Rutger Bregman
@rutgerbregman • 372,833 subscribers
Historian. Books: 'Utopia for Realists' (2014), 'Humankind' (2020) and 'Moral Ambition' (2025). Co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition.
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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 Bregman436,792 次观看 • 1 个月前
Europe loves to lecture the world about values, but morals without power is just vibes. We regulate AI we don’t build, sell handbags instead of hardware, and rely on others for our security and energy. If we really believe in liberal democracy, we’d better be willing to back it up.
Rutger Bregman45,844 次观看 • 8 个月前
Billionaires pay about half as much in taxes as everyone else. So why do we let them? Simple: because they have better lobbyists than us. But it doesn’t have to be this way. History tells us that we can actually win this fight. When the income tax was first proposed, they predicted catastrophe. Same arguments, same “bullshit bingo” we hear today – and democracy still prevailed. It can again. That’s why I’m excited to team up with Gabriel Zucman to ensure it does.
Rutger Bregman25,245 次观看 • 4 个月前
We pay people to quit their jobs, and start fighting the world’s biggest problems instead. Not someday. Not later. Now’s the time. Already, 20+ people across Europe have made the leap. Because the truth is: The world doesn’t just need more brilliant minds. It needs brilliant minds on the right side of history. 📢 EU Fellowship applications close May 12th. 🌎 Global (including U.S.) applications are now open and close soon.
Rutger Bregman32,348 次观看 • 1 年前