Rutger Bregman
@rcbregman • 373,072 subscribers
Historian. Books: 'Utopia for Realists' (2014), 'Humankind' (2020) and 'Moral Ambition' (2025). Co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition.
Shorts
Videos
About a year ago, a Princeton student named Kyler Zhou was sitting in traffic in New Jersey. At some point he was so bored that he put on a podcast with… me 🙃 It was my usual talk about the talent crisis. About the smartest kids of a generation going to work for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, while the biggest problems in the world go unsolved, blablabla, you may have heard it by now ;) What’s interesting is what happened next. As soon as Kyler got home, he emailed me and The School for Moral Ambition (the organization we started to get talented people working on the world's biggest problems). Kyler wanted to bring this to Princeton. Well, we told him no 😅. We had just launched our first university fellowship at Harvard, and there was no capacity for a second campus... Kyler decided to ignore us. Three days into the semester, he launched the first* Moral Ambition Chapter at a university in the United States. In just a few days, more than 120 Princeton students signed up. In November of last year I visited, and the energy was simply AMAZING. Since then, everything has been escalating. Students have started Moral Ambition Chapters at Brown, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Georgetown and 5 other campuses – often before we've heard of them. Which brings me to today. After the launch of our Harvard Fellowship (8% of ALL Harvard juniors applied to the first cohort!), we're now also launching Moral Ambition Fellowships at Princeton, Brown, Vanderbilt and Stanford. The program is simple: twelve super talented students per campus, a $15,000 stipend, and a summer working full-time on the most important causes of our time, like lead poisoning or child poverty or ending factory farming or AI safety etc. – instead of polishing a boring corporate pitch deck. It's just incredible to see how quickly this movement is growing. Every year, thousands of brilliant graduates are funneled into corporate careers that add little to the world. More and more of them are starting to walk the other way. (For students: applications for Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Vanderbilt are open now. Stanford opens October 6. * Brown University claims that they were actually the first – I've decided to stay neutral in this quarrel 😅
Rutger Bregman427,929 views • 2 days ago
Sometimes you get a few minutes on live TV with a billionaire. I tried to make them count! 😅
Rutger Bregman526,213 views • 7 months ago
Very excited to see this: a National Geographic documentary about one of the biggest frauds in social science—the Stanford Prison Experiment. Based on all the new evidence. Thibault Le Texier in particular deserves major credit for his work uncovering the truth.
Rutger Bregman573,515 views • 1 year ago
Laughter and song, the bonds of friendship, the joy of play, the wonder of art, the beauty of nature, the gift of attention – tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg and Musk don't care for ANY of it. They see humanity as redundant, as useless, as slop, and would rather replace all of it with AI.
Rutger Bregman146,169 views • 5 months ago
Just before Trump’s re-election, I attended a private tech conference in Silicon Valley. Over dinner, the conversation was dominated by a tech bro who spoke in ways that reminded me of 1930s fascists like Mussolini. I pointed this out to him, and he replied, without irony: “Yeah, I think we should get a little fascy.”
Rutger Bregman169,997 views • 7 months ago
