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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Rutger Bregman’s utopias, and mine

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.610.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2019

⏱️ 88 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Universal basic income. A 15-hour work week. Open borders. These ideas may strike you as crazy, fantastical, maybe even utopian... but that’s exactly the point. My guest today is Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, whose book Utopia for Realists is not only about utopian visions but about the importance of utopian thinking. Imagining utopia, he writes, “isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our minds.” He’s right. And so this isn’t just a conversation about his utopia, or mine. It’s a conversation about how to think like a utopian, and why doing so matter most when the days feel particularly dystopic. Citations: The Lost Boys by Gina Perry "Socially Useless Jobs" by Robert Dur and Max van Lent "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" by John Maynard Keynes "I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout." by Emily Guendelsberger Book Recommendations: Bullshit Jobs and Debt by David Graeber A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato ******************************************************* The Ezra Klein Show has been nominated for best Society- culture podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for The Ezra Klein Show at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Please send guest suggestions for our upcoming series on climate change to [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

what you assume in other people is also what you get out of them.

0:03.4

So right now, we've designed so many of our institutions,

0:07.5

you know, our schools, our prisons, our democracy.

0:10.8

We've designed them around the idea that people are fundamentally selfish.

0:26.7

Hello, welcome to the Clancho, on the Box Media Podcast Network.

0:29.5

So one piece of feedback I get sometimes, a piece of feedback I agree with,

0:33.7

is the show doesn't do enough on climate change.

0:36.3

And so we're going to do a lot more.

0:37.9

I'm planning a series for the fall that is going to look at climate change

0:41.8

from the science to the politics to the effects from a number of different angles.

0:46.2

And I would love your ideas of peoples and angles you'd like to hear it from,

0:51.7

or you'd like to hear from, rather.

0:53.6

So you know me as a Clancho at box.com, again, as a Clancho at box.com,

0:57.4

I would love your ideas for climate change episodes you would like to hear.

1:01.2

And you know, you can assume that I know, and I'm thinking about some of the big,

1:05.2

obvious players in the space, like the biggest books, that kind of thing.

1:08.0

I'm a little bit more interested here in how to make sure that if we're doing a couple episodes

1:13.1

on this or not all the same episode, there's so many ways to look at this issue.

1:16.4

And so many ways to look at what is doing to us and to our politics,

1:19.6

and to our worlds, and to our futures, and what can be done about it.

1:23.4

So I'm trying to make sure that we cover the waterfront as best we can.

1:27.3

And I would again love your ideas for it.

...

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