Just joined Substack! rutgerbregman.substack.com/p/the-uncomf...

Last year, 52% of Harvard graduates went into finance, consulting or (big) tech. I was invited by students to talk about this waste of talent, and what we can do about it. Link in next tweet →

INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵

1/ Less than 24 hours before broadcast, the BBC called me and said: we're editing a line out of your lecture. The line? That Donald Trump is the most openly corrupt president in American history.

Over 80% of people want a wealth tax for billionaires. Of course they’re resisting with their army of lawyers and lobbyists, but we’re building ours. I’m so excited to be teaming up with @gabrielzucman.bsky.social 👉

It’s the most FT thing in the world to describe the manosphere as a market failure but it somehow doesn’t detract from this very good piece as.ft.com/r/c3d11403-b...

Sam Altman is the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley right now. The board that fired him? Replaced. The safety team that questioned his priorities? Dissolved. The nonprofit structure that was supposed to keep mission above profit? Restructured. The employees who wanted to speak out? Silenced.

GiveDirectly has sent $1 billion in cash directly to people in extreme poverty. Their model has no middle man and study after study shows it works. Any billionaire could call them tomorrow and help pull an entire country out of poverty. For some, it would cost about a year in the stock market.

We pay you to quit your job and spend 7 months fighting the tobacco industry, transforming the food system, or making the superrich pay their fair share in taxes. 37 fellowships. US, Canada, Europe, Kenya. Applications close April 27th.

80% of billionaire political spending goes to one party. Guess which one.

As a historian, I've always been careful with the word "fascism." We've all seen how it shuts down debate when everyone throws it at everything they don't like. But at some point, being careful with the word starts to mean being blind to the thing itself.

Peter Thiel literally wrote that freedom and democracy are not 'compatible' and that regulating Big Tech is the work of the 'anti-Christ'. Stop treating this as metaphor. When billionaires tell you they want to end democracy, take them seriously.

I made a video about fascism in America. Not as an insult. As a clinical diagnosis --> www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDf2...

They didn't die in vain.

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded. 2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning. Go to quitgpt.org. Cancel your subscription, delete your account. And tell at least one person why. My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is the most important thing happening in the world right now. Trump and Hegseth want killer drones + mass surveillance of Americans. Anthropic refuses to build it. While most tech companies fall in line, they are prepared to pay the price for their principles.

What conservatives did to Bud Light in 2023, that's what progressives should do to ChatGPT in 2026. OpenAI is so vulnerable right now. With enough pressure, I think it's actually possible to take the whole company down. quitgpt.org

The BBC just remade Lord of the Flies — the story that taught generations humans are fundamentally savage. But when it ACTUALLY happened in real life? Six boys shipwrecked for over a year built a functioning society.

Just before what could be the greatest wave of job loss, democratic erosion and threat to humanity itself, the Left - the people who are supposed to care most about these things – are going: LALALALALA it's not happening, it's all fake, AI is absolutely incapable of anything 🙃

Absolutely brilliant piece about the Left's TOTAL blindness on AI. Their dismissal of AI risks mirrors how climate deniers treat CO2. Will probably get a lot of nastiness for this on Bluesky, but I guess that's part of the same problem. www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

I tell Ryan Holiday something unexpected: ego can push people to do the right thing. History's biggest moral revolutions didn't just happen from obligation, they happened because people cared about their legacy. Vanity isn't pure, but it's powerful.

The best conspiracies are the ones that change the world. In 1884, the Fabian Society plotted to bring us the 8-hour workday and votes for women. In 1947, a handful of intellectuals met in Switzerland to roll back the state. They called themselves 'neoliberals.'

Just before Trump's re-election, I attended a tech conference in Silicon Valley. Over dinner, a tech bro spoke in ways that reminded me of 1930s fascists. I pointed this out. He replied, without irony: "Yeah, I think we should get a little fascy."

One of the most effective things you can do right now to fight Trump and ICE is to cancel your ChatGPT subscription.

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.

Finally. A voice for the voiceless.

ICE's $100M ad campaign is using the same playbook as the Gestapo & Stasi. The goal? To make repression sound reasonable and patriotic.

We’re hiring a marketing specialist at the School for Moral Ambition (NYC). If you’re a marketer who wants to work on something meaningful with a small team, this might be for you.

We think of wars as the pinnacle of human violence. The numbers tell a different story. Every year, humans slaughter around 80 billion animals. That's more suffering than all wars combined.

Rome didn’t fall overnight. It rotted in public first. Tell me this all doesn’t sound too familiar…

Sometimes you get a few minutes on live TV with a billionaire. I tried to make them count! 😅

It's that magical time of year when private jets descend on a Swiss mountain village to discuss climate change and poverty! Anyway, here's my annual reminder. I'll stop posting this when they stop avoiding the real issue: their own massive tax avoidance 💰

For most of history, progress was a flat line. Then everything took off like a rocket. The only question now: does this story end in liftoff... or collapse? A short excerpt from the incredible video The Market Exit made - one of my favorite interviews. Check it out: www.youtube.com/@TheMarketExit

In 1935, a publisher named Allen Lane walked into a train station and asked a radical question: “Why shouldn’t a great book cost as little as a pack of cigarettes?” That question led to the paperback revolution. Books in kiosks, corner shops, train stations. Books not for elites, but for everyone.

8% of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17% are doubtful about the usefulness of their job. Source: Dur and Van Lent (2019). (And no, these are not all government bureaucrats. In fact, there are three times as many BS-jobs in the private sector as in the public sector.)

Many are laughing at how clownish this administration feels, but historians of fascism aren’t laughing, some are packing their bags. Crackdowns on universities. Pressure on judges. Tactics straight out of Hungary and Poland, now showing up here.

Every major movement in history was built by people who didn’t fully agree with each other. If someone’s with you 70–80% of the way, they’re not your enemy, they’re your ally.

Forget “Follow your passion.” At the School for Moral Ambition, we say: Follow the Gandalf 🧙 Gandalf didn’t ask Frodo about his passions. He said: “Here’s a world-sized problem. You’re the one to fix it.” So… which big, solvable, overlooked problem could you be the unlikely hero for?

I'm late to the party, but this guy, and these lectures are *SUPERB!* They encapsulate the modern world extremely accurately Rutger Bregman, Reith Lectures 2025 youtu.be/fUJ-qEmQGhM

This Rutger Bregman lecture series is fascinating. And also very inspiring. Available on Youtube (in Canada, anyway). Here is lecture 2: Can Ordinary People Change the World? www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwj0...

This video will probably get fewer likes than my posts on taxing billionaires. That difference says it all. Factory farming only survives if we don’t look. It’s time to hold these companies accountable. Every donation is matched, so $1 becomes $2 through Dec 31, 2025. Donate: MoralAmbition.org/food

Factory farming isn't just about animals. It’s also about farmers trapped in crushing debt and contracts they can’t escape. We’re currently building a fellowship to take this system on and only need to raise $8,100 more to reach our fundraising goal! Donate + learn more: moralambition.org/food

Imagine if serving in government was as prestigious as landing a job at Google. In Finland and Singapore, it basically is. Public service is seen as a privilege, a place where the most ambitious people go to solve the biggest problems. That’s the culture we should be striving for.

I’d highly recommend everyone give it a watch/listen. The series was famously censored by the BBC (statements about Trump that they were too frightened to air) An excellent piece by @rutgerbregman.com m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUJ-...

The BBC's Reith Lectures with @rutgerbregman.com are all uploaded now and worth a watch if you want some hope and inspiration going into the new year www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Just catching up with the last of @rutgerbregman.com's Reith Lectures. They're all terrific. But the final one on the ethical/theological implications of AI is superb. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

Yesterday I listened to all four of Rutger Bregman's Reith Lectures and recall one comment he made: "Poll after poll finds that people across the west think that AI will worsen almost everything they care about, from our health and relationships to our jobs and democracies."

There was strong pushback from Bregman in the final Reith lecture when Anita Anand challenged him that democracy had voted in Trump. As he said, it’s manifestly not a democracy when vast sums of money are used to boost a candidate & influence the electorate. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Final Reith lecture is insanely interesting