Conversation with Rutger Bregman — Human Nature, Power Dynamics, and UBI

0:28AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Episode 261. 261 is the country code of Madagascar. In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel to space, and Pampers was introduced as the world's first disposable diaper brand. True story, I can't stand changing my son's shitty diaper. I always ask myself, why did I even put this thing on? Go, go, go!

1:11Welcome to the 261st episode of the Prop G Pod. Daddy is officially, the dog is officially on vacation for the month of August, but the pod isn't going anywhere. I've jumped the fence, I'm roaming through, I'm rummaging through the neighbor's trash, I'm banging that that labradoodle down the street flirting with that Bichon for say and then I'll come back in about a month. I'll be back. I'll be unkept, a little hungry, ready for some of that specialty Iams food or that we now order this crazy food for our hands. It is like, I don't know, mixed by Nepalese monks and, you know, has all the right shit.

1:48And we I think I'm pretty, pretty sure I spend more on my dogs than on our first son. But, you know, which in my mind makes a lot of sense. All month long on Thursdays, you can expect conversations with blue flame thinkers, innovators, professors, authors and the like. Today, we're sharing our interview with Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and author. Rutger Bregman. Didn't that sound serious? Rutger Bregman. That sounds like he'd be like an amazing film director or the father of someone who was on an HBO series who himself was a great actor. Anyways, he's published five books on history, philosophy, and economics, including his latest, Humankind, A Hopeful History.

2:28I beg to differ. Anyways, we discussed with Rutger his research on human nature, power dynamics, and universal basic income. We hope you enjoyed this conversation as we did. Rutger, where does this podcast find you? I'm based in Houten in the Netherlands. It's a small town that's a little bit to the south of Utrecht. I'm not sure if you've ever been there. I'm 100 % confident I haven't. So why do you live there? In the Netherlands. Well, I was born in the Netherlands and I quite like the country. And Houten, you know, the town where I live is actually a really interesting place. There are urban designers from all over the globe who come and visit because it's all designed around bicycles.

3:12So it's pretty hard to get around by car and very convenient to use your bike for basically everything. And yeah, that has a lot of benefits. Oh, that's nice. Well, you're our first guest from there. So let's bust right into it. Your book, Humankind, A Hopeful History, challenges the beliefs that humans are inherently selfish and driven by self-interest. Can you walk us through your view of human nature? Sure. so there's an old idea an old theory that is i think deeply embedded in our culture in western culture specifically and this theory is sometimes called veneer theory and it says that our civilization is only a thin veneer you know just a thin layer and that supposedly below that lies raw human nature, that deep down we humans are just selfish or maybe even worse than that.

4:12And that theory, it is massively influential, I think, in our culture. It has at least a 2 ,000 year history. You know, you could say that it started with the Asian Greeks. It's at the heart of Orthodox Christianity. It was very influential during the Enlightenment when, for example, philosopher like Thomas Hobbes argued that in the state of nature, we were living these horrible lives and we're engaging in a war of all against all. And you could also argue that it's at the heart of our modern economy that very often revolves around competition on the assumption that people are just fundamentally selfish.

4:52And so long story, I think that that theory is wrong. And that's why I wrote this book. What evidence can you point to, though, in terms of a human construct or an economic system or a nation, a society that proves out your point? Because let me put forward it. I think capitalism, as Winston Churchill said, is the worst system of its kind except for all the rest. It seems like the systems that work leverage self-interest. Give me an example of where your theories are working. So I think that Winston Churchill quote was actually about democracy and not about capitalism. Don't correct me on my podcast.

5:30I don't care how beautiful the town is you live in the Netherlands. Yeah, it's an important distinction, you know, capitalism versus democracy. I think the two are inextricably linked, but that's another podcast. Anyways, go ahead. I guess it depends on how you define democracy. So, look, I think there are lots of examples around the globe of people and organizations who already practice what I preach in this book. So to give a very concrete example, here in the Netherlands, we have a pretty huge healthcare organization that's called Buurtzorg. It has now 15 ,000 employees. And what they've done is basically ditched all the management.

6:11They all work in self-directed teams of nurses, you know, really professional nurses who decide for themselves who they want to hire as colleagues, what kind of additional education they need. And this organization is super successful according to standard, you know, consultants metrics. So it actually delivers health care at a cheaper cost of a higher quality according to the patients and clients they serve. And they even pay higher salaries, higher wages to the nurses working there. So that's just one example. And I give, I think, dozens of them in the book of people and organizations who successfully implement this more hopeful worldview and image of human nature that I advocate.

6:54I mean, initially, communism was the idea of a collective, right? The collective man who had more concern or empathy for the group as opposed to the individual. And that didn't work or it doesn't appear that system has worked. At the same time, I think there's a recognition that capitalism that has taken self-interest and an idolatry of the individual over the group has gone too far. I think there's a lot of people who just think that there's got to be a balance here. There's got to be something that recognizes that we're in this together. and that if you constantly have rewards around the individual and the idolatry of the dollar, that ultimately capitalism ends up in a society where the society is just optimized for the 1%.

7:41And I think a lot of people, especially a lot of young people, are coming to that realization, feelings, whatever it is. And what I'm trying to look for other than a healthcare company in the Netherlands is where you think this might go. Like if you said, all right, like you live in a place where this has the most traction. Northern Europe, I would argue, has adopted more of these principles than almost anywhere because six out of the 10 countries are the happiest people are in Northern Europe. And it's a function of, based on the research I've seen, that not of what they can have, but absence from fear of what might be taken from them.

8:18Because there's a collective of concern that if you get sick, you shouldn't go bankrupt, right? That we've decided we're all going to pitch in to remove that fear from you. Where do you see role models for this in terms of countries or is it, I think I already asked you that, but what do we need to do to get people working on this type of better system, if you will? So I'd say it starts with a more realistic view of what human nature is really like. It's why I spend a lot of time in the book on the latest evidence we have from anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, you name it, that really debunks this view that people are fundamentally selfish.

9:00So you may have heard, well, you obviously have heard of famous experiments like the Milgram experiment, right, where supposedly people started torturing other people in another room just because of the pressure that they were under. Or the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which supposedly, you know, seemingly healthy average students from Stanford University turned very easily into monsters just because they were given a uniform and power over some other students who were the prisoners in this experiment. I devote a couple of chapters in the book to show that these experiments were a pretty good example of what you could call fake science.

9:41So with the Stanford Prison Experiment, for example, we now know that actually pretty much the opposite happened, or at least these guards were specifically instructed by Philip Zimbardo, who's actually one of the most famous psychologists alive today. But yeah, they were specifically instructed to be as sadistic and nasty as possible. And then many of them said that they didn't want to do that. And then Zimbardo said, look, come on, you're a progressive, right? You got to help me with this experiment because we need these results. We need to show that prisons are horrible environments that bring out the worst in people because then we can go to the press and say we got to abolish the whole system.

10:20So that's quite shocking, actually, some recent evidence that has come out of the archives and is, I think, completely debunked these old studies that have had a huge impact, I think, on the way many of us look at human nature in general. I was thinking of, there's actually been some real life situations that sort of mimic the storyline of Lord of the Flies. And it ends up that Lord of the Flies is not accurate, right? That when kids stranded on islands actually figure out a way to cooperate and are quite empathetic with each other. Is that not the case? Yeah, that's one of the things I wondered while I was doing the research for this book is, has it ever really happened?

11:01I mean, Lord of the Flies is fiction. I think it's very powerful fiction, but it's still, I mean, it's a novel. And it would be very interesting to see what would happen in a real life experiment. Turns out it's pretty hard to convince parents to put their... To abandon their kids on an island and see what happens. Exactly, exactly. I could go there. There's a few times in the right moment I would sign up for that. For science. Take them to yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I thought maybe I could find a natural experiment where it somehow happened by accident. And after a while, I stumbled upon this article in an old Australian newspaper, an article from the 70s that said that supposedly this happened back then.

11:41And I started digging and digging. And after a couple of weeks, I managed to track down the real story. It actually had happened in 1966. And six boys were at a boarding school in Tonga, which is an island group in the Pacific Ocean. And they didn't like school. They thought it was very boring. And they thought, well, let's go on an adventure. They ran away and they got lost, right? Yeah, exactly. They borrowed a boat. They ended up in a storm, shipwrecked and survived for 15 months on this island. And for the book, I managed to track them down. So today, three of them are still alive. I spoke to them, interviewed them and managed to basically reconstruct their story and discover what happened.

12:28during those months and how they survived. And I realized that if this would have been a fictional Hollywood movie, then everyone would say, this is so sentimental. That would never really happen. You know, this is worse than love, actually. But the real story is really, really optimistic. It's about the power of friendship. These six boys just stuck together. It was really their strong bonds that helped them to survive. You said in an interview with KCRW that we are the product of survival of the friendliest. What did you mean by that? So that's actually a term from the evolutionary psychologist Brian Hare.

13:10And what he and other scientists argue is that the reason why we have conquered the globe, we humans, it is not because we are so smart. It's not because we are so powerful or violent or whatever. No, it is or it has been a matter of survival of the friendliest. So actually for thousands of years, when we were still living as hunter-gatherers, it was a matter of nice guys finish first. There's strong archaeological, biological, and anthropological evidence that it was actually the friendliest who had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. And if you think about it, it's simple to understand.

13:50I mean, how did these six boys survive on their island? Well, because they work together. If you're a narcissist, if you're really full of yourself, if you're very arrogant, then a lot of people are not going to like working with you. And in a very tough environment like the world was during the Ice Age, it was simply not adaptive to be an asshole, to put it bluntly. So friendliness was an adaptive trait. And sometimes another word that we use here is domestication, because we've done something similar to our sheep and our cows. You know, we've selected them for tameness, you know, as another form of friendliness.

14:29And what you see there is the rise of what Charles Darwin already called the domestication syndrome. So domesticated animals have certain traits in common. You know, they have thinner bones, smaller brains, and most importantly, they're much more playful than other wild animals. They just like to play around all the time. Oh, and it takes them a lot of time to grow up. Now, does this remind you of any kind of species? Of course it does. It reminds you of humans. I mean, we humans take a lot of time to grow up. We are, relatively speaking, very playful. We have smaller brains than our ancestors.

15:05So Neanderthals did have bigger brains than us. And yeah, it seems to be the case that we are domesticated apes. And the question is, who domesticated us? And the answer is, we did it to ourselves. So this is what's called self-domestication. Over the millennia, it was simply adaptive to be more friendly, to be more tame, if you put it like that. And that has really changed us as a species. So a couple of things. By the way, I think it just dawned on me, Rutger. You're the guy that went on Tucker Carlson and basically said that Rupert Murdoch, that he was working for, you know, the Dark Prince, right?

15:42Was that, that was your famous YouTube, that was you, right? Yeah, that was my 50 seconds of fame, Scott. There you go. Well, we're working on 16 here. I love your work. So the thesis I would put forward, and by the way, Rutger got a lot of attention for his lecture where he criticized the tax evasion of the rich who attended the Dabas Forum. And I couldn't agree more about, and we'll talk about that, the massive tax evasion of the wealthy. Having said that, having said that, and I'm very open to push back here. I have a politically incorrect view that in general, in general, the very rich are good people.

16:20And that the reason they're very rich, or one of the reasons they're very rich, assuming they weren't born into wealth, is that people are rooting for them. They develop allies and they are generally good people in that this cartoon of a Monty Burns like figure that runs the nuclear power plant and lights his cigars with dollar bills and is evil stepping on people, that that's just not the case. And that you generally find in terms of character, in terms of philanthropy, in terms of empathy, it is correlated with wealth. Your thoughts. um so i would agree that you know most people are pretty decent and that's also true for rich and powerful people i've i've been to davos to the world economic forum and some people imagine that you know that's just some kind of conspiracy where the evil selfish people you drop maps yeah exactly and that's really not the case at all you go there and you meet a lot of really friendly warm, nice, empathetic people.

17:17I do think rich and powerful people can be incredibly blind, though. It's often the case that the people at the top of the pyramid are actually less knowledgeable about how the whole system works because they're at the top. You don't see everything that's necessary to produce all the wealth in our society. And then there's this other phenomenon that I think is quite well studied by now by psychologists and also described by historians, which is that power corrupts. It doesn't corrupt everyone. It doesn't corrupt everyone equally. But I think there's a pretty strong tendency here that power is just a dangerous drug.

17:58And in terms of empathy, we've got psychological, we've got neurological evidence here that says that people under the influence of power are less connected to other members of their species. also because they just have to be less, don't have to be all that connected anymore. So I don't know. It's not like an iron law or anything. There are a lot of powerful people out there who are really, really empathetic and who are really friendly. But I think it's a real risk. And that's why throughout history, we humans have tried to control those people at the top. Our modern representative democracy is one of them.

18:37Ancient hunter-gatherers had other ways. They relied a lot on the power of shame. You could be expelled from the group, and that would basically be a death sentence. But there are also a lot of descriptions in the anthropological literature where basically the group killed people who were too full of themselves because they were actually a danger to group survival as well. And in your book, you discuss the interplay between biology and culture and shaping human behavior. Could you elaborate how these factors interact and influence our capacity for cooperation and kindness? I think that one of the most interesting anthropologists of our time is a man named Joe Hendrick.

19:18And what he also always emphasizes is that it is in our nature to be cultural. So we are, in that sense, an extraordinary flexible species. And it's exactly our friendliness and our social nature that has enabled the extraordinary cultural evolution. So that's obviously that you have to emphasize. And I mean, historians will emphasize this forever until the end of time, that we humans are extremely flexible. There's a lot of possibilities with all different kind of cultures. But then at the core of it, I do think there is this need to belong. right so loneliness for example in every society on the face of the earth i mean people don't want to be lonely they really want to be part of something bigger than that and um whenever that goes in the wrong direction um or or you see an epidemic of distrust as you see today in in the us i mean there are all kinds of pernicious consequences we'll be right back

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21:40Just 15 minutes. Plus, you'll get America's best network. No. See? No. 15. Maybe I should switch to T-Mobile right now. This holiday, switch to T-Mobile in just 15 minutes from your phone. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line, T-Mobile is the best mobile network in the U.S. based on analysis by Google Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. You argue, it sounds to me like you would be, and I know this is in your book, you talk about universal basic income. In your book, Utopia for Realists, you advocate for the implementation of universal UBI as a means to reduce poverty and address social inequality.

22:12Give us your pitch on UBI. Sure. So I think it's a fairly common idea in places like Silicon Valley that you need the power to say no. Or, you know, they call it, I think, fuck you money. You know, it's very important if you want to be free in this world and if you want to be creative in this world. And that's what basic income would be for the masses. So it would be venture capital for the people. Everyone would have the ability to quit their job, to start a new organization, start a new company, just do something else, learn something new. And I think that would have enormous amount of benefits.

22:51In my book, Utopia for Realists, I basically looked at all the empirical evidence that we've gathered since the 1970s. There have actually been some really exciting experiments in the US that a lot of people have forgotten about. But it was under President Nixon and President Johnson that there were actually huge basic income experiments in places like Seattle with very promising results. So what you see time and again is that health care costs go down, crime goes down, kids do better in school. And some of the worries that people have, oh, will everyone stop working, for example, or will these people spend it all on tobacco or gamble it away?

23:31That's just not the case at all. Actually, in quite a few studies, you see spending on so-called, what is it, sin goods, actually goes down. Just to press pause there, I thought I remembered, and I don't know if this is, but there's actually a difference based on who you give the money to. When you give money to women, the kids get taller and fatter. When you give money to men, you know, the brothel and the bar do well. Is that a myth? I'm less pessimistic about giving money to men. I just think that in general, giving money to relatively poor people is a really good idea. Yeah, there's some evidence, I think, from the developing world that sometimes it's even better to give it to the women because, indeed, they tend to think more about the kids.

24:14But in general, I think it's just a really good idea, a simple, efficient method to do something about poverty. There's this fantastic NGO called GiveDirectly, and they do exactly what they say. They give money to extremely poor people in places like Uganda or Kenya. and it works incredibly well. This is one of the best evaluated NGOs today. There's this old saying, don't give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish. And we should really get rid of that saying because maybe the man doesn't like fish. Maybe he's a vegetarian or maybe he doesn't want to fish or maybe there are a lot of other fishermen and women already in the neighborhood and you can't make money with fishing.

24:58Maybe the man has got so many other ideas that you have never even thought about yourself. Maybe you shouldn't be so arrogant that you think you know what the man has to do with his life. Maybe just give the man some money so that he can decide for himself what he wants to do instead of rely on some self-appointed expert. In terms of – I was recently in Germany, and the big topic was Germany's largest economy in Europe, I think fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. but their rates of entrepreneurship are pretty low. And the only thing I could come up with is that they have in fact put in place a pretty strong, I mean, in my opinion, they demonstrate a lot of the attributes that you're talking about.

25:41They have a very strong social safety net. People who take auto shop in high school get slip streamed into a vocational program, right out of school, make good money, great schools, good healthcare, you know, a decent on-ramp into a middle-class lifestyle. Now, the downside of that, if you believe, is that because the downside is not as harsh, there's not as much incentive to take risks and start companies. Do you see any benefit to kind of this Hunger Games approach we've sort of adopted in America, where quite frankly, the incentives are to try really hard to escape poverty? Because it's really ugly here.

26:20My father, when he immigrated here from Scotland, and this is a harsh statement, but he said it. He used to say, America is a terrible place to be stupid or poor. And he was even thinking of moving back to Europe when he was in his 50s and he'd been re-engineered out of several jobs and was worried about his ability to compete. Do you think there's a downside to UBI or a social safety net in terms of incentives? So I think it's really important to make a distinction here between the vision of implementing UBI on the one hand and traditional European social democracy on the other hand. So I'm a big fan, actually, of European social democracy.

26:56I think that, you know, access to health care is a right. I would much rather have the welfare state than no welfare state at all. But I do think there are real downsides. One of the downsides is what you mentioned, is that it's often quite paternalistic. And there's sometimes a temptation to just rely on, say, government benefits and not, say, start your own company. Because once you do that, you lose your benefits. And basic income would be very different here because it's unconditional. Everyone gets it no matter what. It's really a platform. It's a base for everyone to stand on. And I think there's a reason why quite a few economists on the right liked it as well.

27:37So Milton Friedman famously advocated implementing a negative income tax, which is a version of a basic income. I should also say that it's one of the things I've come to appreciate more, I guess, about the United States. I used to be one of those, I would say, you know, arrogant Europeans who visit the US and think like, what a shithole is this? You know, I remember, you know, studying at UCLA when I was a student and I just couldn't believe how many homeless people there were on the street. Like, come on, you can't call this a civilization. Get your act together. just walking around one block in Los Angeles you can see more homeless people than if you would walk around for a month here in the Netherlands but then on the other hand what I've come to appreciate more about the US is the appreciation of weirdness that you're allowed to be strange or to as we say in Dutch to put your head above the hay field.