Are you morally ambitious? With Rutger Bregman (Part One)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today I'm here with head of programming, Connor Boyle. Connor, what have we got coming up on today's episode? Well, we've got a real treat for our audience today with Rutger Bregman returning to the podcast.

Many of you will know him for his sort of viral takedown of the elites at Davos when he basically scolded the audience for talking about philanthropy and all the ways billionaires can help society, conveniently leaving out the kind of big thing, which is tax. And he had this sort of viral clip on social media in which he said, I feel like I'm at a firefighters conference and we're not allowed to talk about water. That was sort of his big announcement, the world stage. But he's been writing these brilliant books, people may be aware of, Utopia for Realists was his first one, then Humankind, which was this sort of brilliant

um counterfactual uh analysis of human nature where instead of people thinking the Lord of the flies type thing, if we're all left on an island, we'll all become savages and start killing each other, actually when a plane really crashed and people were left stranded, they all tried to help each other. So kind of looking at sort of some stereotypes and looking to, you know, inject a bit of positivity about humans. Yeah, absolutely. And his new book, Moral Ambition, is kind of a natural follow-up to that theme, right?

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