Factually! with Adam Conover - Quit Your Useless Job with Rutger Bregman

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Why does it so often feel like the more society claims to value a job, the slimier it is? Why are so many brilliant minds funneled into the tech industry, only to spend their days optimizing ad clicks instead of solving real societal problems? What if jobs were desirable not because of how much money they pull in, but because they made the world better a better place? Today, Adam sits down with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman—author of MORAL AMBITION: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference—to explore how we can rethink work, purpose, and the pursuit of impact. Find Rutger's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Only. Hey there. Welcome to factually I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, when I think about what I do here on this show, sitting in this chair, talking to y'all, in a sense, I'm in the awareness business. I bring awareness to things, I guess. I read about what's going on in the world.

I come up with what I think about it, and then I tell it to you in a way that is hopefully surprising, entertaining, or even funny on a good day. Or I bring someone on this show to tell you about what they know that you don't know. I try my best to bring you ideas and facts that I think you might want to know about or that maybe you should know about. And you know why I do that? It's because, believe it or not, I actually fucking care about the world around me lurking in the background of my work is the idea that by explaining the world and what is fucked up about it that we can eventually use that knowledge to make the world a better place at least a little bit but I have

to confess that when I look at what has happened to the world during my career I cannot help but notice that shit has gotten a lot worse over that time. The world has not actually become a better place. And I know that that is not my fault, but it's clear that there are limits to what you can get done just by explaining shit. Eventually, you have to actually do something about it. And in this time of insane right-wing politics and profound global challenges to say the least getting the word out doesn't seem like enough anymore so how do we actually do something and make the world a better place well our guest today has an answer to that question that involves

rethinking how change happens and reorienting our lives around transforming the world for the better before we get into into it though, I just want to remind you, if you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every week, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of the show ad free. You can join our online community as well. We would love to have you. And if you want to come see me live on the road in Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, Tulsa, Oklahoma,

a bunch of other cities as well. We're always adding them. Head to AdamConover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now let's introduce this week's guest. His name is Rutger Bregman. He's a Dutch historian and author. He's been on the show before. He's famous for his optimistic and counterintuitive takes. And for that one time, he talked a lot of shit to the billionaires at Davos. Very famous clip, loved watching it. And his most recent book is Moral Ambition. Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.

Please welcome Rutger Bregman. Rutger, thank you so much for being on the show again. Thanks for having me back. Very much looking forward to this. I love to have you here. Our audience loves you. People around the world love you. You've written a lot of really wonderful bracing books about the history of humanity

and about our nature as moral people. Your new book, I understand you're doing sort of a pivot from talking about awareness to talking about how we actually change the world. I've been thinking about that a lot myself in my career. It's what a lot of my new hour of standup is about. Tell me about that and how you came to that pivot. So I spend about 10 years of my career in the awareness industry. I've recorded many, many podcasts.

Uh, I must confess. So, um, what is, what is this industry? Well, the idea is that you give your opinions, you give your takes, you provide commentary, you stand on the sidelines, and then you hope that some other people who are actually in the arena do the good work of making this world a better place. You're describing my career

as I've spent the last 10 years. I say, here are the problems of the world, and at the end of the episode I say, here's what you can do to fix them. Yeah, exactly. And it's not so hard. We can just pitch in. And then I, I've been doing that for over a decade. And then I looked around and I said, Oh, nobody did it though.

I made the show, but you know, we didn't actually do any of the shit that, uh, that we've all been proposing. Yeah. Not, not enough at least. And, um, I honestly had a little bit of an early midlife crisis. Um, I think I was 33, 34, and I was like, um, is this it? Um, is this enough? My previous book, as you know, was a very hopeful book about the history of humanity.

And at some point I started seeing these pictures of people on Instagram, reading the book saying, Oh, life is wonderful. Humans have evolved to work together. You know, we're pretty decent. Don't worry. Be happy. Stop following the news. Everything will be fine.

And I was like, Oh, I've created a monster. Um, and, um, yeah, so that's why this book is a little bit different. The previous one was a warm hug and this one is a cold, refreshing shower. Cause you felt that, I mean, that book was about how, you know, humans are not horrible creatures and how we're sort of evolved to be altruistic in some degree. But you felt that this was what, having a soporific effect on people that they were just like, okay, well, reality, history will take care of itself then I don't need to do anything.

Yeah, I think it could become an excuse for a certain kind of complacency. Yeah. And I honestly saw that in myself as well. I looked in the mirror and it's like, well, here you are, you know, writing these articles and books and going on a book tour and, you know, uh, what's, what's the point, um, if you don't actually do something yourself. So I wanted to write a book that would make my own life harder. That would force me to change my career to make things a bit more difficult.

Um, and it all started with studying the great moral pioneers of the past. Um, I was reading a lot about the abolitionists, about the suffragettes, and I started experiencing an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy. Uh, you know, again, you're standing on the sidelines and you're looking at the people in the arena, taking the hits with the sweat on their forehead. And you're like, if only I was like that, then my life would have so much more meaning. So yeah, that's how it got started. Initially I envisioned writing a big book, you know, 500 pages about the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners and what they had in common and what we can learn from them. But I had finished the first part about the abolitionists,

mainly the British abolitionists, because they were the most successful ones. And I thought to myself, you know what, I can finish this book when I'm 60 or 70 or something. Uh, I got to, I got to do something. Uh, I got to try and build something. I got to find myself some co-founders, ambitious idealists who want to build this movement of, uh, yeah, people who really want to dedicate their careers to some of the greatest challenges we face as a species. The irony of course, is that I knew that I still had to write a book because. Books are great excuses to go on a publicity tour.

And that's, that's what you need. You know, if you have a startup, you need some initial traction. So here I am, Adam. Wait, so what was the startup? You started a, tell me about it. You, you started an organization. Yeah. It's called the school for moral ambition.

And we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away the money from the rich and gave it to the poor, which is a very worthwhile endeavor. Um, but we take the talent away from these big corporations and we give it to the most important causes of our time. So this is what I immediately talk about in the first chapter of the book is that this waste of talent that is currently going on is the biggest waste of our era. There's one estimate from two Dutch economists who looked at a huge amount of data from more than 40 countries and they've shown that about 25% of people in

modern economies think that their own job is socially meaningless. And of course, I'm not talking about the teachers and the care workers and nurses. No, I'm talking about people with fancy LinkedIn resumes who went to excellent universities who are maybe a consultant or a HR employee or a banker or whatever. They spend a lot of time in their cubicles, but they could go on strike and no one would really care. Now that, that waste of talent is very sad, especially as the world burns. So we liberate these people, you know, we remove the golden handcuffs, um, and we help them to build a legacy that actually matters.

These are people who are doing their job, but while they're doing it, they're thinking, nobody needs me to do this. It would be fine if this job didn't exist. Who gives a shit? Yep. Yep. How do you remove the golden handcuffs? That seems like the hardest part of it because, you know, the reason people end up in those

jobs is everyone is just trying to make a life for themselves, right? Everyone is just trying to make a living, trying to have their kids, trying to have the basics of life, right? Which are hard enough to get in our society, hard enough to be able to have your kids make, you know, get food for them, provide for your family's medical care, send them to school, all of that.

And so a lot of people just feel lucky to have a job and that's why they end up doing that job. That they, well, it's socially meaningless, but at least I, you know, can go to the movies and eat and sleep under a roof. Absolutely, yeah. So how do you take the golden handcuffs off and enable people to do that work? We pay people to quit their job.

So everything I earned with this book, it's all going into the movement. We've got a group of ambitious philanthropists who are also excited about it. So that's actually what we want to do. When this book launches, we'll be driving around in a school bus and have these billboards that say, if you're so talented, then why do you work here on Wall Street, for example? There's more important stuff to do. We've now got a group of students who's excited about what we're doing and want to start a

group around moral ambition on Harvard. I mean, Harvard is a really interesting example of this phenomenon. 45% of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. A good friend of mine calls it the Bermuda Triangle of Talent. So you've got consultancy, you've got finance, and you've got corporate law. It's this dark chasm that sucks up so many bright young people who once dreamed of solving world hunger and tackling climate change and preventing a pandemic and then. Mackenzie comes along and we never hear from them again it's honestly very sad i'm not obviously.

I mean money is important i don't deny that at all and that is one of sources of motivation that people have and i think that's perfectly fine. of sources of motivation that people have and i think that's perfectly fine but it's not the only thing i'm. Am i study of history i discovered that there have been moments where are you redefined what it meant to be successful. This was very much true at the end of the eighteenth century also in america by the way have from the move from the gilded era, the Gilded Age to the progressive era. Um, when there were people like Theodore Roosevelt or Louis Brandeis, the people's lawyer, um, who were like, you know what? Um, it's not just about checking your privilege. It's about using your privilege to make, uh, a wild difference. And that is way cooler than anything else. Right?

way cooler than anything else. Right. So I've discovered that if you want to, um, uh, uh, want to quote hurt, uh, uh, McKinsey consult, you don't say to that person, oh, you're so selfish. You're making so much money. You're greedy. No, then that person will be like, oh, you're boring. You're jealous. You can't keep up.

No, what you should do instead is, well, you're so talented and this is what you do. Yeah. This is so boring. And that hurts them very, very much, because it's not just the money they care about, but it's also the status. And in our society, we've made the wrong things, high status. We've made very boring, very socially meaningless jobs. We've made them high status and that's got to change. Yeah. I remember when I was leaving college, I had friends who went to law school and I have some friends who went to law school and do really wonderful, uh, you know, tenant advocacy work or things like that. I also know folks who went into corporate law and I remember thinking like, okay,

that's a higher status job that, that you make more money. But when you have that job, all you do is you just become someone else's gun, you know? Like lawyers are the weapons that rich people use or corporations use to get what they want, and you just do whatever the priorities of the person who pays you to do are, and it's highly technical. It's probably like, imagine, intellectually satisfying,

maybe you're solving puzzles or you're doing some work that's sort's engaging, but why would you give a shit about it? You're just helping someone else achieve their aims rather than yours. I feel like a lot of those jobs are like that. Well, you're making money, but fundamentally you're making money for somebody else and you get a little piece of it. Yeah.

You made a really important point there. It is intellectually satisfying though. I mean, it is true that if you go and work for one of these big corporate law firms like scad and for example or some of these other. Coward law firms that were in the news recently because they came to trump very quickly. Yes you do get to work on very complicated cases so that is interesting and you are going to work with very, very smart people. That is undeniable. Um, and it is just sad that we live in a world where the people who work on some of, you know, the actual problems, like, I don't know, 15,000 kids die from easily preventable diseases every single day.

It seems like a pretty big problem to me, but the people who will work on that, you know, they're mostly at NGOs and very often that's not the most high status thing. And it's, and this is difficult to acknowledge, especially for those who are a bit more on the left or are more progressive. I mean, it is true that these organizations have a lot of trouble attracting very talented people and that often quite a few of these organizations could be more much more effective if they would have more access to these very driven entrepreneurial people. Why don't they have that access? I think it's a mix. So obviously the money plays a role.

They pay lower salaries, but it's also very much a cultural thing. So let me give you one example, a case study from the book. In the 60s and the 70s, there was a group called Nader's Raiders. It was a group of extremely talented graduates from Harvard, from Yale, from Princeton, who instead of working for these big corporate law firms, chose to work for this guy called ralph nader i'm a young lawyer who said that. You know working for the for these big law firms was you know the most silly boring thing you could do with your four thousand weeks that one life consists of. Any said you know what you can also work for me you will work a hundred hours a week for a little pay but it's going to be the most awesome thing you've ever done in your life. And these Nader's Raiders, they at some point had their fingerprints on 25 pieces of federal

legislation, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. It was so cool that a third of Harvard Law School applied to work with Ralph Nader in one year. Most people, when they hear the name of Ralph Nader, they think of the silly things he did in the nineties and obviously he ran for president and cost Elgort the election, which wasn't very good, obviously, but well, he did. But yes, it was controversial to say the least. Yeah, exactly.

But in the sixties and seventies, a lot of people have forgotten about this. Ralph Nader was one of the most popular men in America. He received more letters than the Beatles did. And he was a beacon for talent. So it's for me, it's one of those case studies where you see that it's not just the money that counts. It's also very much the prestige that that counts. And so we've, we got started in Europe last year.

We selected 22 top talents to quit their jobs and to take up the fight against big tobacco, for example. That's one of our fellowships is devoted to that. And yes, people are taking pay cuts. They still live a decent existence. With a median income in a country like the Netherlands, you're part of the richest 3% in the world. So sure, you have a house, you can go skiing in Switzerland once a year, maybe not three

times a year, that gets a bit expensive, but you see what I mean, right? And this is also our message to people, like, sure, you can keep climbing the same ladder all over and over again, but you don't want to wake up when you're 50 or 60 and realize that the ladder was standing against the wrong wall all the time. You know, that you had a bit of a shallow definition of success. Yeah. The question that comes to my mind immediately as you described this is that, is to question why you focus on, say, Harvard grads

or other people who came out of prestigious institutions or people who we would consider young elites. Because there are people who work on, name a topic, climate change, racial justice, criminal justice reform. There are people in organizations working on those things right now. They really do care. They do have moral ambition. There's a lot of them out of there, out there right now.

I interview plenty of them on this show. You know, I think of, uh, Darrell Atkinson, who's a civil rights attorney. I've interviewed more than once on this show. He, you know, was formerly incarcerated, uh, for, uh, you know know, unjustly and in my view, and, you know, became a lawyer and now fights for civil rights, right? He's working for a nonprofit in North Carolina. He does great work. He doesn't have the resources, right?

He didn't, he doesn't have the background. Why does he do the work? Why does he have the moral ambition to transform politics, criminal justice in North Carolina? It's because he was directly affected by it. It's because that was his life, you know? And so I guess what I'd push at a little bit, I'd love to hear your answer, is why empower a Harvard grad

who went to a private school, then they went to Harvard, now they're sitting around going, oh, my life has been pretty great, I've had an easy ride, why don't I go work on Wall Street? Oh no, here's Rutger, okay, yeah sure. I'll go work on criminal justice reform or whatever it is versus going to someone like Darrell or someone who is directly affected and, you know, disempowered by our current system and saying, hey, here's 500 grand for you or here's, you know, like, like why focus on those on those highly educated folks?

Well, God bless the people who are already doing the good work. And I'm very glad that they don't need me. I mean, half of the country already works in what we call an essential job during the pandemic, right? The people, if they would go and strike the garbage collectors, for example, that would be a disaster.

So they don't need a sermon from me about moral ambition. The reason I talk quite a lot about these Harvard grads or about other people with a lot of wealth, privilege, status, networks is because I'm really fucking angry at them. They should be using what they have to do much more good. And indeed, it's not just about how you spend your time on this earth. It's also about your capital. I find it insane to see that you have so many of these people, you know, call themselves like philanthropists, but what they do is just donate a fraction of

their wealth, um, to vanity projects, you know, to stick their name on some rich museum or something like that. And it's just, uh, deeply frustrating. Um, look, we always work with people who are already active in the field. So for example, when we started working on fighting big tobacco over in Europe, we partnered up with about a dozen host organizations

of people like the person you just mentioned, who are already doing the work, and yes, who are very happy that they get more allies to work on this. And by the way, I think it is also important that you find people who do it for the right reasons. So the honest reality is also that. If again, if we go back to a company like McKinsey, most people there are probably not suitable for one of our fellowships either because they're not smart or good enough, but also because they are not, you know, genuinely idealistic enough. But there are a lot of good people walking around there with a hole in

their soul wondering, how do I get out? What has happened to me? Can someone please? And yeah, we love to help those people. So you're trying to get, it's a little bit of a tough love approach of like, Hey, what the fuck are you doing with your time? Why are you wasting the privilege that you have? Like that's offensive to, to waste the advantages that,

that other people don't have. And you're just using it to make someone else rich or, or waste your time and make your life more comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing. And also at the same time, acknowledge that as Margaret Mead, the anthropologist once said, it is small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens that can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. So we do really believe that if you're very selective, a little bit like say Y Combinator, for example, the most prestigious startup

combinator incubator in Silicon Valley. They spent so much time in recognizing talent, but then that talent goes on most of the time to just make money, right? Which I don't have anything against, but then at some point it would be nice if you used that money to do a lot of good. And the other thing is that we don't really believe in the model of following your passion. This is what most people do. You know, they spend a lot of time gazing at their navel or they only look at their own life and think, okay, what is my mission in life?

Yeah. Instead, we prefer the Gandalf Frodo model. Gandalf never asked Frodo, hey, Frodo, what's your passion? He said, look, this needs to happen. This needs to be fixed. You got to throw that ring into the mountain. Otherwise we're all dead. You're the look, this needs to happen. This needs to be fixed. You got to throw that ring into the mountain. Otherwise we're all dead. You're the only one who can do it.

We need you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we use so-called prior to prioritization research. Um, this is a new branch of social science, uh, researchers who spend a lot of time thinking about what are some of the most solvable, um, sizable and also sorely neglected issues that we face

in the world right now. Because a lot of people work on the same stuff because it's in the news. Climate change, for example, yeah, we've now got millions of people working on battling climate change, which is great. I'm very happy about that. But then we advise to look for the most neglected bits of that fight. So for example, clean electricity is already doing quite well, batteries are improving rapidly,

but the food system is still a headache. It's 20% of emissions, it's a fifth of the problem, and so far governments have only invested about 1.5 billion in government R&D for alternative proteins, which is like tiny, tiny compared to other investments. And there are very few people working on sustainable alternative proteins, which is like tiny, tiny compared to other investments. And there are very few people working on sustainable alternative proteins that will help us to build a much more sustainable food system. So this is just an example of the way we like to think.

We're always like, okay, what will Gandalf say? Uh, what is, what is like the, the neglected important thing that maybe isn't sexy today, but that we ought to make sexy. You know, folks, if you're listening to Factually, it's probably because you actually care about what's going on in the world, right? But keeping up with politics can be overwhelming. It moves so fast and changes so dramatically, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up. That is exactly why the NPR Politics Podcast is my go-to for decoding what's happening in Washington And what every decision might mean for you and me each episode breaks it down in a way That's easy to understand this week the NPR politics podcast is unpacking the first 100 days of Trump's presidency

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That's right. 40% off if you go to's right. 40% off. If you go to groundnews.com slash factually. So how does, uh, you know, empowering more, you know, people who would be wasting their time at McKinsey to work on food, for example, how does that help solve that problem? Because when I think about why doesn't food get solved, it's in terms of climate. Well, A, it's a massive logistical problem. People like meat. They like it in large quantities. They want it to be cheap. If the price of meat goes up, people will go crazy.

We just saw what happened with eggs in the United States. Basically, a lot of people's analysis is that the entire election was about the price of eggs. So imagine if the price of chicken and beef went up. And then B, it's the power of these large corporations and their embeddedness within the government, right? There's this huge sort of agro-industrial complex government problem to work out.

It seems to be a problem of power. And so how does, you know, taking some individual folks who are very talented, but investing them with moral ambition to work on this problem. How can we help tackle a problem of that size? It really depends on the specific problem you're trying to tackle. So if you're fighting against big tobacco, what we've discovered is that there's just an utter lack of awareness that this is the most evil legal

industry out there. Uh, they've invented the deadliest project, uh, object in the history of human civilization. It's killing 8 million people every single year, which is more than a hundred times as much as natural disasters. And for decades, really smart people have worked on it to make it one of the most addictive things out there. And again and again, they try to make our kids addicted to it. So they keep making more money and they called replacement smokers because, you know, on the other side, so many people are dying from the product.

Thank you for making me mad about tobacco again, because I grew up in the eighties in the U S we were all mad about it. Then in the eighties and nineties, we sort of got less mad. And you're reminding me about the huge moral travesty that, that the, this is exactly the thing. People got to be fucking livid about this. And so if you see that, that people aren't angry enough, we've realized, you know what? We're going to recruit a bunch of utterly brilliant marketeers. Actually, one of them in our, in our cohort in Europe actually used to work for Big Tobacco.

So she knows everything about the tricks they pull and now feels very bad about it, obviously. So she's making up for that now as well. So it just depends on the problem with food. Well, actually these McKinsey people can be quite useful in that regard, because here what you need is not much more polarization. The debate is already so polarized. And if things are really polarized, well, that's good for the status quo, then nothing happens. Right. So what we realized is that we actually needed to build coalitions. things are really polarized, well, that's good for the status quo. Then nothing happens. Right.

So what we realized is that we actually needed to build coalitions. There are a lot of more conservative or more right-wing people who also think that the current system is broken and that we need more options on the menu, that it makes sense to invest in alternative proteins. Maybe not because you care so much about the animals, but maybe because you care about food security. And anyway, my book is full of those kind of examples, also of the abolitionists, for example. People today think, oh, the abolitionists, they spend all their day saying slavery is bad, slavery is bad, slaveholders are evil.

Not at all. They were incredibly pragmatic. The British abolitionists, for example, realized that one of their most effective arguments in Westminster would be to talk about the suffering of white sailors on these slave ships, which is very uncomfortable for us today to acknowledge. But yeah, they discovered that 20% of these white men were dying during the voyages, which was actually a higher percentage than the death rate among enslaved people, because enslaved people were capital investments, right? You don't want them to die before you can sell them. percentage than the death rate among enslaved people because enslaved people were capital investments, right? You don't want them to die before you can sell them. But these sailors, if they die, then you don't have to pay their wages anymore.

And this was an incredibly effective argument among politicians. So once they started using that, they brought in the coalitions and then it became much easier to finally abolish the slave trade in 1807, which Britain then did. So this is really essential about moral ambition. In the fight against injustice, winning is what matters, not your own purity, right? It's about actually achieving results. And so how do you try to encourage

that kind of moral ambition? Because it seems like there's a big difference between saying, hey, let's get some, you know, biomed, biotech majors who graduated from a great university to work on, you know, alternatives to animal protein to try to revolutionize the food industry. That's a technological solution. And, you know, hopefully we get it soon enough and it revolutionizes the food industry. But abolition, that's a straight up moral argument.

There's not a technological solution to it. It is a matter of uncompromising activism to a certain extent, right? So how do you encourage folks to take that sort of stance? So I always find it annoying when people say, oh, it's my method, that's the only one that really works. So sometimes you have extinction rebellion climate activists, for example, who say, oh, we only need more activism.

And then you have climate entrepreneurs who say, no, no, we actually, we just need more startups. And then you have lobbyists who say, no, no, we need more people in the back corridors of power. Well, maybe it's all of those things, right? And maybe it depends on, you know, the specific timing of what you're doing. Maybe sometimes a certain method is super effective and then another time it totally backfires.

It depends. And what we do need is an entrepreneurial mindset, you know, and we need to be flexible, think hard about what works. Right now. Um, that's my, that's my very, that's my very simple framework here. I think I also believe that people can be quite radical in terms of principles. So, I mean, I'm pretty much vegan myself. Um, factory farming is one of the issues I care about most in the world, but I

don't spend much time shouting, go vegan at people because I just don't know it doesn't work all that well. Um, unless I shout it at my best trends and make them feel really bad. Uh, but you know, in, in terms of, you know, in, in a public debate, for example, we've done that for 50 years and the animal rights movement hasn't made much progress. So then at some point, if you're morally serious, then you think, Hey, if we've you know, been, been slamming our head into the wall for 50 years and we're

still here, maybe, you know, a change of tactics is needed and we've seen other examples of moral revolution is happening because of technology and the book. I talk about the second wave of feminism in the sixties and the seventies. Obviously the invention of the birth control was absolutely essential there. Well, the birth control pill, it didn't just happen. It was invented and it was invented by a very radical researcher named George Pincus. And all his work was financed by one woman, Catherine McCornick, who was a very wealthy inheritor, a radical suffragette

who had spent much of her life fighting for women's rights. Wow. And who for many years was like, I want this pill to exist. I am going to find the person who can, you know, actually make it happen. And she gave him more than $2 million. And no one wanted to fund this guy. Even Planned Parenthood thought it was too radical, he was kicked out of Harvard for his research. So this is an example of.

Yeah. Morally ambitious people steering the trajectory of technology. Um, people often think that technology just happens to us. Not true at all. There's a huge amount of human agency. And just imagine what the 20th century would have looked like without the birth control pill, um, or if it would have happened 10 years 10 years later. So yeah, I think we can do that again. And I think it's highly likely that if we have enough morally ambitious entrepreneurs and philanthropists pushing

these innovations in the field of alternative proteins, then maybe 30, 40, 50 years from now, we will have incredible alternatives that are cheaper, that are healthier and that chase just as good or even better. And then at some point we will look back and say, Oh my God, people killed and ate animals. What the fuck? Right. And that is like, so deeply immoral. That's a, that's a really great answer.

I didn't know that story about the birth control pill. That's amazing. Um, and it makes it clear to me that you're talking about all these different sorts of activities, all of which are motivated by being ambitious about the moral problem, about saying women's rights are very, very important. We need political action.

We need technological action. We do need activism and protest. We need all those things together, but they're all united by one big goal. Same with climate change and all the different ways we can tackle that. But I actually really like you bringing up animal rights because I care about that issue as well. I've also felt that the simple demand, hey, just go vegan, is a very self-satisfied one sometimes. Like, I have known, I know many vegans, they're wonderful people, I'm not shitting on vegans.

But I have known vegans who are sort of like, well, I'm vegan, you should be vegan too, that's it. That's sort of like, we're done, you know, like, if everyone goes vegan and the problem is solved, well, that's not a very ambitious point of view, right? Because if you accept, look, you're not going to solve the problem by having every single person, billions of people, morally opt in to veganism. That is not a realistic way to solve the problem. Then you're not being very ambitious. It's not going to work.

It's not going to work. And we know it from history. So sometimes these radical vegans will say, oh, but isn't that what the abolitionists did? They just said, stop doing slavery. And that's how they changed the world. Well, I might study your history. No, that's not what happened.

There was the so-called free produce movement in the United States in the 19th century. And these were these moral purists who said, I don't want to consume anything that has anything to do with slave labor. But they quickly realized that you can consume anything because slavery touched everything. realized that you can consume anything because slavery touched everything. So you had these free produce shops that had very crappy articles that didn't work all that well.

It reminds you of, you know, some veggie burgers today and it became very unpopular, of course. No, the abolitionists were effective. Oh my God. I went on a date with this free producer and like they insisted we go to the slave free restaurant and like the food was terrible. It's a grim comparison, but like it's,

I get the comparison that you're drawing. Yeah, go ahead. It was hugely unsuccessful, which by the way, abolitionism in general was mostly unsuccessful in the United States. It was incredibly unpopular. Even Abraham Lincoln really did not want to be called an abolitionist before the civil war. Um, because what was it like literally seen as a sort of an annoying minority position, the way

people, many people see, uh, you know, vegans or other activists today or. Well, one important difference with the UK obviously was that it threatened the stability of the country because you had slavery practiced, you know, inside your own borders. In the UK, slavery was far away in the colonies that obviously made it easier. But in the UK, there was actually a very effective boycott movement in the late 18th century, but it was so effective because it was so limited. So at some point people decided to boycott the sugar and not put it in

their tea anymore, which is a bit of a sacrifice. It's also a highly charismatic sacrifice because the British, they obviously love their tea, but it's not like this life changing thing, right? You can do that and it's spread around the country. Hundreds of thousands of people started doing it. You know, everyone started virtue signaling, which is great. Virtue signaling can be a very powerful thing if you want to change a country. So yeah, I think that the animal rights movement has so much to learn from

abolitionism and they're not what you think happened, but you know, read the books about what actually happened because it's very different than often what people think. Yeah, I cut you off earlier. I just want you to connect the thought where you were saying, you know, read the books about what actually happened because it's very different than often what people think. Yeah. I cut you off earlier. I just want you to connect the thought where you were saying, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn't want to be associated with the abolitionists. It was not popular. Right.

So then how did abolitionism in the U S finally win according to, you know, the way you tell the story. So the U S was quite late to the game in the 18 sixties. Other countries had already, uh, abolished slavery and indeed it took a civil war. I think the more interesting case study is what happened in the United Kingdom, because the United Kingdom really played the central role in the fight against the international slave trade.

At some point they spent 2% of their GDP, which is more than four times as much as what they today spend on development aid and which is a z four times as much as what they today spend on development aid and which is a zillion times as much as what the US spends now because they don't spend anything anymore. But yeah, they use that to police the seven seas. You know, in the 19th century, the United Kingdom was the most powerful country on the seas had the biggest Navy, the Royal Navy, and they hijacked 2,000 slave ships. They liberated 200,000 enslaved people. They forced many countries, including the country where I'm from, the Netherlands, to stop engaging in this industry.

Now, why did this happen? That's the question that I was so fascinated by. I became convinced that it was a very contingent thing that there was, it really was a small group, a very dedicated entrepreneurial people, um, who decided to change their definition of success. Uh, of the 12 founders of the British society for the abolition of the slave trade, only one was a writer, one was a lawyer and 10 were entrepreneurs. So these were people who knew how to get shit done.

And yeah, the best book that's been written about this is by Christopher Leslie Brown, an American historian. And it's called moral capital. After the loss of the colonies, the UK was in a bit of a, not a midlife crisis, but a crisis of meaning. People were like, what is the point of this country if we don't have, you know, the 13 colonies anymore? And then abolitionism became their new big thing. It gave them a way to feel morally superior.

Um, and it was very effective. Um, this is, this is another one of those lessons that I've drawn from studying history is very often in history, the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And very often you will encounter moral pioneers who were motivated by a mix of things, yes, almost always genuine idealism and altruism, but very often there's quite a bit of vanity involved as well, which is I think fine as long as, you know, the good things happen. Uh, and that very much did happen in, uh, in the UK back then.

So it was, and by the way, I love that I asked you about the US and you were like, Oh no, the US is actually not the example. You guys did it bad. You did a horrible, you had to fight a war. The UK was actually what I'm talking about. Fair point. It took us hundreds of years and we could talk about the history of abolition in the US

and plenty of heroes. I gotta say, it did actually get started in the US. So the most important group, religious group were the Quakers. The Quakers were these very weird Protestants, a radical sect, if you will, who deeply believed in the equality of all people. So they even allowed women to preach, for example, in their churches, there were meeting houses.

And they were the first ones, they were the first religious domination to, denomination to turn against the slavery and the slave trade. It's only once they started working together with others, like the evangelicals, for example, that they really start to make a difference. But quite a few of these first Quakers were Americans. So the very first abolitionist in the US was a very strange man, a dwarf named Benjamin Lay. He was a little bit like the hunchback of the Notre Dame. He had even been kicked out of four Quaker meetings. He was that radical.

And he lived in the hills of Philadelphia, basically as a vegan, even though that didn't exist back then. And that's, by the way, one very striking thing is that a lot of these early abolitionists were also vegetarians or even vegans. Right. Which in a way it does make sense because once you start expanding the moral circle, then why stop, right? And I really see like this threat throughout history that starts with the abolitionists, which is the mother of all movements.

And then many of these abolitionists also became suffragettes fighting for women's rights, and then that became the civil rights movements and the LGBT movements. And I think that the animal rights movement of today is the logical, the natural extension of the work that started two centuries ago. So, uh, you're talking about a time in American history when there was a lot of moral ambition, right? In this country and in the UK and in Europe, you had these groups of people who were purposefully expanding who they put in their moral circle and taking action as a result, taking political

action, eventually changing these nations. Why do you think we have a lack of that moral ambition today? It certainly seems like there's less of it to go around, that people are, we have less of a willingness as a society to say, this is wrong, this is what needs to be done.

Even climate change is like, sure, it's a moral issue. It's also just a logistical issue. It's like, as a matter of practicality, we know that it's gonna be way more expensive to allow climate change to happen than to do something about it. And yet we have trouble taking mass action and do what we know needs to be done.

People kind of shrug and say, oh yeah, I hope someone else does something about that. Why have we lost that ambition? So I think there's one simple lesson that we can draw from the fact that things used to be different, which is this is not human nature, but it must be human culture. In the US, you have the famous American freshmen survey.

So ever since the 60s, students have been asked about their most important life goals. And if you look at the data, what you see is that in the late sixties, early seventies, most students, about 90% of them listed developing a meaningful philosophy of life as one of their most important life goals today. That's just 50%. Now in the sixties and the seventies, only 50% said that making a lot of money was one of their most important life goals.

Today, that's around 90%. So basically the numbers have shifted. Why has this happened? Obviously you can write a library full of books about why this cultural shift happened. But again, we've been here before. So take the Gilded Age, for example, you know, the late 19th century, incredible inequality. You had these rubber barons making a shitload of money with their huge monopolies.

The corruption was through the roof. Um, the immorality was astonishing. The selfishness was astonishing. But then- You're talking about, you're talking about the Gilded Age, not right now. You're not talking about 2025. And so it was basically, yeah, I was talking about the 19th century, but yeah, today is pretty similar.

But there was a movement against that at some point. After the Gilded Age, it became the Progressive Era, and it was a counter-cultural movement of elites who redefined what it was to be successful. Dieter Roosevelt, you know, of the famous quote, it's not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena was a beautiful example he was a harvard graduate who started fighting for workers rights. Breaking up these monopolies etc. I am hopeful that the same thing can happen again today i don't think this is a lot of history or anything like it.

the same thing can happen again today. I don't think this is a law of history or anything like it, but we definitely need it. I think Cory Booker, the Senator, was very right when he said in his 25 hour long speech, and I got to admit that I didn't watch all of it, but I did catch this one thing where he said, this is a moral moment. You know, I studied history, obviously. And as a kid, I always loved history. And we all know that sensation of sitting in history class and thinking, what would I have done if I were alive back then?

Well, for a lot of Americans, especially for a lot of quite privileged, wealthy Americans, this is one of those moments, you know, you can find out who you really are. You are currently doing the thing you would have done. Exactly. Yeah. You are, you know, what would you have done under slavery? Would you have helped in the Underground Railroad?

Well, what are you doing right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the moment that you're currently in. Exactly, so the partners at Skadden, one of those corporate law firms that caved to Trump, they know who they are now. I mean, they found out. There was this very moving interview

with a young corporate lawyer. He'd come to the U S from Japan and he was like the stereotypical example of someone who believed in the American dream, right? Worked very hard for it. I climbed the whole ladder. And then when he saw this happening, he was one of the few who quit his job. He was like, this is not what this country is about. a few who quit his job.

He was like, this is not what this country is about. And it's obviously ironical that a Japanese immigrant needs to give that reminder. Um, but it's very important. Uh, and some people could say, oh, that's just virtue cycling, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'd love to see much more of it. It also seems like an ethos has grown up in America at any rate that the moral goal should be to make money, that what corporations do is good for society. I think you talked about like why Combinator,

like the tech startup people, and all they end up going on to do is make money. Well, I've spoken with them. A lot of them believe that by working for Uber, I'm making the world a better place. Like they're being told this by the corporation that employs them. And I have friends who've gone from very, very altruistic fields, like politics, into the tech sector.

Now they make a lot of money trying to fight against, you know, unions and, you know, people in politics who are trying to make the world better. But yet they have somehow been convinced that this is how to make the world better, but yet they have somehow been convinced that this is how to make the world a better place. Because, oh, if we make XYZ cheaper, or if we're creating wealth for people, or whatever, there's like this sort of shadow morality that has been developed under capitalism

that seems to convince people that that kind of action is actually what makes the world a better place. Have you felt that? I buy a bit of that argument. I think economic growth is generally good, especially for poorer countries. And also we gotta keep pushing the economic frontier.

I just doubt the social value of a lot of these endeavors. All right, the fact that you make a lot of money. I mean, big tobacco of a lot of these endeavors. All right. The fact that you make a lot of money. I mean, big tobacco makes a lot of money. It's bigger than Apple and Meta and Google combined. It's an eight hundred. But it provides satisfaction and relief to people, you know, 20 to 30 times a day.

Sure, sure. Yeah. And we've seen a similar thing, obviously, with the rise of the smartphone and social media. And now you've got people like Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation, with a lot of powerful evidence that this is just a mental health pandemic that is now happening across the world. We all remember that famous quote from someone who worked at Facebook, a math wiss, who said,

the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. It's pretty sad. Look, it's a free country. I think it still is. So if you want to do that, go ahead and do it, right? You can be boring if you want to. Um, I just think that it's, it's a bit sad. Many of these people could go on and do great things.

I've got one chapter in the book about pandemic prevention and it's, it's on the one hand, it is deeply shocking what is, what may be ahead of us, right? COVID was like a tiny, tiny pandemic, not all that deadly compared to what may be coming out of labs, for example, quite soon, especially with the help of AI, which will make it easier to make bio weapons.

Pandemics coming out of labs? How do you mean? Like, are there labs manufacturing the next pandemic? Well, I mean, bad people exist. In the 90s, there was a Japanese sect called Aum Shrinkyo that at some point did a terror attack with sarin gas that killed a lot of people. If they would have had access to modern AI

and to modern biotechnology, I mean, it's pretty scary. On the other hand, if we would have a lot more people working on shoring up our defenses, imagine if we would have much quicker access to new vaccines, if we would produce vaccines for all the 25, 26 classes of viruses that exist, if would have like antivirals that work as well against viruses as antibiotics works against bacteria. If we would have FarUVC lightning, which is very promising, interesting new technology, the idea is that you would have, you know, a specific form of light that does kill the germs but is not harmful for human health, And we could install it in all led lightning.

There are so many promising things, just like the birth control pill. Um, I mean, it's just waiting for people to do it, to make it. And then you see these people in the tech industry, you know, working at Uber. Yeah, it's, uh, it's frustrating. I mean, I, I have seen people, friends of mine go from, you know, trying to make the world a better place to working for those companies. And it's, it's sad. Uh, I mean, there's even this ethos, the effect of altruism ethos, this idea that,

uh, the best way to make the world a better place is to make as much money as possible and then donate it to, you know, a nonprofit that is gonna buy bed nets for people or otherwise, you know, improve their lives. I have to imagine you wouldn't consider that a form of moral ambition. Oh, I'm open to it. Obviously, we've seen one pretty bad case of it, you know, Mr. Sam Bankman Fried,

who made a lot of money and who is now in prison. Yeah. So I would advise against going into unethical industries and then giving it away. Like they called it earning to give. And to me, it sounded like stealing from the poor to give it to the extremely poor. And we just may be net positive, but still not great. Well, you still, you have the stealing part of it. And you have the fact that, you know, the, the person doing the theft is the person

deciding where the money goes. It seems unlikely that it's net positive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But look, um, with, with the school for more ambition, we are now launching an incubator for, um, profit, uh, or founding to give entrepreneurs. So the idea is pretty simple.

Um, it's, uh, it's an incubator, hard to get into. We're looking for very driven, young, talented people who want to build a high growth startup and sell it for a lot of money after a few years. One catch is that at the beginning of the program, they make a pledge to donate at least 50% of the money they make when they sell the company. Um, because we, yeah, we have also seen that again, for example, something like pandemic prevention or the fight against big tobacco or whatever, these are really underfinanced, uh, causes. So we do need morally ambitious philanthropists, entrepreneurs, giving a lot more money to it.

And what we've also discovered is that you make that pledge at the beginning of the journey, it's much easier to actually do it. I mean, you've probably heard about the giving pledge. Well, we're still waiting. I mean, even Bill Gates is not giving away his money fast enough. If he, if he really wants to give away. Yes. Yes.

Well, and a lot of those billionaires who signed that pledge, they donate their money to a nonprofit that they and their family solely own and control, which is not charity in my book. Um, although it might be in theirs, uh, you know, to donate, Oh yeah, I've donated all my money to the Bill Gates foundation, which flies me around in a private jet to go to, you know, Davos or whatever. Well, I, I, I, let me say something nice about Bill Gates because, because he's like the most prominent. You'll be the first person on this show to do so.

Go ahead. Okay. Okay. I've got one chapter in the book actually about malaria and it is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation played an absolutely essential role in developing malaria vaccines. Um, they, they did that because others didn't just give a fuck. Uh, you know, even the most progressive governments like Norway, Sweden, Denmark,

the Netherlands, they didn't invest all that much in fighting malaria, even though 600,000 people who are dying from it, uh, every year or back then actually a million. Uh, in between 1980 and 2020, 40 forty million people died from malaria which is about as much as it people who died in europe during the second world war. I'm so i'm i'm pretty glad that gates did that i also sometimes find it ironic that we. Really don't come the philanthropist who actually you know in the media out there doing stuff. really dunk on the philanthropists who are actually, you know, in the media out there doing stuff. And that we're not angry at the people who are really wealthy and they don't do anything.

Right. Um, well, I think there are a lot of them. My critique, and I certainly dunk a lot in a cheap way. Um, but the reason I do so is, uh, you know, my deeper critique is that the few billionaires who do so in a loud way, a, you know, their donations are often more self-serving than they advertise. Bill Gates has done great work in malaria. He's also, you know, a lot of it is a personal influence project and a, and a,

you know, personal brand building project. The man made a Netflix show about how great he is, you know, like a lot of it is that, and that provides cover for all of the billionaires who do nothing, right? Because it allows us to perpetuate an economic system in which the people who are at the very top get to call the shots. So what we end up doing is pleading with them, you know, going to billionaires one by one saying,

please, will you be a Bill Gates too? Like we like Bill, don't you wanna be like him? And they get to shrug and say yes or no or say yeah sure I'll be I'll be very I'll give a big donation But then they'll give it to something that's actually bad because they have the power to and no one has any power over them versus You know what if we took some of their money away and allowed the affected people through? democratically organ let's call it a government perhaps you you know, to decide where the, where the money goes, um, rather than, rather than begging one by one. Um, and by the way,

when you talk about moral ambition, I do think that there have been times in American history when, uh, you know, during the New Deal era where the, the government, the democratically elected government attracted all of that, uh, you know, uh, high talent, right? High powered people went to go, you know, the New Dealers were this famous group of, highly educated, motivated folks who were not working for, a private philanthropist,

but for democratically elected government. So that's my particular philanthropy. Bradley, I'm curious to hear you respond to it. So two things. Last week I was at the annual conference of patriotic millionaires. It's a bunch of really wealthy people who want higher taxes on themselves.

Um, and that's obviously what we need. I went to Davos in 2019, the one time they invited me and was just flabbergasted by all these people who keep, you know, whining about their philanthropy, but don't actually pay their fair share in taxes. I saw your, you had a viral moment at that Davos conference. So I believe that's the first time I saw you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And it was a lot of fun. They never invited me back. Because you called them out on camera. It was a lot of fun to watch. At the same time though, as a student of history, we talked a lot about the abolitionists who finance the abolitionists. It wasn't government. I mean, government, there were no new dealers, subsidies, whatever.

I mean, they were fighting government. It wasn't the big multinationals who were financing it. No, they needed a morally ambitious philanthropist. There was a guy named Garrett Smith, or as we in the Netherlands like to say, Garrett Smith, because he was actually a Dutch guy. He was the richest man in New York at the time. And he gave a huge amount of money to the abolitionists. He financed the rate on Harper's Ferry, for example.

He was part of the secret six, a group of six radical philanthropists who gave a lot of money to the abolitionists. So I think two things can be true at the same time. Like my favorite, like Bill Gates would be much cooler if he would also finance lobby work on, you know, higher taxation on the wealthy. I, and I believe we can combine those things at the school for more ambition. What we're going to do is to launch a fellowship on tax fairness. We're going to go to wall street again and say, okay, here you are,

all these wealth managers, bankers, corporate lawyers, now fighting for the empire, you know, you're on the wrong side. We want you to quit your job to devote your career in the fight for tax fairness. Because this is one of those things actually, where there is a huge amount of awareness, the vast majority of people is in favor of higher taxes on the rich, including most Republicans. Why is it not happening? Because taxes get complicated very quickly and you need a huge amount of expertise. We need these radical nerds like Ralph Nader surrounded himself with, who devote their

career to actually moving that comma from here to there in an essential piece of legislation, for example, and make all the difference in that way. So that is what we're getting started on this year as well, to start building an ecosystem around tax fairness. And if philanthropists want to finance that, they're very welcome. Actually, I quite need them because I'm not going to get, going to get government subsidies for it. Uh, and Facebook is not going to do some nice corporate sponsorship for it either. Uh, I, uh, I, I take your point and I think about this a lot as well. Look, I would love some, uh, you know, progressive minded billionaire to give me,

you know, stake me a little bit of money so I can continue making more media with people like you and et cetera, that, you know, is about the problems of wealth inequality and all these things. Like I, there are, we often need that starter capital and you need to influence that wealthy person. And the same thing with all the elite folks that you're talking about who come out of these, the people with the best educations, right,

who therefore, you know, maybe have more ability than people who got a less education. If you believe that education increases ability, which I do, you need, you need them as a matter of logistics to get things done. Right? I think the problem is if you are really only catering to those folks and trying to get them to do the right thing and trying to create, Oh, you're so important, we really need you, we really need you, then their priorities can end up taking over, right? And they end up driving the boat.

The elites continue to decide what happens in the world and what gets done and where resources get directed. And one of the problems in the world is that elites already make too many decisions and that the people who are really affected are not the ones whose voices are being heard or not the ones who have power in the world. And so, yes, you need the money and the elites to get started. But if you only center them, then you end up right back where you began. I'm curious if you put any thought into how to avoid that trap.

So here's a really interesting case study of the exact phenomenon that you're just describing. So scientists, political scientists call it movement capture, where indeed a philanthropist or a group of philanthropists finance a certain movement, but then also steers the goals of that movement. And there are historians who argue that that has happened to the civil rights movement. And there are historians who argue that that has happened to the civil rights movement. So in the early 20th century, the civil rights movement was very much focused on anti-lynching. And then a bunch of philanthropists came in and said, you know what, we got to do more work on education. And then some historians argue that they captured the movement in that way. They enabled the movement to hire the first full-time lawyer, and that laid the ground for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,

and that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. So that's one read of that history. I also know other historians who say, well, actually, it was really smart, morally ambitious people within the civil rights movement who played these philanthropists and use them for their purposes. And there were super smart and Machiavellian about it, but this is what they wanted to do all along.

So maybe a little bit of both is true here. The experts disagree. Um, you're absolutely right that movement capture is a risk. Um, but you also, in the end, if you really care about winning, then you got to work with what you have. And what I just deeply do not believe in is those people who just sit back in their armchair and say, oh, actually, if you try that, you will also be corrupted. And if you do it this way, oh, then it's still not helping. And then they can feel really good about themselves and, you know, really appreciate

their own purity, but nothing's happening. And I'm just like, personally, I'm really fed up with that. I completely hear you on that. And I'm not, uh, you know, I don't wage criticism in order to say we shouldn't do anything. It's to, it's to see the, I know, sure. Sure. I know. Uh, but yeah, I just to see the blind spots. I know, sure, sure, I know.

But yeah, I just think about the fact that there are so many people who are morally ambitious, who don't have the resources that they need, and I'm hopeful that, I think the gap that you're talking about, where there's so many people who need ambition, they have privilege and they're not using it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always felt I have an enormous amount of privilege in my life and I feel obligated to use it and I wish more people did.

I think we need to encourage them. We also need to like make sure resources get to people who are already working really fucking hard on, you know, issues of being morally ambitious and don't have the resources. I guess to end here, when I think about people who are morally ambitious, I think about a lot of people who already worked for the American federal government, right?

I think about people at the NIH, for example, right? Who I went and interviewed some of them for my last show, the G word for Netflix. And you know, these are people who could have made a lot more money working for Pfizer or something like that. Instead, they're, you know, working for the federal government trying to cure sickle cell, which no private company was trying to do. That sort of thing. A lot of those people just lost their jobs, right? We've had a huge brain drain in this country,

just all at once, like a couple of forests were just burned down. And so we're sort of living through an era where there's an entire movement that hates the kind of people that you're talking about. And so I wonder if you have any reflections on, you know, at this moment you're trying to encourage people to, you know, take these strong stands and do something. There's a, you're doing it at a moment when there's a movement in the other direction.

What do you think? So let me give you my European Dutch perspective on what's currently going on in the United States. I recently had a bunch of friends and some of my co-founders coming over from Europe and, and they were really shocked, uh, talking to progressive and centrist Americans by how numb they seem to be, how utterly overwhelmed and confused in the sense that everything they believed in is collapsing around them and their whole worldview just doesn't work anymore. Yeah, this is, I think, a time for moral seriousness, where we just got to recognize that it's not normal politics anymore.

It's not left versus right. The Republican Party is in a state of utter and complete moral collapse. And that is a very painful reality to acknowledge. It's not 2015 anymore where we can say, oh, let's organize a nice Ted conference. Let's connect. Let's have a really good conversation about this. And then surely the country will come together.

No, what needs to happen now is we need to learn from countries like Poland, for example, that also experience democratic backsliding, which is, as you know, it's a gradual process, right? It doesn't happen all at once. And what they did there very successfully is to build this huge coalition of all people from the radical left to centrists who believe in democracy, who believe in the rule of law. But that really does mean that this is not a time for purity politics. We remember the days of the pandemic when so many progressive organizations were fighting

each other or fighting themselves, you know? Um, I remember this article in the intercept, uh, written by Ryan Grim at the elephant in the zoom was one of the shocking reads of back then. Yeah. And, and this was just, just before Roe v. Wade was abolished, uh, pro-choice organizations were not focusing on the enemy. There was a lot of internal fighting going on.

I remember this specific tweet from NARAL, one of the main pro-choice organizations, that said something like, if your feminism does not recognize how BIPOC people of blah, blah, blah are disproportionately harmed by, then it is not feminism. Um, and I think that is one lesson we can learn from the Polans, from the Hungarians is that we, we just don't have time for that kind of purity politics. Right now we got to realize how urgent and serious the situation is and, uh, built coalitions with people of all goodwill. Um,

you know, I think that that moment, there were a lot in those organizations, right? There were a lot of people who were, uh, those organizations, some of them needed to have those fights because the people within them were like, Hey, I this I've been mistreated working here. Right. Or that there's been, there's been like actual inequities that were real. The distressing part about working through that was that it ended up sort of

being anti-solidarity within those organizations. Those organizations like descended into recrimination rather than being able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, solve those problems while maintaining a focus on their mission and, and on each other, you know, that it, that it became so, so divisive, but that's, you know, I,'s, I have complicated feelings about those times because a lot of those problems were real. Absolutely, absolutely.

And we have made progress on quite a few of those problems, whether it's sexual harassment or the fight against racism, we have made progress. But we also gotta acknowledge that there was a small group of very vocal bullies that spread a lot of nastiness and toxicity. And I'm glad we're now, you know, moving past that era. Um, hopefully so at least. Yeah.

And I think that as you say, like solidarity between, I, I'm a union guy, so I use the word solidarity all the time, but from, you know, centrists all the way to leftists and even, even you get some of the people on the right on your side, if things are really going bad, you know, that's like the only way to fight back against a backslide, uh, this large. That's how that's, that's really the only way to save democracy. And I think the situation is that dire. I think there's now one in three, or maybe a one in two chance that, yeah,

you don't have a free country anymore, but it becomes like partially free. I already experienced this. It was a very weird thing. You know, you saw people being disappeared in the streets. You know, I think it happened in Boston just for writing an op-ed, which was like the most reasonable op-ed I've written. I've read in a long time, criticizing Boston University for not taking a stance against Israel. And yeah, you're just being picked up by people, you know, in civilian clothes, thrown in a van and never heard from again.

Literally. And I'm like, ah, I'm an immigrant in this country. I'm on an 01 visa. I live in New York. Can I still say this on the factually podcast? Does this get me in trouble? Which is a very weird thing. Well, and it seems like, I'm just talking about this

in the context of your book, because I'm a good podcaster and I'm trying to help you promote your thesis here. Yes, let's talk about the book. Yeah. No, no, you're talking about. Almost forgot about it. You're talking about a highly skilled young people having a sense of moral ambition

and fighting for what they think is right and using their talents to do so. And what the Trump administration is trying to do is specifically to dissuade those people from doing so. They are trying to stop highly talented, motivated, moral young people from coming to America to make this country a better place. Like, full stop, right? That is the reason they disappeared, that tough student off the street was they were like, don't come here and try to be a change agent in America. Like we will put you in a van and bring you to a frigid cell.

And so the argument that you are making is really against the American government at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I maybe it should also add. I really like this argument that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are now making. It's, it's obviously an uncomfortable time to make this argument, but it is true.

That, um, it has become more difficult to be really ambitious and idealistic within government, uh, and that is also very much Democrats and progressives fault. I mean, the reason a lot of talented people go to Silicon Valley is because you're allowed to build in the virtual world, but in the physical world, especially in blue States, it's become really, really difficult to build because there are so many rules and procedures and so many privileged NIMBYs standing in the way. And we all know the case studies, you know, high speed rail in California, affordable housing.

It is an indictment of Democrats that now rents are going down in Austin and people are leaving California. This should be the state of affordable housing, right? It should be the state where people go to build and to make things and to create things. It is not. And we can't just blame that on Republicans or other people that we don't share political views with. It's also very much people's own fault. That kind of stasis and that inability of the government to actually produce things again contrasting with the New Deal era where

That is what was the government was doing and someone could join the government say, ah, yes I'm going to build a bridge or you know give yeah make sure people get food but also the the Republicans are now destroying the last parts of the government where that was the case such as medical research or Absolutely, you or the EPA, etc. Which is obviously way worse, but it is also true that the NIH, as it existed or as it exists, incredibly inefficient. So many researchers spend half of their time writing applications for subsidies. I recently saw this poll where researchers were being asked, if you could do whatever you wanted to do with the money you had, would you change what you do?

Right? Will you change your research project? And most said, yes, quite radically. I mean, what is science? Because they had adjusted their research for, in order to get a particular grant. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Rather than us saying, okay, you're a very smart researcher. Let us just give you the money. Like too many steps of procedure. That's how innovation happens, right? Just give really smart people resources and see what they come up with. I mean, a lot of that innovation works that way. Sure, you can direct a little bit here and there, but it has become so, so bureaucratic and we got to acknowledge that.

And that's got to change. Yeah, I agree. So what is your, uh, what is your pitch to the public to folks? Uh, you know, what, if, if they are stirred by your call to moral ambition, what should they do next? Okay. Here's what I want everyone to do. Um, go to moral ambition.org, um, and join the movement.

We've got many thousands of members now that you're very welcome to start a more ambitious Ambition Circle. It's a group of six to eight people who wanna explore these questions together. We don't believe we have all the answers, but we do think that we are asking the right questions. So what are some of the most solvable and neglected issues out there?

What are your super talents? How can you take the first step? How can we hold each other accountable? How can we build safe spaces for ambitious do-gooders? You know, places where you come and are inspired to do twice as much or three times as much as you're currently doing. Um, yes, everyone is welcome. Uh, and if you're really hardcore, you could even apply to one of our fellowships.

Um, that'd be great. And, um, yeah, read the book, buy the book, give it to all your friends. All proceeds go to the school for more ambition. Fantastic. Well, the book is called Moral Ambition. It's out May 6th. You can pick up a copy or pre-order it at our special bookshop, actually pod.com slash books.

Uh, and Rutger, uh, well, you already plugged the URL. You have anywhere else people can find you on the internet? Rutgerbreckman.com. Thank you so much, man. It's wonderful to have you here and I can't wait for you to write another book so we can have you back. We can have you back before then though, I'm sure. Yeah it's gonna take some time for the next book.

You know, building an organization is a shit lot of time man. Hell yeah. But very much looking forward to the next one. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here. Well thank you once again to Redken for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, that URL again, factuallypod.com slash books. If you want to support the show directly,

head to patreon.com slash Adam Cahn. Over five bucks a month, every episode of the show ad free. 15 bucks a month, I'll read your name in the credits. Let's read some of those names right now. I want to thank Marcella Johnson, Matthew Bertelsen, AKA The Bunkmeister, Kelly Nowak, Anthony and Janet Barclay David Sears VG Christian Brower tank guy Damien Frank Matthew Robin Miller Griffin Myers

Oh, no, not again Sam Biggins Taylor Kennefick BK Ryan Copsil Roth Robin Ward Alex Alex Womack Grant King and 90 miles from needles Thank you so much for your support if you'd like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show, patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join them. Of course, if you want to come see me on the road, head to adamconover.net. Always adding new tour dates. Would love to see you out there. Give you a hug at the meet and greet after the show. After you see my brand new hour of standup comedy. I want to thank my producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman, everybody here at Headcome for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We're going to see you next week on Factually.

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