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Hello and welcome to Spectator Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator,

and this week my guest is Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian who, well, became famous or notorious around the world

when he sat on an equality panel on Davos and suggested that rather than maybe flying Bono

and stroking their chins, the assembled bigwigs ought simply to try paying their taxes

went slightly viral that. Anyway, Rutger's new book is called

humankind a hopeful history. And in it, he argues, if I'm representing him right, that like

Jessica Rabbit in the movie, human beings aren't bad, we're just drawn that way.

Rooka, welcome.

Thanks.

This book aims to upset, well, a couple of thousand years of established wisdom.

What set you on the path?

That's a good question.

You know, it's a hopelessly ambitious book.

It's maybe too ambitious, the kind of book that you can only write when you're a bit younger, right?

When you're still suffering from all this hubris.

But I hope that it's worthwhile because the reason I wrote it is that in the past 15 to 20 years,

there's really been this sort of silent revolution in science

that so many scientists from very diverse disciplines, anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists,

you name it, they've been moving from a quite cynical view of human nature to a much more

...