follow his own curiosity and rely on intrinsic motivation. So we discussed that quite a lot, as well as the importance of diverse communities and why humans are actually really kind, deep down. If you're interested in that kind of thing, his latest book, Humankind, actually covers a lot of what we talk about, obviously, in much more depth. So if you're looking to learn more, then I would really recommend that. Yeah, I really enjoyed this episode. So I hope that you enjoy listening to it as well. Bye. Hello, and welcome to Adelting. Today, I'm joined by Rutger Brechtmann.

Hey there, great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm joined by Rutger Brechtmann. Hey there. Great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited to be talking to you. I don't know, you probably might not have listened to my podcast, but I read your book, Utopia for Realists, right at the beginning of this year. And I think every episode since then, I've brought it up. So when I emailed you, it really had such a big impact on me. So when I emailed you and you emailed me back in like 20 minutes, I'm like, sure, I'd love to do this. Oh, I've never been so excited.

So thank you so much. So it's not out of date yet. You feel it's still relevant because it's actually quite an old book. I wrote it in 2014 in Dutch and it was translated in English in 2017. But I'm very excited to hear that it's still relevant. I think, do you know what's so funny? I've actually been meaning to read it for years because everyone who I know has read it. And I almost felt like I kind of had read it because everyone was talking about it so much. And then I had a guest on called Shona Virtue, who's an

amazing woman, who's my friend. And she was like, you have to read this book. And I was like, right, I'm going to get it and I'm going to buy it. And I was like, God, I can't believe I haven't read this before. I don't think it felt out of date. I think if anything, at this moment in time when everyone's kind of in crisis mode and everything feels very damning, especially with our government and everything that's going on, because it's such a hopeful book, it was like the best tonic, especially at the start of this year when we were back into lockdown. It was amazing. So no, I don't think it's irrelevant yet. You've got a few more years in it, I think. Okay, great. Well, that's good to hear.

So for people who maybe aren't familiar with you and your work, could you give us a background introduction to who you are and what you do? Of course. So I'm a Dutch historian. I studied history at Utrecht University. Utrecht is in the middle of the Netherlands. It's a very small country anyway. If you drive for two hours in any direction, you're either in Germany, in Belgium, or in the North Sea. But yeah, I studied history also at UCLA in Los Angeles. Then I thought about becoming an academic, but changed my mind because academia these days is not a very healthy and wonderful place, I'd say. You know, I've got a lot of friends who've gone into the world of getting a PhD, etc.,

and who've got a burnout in return. So I went into journalism and sort of worked at a traditional Dutch newspaper for one year. It's sort of like the guardian of the Netherlands called the Volkskrant. And that wasn't really my thing either. And at that point in my career, I was very, very lucky because a new journalism platform was founded called The Correspondent. And they asked me to join. And the idea of The Correspondent. And they asked me to join.

And the idea of The Correspondent is that we basically ignore the news. We think that the news is not very good for you. It mainly focuses on exceptions, on things that go wrong, on corruption, crises, terrorism, violence, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you watch a lot of the news every day and you only keep hearing about these exceptions, you might get a pretty pessimistic view of humanity, of human nature and of history and reality. And there's even a term for this, actually. It's called mean world syndrome.

That's what psychologists call it. So you really become more cynical if you follow too much of the news. We try to get away from that and to make a form of journalism that helps you to understand the structural forces that govern our lives. It's not the same as just focusing on the good news. It's not like, oh, we report that a new panda is born every day in the zoo or something like that. It's more, I don't know, having a more realistic, more accurate view of reality. So sometimes that's, you know, quite means focusing on really bad stuff like climate

change or the extinction of species. But it's also about the decline of global poverty and child mortality and about the people who are already coming up with solutions to some of our biggest challenges. So yeah, my work is really a product of that environment, you know, of these friends and colleagues who don't start the day with, okay, what is the worst thing that happened today? And we got a report on that, but more on what are the big challenges? Who are the people thinking about the solutions? What are they doing right now? And why can we be hopeful it's it's interesting because um i was thinking about as you're talking like i wonder if maybe this is too much of a basic kind of observation to make but as children i feel like children are generally lots more optimistic

and then as you start to get older and you kind of have to take more stock of the news and things going on around you you do become you do become cynical i don't know if it's as baseline as that or if there is something to do with just getting a broader understanding of the world. But I definitely think, especially in this pandemic, right at the beginning, I was obsessed with reading the news. And my mental health couldn't have been worse. It was like, I couldn't inject more bad news into my veins if I tried. And so I've really taken a concerted effort now to block out time to find out like the main thing that's going on but not sort of be i think it's the 24-hour continuum of information

that's really striking and really impacting us um at the minute yeah yeah i think that's that's really really true you know the thing you said about that sometimes kids, you know, are wiser than us adults. Yeah. It's true in many domains of life, I'd say. For example, in terms of eating meat, I think that's one of the best examples. You know, if you explain to, you know, a child of five or six years old, you old, that thing you're eating right now, that's actually the animal. It's a pig or a horse, animals that you love.

And they're horrified, like, what am I doing that? Et cetera. So their intuition is very simple and very basic. And then us adults, we come up with all kinds of complex rationalizations to basically say, well, it's still fine the you know, the way we treat animals, to get away from this very basic truth, this very basic intuition that kids have, which is, no, it's not okay. And yeah, sometimes being an adult means coming up with all these complex ways to basically lie to ourselves, right? And if we just listen to our kids a bit more often, we,

I don't know, we can maybe accept the more important truth. So this actually, because you're talking about instinct, and I guess how often we ignore instincts, it leads quite well onto one of the things that you wish you were taught in school. But what I love about when I asked you this question, and you're the only person who's said this, and I don't know if that's because maybe in the Netherlands, you're schooling so much better. But you were like, in general, I'm quite happy with everything they taught me in school. Every other person that I've had on has been like, oh, my God, I wish I'd learned this, this, this. And you were like, I'm pretty content.

Do you think that it's just that your schooling is so much better than here in the UK? I don't know. I'm just skeptical about schooling anyway. So I was relatively happy during my childhood, both in primary school and secondary school. And I don't think I learned that much, but I don't think that's, I mean, I don't blame anyone for that because I don't really believe in this whole process of, I don't know, top-down education, where there are people at the top who have knowledge that they try to implant in your brains. It just doesn't really work, does it? So in terms of languages, you know, I wish my French and German was better,

because that would be really, really useful right now. I could read German newspapers and French newspapers, etc. I would really love to be able to do that. But then again, I think about how could they have taught me that? Well, it would never have worked, right? Because I thought it was completely boring and pointless. I didn't have the intrinsic motivation back then to learn it. Now, my English is, well, hopefully you agree, a bit better. But why is it better? Because I computer games you know i was a lot of highly specialized knowledge of computer games like command to conquer and call of duty and i don't know and you learn a lot you know they don't translate uh most of these games into dutch um and obviously if you want to do multiplayer and communicate with players around the globe you

you know you got to learn english and and so players around the globe, you know, you've got to learn English. And so that's how I learned it, not from school. So I don't know. I'm skeptical anyway about what school can teach us. I think it's more about creating an environment where kids can flourish and, you know, follow their own curiosity and develop their intrinsic motivation, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just very skeptical about education and schooling anyway. So this, I love this because this is what you said. You said exactly that, that you wish you had more freedom to follow your own curiosity and rely on your intrinsic motivation, which ties in perfectly about what you're saying about children kind of having this

gut feeling about something and then having to unlearn the gut feeling and kind of distrust your own compass when it comes to things and I think I've learned that growing up it does a real disservice because then as an adult you're having to go backwards into your trying to get in touch with your inner self all of this kind of like language that we use which is basically just trying to learn our basic instincts again because we are unlearn them in school so if you had to imagine i guess a new infrastructure or a new way of schooling like do you think that homeschooling is the way forward do you think we do need infrastructure do you just think it's the subject and the way that it's kind of curated is wrong or

is it the whole format needs to be well homeschooling seems to me a recipe for extreme inequality, right? Because the kids with parents who have a lot of time and resources at their hands, you know, will get much better schooling than those who don't have it. So I'm very, very much against homeschooling, actually. already before primary school, that kids learn that there is such a thing as society, right? That there is a place called the school where kids from all different backgrounds meet and learn and socialize and, you know, communicate with each other. I think the problem with many of our schools today is that they're so incredibly segregated. So at a very early age, we say, okay, you are the smart kids, you're the not so smart kids. You're the kids from the good neighborhoods. You're the kids from the not very good neighborhoods.

And then we also sort our kids, you know, on age. So 11 years old altogether, 12 years old altogether, et cetera. And then some boarding schools are even worse when they also separate the genders. I mean, it's crazy, right? That's not what real life is like. In society, everything is mixed. So schools should always be mixed. It should also be mixed because it's got to prepare you for real life, right?

If you think about the phenomenon of bullying, for example, we tend to assume, I used to assume at least, that bullying is this natural part of childhood. It's very tragic, but it just happens because kids are like that. Kids are just nasty and mean. And yeah, they just bully. And there are obviously ways to try and combat this tendency. So there are a lot of programs so that you can teach kids how to deal with that. Or I don't know, to teach bullied kids, I don't know to teach bullied kids I don't know how to defend

themselves blah blah blah but the assumption is always the same is that bullying is just a natural part of childhood I used to believe that turns out it's it's bullocks you know if you study the sociology of bullying it tends it seems to be a product of very specific institutional circumstances so there's a lot of bullying in certain schools and almost no bullying in other schools. So where does bullying happen? Well, it happens in so-called total institutions. Total institutions are places where you can't really leave. There are strict rules, there's a strict hierarchy, and there's also a strict schedule of what you're going to do on a certain day. There's basically a lack of freedom.

Now, the perfect example here is obviously the prison. And we know that there's a huge amount of bullying in prisons. Same is true for nursing homes, you know, sort of old-fashioned nursing homes. There's a lot of bullying there as well because, again, people can't leave. There's a strict hierarchy, et cetera, et cetera. Now, obviously, a lot of schools are like that as well especially the classic boarding school right i've always found it ironical that um you know a lot of people uh read harry potter and a lot of parents read harry potter and then sent their kids to boarding school which is very tragical because

we know from a huge amount of evidence that you you know, people pay a high psychological price after for going to such a total institution, right? Where you can't leave, where you have to stay all year, etc., etc. There's a whole speciality in psychiatry that focuses on boarding school survivors, right? It doesn't mean that, you know, everyone suffers from it, but relatively to other schools, you know, there are way more people who suffer from that. Can we turn this around? Yes, of course you can. You know, you can just design your institutions in a very different way. So, one of the most important things you got to do is mix the ages. If people from different ages are

all together in a classroom, preferably, you know, from age four to age 18 or something like that, most of bullying disappears. But it's even better if you also mix all the other things, you know, mix gender, mix, I don't know, academic level or something like that. And if you visit those kind of schools, you know, time and time again, you will see that bullying has pretty much disappeared. Because basically, everyone is weird. Everyone is strange. You know, there's no norm anymore. You can't be young anymore relative to the rest. You know, you can't be that one 10-year-old kid in a class of, you know, where everyone's 11 or 12. Or you can't be that one kid who has this really peculiar interest in, I don't know, where everyone's 11 or 12, or you can't be that one kid who has this

really peculiar interest in, I don't know, space travel or something like that, where everyone else thinks that's uninteresting. If you create an environment where everyone is strange and weird, then yeah, bullying pretty much disappears, which I found absolutely shocking to discover, because that means that for such a long time, we've been optimizing our institutions and our schools for bullying, basically. We've designed them in that way ourselves and it doesn't have to be this way.

Yeah, well, I wonder if, is there some cynical advantage in having these structures where bullying can work? Because does that reinforce the sort of like hierarchical structures that we have more broadly in society in terms of if we're looking back at like um the way that we organize class systems and the way that we organize genders and races do you think that there is some intention of creating um that dynamic in schools because then it it carries on

in society or do you think is that me being really cynical again about the the intention of why no i think that's why things are set up like that i think that's spot on i think you're absolutely right um we have a system that produces or reproduces uh a an elite over and over again you, what drives me nuts is that when we talk about quality of education, so if you look at scientific studies where the quality of education is measured, you know, the way they measure it is they look at how kids perform on standardized tests, but these standardized tests are not neutral measurements of, you know, intelligence or something like that. I mean, psychologists up until this stage still don't really know what intelligence is or, you know, where creativity comes from. I mean, there's libraries full of books that have been written about it, but it seems to me that we're still not really sure.

Well, let's put it like this the people who've who i've learned from the most in my life um you know who i think are the smartest smartest people i've ever met they've pretty much all been a total failure in school you know they they didn't do well on standardized tests they um they thought just in general school was awful and they thought it was boring and they just wanted to basically follow their own curiosity. I'm doing a podcast here in the Netherlands with a good friend and colleague of mine. And I think he's literally the smartest person I've ever met. And he didn't do very well in secondary school. He barely managed to finish it and then tried university like four or five times or something like that.

Then totally crashed and played World of Warcraft for like two years. And then, yeah, pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, I guess, and started a career in journalism. And, I mean, he has such an unusual mind. He doesn't think like other people. He's much more autonomous. And I think that makes him much more creative than other people. And it helps him to ask questions that other people just don't ask.

So a lot of what we call education is about conformity, right? It's basically about they socialize you. They teach you, you know you what are the right questions, what are the right answers, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not saying that's all wrong because, I mean, we've got to live together in a society, so some form of socialization, I think that's healthy. But I've always found it striking that, indeed,

if you meet someone who's truly fascinating and who asks all these unusual questions and you you you ask them about their career in school and they yeah they almost always have a story of um well a story where they say well that was actually a total failure in school one of the things i loved in utopia for realists the most was the section about um bullshit jobs and how we kind of have again it's about this conditioning, this socialization. And I wonder like, if we were given the freedom to explore intuition, like you said in school

and be curious, would we ever really choose to do some of the jobs that are kind of heralded in society as being really useful or really powerful or worth a lot of money? And it was so great to read that because I've always found that, I mean, I did a podcast with ash sarko and it was really funny because i was talking about robots and their invention and why are they not like you know why does that mean we have more free time and she was like you're talking about marx's uh fragment of the machine theory and i basically like butchered this theory that's really famous but i hadn't really realized um but i i i would love to know more about have you always had this kind of really good like a really visceral understanding of the way that society kind of i feel like your mind looks at

things in a really interesting way um and when i when i read the book and especially when you're talking about leisure time and like how capitalism kind of like spears through all of our again it's the natural intuition to want to rest to want to play to want to do all of these things um did you have any kind of awakening or do you think that you have always had quite like a good ability to look on these cracks in society and where we're kind of governed invisibly, I guess, by things that we've been socialized to believe? I think I just learned a lot from other people. So that part of my book, Utopia for Realists, was very much influenced by the work of the anthropologist David Graeber, who sadly passed away last year. And I think that anthropologists often have the ability to look at a certain phenomenon or certain issues from the child's perspective, I guess.

They're able to come into a society and ask the more basic questions. So, for example, one of the fundamental questions of life is, what is wealth? You know, what is truly worthwhile? And who are the real wealth creators? You know, who are the people who contribute the most? And at the beginning of the 21st century, you know, we've ended up in a world where we give a very crazy answer to that question.

So we say, okay, the people who are the real wealth creators are those who sit in offices all day, who write reports no one ever wants to read, who send emails to people they don't like, who come up with destructive financial products that basically destroy a lot of wealth, who come up with algorithms that let us click more on ads or something like that. I mean, that's one of the great tragedies of our time is that so much of our talent is wasted. There are so many smart people working in marketing or in management or in the financial sector. And we call them wealth creators. But, you know, if, say, an anthropologist from Mars would come here and study us and study, for example, the tribe of bankers, you know, the marching would say, well, this is very strange. You know, these people think they're contributing something. Well, it's very clear to, you know, any outside observer that they're basically destroying a lot of wealth. But somehow,, but somehow they've been reframed

as the real wealth creators. So yeah, I think it's very often good to zoom out and go back to sort of the more initial assumptions and think about, okay, who are the real wealth creators? And one way to ask that question is, okay, what happens if certain people go on strike? So in the book, I give the example of garbage collectors going on strike. This happened multiple times in history. I give the example of garbage collectors going on

strike in New York at the end of the 60s. And, you know, the strike lasted for a couple of days, then the state of emergency had to be declared because it turns out, you know, a big city really can't do without the garbage collectors. Then I wondered, has it ever happened in all of world history that the bankers went on strike? You know, perhaps there's one example. Turns out there is. In 1970 in Ireland, around that same time, actually, there was a strike of bankers because they were angry that their wages

were not keeping up with inflation. Now, the strike started, and all the experts said, okay, this is going to be a disaster. The economy will crash, and we'll really pay for this. The strike started, lasted for six months,

and nothing much happened. The economy just kept growing. After six months, the bankers came back and said, all right, all right, all right, we'll get back to work. And if you ask people today in Ireland about the Irish banking strike of 1970, most people won't remember even if they've lived through it because it just didn't make much of an impact. And I think that's a nice way to sort of go back to that more fundamental question of who are the

real wealth creators. Yeah I remember reading that and it's so funny because as you're saying about ideology and the way that we believe things like it of course that makes complete sense and when you think about sort of like what I remember when I read the first time I read Yuval Naharari and his book about how everything is kind of created, you know, and everything's made up. There's no such thing as law. There's really no such thing as human rights. And you suddenly start to break down and realize just how deep we are into these social structures that are completely fabricated. And it doesn't take very long or much time to really figure out, you know, what's crucial. And we've seen it in the pandemic, you know,

finally people are saying key workers are carers and nurses and teachers and all the people that are really undervalued in society. When you're watching that, do you think that this will have a longer lasting impact on how we view, like what you say, the real people who are the real money makers and the people who are the change makers? Do you think this pandemic is going to have a long lasting impact? Or do you think that we might just kind of go back to how it was before? Well, I certainly hope so. And I think that there are also a lot of hopeful signs. So I thought one striking moment at the beginning of the pandemic in April last year was when the Financial Times, which is not known as a, you know, a leftist revolutionary newspaper or anything. I mean, it's basically the paper that's being read by elites from around the

globe, right? And the very rich politicians and entrepreneurs read the Financial Times every day. But at the beginning of April last year, the Financial Times said, now is the time to, quote, and this is a literal quote, reverse the policy direction of the last 40 years. And think about things like, one, a universal basic income, two, higher taxes on the rich, and three, a more activist, ambitious role for the state in combating great challenges like pandemics and climate change, etc. So yeah, reverse the policy direction of the last 40 years. And it's not, again, it's not some left wing publication that was saying that was the Financial Times. And that was when I thought, okay, something is changing here. This, this may be seen this, this specific editorial as one of the, one of the signs that the neoliberal era was ending because obviously for 40 50 years we've been in the in the neoliberal era where you know many people believe that the government was the problem that we need to privatize as much

as possible just let the free market do its magic etc et cetera, et cetera. Inequality is no problem as long as, you know, everyone is, as long as we have a lot of innovation or something like that. This ideology has been incredibly powerful. And, well, we've seen the results in terms of a total climate breakdown, massive inequality growing around the globe. And obviously, you know, a lot of people, you know, have believed that for a long time.

But now for the Financial Times to be saying it, that was very striking to me and interesting. And indeed, if you look at who are the more exciting and influential economists today, it's very different from 10 years ago. You know, 10 years ago after the financial crash, economists and governments were obsessed with national debt, you know, that we needed to go into a period of austerity, because otherwise, we would give our grandchildren a national debt that was way too high, that somehow that was seen as the biggest injustice. So much has changed since then.

You know, governments are borrowing incredible amounts of money right now. If you even look at Joe Biden in the United States, you know, he is like in a total different universe than Obama was, what is it, 10 years ago. Obama, I mean, we all love the speeches, of course, but, you know, he was a pretty don't know Obama was, what is it, 10 years ago. Obama, I mean, we all love the speeches, of course, but he was a pretty disappointing president, I'd say, with relatively unambitious plans. If you now look at what Joe Biden is doing, it's incredible. He's doing what we call blitz politics,

one ambitious proposal after another. This American Rescue Plan, you know, that has just gone through Congress, according to some estimates, it will halve child mortality. Wow. I mean, halve child mortality. That is incredible. For the first time in American history, they have a child benefit, you know. You know, we in, I would almost say more civilized countries are already used to that. But in the American context, it's really unique to just give free money to parents, basically, to help them raise their kids.

It's going to have a massive impact. So all of these things, the Financial Times talking about basic income, Joe Biden, you know, the most boring moderate this world has ever seen, suddenly implementing a bill that will halve child mortality. If you would have told me that when I was writing Utopia for Realists, I would have said you're not, you know, that's never going to happen. But here we are. That's, well, that's really nice idea to think that things are like moving in that direction, because it doesn't, it doesn't often feel like that. But I know that you're famously known for talking about universal basic income, both in Utopia for Realists and from your TED Talks. And it's interesting because I guess it comes back to that same thread of

giving people more credence than we do, whether that's believing children's own intuition, whether it's having faith in the fact that poorer people won't use money in a way that's going to be disruptive and actually that people want to better themselves and they want to help each other. And I feel like that's kind of the crux of humankind. Is that right? Is that kind of the idea that we are much better, like humans in general, we're better than we've kind of been brought up to believe we are? Yes, indeed. So my last book, Humankind, is really about this very simple revolutionary idea, which is that most people deep down are pretty decent. You know, there's this old theory in Western culture that has been incredibly

influential, which says that our civilization is only a thin veneer, only a thin layer. And that as soon as something happens, when a crisis strikes, that we revert to our true selves and that we turn out to be really horrible creatures that deep down were just nasty. That human nature is basically this dark pit of terrible stuff. This idea comes back again and again and again. You already see it among the ancient Greeks. Thucydides, the Greek historian, writing about what happened during the plague in Athens or a civil war near Coursera, he also said, you know, people really showed that they're basically monsters. If you look at Orthodox Christianity, again, you find this idea that people deep down are just sinners,

that there's something called original sin and that we need to be saved by Jesus or by God or something like that. Then you look at the Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and the 18th century, and you would expect some kind of, I don't know, some discontinuity with christian thought but actually the opposite is true when you when you look at their views on human nature so many of these enlightenment philosophers had a really bleak view of human nature thomas hobbes the british philosophers philosopher argued that people deep down are just selfish that in the state of nature when when we were nomadic intergatherers, we were engaging in a war of all against all, that life was just nasty, brutish, and short, and that therefore, we need hierarchy, we need authority, we need a so-called Leviathan, an all-powerful ruler who keeps us in check, basically, who makes sure that we don't start

slaughtering and murdering and killing each other. That idea was very influential during the Enlightenment. It was very influential when the founding fathers of the United States drafted the Constitution. John Adams once wrote an essay with the title, All Men Would Be Tyrants If They Could. And therefore, we need some kind of balance of power with the Congress and House of Representatives and the Senate and the Supreme Court, so that all these selfish people can sort of keep each other in check and there's a certain balance in the system. Then, you know, 19th century evolutionary theory arises, which quickly becomes social

Darwinism, you know, the notion that life is basically a race between species, and it's often the selfish and the more aggressive species that survive. And then modern capitalism arises. And if you would say anything about, you know, the capitalist dogma, it's that people deep down are just selfish, and we need to deal with that. Or as Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street, greed is good. You know, it's actually good. You know, your prime minister seems to agree with that. Or as Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street, greed is good. You know, it's actually good. You know, your prime minister seems to agree with that. It's I guess the reason why I haven't been vaccinated yet. And you guys have. Anyway, that's another subject. So my point is,

this idea comes back again and again and again and again in left wing versions, in right wing versions, in religious versions of the idea, atheistic versions, veneer theory, the idea that people deep down are just selfish. Civilization is only a thin veneer. It's almost like the founding idea of Western culture. And in my book, Humankind, I argue that it's wrong, that it's really not true, that people deep down are pretty decent, that we've evolved to cooperate and to connect with each other. And that if you down are pretty decent, that we've evolved to cooperate and to connect with each other. And that if you truly grasp that idea, it means that we can do everything differently. We can design our schools in a different way. We can design our prisons in a

different way. We can design the workplace in a different way. We can basically, you know, start a revolution. So people may think, oh, that sounds like a very warm and fuzzy idea. Oh, people are kind, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't seem very threatening. Well, actually, if people start trusting each other, those at the top become uncomfortable because it basically means that maybe we don't need that hierarchy. You know, maybe you don't need all these elites at the top

saying what we should do. So, yeah, it's a very simple but also quite revolutionary idea fanduel casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying i do who wants this last parachute i do enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly.

It is, but it makes so much sense because it's kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we've had this understanding of ourselves for so long that we are fundamentally selfish and cruel, and if we had the chance, you know, it'd be anarchy and we'd whatever, then you do start to, some part of that becomes part of who you are and part of your like self-belief where, and like distrust, I was just about to say, I think distrust is one of the most damaging things we can have. And I think it's ravaged us even more over the last, like in my lifetime, like the sense of community that people have between neighbors, for instance,

or like the conversation people don't talk. I mean, I live in London, so I think it's even more heightened here, but there is a real sense of like you're out for yourself, even on like the daily commute. So I feel like you're always in sort of like a fight or flight response frame of mind because it's as if everyone is a threat to you. Whereas if we all let that guard down and we all kind of spoke to each other and like I just feel like everyone's even just in that small act of trusting to be able to smile at someone, people's mental health would be exponentially improved in a matter of days i would imagine um but what what are people how have people's responses been then when when you put this idea because also the truth is like the people that will find this

fundamentally the most revolutionary are the ones like boris johnson the people in power the people that really feel like they've got something to lose if our status quo changes. So, I mean, amongst your peers, I imagine people think it's a great idea, but have you had anyone sort of really angry about you saying this? I think that's a great point, indeed. If people start trusting each other, then that means that we don't need the kings and the queens and the prime ministers and the presidents, etc. It means that, well't need the kings and the queens and the prime ministers and the presidents, et cetera. It means that, well, maybe we can move to a much more democratic, egalitarian society, you know, where people basically govern their own affairs, et cetera.

And in the book, I try to give many examples of exactly that happening. And it makes those at the top very uncomfortable indeed because yeah it means they could be out of a job um so yeah i've received quite some pushback uh i guess in that respect um the other thing though to keep in mind here is that um you know i went to davos this one time you know the the gathering of the very rich and powerful people who go there to discuss the state of the world, I guess. They talk about a lot of wonderful things like feminism and philanthropy and climate change, blah, blah, blah. But they don't really talk about the elephant in the room, which is their own tax evasion, their own corrupt business models, their own tax avoidance, their way they're basically profiting from other people's labor in a very nasty way. Then you would suspect that if you go there, you meet these people who are engaged in some kind of

conspiracy or something like that, that they're all very selfish and that they know what they're doing. But the reality could be more different. you go there and you meet a lot of quite wonderful people you know who are absolutely lovely to you and you think well we could actually become friends um so that is i guess the disturbing thing that uh people have a are really good at lying to themselves you know where they are incredibly rich they have very problematic business models they make a huge amount of money they don't pay their taxes etc but they give a little bit to philanthropy each year and they still feel you know i'm a good person you know there's nothing there's nothing wrong with me there i was about to say about the good person things i think this is something that maybe is the fault of fairy tales or the fact

that we kind of believe that you know um if you do a bad thing you're a bad person and that you can only be inherently good or bad and then we get really confused about say we have a close relationship with someone that maybe votes very differently from us or perhaps holds views that are really abhorrent it could be then really difficult to be like they're really kind to me and i don't know if this is like at fault of something that as children we're told you can only be good or bad and so we're really scared to point out badness in in especially in people that we love for fear of casting them then as an evil yeah and it's so binary and i wonder if we could somehow say, like you were saying, you're a lovely billionaire, but being a billionaire is really unethical. So you can't, you know, I feel like we need better language around what it means to be kind and be generous. But the fact that people are really complicated and I just don't think there's enough room and I think that like online it makes it even more difficult because as you say like I could have a conversation in a pub with someone who's super conservative and have a really lovely conversation but if I bumped into them on Twitter for example I might end up having an

argument about whatever it might be and I don't know if that's if that conditioning is also maybe rooted straight back to that thing you said right at the beginning about being I guess forced into groups that are like you that look like you that think like you from a really young age so much so that then we can't really deal with not even conflict but with i guess coming together in a way that has like a fruitful ending i i i can't agree more perhaps the troubling thing with humans is that we very often do quite bad things in the name of the good. I've got one chapter in my new book about German soldiers during the Second World War who kept fighting in 1944 and 1945, even though it was clear they were going to lose the war. You know, the Allied were advancing after D-Day.

The Russians were coming from the east. You know, it was basically a lost cause. But these Germans kept fighting very fanatically. They were much more effective than Allied soldiers, by the way, in terms of casualty counts, on average around 50% more effective. This was like the best army in the history of the world. And so allied psychologists couldn't understand it why are these soldiers still fighting like crazy you know have they

been brainwashed or something like that are they really all these anti-semite semites have they've been you know gone crazy because of nazi ideology and so they started interviewing prisoners of war and then discovered that actually the vast majority of these soldiers were not fighting because of Nazi ideology or because they were brainwashed or something like that. No, they were fighting for their friends. They were fighting for comradeship. They really didn't want to let their friends down. And the German Army Command knew this. So the German Army Command was very careful not to separate friends.

If, for example, a unit was pulled from the front, they were very careful to keep those who had been fighting for a long time together, to keep them together, basically. And that is obviously disturbing because it's a phenomenon that we see so often is that we do bad things because we don't want to let our own group down and we don't want to let our friends down. I mean, a simple example of that was mask wearing, which especially in the United States became this polarized issue. And so a lot of people ask me, well, Rutger, how can you still believe that most people deep down

are decent if you've got all these selfish people who refuse to wear a mask? But that's obviously not what was happening. It wasn't selfishness. It's just that wearing a mask became a symbol of the liberal tribe. And so obviously, as a conservative, you wouldn't wear a mask because you were basically saying to your own group, well, I think you're wrong. You know, I don't want to be part of that group anymore. And that's really the dark side of human nature, our incredible groupishness, our tribal nature, is that when we very much feel part of our own group, we start to dislike the other group.

That's why I've got one chapter in the book about empathy as well. You know, we tend to assume that empathy is the solution to all of our problems. But the problem here is that empathy often works as a spotlight. You focus on one person often or one specific group, and the rest of the world fades into darkness, right? You don't really see that anymore. And so then you often get these cycles of empathy and vengeance that can go on and on. If you look at the Australia-Palestinian conflict, for example, I've often believed that there's not, it's not that there's not enough empathy in the Middle East, there's too much empathy, right? Because you feel a lot of empathy for your own side, and then you want vengeance,

and it goes on and on and on and on. So're stuck in these cycles and what you need there is perhaps the ability to zoom out and to yeah look at the whole situation from well what psychologists call a more compassionate perspective where you're not really feeling for the other person but where you are recognizing someone else's suffering but also saying you know what your suffering is your suffering is not mine i want to help but you know i'm not going to be swept away here and in all your in all your feelings that's that's you you know i've got my own perspective um so yeah very long answer i hope it makes sense no it does make sense but it makes me think it's interesting because on the one hand um it makes so much sense that we need to kind of disseminate some of the groups and the labels

that we've kind of created and have existed for so long. But at the same time, it sounds as though there does have to be some form of group nature or some segregation because there's just too many people and too many ideologies and you're never, there is never going to be a planet where every single person is, you know, advocating for the same thing and has the same belief. So is it that there just needs to be a shuffling or like, how does that, what does that look like practically? I guess, I mean, it's a massive question, but if we're saying, you know, we've got to stop keeping everyone in these echo chambers and separating and

polarizing all those things. But at the same time, there's just too many of us to be one united front. So how does that, what would your idea of, you know, social structures and community, do you have an imagined idea for how that would reform. You know, what I've often found strange is that you've got these liberal parents who on the one hand say things like, you know, no, no person is illegal, we are all equal, you know, we got to stay in contact, etc, etc. And then on the other hand, they send their kids to private schools where these kids are in a very limited environment and mainly meet other people who are exactly like them. I don't know, that seems to be very weird. Obviously, you got to start at a very early age

to basically say, okay, society is diverse, so school's got to be diverse as well. I mean, it's very simple, but somehow we, I don't know, we do pretty much the opposite of what is necessary. Obviously, a good school should be a highly diverse environment, you know, with people from all different kind of backgrounds, rich and poor, ethnically diverse, so that people, kids learn from a very early age that, you know, people can be different, and that's fine. One of the oldest, most robust theory in psychology is contact theory. So already in the 1950s, psychologists were wondering, what is the best medicine we have against prejudice, against hate, and against racism. And some people argue that, you know, perhaps just putting people into contact is the best medicine. Well, that may sound obvious,

but as you know, everything is obvious once you know the answer. So people actually had to do the research here, and we now have hundreds and hundreds of studies into contact theory, and it turns out, yes, it more or less works like that. If you build diverse environments, then people become much more sympathetic to people who are different. And it also spills over in other domains of life. So if you live in a more diverse neighborhood, a more ethnically diverse neighborhood,

you're also more open to different forms of diversity. I don't know, ideological diversity, for example. And again, it's a very simple message. A child would understand this, right? That it's not very healthy to put all people from similar backgrounds in the same classroom and then hope that they will grow up as very caring cosmopolitan kids or something like that.

Well, obviously, it doesn't work like that. So what you got to do is basically design for diversity. And the only way to do that is to do it together, you know, on a collective level. It's very, I mean, I am sympathetic to, often it's hard to do this as an individual parent, right? Because maybe you don't live in the right neighborhood, etc., etc. But there are, you know, you can vote for political parties that actually want to implement the laws that make this easier, etc., etc. But it seems to me the most simple and straightforward solution.

To me, it totally does. And it's funny what you said about um everything sounds simple when you know the answer because that's how i felt when i was reading utopia for realists i was like oh my god of course this makes complete sense universal basic income makes total sense like everything to me was like this just is so obvious i think the problem is getting everyone around to the same mindset that everything is better for everyone when everything's better for everyone rather than this fear that I guess elite people have and certain circles have that if I give something to them I lose out whereas actually it's it's about reframing I guess it's just such

a capitalist mentality but it's how do you get those people to recognize that their lives would be better in a different way than they could ever imagine if they didn't subscribe to this elitism. I actually was sent to private school when I was younger because my parents again made that decision thinking that, you know, that was going to be so much better for me. And now as an adult, I've had that same realization. Like I can't say I believe in all of these things. And then if I have children, send them to private school, I just wouldn't do that now, you know, having adjusted my mindset. But lots of people that I went to school with will never ever even think to enter this line of questioning because sometimes you're so far removed from day-to-day society. It's like,

I don't know how you bridge that gap because there is just a group, but they're like a completely different echelon of society that wouldn't even engage in a conversation around this topic and wouldn't even think to read a book like yours um and i guess it's like until they and it's the same with money it's the same with climate change it's always the same it's how do you pierce that top fraction and get them to somehow join ranks uh because i feel like everyone else would join ranks you know yeah yeah there's so much to say about this so what i've tried to do in my work and also in utopia for realists is to use a language that appeals to a broader segment of the population right i guess that people especially on the left or progressives are often

very good at convincing people who are already you, right? Very good at preaching to the choir. And the challenge is obviously is to, is that an expression in English? Sort of broaden the church? I don't know. To get a bigger audience and to actually convince people. And so there are a couple of ways how you can do this. One way is to use the technique that psychologists call moral reframing.

So there's one fascinating book written by a psychologist called Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, where he says that morality is actually quite diverse. So people have sort of different – there are a couple of pillars of morality and progressives tend to rely on different pillars than conservatives. So, for example, for conservatives, things like loyalty are very important or stability, where for progressives, things like caring for each other or freedom are more important. But sometimes what you can do is to take an idea, say universal basic income, and pitch it in different ways. So you can pitch basic income and say, well, we got to care for other people. Poverty is

horrible. Let's eradicate poverty. Let's help all these poor people so that they'll be able to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives and have more free lives, right? That's a very sort of liberal, progressive way of pitching the idea. But you could also pitch the idea in a more conservative way where you say, look, we're the best country on earth, right? We're going to be the first ones who implement this very exciting idea, universal basic income, just because we're far ahead of the others. Or where you say, look, society is a mess right now. We've got people living on the streets. It's incredibly unstable. It's not healthy, etc. We've got to bring more stability. If we make sure that there's a floor in the income distribution,

everyone will benefit, something like that. I mean, I'm not saying I'm the best at pitching this idea in all kinds of different ways. But I think the idea makes sense is that you can think about how you can, yeah, broaden the appeal of a certain idea. And that's what I've tried to do quite a bit in my books. So one argument that I make over and over again is that eradicating poverty is not just good for your conscience. It's also good for your wallet. Poverty is actually hugely expensive. We spend a lot on health care and the judicial system and policing, et cetera, et cetera. And we all pay for that.

It's not good for you if your neighbor is really poor. If your neighbor is doing better, you'll be doing better as well. And that actually reminds me of this book that was published this year by Heather McGee. I don't know if you've seen it. She's an American author. She published a book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. I think it's really brilliant, actually. She makes the point that what very often happens

and what blocks our progress is that people both on the right and on the left have this zero-sum mindset where they think that our wealth is just, well, it's limited. If someone gets more than someone else, by definition, has to get less, right? By the way, Donald Trump was totally zero-sum, totally zero-sum. What he described as a good deal is a deal where he was winning and someone else was losing. He had a total zero-sum worldview. Now, disturbingly, I think that also quite a few people on the left and progressive have become zero-sum in their thinking. So, for example, and this is more controversial, but I really agree with Heather

McGee, is that a concept like white privilege is not a very helpful concept, perhaps, because it also explains the world in a zero-sum way. At least that's how it's perceived by a lot of white people, where they think, oh, so I have some kind of privilege that now I have to give up? Well, I don't know. That's not a great slogan. So what Heather McGee says,

well, we got to talk about racism in a different way and say how everyone pays for it. Obviously, you know, those people who directly suffer from racism, you know, black and brown people suffer way more. But in a way, we all suffer. We all have poisoned our society with racism because if people can't develop their talents because they're held back by racism, we all pay for that. It's an incredible waste of talent that we all suffer from. In the book, she gives this example of swimming pools in the United States. There was a period in American history when there were a lot of public swimming pools that were opened up.

Now, in the 60s, during the civil rights movement, it became clear that these swimming pools had to become accessible to black and brown people as well. But what happened is that a lot of cities and towns chose to just close down the swimming pool because they rather had that than that they had to share their swimming pool with different people, right? So they were basically willing to hit themselves in the face instead of just, you of just living together.

And I think that's an example of how this zero-sum mindset, where if you always think that if someone else is doing better, by definition, you have to suffer. That is so much holding us back. And I think it's much more present on the conservative or the right-wing side of the political spectrum, but it also happens on the other side. And so what we got to do, I guess, is to break free from that and say, hey, if we all work together, if we trust in each other, there's actually a society possible where we all live better lives. it's interesting because um what's funny is that i guess what you're saying is that you have to kind of appeal to the selfish side of people and see where they benefit but then twofold to that you're saying that had we not been conditioned to think in a selfish way in the first place we wouldn't then have these this like one-sum reaction and we wouldn't subscribe to that is

that what you mean it's kind of like you've got a big breakthrough each thing so first of all you have to appeal to this selfish sensibility that we have all been coached to believe that if i have if i don't have then someone else is going to get it we're quite jealous we control things like that there's a distrust all of those things you kind of have to appeal to that first in order to get people on side and then once people see the benefits of this more selfless, more community-based society, then we can be free from that cynical belief. You know, one of my favorite bits actually in Utopia for Realists

is about the three homeless people in London. And I think they give them like a certain sum of money. Do you want to tell that story? Because it's my favorite and it's a really nice one to end on. Do you mind doing that? Yeah, sure. Well, it's a really nice one to end on. Do you mind doing that? Yeah, sure. Well, it's a good example of what can happen once you adopt this win-win mentality, right?

And look at the world as a positive someplace. So it started actually as a really small experiment. There were 13 homeless men who had been in the streets in some cases for decades and they they had tried a lot you know and and nothing was really working and none of the sort of the traditional approaches to solving homelessness uh were hope uh were helping in in in these cases um so what they said you know what we're already spending a lot of money anyway, so why not just give it to them? Why not just give them, say, £3,000 and see how they spend it? Maybe that'll do something.

And the results were really extraordinary. So a year after the experiment, 7 out of 13 of the men had a roof above their head and 2 more had applied for housing. They were really frugal with the money. They spent it on quite sensible things like, I don't know, a dictionary or a hearing aid or, you know, one of the men's gardening classes. And what was perhaps most exciting or most fascinating is that the experiment actually saved money because if people are on the streets,

you've got to spend way more on them, you know, in terms of higher healthcare costs, higher policing costs, judicial costs, etc, etc. So it's incredibly inefficient, homelessness. Same is true for poverty. I always like to say that we can't afford poverty. Poverty is too expensive. And when you actually pull people out of poverty, you'll see that that's an investment that pays for itself. And this is exactly what they showed in London. Now, what I love about this particular story is that it turned out to be contagious. So a couple of years ago, there was a woman in Vancouver, you know, in Canada, who read my book, actually, Utopia for Realists, and also was struck by the story of the homeless experiment in London.

And she thought, well, let's scale it up. Let's do it on a bigger scale and let's involve scientists so that they can actually study what happens. And that was actually recently in the news. They've published the first results of giving, what is it, I think around $5,000, $6,000 to homeless people in Vancouver. And again, they found the same results. And it's been really rigorously researched. And now they want to scale it up. It turns out that the most efficient way of spending money on the homeless is to just give it to them. Because it it's it's it's as i always like to say again

poverty is just a lack of character a lack of cash you know it's not a lack of character and and if you give people the freedom to make their own choices in their lives they they often will make very sensible choices um and yeah so what it's it's perhaps the most how do you say that in english sort of most gratifying part of my writing career so far is that you can just report on this story and that someone else becomes inspired by it and that it travels around the globe and it turns out to be contagious.

You know, that gives me a lot of hope. Well, I have to say, I think that your hope and the way that you write and the way that you position things is really contagious. And I think you say that even in Utopia for Realists, like it's this mindset we have, if we believe, you know, that we can do it, then we will. And so I think I love what you do. I absolutely love it. I cannot wait to read Humankind. And even talking to you today, you've just got that personality that's really optimistic. And I'm smiling right now. It's such a lovely conversation.

So thank you for doing what you do. and it is contagious. Well, thank you. Is there anywhere that you want to like point people in the direction of or anything that you think people should be familiar with, apart from obviously your books and your work. And I know that you've got lots of, um, video content. Is there anything specifically you'd love people to look out for? Oh, um, well, that's a good question. Well, because we were talking about it for quite a bit. I really love that book by Heather McGee called The Sum of Us. I would recommend anything written by David Graeber, maybe especially his book on bullshit jobs. Yeah, I guess it really helps people to think about what is wealth and what is worthwhile

in my own life. One other book that I would perhaps recommend is written by Bronnie Ware. What is the title? She's an Australian nurse who asked a lot of people who were under deathbed what they regretted the most. It's like the top five regrets of the dying. I think that's the title of the book. And it turns out that no one's saying, you know, my top one regret is that I've watched too few PowerPoint presentations from my colleagues or that I didn't send enough emails or something like that. You know, it's always the same. People say, I work too much. You know, i spent too much time um doing paid work and perhaps most importantly i wish i i i had the courage to basically live my own life instead of

doing what other people expected of me um so yeah i think that's that's also a very valuable insight. And it helps you to ask that very fundamental question. What is actually worthwhile? How do I contribute something significant to society? And I think it's good if people start asking that question from a very early age and if they keep continuing doing that. Totally. Well, thank you. I've written a made-a a note of all those books, especially The Righteous Mind.

Cause I think my boyfriend read that and told me that I had to read it and I hadn't got around to it, but I will add that. Oh yeah, that's a fantastic book. Yeah, it will be hard to get that book out of your head because you'll be very, how do you say that? Distrustful of your own opinions

after you've read that because Jonathan Hates shows that we very often assume or we think that we have certain opinions because we you know we've actually thought rationally about it but very often these arguments that we come up with are just rationalizations and that it actually starts with our own intuition so yeah it's a bit of a disturbing book but very fascinating. Yeah I'm excited to read that well honestly it's a it's a it's a bit of a disturbing book but very fascinating yeah i'm excited to read that well oh honestly it's been such a pleasure this hour's gone by in about five

minutes for me um it's been so lovely to talk to you well thanks for having me thank you so much for listening everyone and i will see you next week bye When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he?

I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncover. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.