orn in the Netherlands in 1988, Rutger Bregman is a historian and the author of two books in English including Utopia for Realists, which makes a case for universal basic income, shorter working weeks and open borders. Bregman, who studied in Utrecht and now lives just outside the city with his photographer wife, came to worldwide attention at Davos in 2019, when he excoriated the audience for ignoring the issue of tax avoidance. His new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, which seeks to overturn the idea that humans are inherently selfish, has just been published by Bloomsbury. 1. Book Difficult Women by Helen Lewis This is a really good history of feminism in Great Britain. One of its main messages is just how difficult progress is: you have to make so many uncomfortable compromises and alliances. She makes the point that real progress comes from people who are not friendly, but who are difficult, nasty, and who pay a really high price for this progress. It’s also one of the paradoxes of my latest book: I argue that people have evolved to be friendly, but sometimes this is exactly the problem, because friendly people don’t change the status quo. 2. App mySolarEdge I’ve solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to – email, browser – and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further. It works very well, but there’s one app that I’m still allowed to look at, and that’s my solar panel app, where you can watch in real time what your solar panels are generating. I look at it several times a day. Yesterday the panels on our roof generated 28 kilowatt hours – that’s 150km in my car. Even if you don’t care about the environment whatsoever, solar panels are really cool, and are an investment because they save money in the long run. 3. Podcast Invisibilia (NPR) I really love this American podcast about psychology and the hidden forces that govern our lives. It’s so well made – each episode must take hundreds of hours to produce. They feature life stories that really move you, but then connect it with sound science. One of my favourite episodes is called The Secret History of Thoughts, which explains why you don’t have to take all your thoughts so seriously. People familiar with mindfulness and cognitive psychology may find this obvious, but for me it was a real eye-opener – that when you think something crazy, you can just let it go. 4. Film Love, Actually Controversial, I know, but this is one of my favourite films. I read a good quote from the writer-director Richard Curtis recently on how we tend to think that darker stories are searingly realistic analyses of society, whereas stories about friendship and love are sentimental and unrealistic. But I think Love, Actually has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant’s character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it’s about who we really are as a species. And it may seem sentimental, but I think it’s highly realistic. 5. Place Houten, the Netherlands I moved to this small town south of Utrecht last year and I really love living here, not least because it’s the cycling capital of the world. It’s been designed to favour bicycles over cars, and urban planners from around the globe come to study how it’s been done. You can still drive but the layout makes it very inconvenient, and the way the streets are coloured makes it very clear that the cars are only guests. Our streets are very important for social cohesion, for feelings of safety, and we just surrendered all this to the car. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 6. TV Derek (All 4/Netflix) This series is so hilarious but also touching, and populist in a good way – it celebrates the NHS and bemoans the bureaucracy and market forces in healthcare. The main character, Derek, played by Ricky Gervais, is just incredibly friendly and kind, and that’s his life philosophy. He says: “I’m good, not because I think I’ll go to heaven, but because when I do something bad, I feel bad, and when I do something good, I feel good.” Given that my book is about how human beings have evolved to be friendly, I really like that. We’re lucky we live in a world where doing good feels good, most of the time.