From telling the true version of the Lord of the Flies, to dismantling long-held beliefs around the Stanford Prison Experiment and the murder of Kitty Genovese, Humankind is a book that sets out the argument that humans are fundamentally decent. Veering through examples and science from different disciplines such as biology, psychology, and human history, this is a book that attempts to cut through the cynicism of the modern age and offers a more optimistic version of what it means to be a realist. In this episode we speak to author Rutger Bregman to hear how this book came to be. And in Footnotes, we offer a mini book club, examining the darker worldview on offer in William Golding's classic, Lord of the Flies.

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