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The PoliticsGirl Podcast

How to Be a Good Person in a Bad World: A Conversation with Rutger Bregman

The PoliticsGirl Podcast

MeidasTouch Network, Leigh McGowan

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.93.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Historian and author, Rutger Bregman believes there’s an antidote to the sense of emptiness that so many people feel, and it’s the will to make the world a better place. To devote your career to the greater challenges of our time rather than just making money. That the time has come for a moral reawakening. That moral ambition not just financial ambition is what we need if we want to fix the world and actually like our place in it. As always, if you find worth in what we do, please consider SUBSCRIBING to PoliticsGirl Premium. You’ll get this podcast ad free and it, and the rants delivered directly to your inbox so even if we’re shut out of social media, you’ll still get access to the most highly researched, factual information available. Independent media needs your support now more than ever.   Go to https://www.politicsgirl.com/premium and subscribe today!! Thank you so much!  xoPG   Guest social: https://www.moralambition.org/ https://www.rutgerbregman.com/ https://linktr.ee/rutgerbregman           As always, please RATE and SUBSCRIBE so we can grow the show, open the dialogue, and inspire change moving forward! All show links here!: https://linktr.ee/politicsgirl This episode is sponsored by… https://laundrysauce.com code: PoliticsGirl20 https://honeylove.com/politicsgirl IQ Bars: TEXT - PG to 64000

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I think that a lot of people agree that it's not enough anymore to look for the moral minimum.

0:04.6

There have been a lot of do-gooder movements in the past that are all about, you know,

0:09.9

offsetting your carbon emissions, recycling your garbage, eating a little bit less meat.

0:15.1

And I'm not against any of that.

0:17.1

I think all that is good.

0:18.6

But it's just not ambitious enough because take your

0:21.5

environmental footprint. If you do everything right, then in the best possible scenario, you

0:27.0

will have reduced your footprint to zero. You live in a tiny house with your own vegetable

0:31.3

garden and you might as well not have existed, right? This is not how we're going to prevent

0:36.4

climate collects and save democracy

0:38.2

and prevent the next pandemic, et cetera. We've got to be a bit more ambitious, almost like,

0:42.3

morally greedy. At the school for more ambition, we're not interested in looking for a moral

0:46.2

minimum. We're more looking for our moral maximum. We're thinking like, okay, how far can we

0:51.3

take this?

1:02.1

Yeah. far can we take this? Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host Lee McGowan. Let's get into it.

1:06.9

I'm so excited today because we're taking a break from the daily nightmare that is Trump's

1:10.3

America to talk to one of my all-time favorite thinkers, the brilliant Dutch historian and author Rutger

1:16.1

Breggman. Rutger is known for his thought-provoking works on history, philosophy, and economics,

1:21.5

and if you haven't read any of Rutgers books like Utopia for Realists, Human Kind,

1:26.3

or his newest bestseller moral ambition, you really

1:29.1

should. If you don't know Rutger as an author, you may remember him from the time he went viral

1:33.9

at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when he called out the richest people in the world for

...

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