Latest / The Fourcast / How to take on Trump’s ‘unhinged’ politics | Rutger Bregman

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How to take on Trump’s ‘unhinged’ politics | Rutger Bregman · The Fourcast

0:00
Hello and welcome to the forecast.
0:02
With the world still reeling from Donald Trump's tariffs,
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there's more bad news as the International Monetary Fund has
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slashed the UK's growth forecast and says that the global economy
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will see a significant slowdown. Add to that wars in Europe and
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the Middle East, climate change and the promise and the peril of
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AI. Is it possible to find hope
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amongst this constant chorus of doom and gloom?
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Well, one person who thinks they might have an answer is I guess
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today Rutka Brakeman, a progressive historian famous for
0:31
taking on the Davos billionaires.
0:33
Rutka, good to see. You thanks for having me.
0:35
So one of the reviews about your book said it was wonderfully
0:38
dangerous. Is it dangerous?
0:41
It is a you'd like it. To be dangerous, it is a bit
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dangerous. It encourages people to join a
0:46
cult, if you will, of radical do gooters who want to devote their
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career, their lives to some of the most pressing issues that we
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face as a species. I think that the waste of talent
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that is currently going on is one of the greatest waste of our
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time, even worse than plastic straws, if you will.
1:01
And yeah, the book is a call to arms for for the best and
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brightest among us in particular, who are currently
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often, you know, stuck in consultancy jobs and finance
1:12
jobs and corporate law jobs. And I think they could.
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Do they? Really like those jobs.
1:17
Well, maybe. Maybe some of them do, and maybe
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they like the paycheck in particular.
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And you think that's wrong? No, not necessarily.
1:25
I am just inspired by examples throughout history of elites
1:30
redefining what it means to be successful.
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I mean, in this country, the United Kingdom, we've seen the
1:36
greatest movement for human rights this world has ever seen,
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the abolitionist movement. I'm personally from the
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Netherlands and we didn't stop, you know, the slave trade or or
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engaging that because we thought it was bad the British forced
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us. So I spend a lot of time
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studying that movement and I realized.
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Are you right about it? Of course in your.
1:55
Book. Yeah, exactly.
1:55
Moral ambition. And I, I, I realized that it was
1:58
part of a bigger societal shift that was all about redefining
2:02
what it means to be successful and, and, and living a different
2:06
kind of life. So is the key to this book that
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you're appealing to essentially smart people, you know, who've
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got excess intelligence, excess capacity, excess energy, you
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think they're using it in the wrong way and say, come on, get
2:18
on board for something that you will feel that will make you
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feel good about yourself, that you might be remembered for.
2:24
Yeah, Yeah. At the pearly gates.
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Yeah, yeah. I think the most ambitious
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people should be working on the most important global problems
2:30
is it's it's as simple as that. We've got currently three types
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of waste of talent. We've got people who aren't very
2:37
ambitious and aren't very idealistic.
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They're stuck in the so-called BS jobs.
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It's a highly technical term, you know, that scientists use to
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describe those socially meaningful, meaningless jobs.
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And it's about 25% of the population, according to a big
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survey. Give us an example of that job.
2:54
Well, HR managers, marketeers, consultants, corporate lawyers,
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I mean, a lot of people stuck in cubicles and it's not me saying
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it about their jobs. That would be unfair.
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I mean, people can be the judge of the social value of their own
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job. So it is people saying it about
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their own work. I think that's tragic.
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But we also have a lot of people who are ambitious but not very
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idealistic, right? And then we talk about all these
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Harvard graduates, the Oxbridge get graduates who could, you
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know, build a rocket that brings us to Mars, but instead instead
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they become quants or something like that.
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And. Where does a historian or a
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journalist fit into that? It depends on what they work on,
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obviously, so I wouldn't want to live in a world without
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historians. I think that history has a lot
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to offer us, especially right now as things are quickly
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getting darker. Yeah, umm, we like to think that
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we're, we are so exceptional. I currently live in the United
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States, and I mean, that's a country in particular that likes
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to think that it is very exceptional.
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But we see things that can be a dangerous thing.
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Yeah, we've seen these things before.
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You know, we've seen democracy breaking down before, and we
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need people to take a stand against that.
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But I'm also quite critical of some of my friends on the left
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and some progressives who are maybe idealistic but not
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ambitious at all. We've got so many people who are
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utterly obsessed with their own footprint.
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For example, they don't fly, they don't eat meat, they don't
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use those plastic straws. But in the best possible
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scenario, they have a footprint of 0 and they might as well not
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exist, which is not very ambitious to me.
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And same is true for all those educated elites who spend a
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decade policing language, saying you can't say this, you can't
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say that. You have to use all the right
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words to describe all the injustices in the world.
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Well, that's also not very ambitious, and that's not how
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you actually help people. So where does someone like Elon
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Musk fit in to this, You know, Rubric?
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Because I'm here's someone, you know, who's trying to fix the
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problems of the planet, you know, trying to fix the problems
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of industry, of, of vehicular traffic and is trying to fix the
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problems of government. He would say to them, not
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everyone would recognize that, but that's what he would say.
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And he has been rewarded, you know, quite lavishly by, by
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shareholders. The question is, are we talking
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about Elon Musk? Pre Twitter post Twitter, I
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think the man sadly went nuts. But before that you got to
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recognize that he built 2 amazing, amazing companies.
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And I'm often quite frustrated by, again, some people on the
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left who say, oh, he's, he's, you know, fake.
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He's not smart. He's just doing with government
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subsidies or whatever. I mean, obviously he's taking
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billions of dollars in government subsidies.
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And that's exactly what it should do.
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That's what those subsidies were intended for.
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And he built an amazing company. Like the whole transition
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towards electric cars. Thank you, Elon.
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Uh, so, but. He's trying to apply the same
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principles to slimming down government.
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Now, you could say that he's doing a terrible job of it or
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he's being dishonest about it. But in his own, in his own mind,
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as someone who's, you know, maybe heard your Clarion call to
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be ambitious and morally ambitious, he thinks he's doing
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the right thing. And I just wonder if the problem
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is that what is moral ambition to one person is morally
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reprehensible to someone else. Sure.
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And it's very hard to find the common denominator.
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Look, I'm not a moral philosopher and I don't want to
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get into a boring debate about what is morality, what is.
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Good. What is called moral ambition?
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That's true, but I think that a lot of us are on the same page.
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So I think that a lot of people will agree that the fact that
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15,000 kids die today from easily preventable diseases is
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not very good. The fact that we are utterly
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unprepared for the next pandemic is not very good.
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The fact that 80 billion animals are slaughtered every single
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year and live in pretty horrific conditions in so-called factory
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farms is not very good. So I don't try to be very
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controversial here and I'm mainly saying like these are
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clearly very big problems. These are very talented people.
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Like maybe those people should do something about those very
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big problems. So we have these incredible, you
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know, global challenges, you know, which we keep talking
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about, whether it's, you know, the promise in the peril of AI,
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whether it's climate change, whether it's the next pandemic.
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And yet at the same time, what we're seeing is that national
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borders, you know, personal borders, walls, you know,
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frontiers are popping up left, right and center.
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So the trend at the moment is nationalism, selfishness, if you
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like, with a vengeance. So how do you, how do you
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breakthrough to that? Because that's not just about
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you're, you're wasting your life.
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You're much too clever to be a consultant.
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It's, you know, you need to have a different mindset.
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You need to cheer up a little bit, you know, be more positive.
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That's the tricky part, isn't? It I am unashamedly
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cosmopolitan, so I take inspiration from the great
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abolitionists who came before us, the suffragettes who fought
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for the women's right to vote. And what I see in that history
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of moral progress is the drive to expand the moral circle so
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that we don't just care about our own people.
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I mean, I'm a I'm a father. Obviously I care much more about
7:46
my own kids than other kids, But I also have the ability to
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expand my moral circle and I have a career anyway, so I might
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as well do some good with it. And indeed, if you want to have
7:57
the biggest possible impact, then often it does make sense to
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have a more international perspective.
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I know you had a falling out with Tucker Carlson, once
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Trump's favorite journalist. But I mean, if you look at the
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Trump world, I know you know, not everyone's bought into it.
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He has divided the world. But the point is that there are
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people who firmly believe in the United States and even
8:20
elsewhere, that his particular brand of politics is the answer
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to our problems of not just prosperity, but community,
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family, all these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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That's the fundamental political divide right now.
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It's on the one hand you have a 0 sum world view, the belief
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that yeah, if other people come into your country, they only
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come to take things away from you.
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And yeah, like with everything I have in me, and I think this is
8:50
true for a lot of other people. Yeah, we want to fight against
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that because it's not in my view, not true.
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I am deeply, deeply worried. As I said, I currently live in
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New York. I sometimes got the feeling that
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Europeans don't always realise just yet how bad the situation
9:06
is. We're talking about a real
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chance of an authoritarian breakthrough in the next couple
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of years. I live there, you know, on an
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immigrant visa. People are kicked out left and
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right if they are critical of the regime currently.
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That's what currently happening for me.
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This is not normal politics anymore.
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This is not left versus right. This is good versus evil.
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Well, I mean, I, I think we'll talk about left and right in a
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minute because those labels seem to have been diluted somewhat.
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But there's a reason why Trump got elected the first time
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slightly less convincingly and the reason why he got elected a
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second time more convincingly. And there's a reason why, you
9:44
know, he has this extraordinary following.
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I mean, it is a cult like follow.
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You talked about a cult at the beginning.
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And I think those people, yeah. I just wonder how you
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breakthrough, whether you should even bother where you're
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bothering to breakthrough to those people who voted for him
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to say I want to understand why you're so angry, you know, and
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then maybe we could use that rage in a different.
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Way. So I think it's a lost.
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I worked in a journalism platform for a long time in the
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Netherlands, where we would always say like we need to break
10:09
out of our bubble. And I was always like, should we
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really? Like I want my friends to read
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my pieces in. Very often they don't.
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Even so, in this book I am talking to my own people because
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I'm frankly a bit angry at them. You know so many of them.
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Angry with your own people or the other people or my own
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people? Because many of us went to great
10:31
universities, maybe we went to Oxford or Cambridge, and we
10:34
wrote these application essays when we wanted to get in.
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And we said that we were going to, you know, make a massive
10:40
difference. We were going to take on global
10:42
hunger. We were going to build
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affordable housing. We were going to accelerate the
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clean energy transition. And look at us, what are we
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doing? So I'm not really interested in
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preaching at MAGA people or anything like that.
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I think you want to preach. At your own people.
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Exactly, exactly. And I think a big reasons why.
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Progressive are really annoying. Yeah, sure, but I, I guess I'm
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more effective if I am trying to convince people in my own circle
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than if I, you know, and. And by the way, half of the
11:12
country already has an essential job, right?
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Teachers, plumbers, nurses, care workers.
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They don't need some lecture about moral ambition from me.
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I have been incredibly frustrated by the purity
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politics that's been so dominant on the left.
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We talk about it, the the policing of language, the utter
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inability to actually build things, to actually achieve
11:39
things. I think we got to have a real
11:41
honest conversation about why has government become so
11:44
ineffective? For example, we can say, Oh
11:48
yeah, clean energy now, but if it's actually illegal to build
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because of all kinds of red tape, etcetera, well, that is a
11:56
problem. Why does so many talent flow to
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the private sector or to Silicon Valley, for example?
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Well, because you can still build in the virtual world,
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right? You can still build with bits
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and bytes, but you very often can't build with real bricks and
12:09
mortar, right? That's, that's become very
12:12
problematic both in the UK, in the US, in Europe.
12:15
So got to have an honest conversation about that.
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If you don't fix real problems for real people in the real
12:19
world, then at some point they get very angry and they start
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voting for, you know, people who don't have the best of
12:25
intentions. But fixing real problems, we
12:27
call it, you know, here we love to talk about fixing potholes in
12:30
the streets, you know, build, you know, housing, all these
12:33
sort of basic things, infrastructure, roads, better
12:36
plumbing. This is also the kind of stuff
12:38
that Donald Trump talks about. Yeah, he talks about it.
12:42
He talks a lot about it doesn't do much right.
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I think we can now see that there's no real economic plan
12:49
here. I've actually spoken to quite a
12:51
few entrepreneurs also in Silicon Valley who are more on
12:53
the right side of the political spectrum, who are feeling quite
12:56
a bit of buyer's remorse. It's been, I mean, if the
13:00
situation wasn't so bad, it would be funny.
13:03
What we now have in the US is court politics.
13:07
You have Donald Trump at the center of it all.
13:09
And the people who are best at sucking up to him, well, they
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maybe they get, you know, a little bit of candy.
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So yeah, you wave with a letter from from the king or something
13:18
like that. And maybe that works for a
13:20
while, but this is the situation we're in.
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It's an utterly unhinged kind of politics.
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But it's also a cult, isn't it? And it's a kind of revolution.
13:28
And in the revolution, what happens is that when the
13:30
revolution doesn't work, mostly, you know, history tells us they
13:35
double down on the revolution. There's more revolution, it
13:37
becomes more radical. And then maybe at some stage,
13:39
you know, there's a there's a correction of course, or there's
13:42
some bloodletting or there's a counter revolution.
13:44
Sometimes. So I think I hope, for example,
13:47
is Poland. Poland also had a lot of
13:50
democratic backsliding going on a very right wing populist
13:54
government that was in power a couple of years ago trying to
13:59
end basically the the balance of powers and the power of the
14:02
courts. Then there was a big coalition
14:05
against it from the left to the center to the moderate right.
14:10
And I think that's exactly what we need right now.
14:13
All great movements in history, honestly, have been coalitions.
14:17
It's one of the things that, again, my friends on the left
14:20
are always, not always the best at working together with people
14:23
who don't share all their opinions.
14:25
But it is very important. It's what you see when you study
14:28
those abolitionists, for example, the great coalition
14:30
between the Quakers and the evangelicals.
14:32
You see it in the civil rights movement.
14:34
People like to think that, oh, they were so radical and
14:37
purists. No, not at all.
14:38
The Super pragmatic and I think that's what we need again today.
14:43
What's really interesting in America, and you see that to
14:45
some extent here, well in Europe, is that the the
14:48
storytellers that have that have captured the moment are the
14:51
storytellers that are angry, the rageful storytellers, mostly on
14:55
the populist right, but also on, you know, look at Germany on the
14:58
populist left. There are plenty of those who've
14:59
kind of ignited the imagination of young voters.
15:03
Where's the story? Where's the optimistic
15:05
storytelling in modern politics, the kind of things that you
15:08
refer to in your book? Yeah, I see there the essence of
15:11
what could become. So I think you're on the wrong
15:13
track there. I think you're positive track.
15:15
So it's not 2015 anymore. It's not a time where you say,
15:19
oh, we're going to do good by doing well and let's give a Ted
15:22
talk about it and bring the community together and have some
15:24
nice. Conversations.
15:25
I'm referring to that. I think this is a time for maybe
15:29
you could call it moderate anger, right?
15:31
You could still be angry at the state of the world, but but
15:35
still be how do you say that sensible and moderate and
15:38
compromising in your approach? I'm I'm I'm very angry about
15:42
what I consider the betrayal of elites.
15:44
You know, we have so many educated elites and they're the
15:47
big betrayal is not a lack of empathy, a lack of listening to
15:51
Trump voters or reform. Voters to match.
15:54
Match their anger with my anger, that's what you're saying.
15:57
I think that sometimes there just to fight anger that can
16:00
motivate people, because here, as I said, the big betrayal is
16:05
the the lack of actually contributing to the common good.
16:09
So that that is the betrayal. Yes, of the elites.
16:11
Exactly what other people like to call the elites, yeah.
16:14
Yeah, yeah. And honestly, for me, writing
16:15
this book, writing about moral ambition, also, you know, it
16:21
helped me to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
16:23
I've spent a decade of my career in the awareness industry,
16:26
standing on the sideline, you know, giving my opinion, looking
16:29
at the people who are in the arena, doing the actual work.
16:32
And I started experiencing this emotion that I like to describe
16:35
as moral envy. I think more journalists could
16:39
use some moral envy because, you know, for us, and I guess I'm
16:43
not really a journalist. Anymore what is moral envy?
16:45
It is. It is just looking at those
16:47
people who are doing the good work, who are taking the risks,
16:50
who have this entrepreneurial approach, who don't always
16:53
succeed, who have to sacrifice, who have to, who fall and then
16:57
stand up again. It's something I I deeply
17:01
admire. Just getting back to the
17:02
sacrifices that you're asking people to make by giving up.
17:05
You know, that that job in consulting and banking, I mean,
17:08
a lot of jobs that you would classify as kind of relatively
17:12
useless, let's say, well, the world would continue spinning
17:14
without those jobs. Those are jobs that don't pay
17:17
particularly well, but they pay enough to pay someone's
17:19
mortgage, you know, to provide, you know, 3 square meals a day.
17:22
And I mean, when people are squeezed economically, yeah, you
17:26
know, do they then still have the luxury to think about doing
17:29
the morally right thing or not? Money matters Margaret Thatcher
17:32
had this excellent saying when she said that the Good Samaritan
17:36
didn't just have good intentions.
17:38
You have cash, you have money as well, right and in the fight
17:40
against some of the biggest problems we face, we need money.
17:43
So I Co founded an organization called the School for More
17:46
Ambition. We like to see ourselves as the
17:48
Robin Hoods of talent. We take away these people out of
17:51
the Bermuda Triangle of talent, consultancy, corporate law and
17:55
finance and we convince them to work on some of these most
17:58
important things. For example, the fight against
18:00
the the tobacco industry is one of the causes we took up in
18:03
Europe. What you quickly realize if
18:05
you're working on that is that there's a total lack of capital
18:08
here. So there what you also need is
18:10
entrepreneurial people, people who have built great companies,
18:13
skilled those companies who climbed the first ladder of
18:15
success and who are now like, OK, let's use that capital to
18:19
make a big difference. Again, abolitionists,
18:21
suffragettes, they weren't financed by the government.
18:24
They weren't financed, you know, with some fancy corporate ad
18:27
deal or whatever. No, they were financed by brave
18:30
individual philanthropists. So money is important.
18:33
But, you know, especially in America where philanthropy is
18:35
also tax deductible, They're they're for.
18:38
Now, actually, but, well, Trump is going to crack at he's going
18:40
to come. I'm sure he might.
18:42
I wouldn't be surprised at all. But you know, there's some very,
18:44
very rich individuals and you've met them, you know, they, they
18:47
show up at Davos and they say we want to be taxed more, we want
18:50
to pay more money in taxation. And, and indeed, many of them
18:53
could, and they wouldn't be missing meals if they did.
18:56
But they're not the real challenge, are they?
18:58
The real challenge is that the people in the kind of lower
19:00
tiers who don't earn that much money, but there are millions of
19:03
them. Yeah.
19:04
And you need safety in numbers to actually make to affect
19:07
change. Don't.
19:08
I'm not certain really. There's a great quote from
19:11
Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who once said
19:14
that we should never doubt that small grips of thoughtful,
19:17
committed citizens can change the world.
19:18
In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.
19:21
So Peter Thiel, the right wing venture capitalist, has this
19:24
great saying that he says what's the opposite of a consultancy?
19:28
Well, it's a cult. It's a small group of people who
19:31
are really committed to an ideal that they're willing to fight
19:33
for. Now that's not necessarily good.
19:35
You could argue that some of the worst dictatorships started as
19:38
as a cult, but it's also true for some of the greatest, most
19:42
beautiful movements we've we've actually seen.
19:45
But then it rubs up against democracy, doesn't it?
19:47
You could argue, for instance, that, you know, climate change,
19:50
you know, driven by a small number of committed people, is a
19:52
kind of cult. You know, we see the scientific
19:54
sense of it, etcetera, etcetera. Trump comes along and says this
19:58
is all you know, a lot of BS. You know, you know, you who
20:01
still drive your diesel powered truck in Wisconsin, you should
20:04
be giving your vote to me and not to those other people.
20:06
And, and climate change in America at least, is now a dead
20:09
agenda. Yeah, I mean, that is the
20:11
problem, isn't it? You you may sneer at the kind of
20:14
vast majority. You may not need them for your
20:15
project, but they still have the vote and they can upend your
20:19
best intentions. Sure, sure.
20:21
But how? So you do need to persuade.
20:22
How did those ideas enter the mainstream?
20:25
You know, it was a small group of very committed people and it
20:29
started in the early 70s. So back then you had a corporate
20:33
lawyer named Lewis Powell who was actually on the board of Big
20:36
Tobacco. He had spent much of his years
20:39
railing against the scientific evidence on the dangers of
20:41
smoking. And he wrote the so-called
20:43
Powell memo, which is today seen by historians as the blueprint
20:48
for corporate Americans political takeover.
20:50
And they built this whole ecosystem, the Heritage
20:53
Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, many
20:57
political action groups, and they had an incredible
21:01
perseverance to really change the country, in my view, for the
21:05
worst. But there's a lot of admire
21:07
there as well. I mean, this is what it takes.
21:10
Back then, in the 60s and the 70s, most people were Social
21:13
Democrats. They were Keynesians, you know,
21:15
followers of the British economist John Maynard Keynes.
21:18
And they, they really succeeded in, yeah, creating this
21:23
political revolution. So that is honestly what it
21:26
takes. That's the kind of perseverance
21:28
that you need. And what I see on the other side
21:30
of the political spectrum is not nearly enough of that.
21:34
So I see people who are, you know, who think on like AI don't
21:37
know a monthly basis or even a daily basis.
21:40
You know, they have a project here or there.
21:42
They're not really serious about building coalitions.
21:45
They're also not really serious about getting the necessary
21:47
capital act to actually build a counter movement.
21:51
And that's what we need if we want to be morally ambitious
21:53
about this. What I'm hearing from you, and
21:55
correct me if I'm wrong here, is that, you know, basically there
21:58
should be a sort of almost the right to rule for smart people.
22:02
Smart people with talent should run the show, and less smart
22:06
people should basically trust in their smart people to run the
22:09
show better than, you know, the messiness of democracy, because
22:12
the messiness of democracy produces things like.
22:14
That sounds like played out to me like we need philosopher
22:17
kings. No, I that's not.
22:19
What you're coming from? I think we have to be very
22:21
worried about that kind of society because very smart
22:23
people are less smart than we like to think they are.
22:26
I am saying though, that it is not enough to just check your
22:29
privilege, you also got to use it.
22:31
We live in the reality that some people just have much more
22:37
wealth, have much more talent, much more cultural capital or
22:41
access to certain kind of networks.
22:43
I'm saying use what you have to make a big possible difference
22:47
and to move towards a much more equal and equitable world.
22:50
I think we got to work with the world as it currently exists.
22:53
I would love to live in some kind of utopian paradise.
22:56
I don't. I don't think we are there
22:58
nearly yet. And.
22:59
And just finally, the phrase as it currently exists is sort of
23:02
up in the air because AI is in the process of changing that
23:06
existence, perhaps in a very revolutionary way.
23:09
How does AI fit into this, this greatest sense of, you know, of,
23:12
of moral, you know, ambition and personal sacrifice?
23:16
If AI comes along and says I can do all that so much easier, so
23:19
much more cheaply than you can. Yeah.
23:21
So for a long time, experts, historians, sociologists,
23:27
economists have been predicting that the robots would come and
23:30
would take all over our jobs. I think we should never
23:33
underestimate capitalism's extraordinary ability to come up
23:36
with new, meaningless jobs. Currently it's about 25% of the
23:40
workforce. That could number could come up
23:43
quite a bit. I think AI will force us and
23:47
hopefully also help us to rethink the whole structure of
23:50
our economy. Basically, I think the time will
23:52
become ripe for something like a universal basic income.
23:55
Yeah, I think that'll be essential.
23:58
I think we will. You think?
23:58
That'll work. Oh, absolutely.
24:01
Wrote a whole book about it. I know, I know.
24:02
But I'm just wondering, you know, at the moment we're
24:04
finding it very difficult to give, you know, people benefits
24:07
when they can't work or find it difficult to get work because we
24:11
feel that actually everyone should be working, you know, for
24:13
their own crust. If you're putting people on the
24:15
universal income that has to be paid by someone, I can see the
24:17
discontent now. Yeah, and there we need just a
24:20
quite different system of taxation.
24:22
So currently we mostly tax labour and we don't really tax
24:26
capital and wealth. That needs to be completely
24:29
turned around because capital is going to be the great producer
24:32
of wealth. It's going to be these machines,
24:34
it's going to be these robots. So if we don't tax that, then
24:36
how are we ever going to finance the welfare state or anything
24:39
else? We care about the roads, fix the
24:41
potholes, etcetera. I think it's that's really
24:44
essential. But I'm not just talking about
24:46
the redistribution of wealth. I'm also talking about a
24:48
redistribution of talent because actually since the 17 and the
24:52
80s, ever since the tax rates for the rich have been going
24:55
down, we saw this talent shift as well.
24:57
It has become more attractive to go to Wall Street, to Silicon
25:00
Valley, to the city here in London to work in those jobs
25:04
that are less socially meaningful.
25:05
And I think that a more reasonable system of taxation
25:08
where billionaires, for example, actually have the same effective
25:11
tax rate as middle class people, wouldn't that be nice?
25:14
I think that will leave let lead more people to work for the
25:18
government, for example. I think it should become much
25:20
more prestigious and and normal. If you are, you know you know
25:23
someone who wants to build things that you go and work,
25:26
become a public servant. Just one final thought, those
25:30
10s of millions, hundreds of millions of people on universal
25:32
basic income, What, what would they do all day long?
25:35
They video games go ballroom dancing, I mean.
25:38
So I think I. Had a lot of.
25:40
Fun. I had a lot of fun for another
25:41
book looking at all these predictions from the past.
25:43
So John Maynard Keynes famously said that we would have a 15
25:46
hour work week in 20-30. Isaac Asimov, the great science
25:50
fiction writer, he said that the great challenge of the future
25:53
will be boredom. Bertrand Russell, the
25:55
philosopher, also thought that this was going to be a big thing
25:58
and that, you know, the lost product of civilization will be
26:00
figuring out how to spend our time wisely when the robots will
26:03
do our work. I'd I'd love to have that
26:06
challenge. I think we can figure it out.
26:09
Maybe we've got a banned TikTok, but a.
26:11
Bold Planet could be a dangerous thing.
26:13
Yeah, that is that interest. That could be one of those
26:16
challenges of the future indeed. Brickman, author of Moral
26:19
Ambition. Thanks for coming on.
26:20
Thanks for having me. That's it for this edition of
26:22
the Forecast. Until next time, goodbye.