Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference with Rutger Bregman

0:00David McWilliams: Coming up, we have an interview with the brilliant Rutger Bregman on the idea of moral ambition. What he's talking about is why so many of us end up doing jobs that are wasteful of our talents, and we could be doing something much more important. And the reason this is essential is because it harks back to the history of great movements like civil rights, like abolitionism, like, for example, Daniel O 'Connell and the Catholic Emancipation, all these great movements changed the world for the better. But they changed the world because people got up and got motivated. So that's all ahead of us with Rutger Bregman in a couple of minutes.

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2:06How you doing there?

2:08David McWilliams: It is time for the podcast and we have a little gem for you. because one of the best-selling authors, philosophers, moral philosophers of the last decade is Rutger Bregman, a Dutch originally economist who has turned his attention to all sorts of, not so much criticisms, but investigations, inquiries into the nature of humanity. His first book was called Idealism for Realists, a wonderful call to arms about how you can change the world and be idealistic, but be realistic. His second book, Humankind, was the very first book on the David McWilliams Podcast Book Club. It is, again, a call to arms about essentially the idea that humans are kind, that we are cooperative, we are collaborative.

3:07David McWilliams: In fact, the history of humanity is not the history of violence and coercion. It is also a history of collaboration, of cooperation, and of fundamental decency. And his latest book, which is called Moral Ambition, essentially says, stop wasting your time and start making a difference. And again, it is another call to action about why so many of us waste our talents in jobs that are meaningless and why so many of us could be galvanized to change the world for the better. He's a wonderful, wonderful thinker. He probably came to prominence in many people's minds at Davos many years ago, where he basically took a coach and horses and drove it through a lot of the sanctimoniousness that is described at that alpine resort.

3:58But, and here's the but,

4:00David McWilliams: what was on display at Davos recently was hard power, was coercion, was violence, was might as right, was strength as right, was an expression that the little people follow and the big people make rules, a total and utter contradiction to what Rutger has to say. And that's why it is so wonderful to have him on the podcast this week, as in some way, the antibody to the virus of might is right, not just in economics, in politics, but also in global philosophy and the sort of world that we are told is the only world we live in and we have to suck it up. So let's go to Amsterdam and let's talk to Rutger Bregman.

4:50David McWilliams: I am delighted, absolutely delighted to have on the line from Holland, Rutger Bregman. Now, Rutger has been at Kilkenomics many, many years ago, but it's kind of apt that we have Rutger with us this week because it's fair to say, I wouldn't say he made his name out, but certainly he was propelled onto the global stage by a speech, a Carney-esque speech he gave at Davos a couple of years ago. And now that Davos has just subsided, although I don't think the world has actually recovered from the various missiles that were thrown at that ski alpine resort in Switzerland. It's great to have Rutger back.

5:30David McWilliams: Rutger, how are you? Great to see you. I'm good. So good to see you again, David, after all those years. I want to talk to you about Moral Ambition, the latest book. But I want to backtrack a little bit about the Rutger Bregman story. Mm-hmm. How did you come? Because I've been a big fan. I'll say our very first book club of this podcast was Humankind. Okay, the very, very first one we did was Humankind. And I've been following you for many, many years. Tell me how you came to see the world the way you do before we get into the work and before we get into the new work. So Moral Ambition is my third book, basically, or at least the third book that I'm actually proud of.

6:13I've written a few books in Dutch and I'm very glad that they've not been translated. But yeah, the first one was Utopia Freelist a decade ago, which was about how crazy ideas can become reality. I think that's why you invited me to economics back then, you know, to talk about basic income, which was such a revolutionary, crazy, inherited idea back then. Now it's much more mainstream. And indeed, the second book was Humankind, in which I tried to provide a new view of human nature. Because all these ideas that I was excited about, like basic income, but also, you know, a radically different way of doing democracy, much more participatory, and other ideas, they all seem to rely on a different view of what humans actually are, what kind of creatures we are.

6:56And I had a much more hopeful view of our species. And yeah, it was also interesting to see that there had been a shift in a lot of scientific disciplines, sociology, anthropology, you name it. And basically, I wanted to give people the big picture. Now, after a decade of doing that, you know, writing articles, writing books, I had honestly become a little bit fed up with myself. I had come to the conclusion that perhaps awareness is overrated and that perhaps I needed a kick in the ass. So I'd always been fascinated by that self-help genre of books, you know, that those books in the airports, you know, the books that teach you how to be happier or more productive.

7:36or more mindful or whatever. And I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if we would have a self-help book that would make your life more difficult, right? The kind of book that you wish you never had read because now, damn, now you have to do something. I wanted to read that book. I couldn't find it. So I thought, you know what, let's write it.

7:57David McWilliams: And that's moral ambition. I mean, what I love is the title is, hold on a second, in parentheses, it's like, stop wasting your time. and do something meaningful. So explain to me, and your statistics in the book are fascinating. So a lot of people listening to this will feel the message of this book is absolutely essential for people to have a more fulfilled life, a more passionate life, a better life. What is the central idea? Is the central idea that there's lots of people who are very talented doing stupid jobs and wasting their time? Yeah, yeah. And this is something I've talked about in all of my books.

8:36So this waste of talent is something that I consider the greatest waste of our time. There are so many brilliant, talented people working on jobs that don't really make the world a better place. The legendary anthropologist David Graeber called this the bullshit jobs. Yes. But now we actually have really good data on it as well. There was a team of Dutch economists a few years ago that did a huge study. They looked at more than 40 countries, 100 ,000 people were polled and asked this simple question, does your job add something of value? Is your job socially meaningful? And the astounding finding was that around 25 % of all people in modern economies think that their own job is socially meaningful, or at least they doubt the value of their job.

9:22That is a bizarre number. If you think about it, it's like five times the unemployment rate. These are so often people with excellent resumes, beautiful LinkedIn profiles. They've gone to nice universities. they have cool sounding job titles like marketer or HR manager or consultant or lawyer or banker or whatever. They could, in theory, do extraordinary things with their one life on this planet, but instead, they're wasting away in cubicles. So yeah, what is the antidote to that? I think it is more all ambition.

9:54David McWilliams: And so tell us, let's go back to this idea of, you know, good jobs, good universities, good grades, seems to be a sort of an incubator, which is very, very well regarded universities that pushes an elite into kind of useless things. Do you have statistics on that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So a friend of mine calls this the Bermuda Triangle of Talent. It's consultancy, finance, and corporate law, this gaping black hole that sucks up so many of our quote unquote best and brightest. And we have incredible data from some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Look at Harvard, for example.

10:31At Harvard, 40 % of all graduates are funneled because that's what happens. They're really being funneled into this Bermuda Triangle of talent. And it starts very early. So already in their first year or their second year, they're being wined and dined. There's like armies of McKinsey consultants arrive on campus to try and lure these students in. And it's very hard for them to resist because you got to imagine most of them have arrived and they've written beautiful application essays about all the global problems they aspire to solve. You know, poverty, infectious disease, war. These kids are often generally idealistic.

11:10But then this whole machine starts doing the work on them. And it's super effective. So if you add big tech, it's actually more than 60 % of students at Harvard who end up in these jobs that are very often by people themselves considered as bullshit jobs.

11:28David McWilliams: And what you're saying is, no, I mean, and believe me, I know many, many of those people who at this stage in their career are thinking, what have I been doing for the last 25 years? Explain to me, why do you think this is the case? Why do you think so many otherwise clever people and otherwise ambitious people and otherwise good people whose urges are positive find themselves or allow themselves to be funneled into jobs that they feel and they know are not worthwhile? So there are a couple of things we need to look at. The first and most obvious variable is money. There's a really interesting study that was done a few years ago in Switzerland, where they asked people to judge the morality or the immorality of certain industries.

12:18And then they looked at the hourly wages in those industries. And you see this striking correlation that the more immoral a job is perceived to be, the more money you can make in that industry. So like the tobacco industry, for example, scores very highly. and it makes sense because like Philip Morris is probably, you know, one of the worst legal evil companies in the world. Yeah, it's like probably one of the most embarrassing things you can do with your life. So you want to be compensated for that. I think that the money variable is not the most important one there. Okay. If you ask like these students, for example, why do they end up at JP Morgan or McKinsey?

12:56Initially, the money isn't that good. I mean, you're exploited like a slave. You work like 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And if you just do the numbers, they're not compensating you that well, actually, especially in the first few years. Later, obviously, you start making more money and then lifestyle inflation becomes a problem and the golden handcuffs tighten. But initially, I think something else is way more important, and that is status. As a society, we have adopted a very shallow definition of success, of what it means to live a great life. It is about the conventional stuff, money, job title.

13:33Power, perceptions of power, all of this stuff. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you can see this, again, very clearly in the data. So there's one study that I often quote. It's the American Freshman Survey. Students have been asked since the 1960s what they see as the most important values in their life, their most important life goals. And half a century ago, 90 % said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life, was one of their most important life goals. Today, that's just 50%. So it has really plummeted. Now, in the 60s, only 50 % said that making a lot of money was one of their most important life goals.

14:07Today, that's 90%. So basically, the numbers have reversed. The important thing here, though, is that this is not human nature. This is human culture, right? It is a certain definition of success that has spread a little bit like a virus. But that also gives us some reason for hope. because if it is culture, then it can change.

14:29David McWilliams: Well, let's go back. I mean, you were briefly going to touch on humankind. I mean, the thesis in humankind is that we're kind. The thesis in humans is that humans are nice. We are decent. We are driven by altruistic ideas. We are not this slightly sociopathic, linear, highly focused on money creature. The sort of person you see in the likes of Donald Trump would be absolutely emblematic of that. I was very taken in humankind by the Lord of the Rings story. I wonder if you can tell the listeners that again, elucidate your idea that humans are kind. Sure, sure. So I've got a lot of Lord of the Rings stories, but I think you're referring to a Lord of the Flies story.

15:09David McWilliams: Sorry, Lord of the Flies. Sorry, Lord of the Flies. I'm happy to tell you Lord of the Rings stories as well. No, no, no, no. Lord of the Flies is much more interesting. Honestly, this was one of the highlights of my career. So in humankind, indeed, I wanted to show that humans are not as bad as we think we are. And so I had to basically disprove all kinds of stories, narratives, scientific studies that had, you know, become so famous or infamous. And one of them was indeed Lord of the Flies, the William Golding book published just after the Second World War about kids that shipwreck on an island and turn into monsters.

15:45For that book, I just wondered, okay, well, has it ever really happened? Has there ever been a real life case of real kids shipwrecking on a real island? Because that would be rather interesting to see what would happen. Now, turns out, you know, scientifically, there are some ethical problems with, you know, just dropping a few kids on an island and then watching what happens.

16:07David McWilliams: Disappearing for a couple of weeks. But there was a natural experiment, actually. It was a forgotten experiment that happened in the 60s when six kids from a Tongan school, Tonga is an island group in the Pacific Ocean, were just bored with school. They thought, let's go on an adventure. They borrowed a boat of a local fisherman and then ended up in a storm on the first day. They drifted for seven days and then washed up on this forgotten island called Ata in the middle of the Pacific. and somehow they managed to survive there. It's an incredible story of friendship, of cooperation. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, the boys were doing really well, actually.

16:55They were quite muscular. They had built a gym for themselves, a farm. They were healthy. I mean, they were bored shitless, of course. Yeah, of course they were. They really wanted to get off the island. Yeah. But yeah, it's just this incredible story of the power of friendship. And I always say, like, if we force kids to read Lord of the Flies, then maybe they ought to know about this story as well.

17:18David McWilliams: But, you know, the fascinating thing was that was the very first book that was on our secondary syllabus, secondary school in Ireland. The very first classic was Lord of the Flies. And that, of course, suggested to us that, yes, we are not collaborative, we are not cooperative, we are highly competitive, and at the end of the day, we are ultimately incredibly violent. Yeah, yeah. Here's the point that I'd really like to make here, David. We humans, we become the stories that we tell ourselves. So what has happened over the last 50 years is that we started telling ourselves a really nasty story about civilization being a thin veneer, about humans being fundamentally selfish.

17:58And then when you do that, you start designing your whole society around it, right? And you build institutions that bring out exactly the kind of behavior that your theory presupposes. And so what I'm doing both in humankind and in moral ambition is I'm just trying to tell a different story about what we can do as a species. And there are so many amazing examples of really morally ambitious people, moral pioneers who made a massive difference in the fight against some of the greatest challenges that we ever faced as a species. I talk a lot about British abolitionism, for example, in the book. And just sharing those stories can hopefully, you know, be infectious.

18:37David McWilliams: No, no, I mean, and you obviously cite, you know, why did people in the Second World War hide Jews? Why did some people just decide, actually, I'm not going to go along with this? Yeah, this is another thing that I've been obsessed with for a long time. You know, when I was a kid in school, in primary school, I was always reading books about the Second World War, always, you know, everything that I could get my hands on, and always asking myself the question, what would I have done? So I grew up in the Netherlands, as you know, the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis. And most people didn't do anything to resist them.

19:08Most people were just like, yeah, what are you going to do? Right? You can't do anything. But there were a few exceptions. So for this book, I wanted to find out what made those people difference? What is the psychology of the resistance hero? Turns out that after the war, quite a few books have been published about that. Hundreds of resistance heroes have been interviewed, and researchers have been trying to find the variables, right? Were these mostly left-wing people or right-wing? Were they religious or secular? Men, women, young, old, rich, poor? Well, David, it turns out it was just a cross-section of the population.

19:43There was really, really nothing there, actually. It was only years later, in the 90s, that a new group of researchers looked at the same data, and they were like, hey, wait a minute, there is actually something going on here. There is this one variable, this one simple variable that explains incredibly well or predicts incredibly well whether people would join the resistance, yes or no. In fact, if this variable was present, then in 96 % of all cases, people joined the resistance. What was it? It was the mere matter of being asked. If people were asked to do the right thing, they pretty much always said yes.

20:20Now that is for me, it's such a simple, but such a profound insight. This explains why resistance was not evenly spread out over the country. It was not a matter of individual psychology. It was a matter of collective sociology. It was a matter of a virus, the virus of resistance spreading from one person to the other. And you had a few people who were like actual super spreaders, who were asking like a lot of people to join the resistance. And I think that is exactly what we need right now. You know, the face of rising authoritarianism. We need super spreaders. We need people who spread this virus of moral ambition, of resistance, and ask a lot of people in and say like, hey, I think you can do this.

21:00David McWilliams: Just to remind listeners, I'm talking to Rutger Bregman. We're talking about his latest book, Moral Ambition. And the crux of it is that we have one precious life. All of us, whoever the hell you are, wherever you're listening, if you're in the gym, if you're walking around, if you're at home, you're listening, all of us have one life. And I mean, the challenge is, what are you going to do with it? And what Rutger is saying is that so many of us waste our time and our talents and actually avoid doing something that would make us feel much, much more satisfied and would help the world. What I really like about the book is the fact that you've said that, Rutger, is that good intentions are not enough.

21:40David McWilliams: Having this sort of sitting in the pub saying, you know what? I feel this. Outcomes are essential. Absolutely. Let's elucidate that. Yeah, yeah. So in the book, I talk a lot about the greatest movement for human rights that has ever existed in the history of our species. And I think that was the fight against slavery and against the slave trade. Now, a lot of people think that abolitionism mainly involved shouting, abolish slavery, abolish slavery, abolish slavery. Well, that was not it. You know, this was such an incredibly pragmatic movement. These people were able to build coalitions that were incredibly unlikely, working together with people who disagree with them in many issues.

22:20But they also leveraged arguments that we would never think about today. I've got one story in the book about Thomas Clarkson, one of the great English abolitionists who was a university graduate of Cambridge. and when he was 25, he basically made the decision to devote his whole life to the fight against the slave trade and against slavery. Now, what he discovered as basically an investigative journalist was that a lot of the people that were dying on these slave ships were not just the enslaved people themselves, but also the sailors, also basically the white men, the perpetrators. Now, for us today, you would say like, yeah, okay, but like who cares?

23:01Like, okay, so they succumb to diseases, but like the really evil thing going on here is the slavery. That's what you ought to fight. But for Thomas Clarkson, this was a massive breakthrough because suddenly they realized, hey, we can go to Westminster. We can say to the politicians, our men, our boys are dying. We ought to abolish the slave trade. And boom, that was extremely effective. It's that kind of pragmatism that I honestly really admire where you're just laser focused on actually achieving results. And if I look back at, well, let's say the last five to 10 years of progressive and leftist activism, I have seen, I don't know about you, David, but I've seen a lot of moral purity.

23:40David McWilliams: Don't get me started. Don't get me started, Rutger. We could have a couple of drinks. No, but let's tease this out about moral purity, let's say on the left in this case. Sure. Okay. Let's go back a few years. This was the height of the Great Awakening. in places like america what you saw was that you know the big progressive organizations they were not fighting quote-unquote the enemy they were fighting themselves like they were embroiled in the worst internal wars uh in in many many years and take the moment when the rights finally took down roe v wade you know when the federal right to abortion was finally destroyed you know after 50 years.

24:22It was an incredible moment. What was the left doing at that moment?

24:27David McWilliams: I can't even remember. Tell me. I can't even remember. Multiple leaders of like the pro-choice groups came out and said like, okay, but my worst enemies, they were on my own payroll, you know? Yeah. It's on the one hand, darkly funny, but also deeply tragic, of course, because in the fight against injustice, what really matters is actually winning. That's what it's all about. Like the animals that are currently tortured in factory farms, they don't give a damn about your moral purity. You know, to all those vegans who are looking at, you know, those products is like, is there a tiny little bit of milk powder in there that I can't consume it?

25:02No, they want you to win. They want you to achieve results. And if we really want to learn from the moral pioneers of the past, then look at how pragmatic they were. Look at how good they were at building coalitions. You know, the Quakers, the evangelicals teaming up, even though they had radically different conceptions of Christianity. But the fact that they worked together, that's what made them so powerful.

25:21David McWilliams: Well, this is always the case. I mean, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends. I mean, this is the great peacemakers reach and over the boundaries and do deals with people who they dislike. Because the whole life, you know, there's no point sitting with all your mates and saying, yeah, we're all great. You've got to actually deal. I remember many years ago in the Drop the Debt campaign, which was a big, big campaign orchestrated by Bono in the main and Geldof here in Ireland. There was a moment when I think Bono had to go and meet George Bush in order to get this done. He had to say, okay, I'm actually going to do the least rock and roll thing you can do and go in to meet George Bush, because George Bush was the guy, to your point, who could actually sign the agreement.

26:06David McWilliams: There was no point in talking on campus. You had to go in. And they took enormous shit for that, because somebody's got to do it. To drop the debt, to get those antiretroviral drugs going, to save people's lives, you need to do a deal with the devil, in effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what you're kind of calling for. You've got to go and, you know, it's all right. The conceptual left is fine, but you've got to go and actually convince people who need convincing, who have the ability to change the outcome. Yeah, I can't agree more. It's all about actually achieving the results. And let's look at this idea that the problem with idealism, and this is where a cynical say, well, you know, I get it.

26:46David McWilliams: I believe you. It sounds great. But I've seen idealism and I've seen idealists just get lost before. How does somebody who has the urge to do something with their lives, and I'm talking to, you know, many of our listeners will feel will really respond positively to this. how did they avoid the threat of being that sort of ineffectual idealist? So I think what was so crucial is that they deeply, deeply cared about the cause itself. So if you find something like slavery so abhorrent, then you really want to win. And then you really get into the mentality of whatever it takes, right? Obviously, there are always limits to what you can do.

27:29And yeah, I'm not saying like go 100 % fully consequentialist, but that is a striking thing about many of these people in many of these movements that they're so focused on actually winning. I think there's actually a great tradition that goes back all the way to the abolitionists. I think it's so interesting that many of the suffragettes had parents who were active in the abolitionist movement and many of the civil right campaigners had parents who were activists. Were suffragettes. Yeah. And then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by people who were also part of the civil rights movement, you know.

28:05So there is this one great family, basically, of people who have been able to push us forward. And it's that great tradition, call it liberalism, call it universalism. It's that tradition that is now under pretty existential threat. We started taking it for granted. it. We started thinking about it like, oh, you know, that's kind of what we've always had, whatever. When people say like human rights, we kind of find it kind of boring often. But this is one of the most extraordinary ideas in all of human history, that no might does not make right, and that there are rules in the global order, and that the powerless can hold the powerful fall to account.

28:50And I think that we are now living through a moment, living through a year where we're all waking up and thinking, oh, wow, that thing that we took for granted, that was actually an ideology. You know, that was something you could actually believe in and that we now have to fight for. In fact, there are young men and women dying in the trenches in Ukraine for that exact ideal right now. So I think that is the incredible wake-up call that we're now going through?

29:18David McWilliams: Well, actually, we started this discussion at Davos. Okay. And when you made the speech, and it was just, you said, just pay your fucking taxes. That's a good summary. It was a good summary. It was wonderful. And it really sparked a chord. But let's go back to that Davos performance last week by Donald Trump, because everything we're talking about, enlightenment, human rights, the powerless having a voice, people standing up. That looks to be like yesterday's world. Today's world is Putin. It's Xi, it's Trump, it's Netanyahu. I'm naming leaders, but leaders are products of movements. They don't just appear out of nowhere.

29:59David McWilliams: You know, it's quite hard to be optimistic in this world. Yeah. Well, I'm not the right one to talk to if you want to be more optimistic. I can give you some hope that's such a Dutch answer I love it reasons to act but I think the rational response right now is to be quite terrified because we got to recognize two things one is that we are living through an extraordinary technological revolution that is at least similar to the rise of electricity or the steam engine but I think it's going to be more profound than that I still meet people especially on the left who say like oh AI yeah, it's just advanced autocomplete.

30:38I'm like, come on, come on. Have you actually used it? I mean, as a professional writer, I can feel my own craft changing. People say like, oh, AI can't write. I'm like, it can write. It can write damn well. Oh, yes, it can. And that is just, for me, it's like, I don't know, like an existential experience. I never thought I would experience anything like it, that a computer would. So, I mean, that's one thing, the enormous revolutionary effects of AI. And I think the next five years are going to be wild, David, absolutely wild.

31:08David McWilliams: So as you say, everyone's skirting around this issue. Everyone's thinking, oh, well, it's just a high-powered Google, and it's just a search engine, and all that sort of stuff. Where do you think in the dystopian worldview AI could take us, and where do you think in the more pragmatic, harnessed-for-good worldview it might take us? So I think there are a lot of dystopian outcomes, actually. So one obvious one is we lose control of AI and it develops goals that are not aligned with human flourishing. And we get into those sci-fi scenarios. I think that's a real option. Another option is that AI will be used to basically build a totalitarian society.

31:51The thing that I'm worried about most probably is if China will be there first. It is already an autocratic totalitarian society. It is already using mass surveillance. Just imagine if it would have the power of advanced AGI, as they call it, super intelligent. I'm not a big fan of those concepts, but just like really, really powerful AI. I think that would be terrifying. But yeah, you can see the same thing happening right now in the US. I mean, that's the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. Fascism is here. Like for a long time, I resisted using the label. But now I think it's pretty clear.

32:24And like my colleagues agree. So talk to the best historians of fascism. they're leaving the US right now because the lesson of 1933, according to them, is that it's better to leave early than late. Paxton, you know, the great historian of fascism, wrote the anatomy of fascism. He has changed his mind. He said, this is really it. It is bubbling up from below, but it is strikingly similar to what we saw in the 1930s in Italy and France and in Germany and other places. So yeah, it's those two trends that I think are really, really terrifying. and then obviously all the other kinds of consequences like the massive disruption of the labor market.

33:01I think we can already see the early evidence of that for, you know, entry-level jobs, but also just for the experience of what it means to be human itself, you know? Yes. As I said, in the last couple of months, it became really personal for me because like particularly Claude of, you know, of Entropic became much better and I experimented a lot with it. Yep. And then if you are, as I said, if you are a professional writer, this is what I do day in day.

33:30David McWilliams: There's two of us in this conversation. And then it is, you suddenly understand what it meant to be a cloth worker in the 19th century in England. People think like, oh, but these were uneducated people. No, no, no, no. They were incredibly educated. That was a craft, right? That was an incredible skill that they had honed for many, many years. And boom, it was gone. was taken over by a machine. And I think it may now start happening to a lot of people. But yeah, I think that is even like a minor thing compared to, for example, the power concentration. We already see that. Like the Gilded Age that we're now going through is worse than the first Gilded Age.

34:11Far worse. Like the inequality is bigger. People like Elon Musk own now a bigger share of the wealth relative to GDP than Rockefeller, who is the richest man in the late 19th century. And this is before AI is really taken up.

34:26David McWilliams: But it's funny you talk about that. I mean, we were talking about Carnegie a couple of weeks ago on the podcast because there's a library down the road here, the Carnegie Library in Dunleary. This was built by a man who was Elon Musk-esque in his financial prowess. Yeah. And he gave all the money away. Yeah. He gave it all away. He was driven by a higher power that comes back to this idea that he was quite religious. Yeah. He came from a Scottish family that were informed by biblical ideas of equality and all that sort of stuff. And he brought that to bear in his life. Yeah. And that's the big difference.

35:02Yeah.

35:02David McWilliams: And that was the philosophy that was driving him, was coming from somewhere he had inherited those notions. As you said, like the suffragettes were spawned by abolitionists. The suffragettes themselves spawned the human rights, the civil rights movement, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And look, Carnegie was no saint or anything like that. No, he wasn't, of course not. He exploited his workers on a massive scale. But what we now have are robber barons like Jeff Bezos, like Elon Musk, who do not seem to have a philosophy of life like some of the robber barons have in the past. So yeah, that's even more depressing and only means that we need more and more ambition.

35:44You know, one thing that really struck me about studying the British abolitionist movement, which was the only successful abolitionist movement in the West. So in the Netherlands, it totally failed. In France, it got nothing done. In Portugal and Spain, it was non-existent. In the US, it was so unpopular. Well, it was worse than veganism today. But in the UK, it really took off. And I think one of the reasons is that of the 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. People who knew how to get shit done, how to take things from zero to one, who were highly pragmatic, who had built and skilled companies and then used their wealth to take on one of the great moral atrocities of that time.

36:26Some of my friends on the left say, yeah, but it's always the government who ought to be doing that, right? We got to change the system. They were fighting the government, right? They were fighting the big corporations. Sometimes you need people outside of those systems. Sometimes you do need individuals and small groups of people who say, you know what? I'm not going to whine and complain and moan anymore. I'm not going to stand on the sideline. I am the captain of my ship. I am the master of my fate. I'm going to do the right thing. Just jumping back to the bullshit jobs and the wages versus status and all the rest and the idea of ambition, individual ambition.

37:03Is there regional differences in terms of mentality, like between, say, America, Europe, Asia, India, Africa? Is there a regional difference? So there's one really striking thing, and for a lot of people, a kind of uncomfortable, unexpected thing, which is that there are way more bullshit jobs in the private sector than in the public sector. A lot of people like to think like, oh, yeah, bullshit jobs, that's like government bureaucrats, right? And that's why we need people like Elon Musk cleaning up the swamp, cleaning up the government, because, yeah, there's so much waste and fraud in the public sector.

37:41But if you actually ask people themselves, and I think they are the greatest experts, you know, on the social value of their own jobs, like who would know better? Then actually, there are three times as many BS jobs in the private sector as in the public sector. So this is also something that you see reflected if you look at different countries, right, where the public sector is a bit bigger, there are fewer BS jobs, and vice versa. So I thought that that was really an interesting, and for some people, counterintuitive finding.

38:12David McWilliams: Yeah, that's revolutionary finding. That is blasphemous finding for many. Yeah, it does go back to that ultimate question of what is wealth? And you notice, David, economists used to be moral philosophers. They used to think about the big questions of life all the time. Like, what is morality? Where do we come from? Where do we go? How do we have to live our lives? What is sacred? What is really important? And indeed, what is wealth? And at some point in the late 19th century, economists adopted something called marginalism, where they said, you know, basically, wealth is just whatever someone wants to pay for this or that, for that product or service.

38:52So like, it's not up to us economists to do any moral or aesthetic judgment here. And I think that's kind of where economics lost it.

39:01David McWilliams: I agree with you. And economics has been deployed. and mathematics inside economics has been deployed as what I would describe as the great bully of moral philosophy. These discussions are about matters of moral ambiguity as well as moral ambition. They are about philosophy, but they're about a way of life. They're about an inherited logic. They're about all sorts of things because they are about where we started. They are about culture. Culture matters and culture is malleable. Yeah, exactly. And what you're doing is you are urging people to look at the culture. Yeah. Because culture can change.

39:41Yeah. And here's one final story, perhaps, that may help us to change that. Go for it. So there's a story of two strikes. One strike happened in New York in the late 60s, and it was a strike of garbage collectors. You know, terrible consequences. The city, you know, lost it for six days. State of emergency had to be declared. And then everyone's like, come back, please, garbage collectors. We can't do without you. And I compared that to a strike of bankers in Ireland that happened around the same time in 1970. And what's so interesting, like the New York garbage collector strike lasted for six days, while the Ireland banker strike lasted for six months.

40:19And after six months, the bankers came back and said, all right, all right, all right, we'll get back to work. But for half a year, like 85 % of all the money was not accessible. And something incredible happened when people started writing IOUs to each other on the backs of cigar boxes and toilet paper, etc. And meanwhile, the economy in Ireland just kept growing. Now, I'm not saying we don't need finance or anything like that. It definitely has a pretty useful role to play in any mixed economy. And I am an old-fashioned social democrat, so I always believe in a balance of markets and governments and civil society.

40:55but it does make you think like, okay, so these people could go on strike for six months and the economy just kept growing. Like what value was being provided then?

41:06David McWilliams: Well, that is for later. Actually, John, I think we might even discuss this on which Wilkart's gone because it's one of the great examples of the bizarre question of what is money. Wilkart, thank you so much. That was wonderful. Thanks so much for having me.

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42:39That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with Stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. God, interesting stuff. Could have spoken to him for hours upon hours.

43:20but tell us about this Irish banking strike. I do have vague memories of that from years back. What year was that? 1917?

43:31David McWilliams: It was in the 70s, John. It was in the 70s. We were kids. I have kind of a vague recollection but I think if you talk to anyone who was older than us, our parents' generation, they will remember it. So what it was was kind of very funny and it also goes to the root of what is money and this is one of the great debates because if money is not cash in circulation, well, then what is it? Okay, so what happened was the Irish banks went on strike in the 1970s. And the bank officials went on strike and the banks closed. For why? Why did they strike? Over money, over money, over cash. They wanted more cash, right?

44:08David McWilliams: And because they were licensed to the state, they decided that they would go on strike and as a result of that, the state would cave in and ultimately away they go, right? But their weapon was that because they were the sole custodians of the money of the economy, that the economy would grind to a halt and they would be elevated to deity status. They would rock into the Department of Finance and call their price, name their price. But what actually happened was the following. People set up a parallel system of debits and credits. Now, it goes back. Just naturally. Naturally. So basically what happened is you owed somebody money, like you did a job for me, and I just said, okay, John, well, I can't pay you today because I have no cash, but I will pay you back when cash is back in circulation.

45:02David McWilliams: And so basically what it did was it reinforced the idea that trust is money, not cash, trust. that cash is just the symbol of the trust that underpins money. And this is one of the central arguments that I was making in my own book about money, which is that actually money is a system whereby humans allow themselves to trust each other. Now, the great thing about cash is that once you have cash, you don't have to trust each other because cash is actually a symbol of trust. But if you take that out, you replace trust. So the amazing thing is Irish economic historians will always talk about, you know, in the countryside, John, there's usually families that are the publican, the undertaker, and the grocer.

45:52David McWilliams: And the reason they are those three is because they are the ancestors of, the descendants of, those types of businesses which were actually operating in Irish country towns as proxy banks during the 19th century. Right. So in actual fact, the grocer and the undertaker lent money to people. They were money lenders. Some of them were called gombin men, but most of them were just money lenders. So basically what happened in the Irish banking strike, as Rutger was saying, is that once people realized, well, we don't actually need cash. We just need to trust each other. So basically it was a whole intricate network of IOUs.

46:30And the extraordinary thing, John, is there were very, very few defaults. Right, okay.

46:37David McWilliams: So when the cash came back into the system, people paid each other back. But that must have been amazing for local communities because it would have brought them together. It would have been an even greater gelling kind of agent. Absolutely. And you remember like the shop that was up the road from the Premier Dairies. Yeah. They would have had to take IOUs from everyone in our area. Yeah. And again, that is essentially what he's saying is that if you move from that, that the trust, the cooperation, the collaboration, the essential decency of humanity was evidenced in the Irish banking strike. And the irony is the bankers themselves didn't see that.

47:17David McWilliams: They assumed that everybody was a wanker, right? And it transpired, no, everyone was decent. And their weapon, their main weapon, was this idea that everybody is distrustful, everybody is violent, everybody's opportunistic, therefore we take cash away from them they'll turn into barbarians degenerate defaulting barbarians and that will be our main weapon against the state and know that can happen the people actually turned into cooperative reasonably decent citizens who as you said trusted each other yeah so there is one point i just wanted to pick up on what rutker was saying which is about you know this idea of give up the bullshit jobs and go and do something greater for humanity or whatever.

48:09But there's an element of that's all well and good if you're in a good socioeconomic kind of circumstance that not everyone can do that because, you know, people are taking a job to survive, to pay the mortgage, to pay the bills.

48:26David McWilliams: Yeah, I think what he's saying is that in societies like Western European or American societies, where a huge amount of talented people, people with the networks, people with the financial background, people with the professional education, all that stuff, a huge amount of people go into jobs that they really don't value themselves. David Graeber called them bullshit jobs. He talks about this idea of a waste of talent and that there are many people who would be absolutely liberated personally and socially if they were to involve themselves in jobs which forward the greater good. Now, what he's saying is you've got to break down your cynicism as well as everything else.

49:17David McWilliams: But he's not saying that people in very poor countries who can't survive need to actually dispense with their jobs and start adopting this mantle. But I think he's just saying that there is a huge amount of ambition in the world. And that ambition is defined by monetary or status ideas. And that we have been fed a morality play that suggests that humans are of a certain type. Yes. Greedy, venal, et cetera. It's the Hobbesian Leviathan idea that life is short, brutal, and dark, John. And what he's saying is that's not the case. And I like it. I like that stuff. I think it's an interesting antiseptic to the open wound that is what we're seeing all around the place.

50:08David McWilliams: It's an interesting antidote intellectually to notions of the way humanity is constructed and that we're all mean and obnoxious. And it's an interesting antiviral vaccine to the idea that might is right. Because ultimately, if humans don't cooperate and if we're entirely coerced into doing everything, well, then we lose the essential chemistry of humanity, the algorithm of humanity, which is that we are a, I think at least, collaborative species. Well, clearly the answer to it is close the banks and we'd be all grand. Close the banks. End of story. Close the banks. It'll be all grand. You sound like a Bitcoiner, John.

50:55David McWilliams: That's what you sound like. All right. Listen, we talk to you on Thursday.

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