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

Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and author, joins Scott to discuss his research from his book, “Humankind: A Hopeful History.” We learn about human nature, power dynamics, and his thoughts on Universal Basic Income. Follow Rutger on Twitter, @rcbregman. P. S. Scott is on holiday, so we’ll be back with our business analysis and Algebra of Happiness in September! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  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!

• 1:49Scott Galloway?

  Welcome 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 neighbors' trash, I'm banging that labradoodle down the street, flirting with that Bijon Versay, 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 Ayam's food, or that, we now order this crazy food for our hands that is like, I don't know, mixed by Nepalese monks and has all the right shit in it. I think I'm pretty sure I spend more... On my dogs than on our first son.

• 2:32Scott Galloway?

  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. I beg to differ. Anyways, we discussed with Rutger his research on human nature, power dynamics and universal basic income. We hope you enjoy this conversation as we did.

• 3:17Scott Galloway?

  Rutger, where does this podcast find you?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:27Scott Galloway?

  I'm 100% confident I haven't. So why do you live there?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  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. So 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.

• 4:01Scott Galloway?

  Oh, that's nice. Well, you're, 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?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  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. And that Theory, it is massively influential, I think, in our culture. It has at least a 2,000 year history.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  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. And so, long story, I think that that theory is wrong, and that's why I wrote this book.

• 5:36Scott Galloway?

  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, 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 where, give me an example of where your theories are working.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  So I think that Winston Churchill quote was actually about democracy and not about capitalism.

• 6:05Scott Galloway?

  Don't correct me on my podcast. I don't care how beautiful the town is you live in the Netherlands.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an important distinction, you know, capitalism versus democracy.

• 6:17Scott Galloway?

  I think the two are inextricably linked, but that's another podcast. Anyways, go ahead.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  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 Burelsorg. It has now 15,000 employees. And what they've done is basically ditched all the management. They 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.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  So it actually delivers healthcare 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.

• 7:32Scott Galloway?

  I 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 1%,

• 8:16Scott Galloway?

  you know, the society is just optimized for the 1%. And 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, you know, a healthcare company in the Netherlands, is where you think this might go. Like, if you said, all right, like, you live in the 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 with 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. Because there's a collective concern that if you get sick, you shouldn't go bankrupt.

• 9:00Scott Galloway?

  Right? That we've decided we're all going to pitch in to take, remove that fear from you. Where do you see, like, 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?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  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 debunked this view that people are fundamentally selfish. So 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

• 10:04Speaker 02

  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. So 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 Simbardo, who's actually one of the most famous psychologists alive today.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  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 Simbardo said, look, come on, you're a progressive, right? You gotta 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 gotta abolish the whole system. So that's quite shocking, actually, some recent evidence that has come out of the archives and has, 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.

• 11:16Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one of the things I wondered while I was doing the research for this book is, has it ever really happened? I 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-

• 11:50Scott Galloway?

  To abandon their kids on an island and see what happens?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 11:53Scott Galloway?

  I could go there. There's a few times, in the right moment, I would sign up for that. Take them, they're yours.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  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 seventies that said that supposedly this happened back then. And I started digging and digging, and after a couple of weeks, I managed to track down the real, 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.

• 12:40Scott Galloway?

  And then ran away and they got lost, right?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. They borrowed a boat. They, 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, well, basically reconstruct their story and, and, and discover what happened during those months and, and how they survived. And I realized that if this would have been a fictional Hollywood movie, then everyone would say, ah, 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.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  These six boys just stuck together. It was really their, their strong bones that helped them to survive.

• 13:34Scott Galloway?

  You said in an interview with KCRW that we are the product of survival of the friendliest. What did you mean by that?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  So that's actually a term from the evolutionary psychologist Brian Hare.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And 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. I mean, how did these six boys survive on their island? Well, because they worked together.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  If you're a narcissist, if you're really full of yourself, if you're very arrogant, then, you know, 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, is another form of friendliness. And what you see there is the rise of what Charles Darwin already called the domestication syndrome. So domesticated animals have certain traits in common.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  You know, they have thinner bones, smaller brains. And most importantly, they're much more playful than 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, if we humans take a lot, take a lot of time to grow up. We are, relatively speaking, very playful. We have smaller brains than our ancestors, so 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.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:09Scott Galloway?

  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? Was that, that was your famous YouTube moment? That was you, right?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my 15 seconds of fame, Scott.

• 16:25Scott Galloway?

  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 Davos Forum. And I couldn't, 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 pushback here. I have a politically incorrect view that in general, in general, the very rich are good people. And 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.

• 17:07Scott Galloway?

  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. In that you generally find, in terms of character, in terms of philanthropy, in terms of empathy, it is correlated with wealth. Your thoughts?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:46Scott Galloway?

  Etop maps, yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  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. I 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 know, 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

• 18:30Speaker 02

  a pretty strong tendency here that power is just a dangerous drug, you know? And in terms of empathy, you know, we've got psychological, you'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 were really friendly. But I think it's a 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.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Ancient 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.

• 19:38Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I think that one of the most interesting anthropologists of our time is a man named Joe Hendrick. And what he also always emphasizes is that it is in our nature to be cultural. Right? 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, that's obviously that you have to emphasize. And I mean, that historians will emphasize this forever until the end of time, that we, 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's this need to belong.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  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 whenever that goes in a wrong direction, or you see an epidemic of distrust, as you see today in, in the US. I mean, there are all kinds of pre-issues consequences.

• 20:58Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 21:02Scott Galloway?

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• 22:20Scott Galloway?

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• 23:31Scott Galloway?

  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 equality. Give us your pitch on UBI.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  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. In my book, Utopia for Realists, I basically looked at all the empirical evidence that we've gathered since the 1970s.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  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 healthcare 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? That'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.

• 25:16Scott Galloway?

  Just to press pause there, I thought I remembered, and I don't know if this is, but there's actually a difference between, 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, is that a myth?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  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. But in general, I think it's just a really good, 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, it works incredibly well. You know, this is one of the best evaluated NGOs today. There's this old saying, you know, give a, don't give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  And we should really get rid of that saying because maybe the man doesn't like fish, you know? Maybe he's a vegetarian or, or maybe he doesn't want to fish. Or maybe there are a lot of other fisher men and women already in the neighborhood and you can't make money with fishing. You know, maybe 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, you know? Maybe just give the man some money so that he can decide for himself what he wants to do instead of relying on some self-appointed expert.

• 26:51Scott Galloway?

  In terms of, I was recently in Germany and

• 26:56Scott Galloway?

  You know, the big topic was Germany, 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. They have a very strong social safety net. People who take auto shop in high school, get slipstreamed 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,

• 27:40Scott Galloway?

  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? My 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?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  So I think it's really important to make a distinction here between the vision of implementing a 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. I think that, you know, access to healthcare 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 are, you know, 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.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  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. So 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, arrogant Europeans who visit the US and think, like, what a shithole is this? You know, I remember studying at UCLA when I was a student and I just couldn't believe how many homeless people there were on the street.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  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 hayfield. What you see in many social democratic countries like Sweden, like Denmark, like the Netherlands, probably also like Germany, is, well, in Denmark, they call it Ynteslaw. It's this old story from the 19th century that says that you cannot pretend you're

• 30:27Speaker 02

  special, you know, you're just like all the others. In the Netherlands, we have a saying, behave normally, that's crazy enough. And I don't know, that's not really good if you want to create a culture of ambition and of weirdness, which is obviously a very important ingredient of progress.

• 30:42Scott Galloway?

  I have a lot of mixed emotions here, and I think a lot of it comes down to incentives. And I have economic security now, and it's a function of one big government, which America, you know, people would love to call themselves a self-made person. No one is self-made. People in America, I find, don't appreciate how fortunate they are. And also, I went to UCLA, which kind of started an upward spiral for me, and it was government. It was big government. It was generosity of taxpayers who would never meet me, who thought, we want to help the children of single immigrant mothers who were secretaries, which was my mom. At the same time... I think a big part of my economic security comes from,

• 31:27Scott Galloway?

  by the way, I should have warned you, these podcasts are just an opportunity for me to talk about me. But anyways, the moment that the fire got, I was a fuck up until really, I was in graduate school, just barely getting by, classic underachiever. The moment that really lit a fire for me, I mean, really like gave me real hunger that was key to my success was when my mom got very sick and we were underinsured. And in America, being sick and underinsured is a terrifying place to be. And that was very motivating for me. And I wonder if I lived in a more forgiving, a more gentle socialist country that had a bigger safety net,

• 32:11Scott Galloway?

  if I would have had the drive, if I would have had the hunger. Your thoughts?

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. I would say it's much more a part of your genetic makeup is that. Some people, you know, just have a lot of energy, ambition, willpower, et cetera. I think there's a much stronger genetic component there. So for me personally, I've always been quite restless, even though I've, you know, benefited from a great social safety net here in the Netherlands. Wonderful parents, two fantastic sisters, you know, basically I've been very, very lucky. I don't think it's made me lazy. I mean, that's, this N is one.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  But I tend to think that altruism is often a luxury. So the ability to do good is a privilege. And it's also a duty if you, if you're really lucky. So if we zoom out a little bit further, it's estimated that around 117 people have lived in the history of humanity. And we are part of that 1% or maybe even less than 1% who live now and have access to. You know extravagant convenience luxuries such as refrigerators, you know,

• 33:30Speaker 02

  cars, airifications, you name it. I mean, we've really won the lottery of life in many ways. We could have been a hunter gatherer in the Stone Age, we could have been a peasant in the Middle Ages, we could have been a slave in ancient Egypt. We, I mean, it's pretty extraordinary if you think about it that way, just how lucky we are. And you correctly said that just the, your passport, just the fact that you're born in a rich country, that is, I mean, that's, there's one economist, Branko Milanovic, who estimates that that's already 60% of your income. Then another 10% is gender, another 10% is ethnicity, and then the rest is, you know, maybe you could say your willpower or your own creativity, but even that is also your, you know, genetics or your upbringing.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  So, to be honest, I personally don't believe there's such a thing as free will. I think it's all given to us in a way. And that, that means that we have an extraordinary moral duty to help others and to do good in this world if we can.

• 34:32Scott Galloway?

  So I'm fascinated by taxes. I've heard you talk about it. At the end of World War II in the United States, the top income tax rate was 92%. Now it's 37 for current income in the US, but I would argue the majority of people, we have a very strange tax system here. It's progressive until you get to the 99th percent, and then it drops. And the myth is that taxation has been really hard on lower middle income taxpayers. They have, their taxes have gone up a little bit because of consumption taxes and sales tax. But the people who've gotten really screwed in the United States are what I call the workhorses. And that is people who make between 100,000 and a million. They make enough to get into the highest tax bracket. They usually have to live in a high tax state. They pay 50% tax rate.

• 35:13Scott Galloway?

  But they don't go above a million such that they can start investing and then have their income shift from current income to long-term capital gains, engage in sort of all kinds of tax avoidance, you know, whether it's qualified small business, 1202, also carried interest, all sorts of goodies. What do you think happened? And it's kind of, it's happened in Europe too. I see Bernard Arnault moving. I see corporations doing reversions. Why in the last 20, 30 years has tax avoidance at the top just gone haywire?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  So I think the main reason is that we allowed it to happen. So there was very little attention to the issue. If you go back to, say, ten, fifteen years, very, very few people were talking about this phenomenon of tax avoidance and tax evasion. I mean, tax avoidance is technically legal, but you could argue it's immoral. Tax evasion is actually illegal. It's criminal, and a lot of the super wealthy do a lot of tax evasion, so are technically criminals. What we've seen happening in the past, say, five years, though, is a turnaround. So now there's a lot more attention to the issue. And I think that's one of the reasons why, luckily, once again, we're making progress.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  So actually, the world has just agreed, or the EU has just agreed on a minimum corporate tax of fifteen percent. I think that was a huge milestone. There's a crackdown on tax paradises going on. That was actually led by the United States, you know, under Barack Obama. They killed the bank secrecy laws in Switzerland. I mean, it was basically like, stop doing that. We're the most powerful country on earth. Don't do that. We don't want it anymore. It's as easy as that. And then, boom, there's no bank secrecy in Switzerland anymore. You can see the same thing happening here in the Netherlands. You know, the Netherlands is a huge tax paradise. There are billions and billions, actually hundreds of billions of dollars of American

• 37:11Speaker 02

  companies stashed in the Netherlands, or they flow through the Netherlands to other tax paradises such as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. And there's also a lot of change happening there. So actually, the size of the money flow has been declining a lot in the recent years. I still think there's a lot of progress to do, but it's just that, you know, what's the expression? Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's really what you can see happening here, is that once you see people getting angry, that's when we're making progress. It's when no one's talking about it, that's when the biggest injustice happens.

• 37:47Scott Galloway?

  Do you have kids, Rucker?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've got one little daughter. She's, she's almost two.

• 37:53Scott Galloway?

  So have you thought at all about, so I have two boys. And you wanna, as you get older, you think, all right, you wanna, you want your, you wanna leave the world with two. Or people who are, are good, productive, empathetic people, who are gonna add value to the world. You know, you hope they're successful and happy. But you at least, at a minimum, wanna make sure that they're, that they're in the agency of something bigger. And that comes at a, that's a huge benefit, they benefit from it, but they have an obligation. Have you thought at all about, you know, in your work, how it impacts, or is gonna impact the way you approach fatherhood, or even the way you approach relationships?

• 38:37Scott Galloway?

  Because it strikes me that, at the end of the day, we just have to have people thinking more as a collective. Thinking more, how do I create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts? Because it does feel very individualistic over the last 20 or 30 years. And it's gotta start, you know, I would imagine these values have to be implicated at a very young age.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Recently, I spent quite a bit of time studying the psychology of resistance heroes during the Second World War. I was just really interested in this question. What motivated these people to risk their lives to save Jews? And there's actually been quite a bit of research. There, there were two professors, Samuel and Pearl Olner, in, in California, actually, who'd done this huge interview project where they interviewed more than 700 resistant heroes. And asked them, you know, why did you do what you did? And it's interesting, if you read that book, pretty much nothing comes out of it. You know, it turns out that it was a cross-section of the population.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Men, women, rich, poor, young, old, highly educated, no education at all.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  You know, could be anything. And it was only in the nineties that a group of economists looked at the data again and discovered a couple of things. So the most important characteristic was that people were asked. So if you were asked to join the resistance, almost everyone said yes. And now, obviously, there was a selection bias, you know, you couldn't ask anyone. So often, people had already given, you know, small signs that they could be, that they could join the resistance. Uh, you know, maybe they didn't, you know, sing during some Nazi song or something like that. So that was important. And there were some interesting characteristics at the same time. And one of them was how they were raised by their parents.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  It's it's not helicopter parenting in a way. It's the opposite of that. Kids get a lot of freedom to make their own judgments. But then, at the same time, the parents instill a strong sense of moral duty in them. You know, they they they they help them develop a strong moral compass. They don't say like, this is the rule. They try to explain the rule, you know, they they try to make their kids understand why, you know, certain actions have consequences. So you you also see this a lot in a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, by the way, is is the belief that you can make a difference.

• 41:05Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  That things do not happen to you.

• 41:07Scott Galloway?

  That's what the Valley calls it.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Things do not happen, you know, you can make things happen.

• 41:11Scott Galloway?

  You have agency.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. You're very, very agentic. And and that's something I think you can try and instill in in your children. I think a lot of it is still genetic, probably. But if there's anything that that I would try to do in in in bringing up our daughter, then it would be that.

• 41:31Scott Galloway?

  And advice to your younger self, you know, you've you've had a really interesting career. It it seems like I just get the sense you're enjoying what you're doing. You have a nice life. What would you what would you advise to younger people as through the lens of advice to your 25 year old self be?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Huh. Um, so let me first give really, really detailed, practical advice. Um, I always. Tell people to spam, so just spam a lot of people. What I often see is entrepreneurs have a great idea or book writers have a nice idea for a book. And then they just send one email, you know, that one pitch to one person that they worked on for a long time. I think it's much better to send 100 emails to 100 people. And you just have to get lucky early in your career. And if you just throw a lot of pasta on the wall, then you can just see what sticks. At least that's how I approached it. And then if you're lucky, you get the opportunity to learn because you're going to be crap at what you do anyway

• 42:32Speaker 02

  early in your career. You know, if I read what I wrote 10 years ago, it's quite a painful experience, to be honest. But I wouldn't have gotten to where I am today if I didn't get that opportunity. So you've got to try and find a place where you can make those mistakes.

• 42:49Scott Galloway?

  Isn't a lot of that, though? I talk a lot about this. Isn't a lot of that, you know, throwing a lot of darts, isn't a lot of that a function of your ability and willingness to endure rejection?

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. And again, can you teach that to people? It's just something that I didn't really have, especially when I was 24, 25 years old. Whenever I got a rejection, I guess my attitude was, you don't see my brilliance. Poor you.

• 43:17Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, no, I think that's good. Well, we see your brilliance. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author. He has published five books on history, philosophy, and economics, including Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, which has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been described by The Guardian as the Dutch Wunderkind of new ideas and by TED Talks as one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. He joins us from his home in the Netherlands. Rutger, we love your work and we appreciate your time and keep fighting the good fight.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Thanks, Scott. Really enjoyed it.

• 43:55Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

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