4. Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine.

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rutger Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures, called "Moral Revolution", explore the moral decay and un-seriousness of today's elites, drawing historical parallels to past eras of corruption that preceded transformative movements especially the 19th Century campaign to abolish slavery. In his series, he argues that small, committed groups can spark moral revolutions, emphasizing the importance of perseverance and long-term vision.

In this fourth and final lecture, he zooms out to reflect on humanity’s strange historical trajectory, warning of the existential risks posed by unchecked tech and AI. He urges privileged individuals to take on an active role in shaping a better future.

The Reith Lectures are presented by Anita Anand who chairs a Q & A. The programme was recorded in front of an audience at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, USA. The researcher was James Bonney and the series is produced by Jim Frank. The Editor is Clare Fordham. The programmes are mixed by Neil Churchill.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.
0:13.4	This Christmas, forget about socks. We've got the best present of all.
0:17.2	Dead people!
0:18.2	All that sounds like zombies. Sorry, it's not zombies. Let me start again.
0:21.8	In our new family-friendly podcast series, dead funny history, historical figures come back to life
0:26.8	but just long enough to argue with me, tell their life stories, and sometimes get on my nerves.
0:31.8	You're dead to me.
0:32.8	Dead funny history.
0:34.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.2	Hello, my name is Rocco Brackman, and in my fourth BBC Radio
0:40.0	for a Reith lecture, I'll be talking about my own secular religion. Hello, and welcome to the
0:47.1	final Reith lecture of 2025 with the historian and writer Rutger Breggman. Today,'re at Stanford University at the heart of Silicon Valley.
0:58.0	Now this place is pretty close to San Francisco on the west coast of the United States, and we're at
1:03.6	the Graduate School of Business, where students from over 16 nations develop ideas in entrepreneurship,
1:10.6	leadership and technology. And just
1:13.6	down the road, you'll find some of the world's biggest companies, including Apple, Meta, and
1:20.2	NVIDIA, a company valued at a staggering $5 trillion. That makes it the biggest company in history, at least on paper. Now, some of these
1:31.6	tech giants are causing Rutger Bregman considerable worry. In his series of lectures entitled
1:37.6	Moral Revolution, he has already castigated our political elites for their decadence and uns seriousness.
1:46.0	He said that history has much to teach us about how small groups can organize and change the world
1:53.0	and how individuals can remodel entirely the way we live our lives, sometimes in very radical ways. Now, today we're going to be hearing about big tech.
	...

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