Hope Is A Verb - Rutger Bregman- Why we're better than we think we are

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

To celebrate the end of our first season of this podcast, we're delighted to share this conversation with Rutger Bregman- the person who inspired this project.  Rutger is a journalist, historian, and the author of Humankind: A Hopeful History, in which he challenges the assumption that people are inherently selfish and competitive. Instead, he argues that we are hard-wired for kindness and collaboration, and this is what has led to our flourishing as a species.  In this conversation we dive into a range of topics from news cycles, to Rutger's next book and why the key to creating a better future starts with the belief that we're better than we think we are. Find out more: www.rutgerbregman.com/books This episode of Hope Is A Verb was hosted by Angus Hervey, cofounder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, creative director. The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain" composed and performed by El Rey Miel from their upcoming album"Sea the Sky." Audio Sweetening by Anthony Badolato- Ai3 Audio and Voice. We would like to acknowledge that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Warring People. These conversations are inspired by our charity partners and our Humankind Project that celebrates the people who are stitching our world back together. You can contact us at: [e-mail] Transcripts will be available on our website soon

Hi, welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast from Future Crunch that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it is to be human. We've got so much evidence now from anthropology, from archaeology, from sociology, from economics, from history, you name it, that basically shows that we're much better than we often think we are. And you could even argue, as one evolutionary psychologist has said, that we have evolved to work together, that we are the product of survival of the friendliest. To wrap up the first season of this podcast, we're delighted to introduce you to the

person who originally inspired this project. Rutger Bregman is a journalist, historian, and the author of five books, including Humankind, A Hopeful History, in which he challenges the assumption that humans are inherently selfish and competitive. Instead, Rutger argues that we are hardwired to take care of each other and solve problems, and that this innate kindness and collaboration in the face of obstacles is what has led to our flourishing as a species. It's a radically different perspective from what we see in the news and one that prompted us to start our own Humankind project

when we set out to find one person every week who was making the world a better place and share their story in our newsletter. You've met a few of these people in this first season of the podcast, and for us, it feels like a homecoming to be able to share this conversation with Rutger in the place where it all began. with Rutger, in the place where it all began. Rutger, hello, and welcome to Hope is a Verb.

We are really, really excited to have you on the podcast. Yeah, I'm excited as well. Thanks for having me. I wonder if we could start off with a simple question. Is there a news story that is giving you hope anywhere in the world right now? I don't really follow the news, Gus, apart from your newsletter. Great, well, maybe let me reframe that then.

Is there a trend or a phenomenon anywhere in the world that you're aware of right now that's giving you hope? Okay, I'll give an example from my own life. I'm 35 now, and around 12, 13 years ago, I was a member of a small student society in the Netherlands. It's called SSR. It had like 150 members. And I considered myself relatively idealistic

at the time, and I think many of my friends did as well. But I recently came back to the same old student society and I was just astounded by the generational difference. I mean, at the time we had only, I think, two vegetarians and we made fun of them all the time. And I was probably the worst bully. And now, I mean, all the collective meals of the student society were all plant-based, and there were many more vegetarians and even vegans, and that was just in 12 years that that had happened, this difference.

I asked some people whether they had recently joined a protest, and I remember that, I think I joined one protest at the time when I was a student, which was when the government threatened to cut our allowance, which made me really angry. I mean, that would have meant less beer for me. But these kids, I mean, they've gone to a lot of protests,

whether it's Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter, you name it. And yeah, it just gave me this feeling of that things can change really, really quickly and that the current generation is so much more idealistic than we were at the time, which is of course also very necessary because we've got some pretty big challenges. But just to see how quickly things can change, that's something we often forget. So, I mean, obviously this is anecdotal in the sense that it's your experience in terms of the student body that you were part of and that you've gone back and seen now.

But do you think that that is indicative of a kind of wider generational change, both in the West and maybe more broadly across the world? Yeah, we have quite some evidence. Pew has done this polling year after year, and there you see indeed that millennials, but especially Gen Z, is probably the most progressive, most diverse, most highly educated generation this world has ever seen. People often talk a lot about, oh, kids these days. That's basically what people have been saying since the Asian Greeks.

I think Socrates was also complaining about kids these days. Yeah, I think there's some pretty solid evidence to back this up. Then in terms of news consumption, probably the best thing is to open Our World in Data, probably my favorite website, after yours, of course, on the internet. Because statistics, again, they help us to zoom out. And it's not necessarily that they always make you optimistic.

I mean, there's some really bad stuff going on in the world. There's a lot of reasons to be hopeful as well. That's something that you should really try and remind yourself of again and again and again. I mean, this is what you guys did with the Progress Network, right? This list of all the things that went really well in 2022. To be honest, I mean, I've been writing about this stuff for 10 years. I mean, I was supposed to know.

But still, when I read that long list that you guys pulled together, I still felt silly and stupid. Like, again, you've fallen for it. And again, yeah, you had a too pessimistic view of 2022. So why is it so easy? Even though we do know that the good stuff is happening, why does even somebody like yourself that is wired to find the good news stories,

there's still that gap in our knowledge. Why is that? So a couple of things going on. I mean, there are the obvious reasons of obviously the negativity bias. We focus on the bad, the confirmation bias when we already believe the world is mostly bad, then we find evidence for that everywhere. The news in and of itself, it presents itself as a neutral product, just as a way to inform yourself about the state of the world. But obviously, if you think about it for a little longer, then it becomes pretty clear that it is a very non-random selection of things, mostly bad things that go on in the world. I mean, the news is like 0.0000001% or even less than what goes on in the world every

day, but it determines more than 90% of our world view. Another thing that I would point out is that we're not very cosmopolitan. I mean, sometimes we like to think we are, but most people, when they think about the world, they mainly think about their own country, for example. And so Americans are quite depressed about the state of the world because things are getting polarized. And when they watch CNN, they see people screaming at each other and they think everything is going to go downhill. But they have no clue that there is such a disease as, say, river blindness and that it's been eradicated in this country that they never even think about.

People in rich countries are extraordinarily privileged, but very often we don't really realize it. The one stat that always blows me away is that if you earn a median wage in a country like Australia or the Netherlands or the US, then you're already part of the richest 3% in the world. It's astounding. And many people don't really feel that way, obviously,

but it is true. My favorite way of looking at this, and something I always remind myself if I think I'm getting world news is to ask myself when the last time it was that I heard a piece of news out of South America, the continent of South America. There's 442 million people there. And I say to myself, when did you hear anything out of South America that wasn't about drugs, And I say to myself, when did you hear anything out of South America that wasn't about drugs, crime, or forests? And the answer is usually, basically, I've heard nothing. And yet, sometimes when I think about that, I say,

well, what are those 442 million people doing? What have they been up to? The answer, of course, is that they speak a different language to me, and so I don't get to hear their news. I think that there's also this problem in journalism that's also present in art, which is that it is really difficult to make something interesting, exciting about the good in human nature. So I'll admit that I bingewatch Succession. I love the series. But it's just really hard to make something similar

that gives you a really optimistic view of humanity. It is possible. You could argue that Ted Lasso pulled it off. I love that series, especially the first two seasons. But it's much more difficult. There's this line from, I think, Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, if I remember correctly, where one of the characters says that

all the happy families are happy in exactly the same way, while all the unhappy families have a very particular way of being unhappy. So there's a novel for every unhappy family, while the happy family, that's just one boring story, and they live happily ever after. This is a challenge, and I guess that's why journalists and artists often feel pulled towards the negative

because it's just more exciting. It's easier to tell a story around it. There's this great quote at the beginning of your book, Humankind, that cynicism is the theory of everything. And throughout the book, you really unpack why we ended up with such a negative view of ourselves. Where did this negative self-image come from? I think it has pretty deep roots, actually. You could argue that it goes back all the way back to the ancient Greeks or Orthodox Christianity, when some thinkers such as Thucydides,

the Greek historians, or St. Augustine started to argue that our civilization is only a thin veneer, just a thin layer, and that below that lies raw human nature, that deep down people are fundamentally selfish. Particularly in Western history, you see that idea coming back again and again and again among the Greeks, among the Christians, among the Enlightenment philosophers. This is something that really surprised me. Many of these Enlightenment philosophers had a pretty bleak view of humanity. The most famous example is probably Thomas Hobbes, the British philosopher who argued that in the state of nature, we people were all fighting one another until we decided to give up our liberty

and appointed a Leviathan, an all-powerful ruler, and we got security in return. And yeah, other examples as well. If you, for example, read the founding fathers of the United States, the American dream may give you the impression that, oh, they must have been really optimistic about humanity's potential. But actually, some of the writing was really, really bleak. John Adams once wrote this essay with the title, All Men Would Be Tyrants If They

Could. That's what they really felt they had to deal with. And that's what they had in mind when they were designing the Constitution. It's like, how do we keep these terrible animals from tearing each other apart? That was basically the way they tried to set up the country. Yeah, it's a really deep, old, pernicious idea, I think, that comes back again and again. And that's mainly been advocated by those at the top. I think this is an effect of being pretty powerful, is that you look down and start to become quite cynical. In the book, what I try to do is to show that this view of human nature is seductive, but basically wrong. It's not true. We've got so much evidence now from anthropology, from archaeology, from sociology, from economics, from history, you name it,

that basically shows that we're much better than we often think we are. And you could even argue, as one evolutionary psychologist has said, that we have evolved to work together, that we are the product of survival of the friendliest. I felt that it was really important to bring all that evidence together and to tell this one big story of what has happened in science. Because as you know, scientists are wonderful, but often very specialized, and they know everything about their tiny little part of the picture. And then I thought, okay, I'm in this position to try and bring this all together and to tell a bigger story about what's been happening to our view of

human nature, and also what that could mean for the future. Because a theory of human nature is never just a theory. It's often a self-offending prophecy as well. It's what you assume in others is in the end what you get out of them. So you published that book in 2020 and you've been out on the road and promoting, I suppose, that different view of human nature. What's your experience of that been like? Have you found that people are receptive to you changing that story? Or have you found that this veneer theory

is just really difficult and really sticky to overcome? Or has it been a combination of both? Yeah, absolutely a combination. So obviously the question that I got again and again during the pandemic is like, Rutger, do you still believe in it? Have you seen those people hoarding toilet paper? Have you seen those people hoarding toilet paper? Have you seen the images from the supermarket in Australia? So what I said at the time when people asked me this is like, look, I don't know. I mean, I can point out examples of people doing wonderful things

during the pandemic, and I see a lot of evidence anecdotally for an explosion of cooperation and altruism. I mean, there were a lot of wonderful stories out there, but there were also other stories. And it's like, yeah, we don't know. We're in the midst of it. We have to wait until researchers do their work, and then maybe we can try and zoom out. And that's actually what happened. So I think it was last year that the World Happiness Report had this study. And they talk about a, what was the phrase?

A global surge in benevolence. And I think there's more and more evidence that has come in ever since then that yes, indeed, the pandemic was another example of this phenomenon that we see in many other contexts as well, which is that crises tend to bring out the best in people. That it's actually when things get really tough that people pull together and they become even more altruistic than they already are. And in the book, I obviously give a lot of examples of that, mainly in the context of natural disasters.

The news will always tell you that, oh, people start looting and plundering and the emergency services are too slow and it's all terrible and blah, blah, blah. But in reality, actually, pretty much the opposite happens. We've got decades of research by these disaster scientists. And every time you basically see the same phenomenon. Most people's lives are saved by their neighbors, by the people themselves. And it's actually only a very small fraction of people that gets rescued by these brilliantly trained dogs or the teams that come in with their helicopters. I mean, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have those teams.

That's all wonderful, but it gives you a misleading picture of who actually does all the rescuing. If the building collapses that you're in and you're underneath the rubble, then you're most likely to be saved by your neighbor. Because he's like, huh, my neighbor's under the rubble, maybe I should do something. That's just a natural human response.

So just to be clear, you're not arguing here for a kind of dualistic view of human nature, where you're saying it's not kumbaya, hold hands, everyone's fantastic. I think what you're saying here is it's much more complex and that people can be awful, but people can be wonderful and that disasters can be terrifying and scary, but also they can bring out the best in us.

In and amongst this kind of more complex view, I suppose, that you're espousing, why does kindness feel so underrated and so undervalued in our world? Maybe because it isn't very loud. Well, we've recently seen some studies on what does well on social media, right? And it's just exactly what you think. Yeah, the more loud and the more angry you are and the more negative, yeah, the better it sells. And look, I'm not against that. I've been pretty angry a couple

of times in my life and I've done some of that stuff on social media. I once said some nasty things about billionaires not paying their taxes, and I stand by that. And I'm not going to take anything of that back. I'm not saying like, oh, let's all be happy and don't worry and blah, blah, blah. It's also why I sometimes don't really like the word optimism, because optimism to me, it suggests a little bit of complacency maybe. It's always why I prefer the word hope. Hope is about the possibility of change and it impels you to act. But yeah, it's often harder to make hope go viral.

It's certainly not impossible though. During the first weeks of the pandemic, is that I had written this story about kids in the 1960s, six boys that had shipwrecked on a small island near Tonga, the island group in the Pacific Ocean near Australia. This was a story that for me was, I like to call it the real Lord of the Flies. I mean, many of us were forced to read Lord of the Flies in school, which is this novel about kids that behave really terribly when they shipwreck

on an island and quickly turn into monsters. And I think at the end of the novel, a couple of them are dead. I wondered, has this ever really happened? And it turns out, yes, it has. I found out about this story and managed to track down the boys who are now actually in their 70s. Three of them today are still alive. I interviewed them and they told me this, about this wonderful experience, how they survived for 15 months on this island. Again, it was a matter of survival of the friendliest,

of working together. Initially, I'd published this in Dutch and it hadn't done all that much. I mean, people were interested in it, but a lot of theies is not very famous here in the Netherlands. Then early in the pandemic, my book came out and my publisher had asked The Guardian

to publish a small excerpt about the story of Lord of the Flies. I've never experienced anything like it. So The Guardian told me that it's still today the most read article in the history of their website. Wow. Yeah, yeah. It had more clicks than the coronavirus lifeblood,

even though it was like the beginning of the pandemic. Because it was really, really hopeful and really optimistic. And they're turning it into a Hollywood movie now. But I guess what makes that story work is that it's also about people overcoming adversity. And they were not fighting each other, but they were fighting nature, basically. In that sense, it could be a people overcoming adversity. And they were not fighting each other, but they were fighting nature, basically. In that sense, it could be a metaphor for our times,

whether we think about climate change, for example, or the risks of new pandemics. We're all in this together. If we really try and cooperate, we can do this. And that's another way of telling the story that indeed it can actually appeal to millions and millions of people. I think another thing that we really learned doing the Humankind Project is that so often these stories of these amazing people that are out there changing the

world, those are the untold stories in our world. We don't hear about them enough. And one of the reasons why we wanted to start this podcast is because we were really interested in finding an answer to the question of what does it take to change the world? Why is it that some people will roll up their sleeves and keep showing up against the odds and others won't take any action. I'm really interested in what are your thoughts on this? What makes somebody change the world? So there's this quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead

that I've always loved. And she once said that we should never underestimate the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And it's especially the second line that really fascinates me. It's the only thing that ever has. Which is, I mean, on the one hand,

idealists often like to quote Margaret Mead here because it gives them confidence that, yes, we can make a difference, even if there are a few of us. But if you think about it for a little longer, then the second line is quite brutal as well. She basically says, most people don't change the world. Most people are just on the sidelines, and they don't make this big difference. It's really the small groups of people that really determine everything. In statistical terms, we would call this a power law.

We know that, for example, the worst earthquakes cause more damage than all the other earthquakes combined. The worst wars cause more suffering than all the wars combined. Or the best team players in certain sports score more goals than other players combined. That is what they call the long-tail effect in statistics. But the thing to keep in mind here

is that we can all sort of choose to join one of those small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens. This is something that I realized when I studied the psychology of resistance heroes during the Second World War. Why that some people have the courage in Europe in the 1940s to risk their own lives to help persecuted Jews, you know, to take them in their home, which is an incredibly risky thing to do. And there have been a lot of studies, some databases with hundreds of interviews with these Jew rescuers. And it turns out that there's not

really a defining characteristic at all. If you would go to an award ceremony in Jerusalem, where these people were honored, it seems like a cross-section of the population. You know, it's people who are young, old, rich, poor, highly educated, or no education at all, could be anything. And then some researchers started to realize that it's actually not about the psychology of the resistance hero. No, it's about the sociology of resistance.

It turns out that the most defining characteristic of a resistance hero is that they were asked. So they were asked by someone else to join the resistance. And 96% of people say yes when they're asked. Now, obviously, not everyone were asked. So they were asked by someone else to join the resistance. And 96% of people say yes when they're asked. Now obviously not everyone is asked, so there is some selection mechanism going on there. It's almost like a pandemic. So resistance, it wasn't evenly spread out over the country,

in the Netherlands that I looked at in particular. Now you can really see these pockets of resistance where people are inspiring one another, where people are saying to each other, look, you don't have to stand on the sidelines. You can be someone who really makes a massive difference. I think that's the way we should look at idealism in general. If you think about why was the British abolitionist movement so successful? Why suddenly in the year 1787, why did it suddenly took off?

Why suddenly in the year 1787, why did it suddenly took off? If you read newspapers at the time, there was a lot of talk about it spreading like wildfire. That was the metaphor that was used again and again, that something had ignited, that it was like fire. And that is just the same phenomenon. It's people inspiring one another. So again, it's not about the psychology, it's about the sociology of what we can do together if we are infecting one another with this virus of idealism and altruism and cooperation. So that's one of the reasons why I think we should be quite vocal about these things as well. You know, there's this story in the Bible of Jesus saying that we shouldn't pray on the corner of the street. You know, you should pray, you know, in the seclusion of your own home

where only God will hear you, which I think, I mean, I like the man. Jesus made some good points, but this is terrible advice. It really is terrible advice. But then when I wrote this, my mother told me, my parents are both Christians and my father's actually a preacher. My mother told me to actually, Rutger, come on, read the Bible again. There's actually this other passage where Jesus say that we shouldn't hide our light and that we should actually, you know, we should try and find the sweet spot here

where we don't come off as sanctimonious. But we should also be willing to tell these stories and spread the light and inspire one another. Perhaps Jesus was a complex human being who was in conversation with his past self when he was preaching his messages. Yeah, probably. So I finished your book this afternoon. I did. And what struck me, not only the incredible amount of research, but the amount of curiosity

that you would have to have to embark on this kind of journey. And I was curious because you dedicate the book to your parents. Is this something that they fostered in you? I think so, yes. I think they really did. I guess the more trusting attitude of seeing the good in everyone, I think that really comes from my father. And the more angry, indignant part of me that's shouting at billionaires,

like, why are you not paying your taxes? That's really my mother. My mother has always had this really clear world view. She's never accepted it, that we have this insane amount of inequality in the world. I've always liked this phrase by Max Roser, one of the founders of Our World in Data, the website that I mentioned earlier,

where he said, the world is bad, it's getting better, but it could be so much better still, right? And all these things are true at the same time. I'm really, really angry at the state of the world today. I think it's so unacceptable, right? We have extraordinary levels of poverty still, of inequality, of suffering, of disease, you name it. But at the same time, I'm really hopeful because things have been getting way better. We are making progress and there are just hundreds of millions of fantastic, wonderful people doing their very best. And at the same time, I think we should do so much better than this, right? Because there's still so much room for improvement and for even more

progress. All these things, you can believe them at the same time. You don't have to pick and choose, right? You can be really, really indignant about the injustice of the present and at the same time be incredibly hopeful and optimistic about what we can do together and what we have already been doing. So I have no doubt that anyone who reads this book will at the very least pause and think about their view of humankind. But how did this book change you? How did all this research maybe reshape your view of the world? Were there any surprises?

So I've never been a really big fan, I must admit, of the self-help genre. And I've often believed as a historian, as a writer, that we should try and zoom out and, you know, fight for systemic change and not be misled by this view that people can just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and that all it takes is just some individual heroes. So I've always been a little bit skeptical of that genre. But then at the same time, when I had almost finished writing Humankind, a friend of mine asked me, okay, so Rutger, what are the personal implications of this view of human nature? And then I realized that actually working on this book for five years has made a personal difference.

It has changed me. If you just continuously learn to look for the best in humans, yeah, there are some real life lessons to be learned here. I guess my favorite is that when in doubt, we should always look for the best in people. Actually assuming the best in someone else can create this wonderful effect that if you treat someone else in a really positive way,

then that can make someone else nicer as well. Because people mirror each other all the time. This is basically the turning the other cheek effect. And then finally, yes, there are still people who are just gone artists, for example, who are trying to rip you off. It's happened a couple of times to me in my life. I remember when I was a student, there was this man who came up to me. It was late in the evening, around 11 p.m. in Utrecht. And he said, okay, look, I've been in this car crash and I had to leave my wife and my children and really need money for a cab. Can you give me 50 euros? And I was like, okay, sure. I immediately

make this instinctive decision to trust a man. And I said, okay, here's 50 euros. It was a lot of money for me at the time. That was like a month of drinking beer. And I came back that evening and I said to my girlfriend, who's now my wife, I said, look, this and that happened. And she just burst out laughing. And she said, Rutger, you're such an idiot. Do you really believe that you're getting this back?

Clearly that's not going to happen. I was like, no, no, no, no, I really think that. I gave him my cell number, no, no, no, no. I really think that, you know, I gave him my cell number and no, no, no. I think he's really going to give me back my money. Obviously never happened. And at the time I remember feeling quite ashamed of being misled in this way, that my trust was abused. But in the course of writing this book, I actually became a little bit proud of this memory. I realized that this is the way I want to live my life, that I'd much rather be conned a couple of times in my life than that I would have to live my whole life distrusting most strangers around me. So now what I often do when I give a talk about the book, I ask the audience,

okay, who's never been conned? Who's never been the victim of some fraudulent scheme? And there's always, I think, 5% to 10% of people who raise their hand. And then I always tell them, you should see a therapist right now. Because you need a more trusting attitude in life. I'm personally really willing to pay that price

because what you get in exchange is so much more wonderful is that you can basically trust most people most of the time. You've worked on Humankind. It's not your first book. You wrote Utopia for Realists before that. And you're currently working on a new book. What does it feel like perhaps trying to explode some new assumptions? I often feel that I am in conversation with myself or my former self, or that all these books

are in conversations with each other. And I think that Humankind and my new book are going to have a difficult relationship. They might not really like each other. I think there are two sides of the same coin, but yeah, it might be a little bit difficult. So Humankind is really a warm hug that is supposed to restore your faith in humanity.

And the new book that I'm working on right now, the working title is Moral Ambition. Moral Ambition is what I consider the desire to use your career to do as much good as possible, to really stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable. For me, it started off with this simple question of who are the abolitionists of today? We can look back on those in the 18th century who fought slavery, and we know they often paid a very high price for it.

They were threatened, abused. Sometimes they even had to fear for their lives. And we also know they were right. They were standing on the right side of history. And then surely there must be some people out there today who are the equivalent of that. But then that's a pretty uncomfortable question as well because it forces you to ask the question,

what are the moral catastrophes of our time? What are some things that we are doing today that may be considered really horrific by our children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. So that's why I think this book will be a little bit more uncomfortable. In a way, it's almost going to be like a self-help book in that sense. But I mentioned earlier that most self-help books will probably give you a more good feeling about yourself and teach you, you know,

to be more mindful and productive. And this book should basically give you a bad feeling about yourself. So, or at least challenge you to live a more difficult life. In the end, I would say it's also a more meaningful life, but yeah, it is more difficult because that's, that's the, the path that these abolitionists or the suffragettes or, you know, some of the greatest animal rights activists took. It is a more difficult path. So yeah, I had the feeling that that was really something I had to write on next, because I must also admit that at some point I started seeing photos of people reading my book, Humankind, on Instagram next to a wonderful beach and saying, oh, this is wonderful. Everything's going to be fine. Just reap humankind. You know, don't follow the news. Don't worry about this or

that. And we're going to go on our next holiday on Bali next week. And I was like, oh, no, I created a monster. I suppose, I mean, it actually comes back to Max's quote, doesn't it? The world used to be awful. The world is getting better, but there's still so much more that we can do. And all of those things can be true. And they can be true in the form of one sentence. They can be true in terms of the data we look at, but they can also be true in terms of the books that you want to write. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm thinking of starting this book with the story of a monk that I actually really admire. His name is Mathieu Ricard, a French monk who, when he was 25, he was a really brilliant scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. And he decided to basically quit his career as a scientist, go to the Himalayas

and study under the great Buddhist masters. And he clocked, I think, around 60,000 hours of meditation, compassion meditation, altruistic meditation, you name it, just thinking about the suffering of the world and how important it is to be kind to one another. And then in the early 2000s, they put him in a brain scanner. And it was proclaimed that he had the most beautiful brain on earth, basically. Just the level of gamma waves in his brain, I have no idea what that is, but anyway, the level was astounding,

and the regions in his brain that were associated with feelings of positivity were enormous, while the regions in his brain that were associated with feelings of negativity were very tiny. Journalists around the world were fascinated by this man. Who is this? How did he do it? And the answer was, well, he meditated for 30 years, basically 30 years full-time, he meditated on compassion. And I remember reading about that story for the first time

and getting really angry. It's like, what a douchebag. I mean, for 30 years, he did nothing for the world. And now he has this brain and we're supposed to feel grateful or something like that. And then I compare that to one of my heroes, which is a man named Thomas Clarkson, who was one of the great abolitionists in the 18th century, who, when he was the same age, 25, decided to devote his life to the fight against slavery. And then for the next seven years, traveled around the kingdom to spread his anti-slavery propaganda everywhere. He worked for 100 hours a week. He was unstoppable. And then after seven

years, he had a total, utter, complete nervous breakdown, or what we would call burnout today. And he couldn't walk the stairs anymore. He was a wreck. He was 33, but he looked like he was 70. And then I wonder, if we would have put that man in a brain scanner at the time, what would we have seen? Well, journalists would have said, look, this is the most ugly brain we've ever seen. What's happened to this terrible man, right? And then I think about it, but yeah, but wait a minute, it's Thomas Clarkson that I really, really admire here. I mean, he should be our role model. So anyway, that's something that sometimes frustrates me

with the contemporary craze around mindfulness and how do you work on your brain. I mean, in the end, it's not about your brain, it's about what you do. It's not how you look in a brain scanner, It's about the impact that you have on history and in others. And sure, I mean, it would probably have been much better if Thomas Clarkson would have been a little bit more mindful and practiced compassion meditation for 20 minutes a day. Maybe that would have made him more effective even, you know, because it's not really great if the great

activists have nervous breakdowns. In the end, if I zoom out and look at who I really admire, it's the Thomas Clarksons. So I guess that's the idea of my next book, is a self-help book on how to ruin your brain, but make the world a much better place. Yeah, great. So imagine the world wakes up tomorrow and decides to embrace these twin assumptions that, A, human beings are hardwired for kindness and collaboration, and B, that all of us could do with a little more moral ambition.

If you combine those two things together, what changes do you think we would see? How could this shift in mindset shape our collective future? Oh, I think the differences and the changes could be absolutely massive. And I think for two reasons. The first reason is because there's so much low-hanging fruit. A charity evaluator like GiveWell tells us that it costs only $5,000 to save one life. Just $5,000. And that in and of itself just shows

how relatively easy it is for people in rich countries who are so, so privileged to do an enormous amount of good. I mean, $5,000 is a lot of money, sure, but it is about as much as millennials spend on their vacations every year. So it is relatively doable, and you could actually save someone else's life so yeah if we really focus on that low-hanging fruit on the fight against malaria for example or

tuberculosis or you know some of the things that we are making progress on and you write about that all the time in your newsletter if only people realize how much they could do if they would focus on some of these great challenges. This is the most important thing. When we think about moral ambition, it's not so much about how talented you are, but it's really about what you do with the talents that were given to you. That is so, so much more important. And I just see so much waste, so many people stuck in jobs that don't add much value,

working on first world problems that don't really matter, selling products that they don't even really care about in the first place. And that's just such a shame because many of these people are really smart and could contribute an enormous amount. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that when we assume the best in one another,

we can revolutionize how we run pretty much all our institutions. One of the most radical examples that I give in humankind is what we can do in our criminal justice system. I look at Norwegian prisons, which are these very weird places. On the one hand, they're the best prisons in the world with the lowest recidivism rate, the lowest odds that people will commit another crime

once they get out of these prisons. On the other hand, they don't look like prisons at all. The prisoners get the freedom to go to the cinema, make music. They've got their own music label, which is called Criminal Records. They've got their own band. They socialize with the guards. It's like a pretty wonderful community that assumes the best in one another, which is, by the way, really difficult. It takes a lot of courage, I think, of Norwegian society to be able to do this and to not sink to the level of people who've done terrible things,

but actually turn the other cheek. In the end, that gives us better results. Empirically, as I said, these are the best prisons in the world, if you look at the recidivism rate. And it's just one of the examples of what you can do once you change your assumptions about human nature. For our listeners,

where can they follow you? How can they support your work? Yeah, so I assume that reading Dutch is no issue for most of your listeners. I mean, it's a relatively easy language. So that's the language actually that I write in for a platform called The Correspondent.

It was founded 10 years ago in the Netherlands with the philosophy that the news is actually the problem. So we wanted to unbreak the news. We felt like we didn't need more breaking news, but actually needed to zoom out and focus on the bigger forces that really govern our lives. Yeah, but obviously I'm also on all the standard social media platforms. Although I tweet less and less

because it's not very good for your mental health. It's not good for your brain. Do you have any timeline in terms of when we can read the new book? Yeah, so in the Netherlands it's coming out next year, in April 2024, and I think out next year in April 2024. And I think probably a year later in English. This has been such an amazing conversation. And we finish all our podcasts interviews the same way.

What does the word hope mean to you? For me, hope is about action. I become really hopeful when I see people doing things. Just getting up in the morning, getting their act together and contributing to making the world a better place. Going out on the streets, protesting, building organizations, or sometimes the really quiet stuff that doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's not on the news because it's not flashy,

but it's the incredibly important work of maintaining social cohesion and building our society. That just always gives me hope when I actually see people doing stuff. In the same way we can all hear a song but dance to it differently, a song but dance to it differently. Hope is something that we can make our own. It doesn't wait for a software upgrade or another qualification. The invitation isn't to learn new dance steps, but to respond to the situation just as we are. If there's one thing we know for sure at the end of this season, it's this. That hope is something you do. It's not something that you have or wait to be given. We can't wait to introduce you to more people mending the world

when we launch season two of Hope is a Verb later this year. You won't want to miss out. And the best way to do that is to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you want to learn more about Rutger and his work, check out our show notes for details. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making this project possible.

To support us by becoming a paid member, check out futurecrunch.com. We would like to acknowledge that this podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe and leave a review.

And if you want to reach out directly, send us an email at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening.