Rutger Bregman Is Thinking About Billionaires, the US Versus Europe and Saving the World

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2:02Be smart. Get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. Terms and conditions apply. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. If you look at some of these massive challenges that we face, AI safety, global poverty, climate change, sometimes I want to pull my hair out if I look at these billionaires who could make a massive difference. Rutger Bregman, writer, historian, a man who calls today's elites decadent and corrupt. There are so many people stuck in jobs that don't really make the world a better place. You know, consultancy, finance and corporate law. Could be one of your kids one day.

2:45Well, maybe, but... How would you feel if that happens? I mean, slightly disappointed, I guess. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

3:03If there's a single moment in the year that symbolises wealth and power, it's arguably the one that's just happened in the Swiss Alps. Davos, this year attended again by President Trump. Rutger Bregman knows exactly what appearing at Davos can do for your reach and profile because, in many ways, his reputation was made when he went there in 2019 and his attack on the rich over their taxes ended up going viral. Since then, he's written books about changing the systems around us, the ones where the largest financial rewards are in finance, and other top corporates. He is, however, more nuanced than you might think.

3:48He believes in the power of businessmen and women to do good, and he's channeling his book profits towards an organisation aimed at action, not just commentary. What you're about to hear is a particularly wide ranging conversation, because he has views on almost everything happening around us, and as a result, we pivot from one topic to another. We also talk about his recent clash with the BBC. He accused it of censoring his view of Donald Trump. You'll hear his opinion, and there's more context, as well as the White House position, at the end. We start, though, with Bregman's wider analysis of America and Europe, both, he says, declining in different ways.

4:39So let's start with near-term history. I think we all remember February 2020, right? This moment when really knowledgeable people, super forecasters were like, you got to stockpile masks right now. And you looked at, say, the telly, BBC, whatever. And it was like a Chinese virus. It's going to be fine. It's probably nothing big. I really feel we're in that moment right now in two respects. Obviously, with the rise of AI, we talk about it a lot, but the vast majority of people have no idea what's going to hit them in the next three, four, five years. And the other thing is just the complete breakdown of everything.

5:13Historians of fascism, I'm afraid I have to use that word, have developed a very precise terminology to talk about different regimes. And I think the family resemblances, you know, the lists, you know, it's getting pretty long now. And it's very striking for me as a historian to see the resemblances to some of the darkest periods in our history. Can I dig into the first part of what you said in the first instance? The idea that AI is like the equivalent of a pandemic setting in, do you see it as negatively as that? Well, it is like people don't seem to realize just how big it is. That for me is the metaphor.

5:45So this is not just another technology. It's really like the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution. I think many people do see it like that. Not really, though. We can already see its effect on jobs. Yeah, a little bit here and there. But this is about what it means to be human. That's what this is about. So you're seeing it as more negative than positive. What it takes away is going to be much more than what it gives us. With this speed, more negative. My very first book that I wrote a decade ago, a lot of that was about what we called robots back then. And indeed, automation and the extraordinary utopian potential of these technologies.

6:20It's just that the way we're doing it right now, I think there are two massive risks. One is misaligned AI that is already happening, just basically AI going rogue and us not being in control anymore. What's the example of that you'd cite? I mean, there are many examples in the literature of, you know, researchers giving AI certain tasks, and then at some point they discover it's doing something else instead. So we have proven that it is possible. The other thing that we should be really worried about is enormous power concentration. We have already started to see that happening in the last 10 to 15 years.

6:55Which companies? Or do you mean which parts of the world? Yeah, and here it's mainly the US, right? And China. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things I talk about in the Reith lectures, is if you talk about leadership in the US right now, for me, two words come to mind, which is a combination of immorality and seriousness. But if I look at European elites, I would add a third word, which is irrelevance. It's kind of Europe is squeezed in the middle. And I just came back after a year of living in New York. And if there's one thing that struck me is how many American elites on both sides of the political spectrum look at Europe and are like, yeah, that's Venice.

7:31You know, it's an open air museum. Doesn't matter. The decline of Venice. But just before we talk more about that, because I am interested in that parallel, are you not excited by the promise of AI? And I'm thinking particularly of drug discovery. Or of climate and finding energy efficiency and, you know, finding those ways of the world using less energy. I'm super excited about that. My very first book, the first line of that book was, in the past, everything was worse. We made tremendous progress in the fight against poverty, against disease. It's very hard for us to wrap our head around how horrible life was for most of human history.

8:04Like, even if you were royalty, like in the UK, you had Queen Anne, who had 17 children, and they all died before the age of 18. All of them. Today, they would all be alive, thanks to modern technology and medical technology. So I would be the last one to deny the extraordinary promise and potential of this technology. But you want it controlled? You want it regulated? Isn't that what Europe's quite good at, doing the regulating side of it? Well, let's look back at these transition. I mean, the Industrial Revolution, for at least a century, it was pretty bad for most people. The Luddites, you know, famous for smashing machines in the 19th century, they were basically right.

8:41They were losing their jobs. They were not unskilled laborers. They were very skilled, you know, the cloth weavers, makers. They lost their job, and they became much poorer because of it. And you could say, well, in the long run, in the long run, we're all dead, as John Maynard Keynes said. And you could also look at another technological revolution, which happened way earlier, 10 ,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution. And that's an example of something that made life worse for everyone for thousands of years, basically. Population started growing. People had a worse diet, the age of hierarchy and inequality dawned and wars.

9:15And it was probably better to be a nomadic hunter-gatherer. So the jury is still out. We don't know yet. You use history and you're doing it now as we talk to guide us around the present. Europe, right? So you've just come back from living in the U.S. You've returned to Europe. Why were you living in the U.S. in the first place? What's the choice that you made there? So I wrote a book called Moral Ambition, which is all about using what you have, your talent, your time, your capital, your resources to make a massive difference, to make this world a wildly better place. We think that the waste of talent is one of the greatest wastes of our time.

9:53There are so many people currently stuck in jobs that don't really make the world a better place. Maybe AI is going to start doing some of those jobs. That's true. And honestly, also after a decade of basically being a pundit, I was a bit fed up with myself, you know? What did you do in the States? I quit my job and I co-founded an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. And we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. So we recruit the most talented people we can find that in another life would go on and work at a hedge fund or, I don't know, McKinsey, JP Morgan. And instead, we convinced them to work on the most pressing issues that we face as a species.

10:30AI safety, pandemic prevention, global poverty, climate change, you name it. We believe that the most ambitious people ought to be working on the most pressing problems. So, yeah, that's why I was there. And we built the US chapter. We just launched our first fellowship at Harvard. I think you're partly funded by philanthropy. Yeah. And yet you're pretty harsh on philanthropy. Yeah, most of them, yeah. In your writings. You're clearly quite subjective in which philanthropists you like and which you don't. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Are you only like the ones who fund your kind of work? Well, look, if you give money to, let's say, a hedge fund masquerading as a university, for example, no, I'm not very impressed with you.

11:08A lot of philanthropy is BS, is PR, is whitewashing your motivation. Philanthropy at places like Harvard funds scholarships a lot of the time for students who couldn't otherwise afford to go there. And really big buildings, obviously. I mean, look at the size of that endowment. I'm not saying it's all wasted. But if you look at some of these massive challenges that we face, sometimes I want to pull my hair out if I look at these billionaires who could make a massive difference. You know, I recently spoke to Nick Allardis of GiveDirectly, which is one of the greatest NGOs in the world. You know, they have found the way to tackle global poverty, which is just give people money.

11:48There's enormous amounts of evidence now that that works. There are thousands of people, thousands of billionaires in the world who could call up Nick Adidas right now and say, let's pull Malawi out of poverty. And I mean, that would be, I don't know, a year in the stock market for them in terms of what it will cost. So, yes, I'm quite critical of a lot of wealthy people because I think they ought to be doing way more, especially as we face a poverty crisis, so many massive challenges that are so neglected. So is European leadership in a better place than American leadership? No, not really. No.

12:21Well, you could say that like the decadence, the corruption is not as bad. I mean, I think in the US we really see the collapse of democracy and it is really unclear whether we will have free and fair elections in 2028. I mean, people like Steve Bannon are very openly talking about a third term. If you listen to people like Stephen Miller, basically the prime minister in the U.S. right now, it's an entire worldview that believes that if you have the power, you can just do whatever you want. Trump himself literally saying the only check on what I do is my own head. It's my own morality. He's used executive power a lot and there are challenges to it, but a lot of them have failed and the Supreme Court has the makeup that it has.

13:05Why do you say that you don't think Europe is much better? Because we are also at a moment where we're seeing America project military might or threaten to project its military might in more than one part of the world. And you see Europe, which is a place where most countries are part of an alliance against Russia, supporting Ukraine. That's true. The main problem of Europe is, frankly, its weakness. I'll give you a couple of examples. A few years ago, the EU proudly announced its AI Act to the world. the first major regulation of artificial intelligence. But the problem is we hardly have any AI companies to speak of.

13:42We've become really good at regulating industries we don't have. We've become the continent of handbags instead of hardware. So if you really believe that this liberal social democratic model is the way we should rule the world, then it would be quite nice if you also have the power to back it up. And the reality right now is that indeed, thousands of young men are dying in the trenches in Ukraine. And we're quite dependent on Daddy Trump, as my fellow Dutchman, Mark Rutte, you know, the current head of NATO would say. And that's an embarrassing and painful position to be in. But it is the reality.

14:16But I imagine that someone from your background also has qualms about the pivot in European budgets towards more military funding, which is because of Ukraine and in the face of what's happening with Russia. So how do you square that? I don't have those squamps. The only thing I'm worried about is that we're mainly spending that money to buy more American weapons while we should have those industries ourselves. So you think if Europe manufactures weapons rather than handbags, that's a better place for Europe to be in. Absolutely, yeah. If there's one thing we can learn from history is that values and ideals are worth very little if you don't have the power to back them up.

14:50And I talk a lot about the British abolitionists. Abolitionism was a failure pretty much everywhere. In the Netherlands, in Spain, in Portugal, in the US, it hardly took off. Britain was different. Here it became a massive movement. In 1807, the slave trade was abolished after hundreds of thousands of people had signed petitions, joined consumer boycotts. But then what happened is that the British Royal Navy was able to force 80 % of other countries to stop slave trading as well. Like power mattered in that respect. Politics is for power. You have that very inspiring story in your book, and you pick other inspiring stories like those who resisted the Nazis.

15:28So what is the equivalent today? Who do you see that gives you hope? For us, it's easy to look back on the moral atrocities of the past, right? I think most people watching this will be like, yeah, slavery was really bad and child sacrifices and witch hunts. But, you know, someday historians will look back on us. And maybe by pure coincidence, we're the first civilization that has figured it all out. and we're like the good people, I would say that's rather unlikely. There are still things going on that are absolutely horrific. The way we treat animals is probably the most obvious example. You're a vegan, I think.

16:03Yeah, I am. But I don't think that's my big contribution to making the world a better place. I mean, for 50 years, vegans have shouted, go vegan, didn't make a big difference. But it's a personal commitment in line with what you're saying. Sure, sure. But the real personal commitment would be building a movement, actually achieving results. because we need a mix here of lobbying, of new technologies, of alternative proteins. I think one of the problems that happened in, you know, in my world, you know, so many people, progressives, liberals on the left, they are obsessed with their own environmental footprint.

16:35They don't eat meat. They don't fly. They don't even have kids. But the problem is that if you do everything right in that scenario, then your footprint is zero. You might as well have died. That's not really how we are going to save the world. But my question was where your sources of hope are, right? So is it people, is it anyone who's coalescing or building some kind of community around a cause you support? So my dad is a minister. I grew up, you know, sitting in a church on Sunday, hearing the answers to the five great questions of religion. Who are we as a species? Where do we come from? Where do we go?

17:10How should we live? And what is sacred? And for me, the old answers that theology provides don't work anymore. I find the answers to those questions in history. So my heroes and my saints are indeed people like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Susan B. Anthony, the great moral pioneers of the past. Rosa Parks, you put her in your book. Yeah, I get it. And we can learn so much from these people. We can, but where are those figures today? You must be part of a world where you're looking at examples. Oh, there are so many of them. It's just that very often they're not very famous. Something I deeply care about is malaria, one of the most horrible diseases, taking 600 ,000 lives every year, extremely neglected from the left to the right.

17:50Very few people care about it. Much bigger killer than people realize. Yeah, yeah. And there's a guy named Rob Martha here in London who built the Against Malaria Foundation, which is one of the most effective charities in the whole world. In another world, he would have been one of the richest hedge fund managers, But he chose to use that incredible analytical talent, you know, the ability to really build a juggernaut, a machine to take on this horrible atrocity. I mean, this is a guy, if he would have by some unfortunate accident died like 20 years ago, then more than 100 ,000 people would not be alive because they would have succumbed to malaria.

18:28So, but let's take an example like that because your latest book is called Moral Ambition. And you've talked about moral revolutions as part of the lectures you gave on the BBC as well. So isn't there a moral dilemma then for someone like you that you get money from a philanthropist? Maybe the more moral thing, if you really believe in his work, is to say, you know, fund him rather than fund my office. Sure, sure. I'm the biggest funder of this whole thing, by the way. Everything I earn with the book is going into the movement. Your foundation. I think it's important to practice what you preach in that respect.

18:55But I also love working with morally ambitious entrepreneurs. I mentioned the British abolitionists. of the 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 10 were entrepreneurs. The reason they achieved very little in France was because it was mainly writers and intellectuals who didn't know how to go from zero to one. So if there's anything I've come to really like and enjoy is being in the company of entrepreneurs, people who have skin in the game, who know what it takes. It's just that I think it's so sad that so much of this entrepreneurial energy is currently going to waste.

19:30What I found really interesting is that most of the pushback to this book has actually come from the left of people who say, no, you can't change things. We need systemic change. You can't, you know, ask individuals or small groups to do their thing. Or as you were calling more from grassroots. Well, actually, on the right-wing side of the political spectrum, a lot of people said, like, Rugga, you're basically right. Indeed, we should do way more. Political hope, because you clearly follow politics incredibly closely. Someone like Zoran Mamdani got elected in New York while you were living there, right?

19:58Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does he represent to you? Does he show that the American political system is not broken? Because there were plenty of billionaires who were backing his rival rather than him. For me, it was a very joyful thing to see. So finally, a Democrat politician who understands the attentional game, basically how politics works. He understands social media as well as Donald Trump. The other thing, he turns out to be much more of a pragmatist than a lot of people appreciated in advance, right? So he's very open to working together with more centrist liberals. roles. He's excited about what they call the abundance agenda, which is something I talk about in my lectures as well.

20:32I mean, it's not just old-fashioned redistribution that we need here, although we do need some of that, but we also need to, actually, we need quite some deregulation, not in the old neoliberal sense to just make shareholders richer, but to unlock the economy, to build the things that people actually need from housing to clean energy. And what I like about this guy is that he doesn't seem to be this old traditional socialist who, you know, has mainly been reading German philosophers, but he seems to look at the world as it really is and be quite curious and learn new things. You said he understands social media as well as President Trump does.

21:09I think you have expressed some concern, if you like, about the way that he has, he's had very simple messages that helped get him elected. Because I think you have a suspicion of very simple political messages. But this is the classic dilemma of populism, right? So you need certain populists. So is he a populist? Yeah, of course he is. And you don't have a problem with that? No, no, no. As long as it's a populist from the left? I think every good democratic populist has a lot of populism. And like some populism on all sides of the political spectrum is what you need to really, yeah, give people the feeling that you are speaking for them.

21:42I think that's totally fine. But the question is, what happens after that? Can you deliver? A good example is rent control, right? Super popular. We know that. At the same time, economists are very, very clear. And it's not just the Chicago boys, economists who don't like rent controls. It just doesn't work. It usually makes the problem worse. So this is one of those cases where I hope that Mondani will be smart enough. The hardest of his pledges is probably delivering the childcare. Oh, absolutely. The most expensive one. Yeah. What's at stake if he doesn't succeed? A lot. A lot. I think it's incredibly important that people like him actually deliver.

22:19We see the same thing here in the UK, right? Where the storm government is so, so unpopular, and I guess for understandable reasons. Do you think they're trying to deliver? Oh, I'm sure they're trying. Because I know you call yourself a social democrat, which is exactly what they call themselves. Yeah, yeah. It's just that I see myself as an old-fashioned social democrat, and very often I look at what passes as social democracy today, and I'm like, that's not what I signed up for. For me, social democracy is about progress. It's about innovation. It's about patriotism, all these things that we have given away.

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