Hope Is A Verb - Rutger Bregman – Quit your job, change the world

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Meet Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, bestselling author andour first repeat guest on the podcast! In this episode we chat with Rutger about his new book Moral Ambition and why it’s time for people to stop wasting their talent and start making a difference. From his early midlife crisis to what we can learn from the abolitionists and why the world needs to redefinesuccess, this is a conversation for our times. Topics discussed: Why the biggest waste of time is the misallocation of talent, the ‘mother of all movements,’ what it takes to build a wildly better world, on taking the long view, the problem with online activism, money is not a dirty word in creating social movements and why the School for Moral Ambition is paying people to quit their jobs. Find out more:https://www.moralambition.orghttps://rutgerbregman.comhttps://www.givingwhatwecan.orgDon’t forget to ‘Ask Us Anything’ – email yourquestion to [e-mail] or leaveus a voice note here. You have until 9am Wednesday 27th September AEST.This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from Fix The News and sound design by Anthony Badolato from Ai3 - Audio & Voice.  

Welcome to another episode of Hope is a Verb. We really appreciate you being here, and it's kind of lucky that you are because today we're chatting with best-selling author Rutger Bregman. From a punk rocker last week to a historian this week, I don't think anyone can accuse us of having to type. Definitely not. We are all the colours of the rainbow here.

Now, we do have something quite special to announce, which is that next week we're going to be doing our first ever Ask Us Anything episode. So if you're curious about a certain topic that we've covered here, or you have questions about a guest, or you're just like us to riff on a topic, or you're even curious about something from our personal lives, although why would you be, but you never know.

You can ask us any questions. All you have to do is go to this week's show notes. There'll be a link there. and you can follow that link and either send us a question via text or you can record it via audio. And next week we'll be answering all of those questions

in a special episode of Hope is a verb. But don't go to the show links just yet because we have a really great episode for you first. Let's get into it. For a lot of you, Rucker doesn't really need much of an introduction. He's the author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind, along with his most recent book, Moral Ambition. and he's also famous for challenging billionaires to step up to pay their taxes.

This is Rutgers' second time on this podcast. He closed out season one for us back in 2023 in one of our most downloaded episodes about his book, Human Kind, which made the argument that kindness rather than ruthlessness has been the greatest factor in our success as a species. However, his latest book, Moral Ambition, tells a slightly different story. This one is a real wake-up call, inspired by a deep dive into the history of the great movements that have changed the world and also by an early midlife crisis that forced Rutger to step out from behind his desk,

move countries and build a school for morally ambitious people. We really get into so many topics in this conversation. From the suffragettes and Black Lives Matter, Dwight might just be time to quit your job. This is one of those episodes that maybe, maybe, might just change your life. Rucker Bregman, welcome back to Hope is a verb. The second time on the podcast, our first repeat guest. Woo-hoo! Well, thanks for having me.

It's great to be back. It's a big honor. So last time we spoke to you, which was over two years ago, which feels crazy, we spoke about humankind and obviously things have changed. Now we're speaking about this idea of moral ambition. So how did you go from assuring us all that human nature is essentially good to telling everyone the world is on fire and we all need to be more morally ambitious? How did you go from a warm hug to a cold slap in the face?

Yeah, it's been a little bit of a shift in tone, a bit of a career shift, you could say. On the other hand, though, the sideguise feels very different. When humankind was published, that was the pandemic. And I think a lot of people appreciated my attempt to restore people's faith in humanity. Because honestly, I think a lot of us felt it at the time as well. We were locked up in our houses or apartments. We did see an outburst of everyday, kindness during those weeks and months. But I was also recently reflecting and thinking about

what kind of stories do we need today? I guess everyone on this call, we are all pretty optimistic or we like to emphasize the good stuff. And that's still something that's incredibly important for me to keep pointing out how toxic the news is and how misleading it is. But then at the same time, I felt that after publishing humankind, a narrative that becomes a bit too optimistic, could also become an excuse for complacency. I had this moment. I remember it quite well. There was an influencer posting about my book on Instagram saying, oh, this is a lovely book. It makes me so happy. And this is a fantastic holiday. And I love Bali so much. People should just stop following the news and just be happy. And I was like, oh, no,

I've created a monster, right? This wasn't really what I wanted to say with that book. So, as you indeed rightly pointed out, Angus, if my previous book was a warm hug, then this one is a bit of a cold shower. Well, you know, I think a cold shower is good for everyone. Maybe that influencer in Bali as well. You said that the zeitgeist has changed. How did the change in an environment lead to you writing this book? I was basically thinking about what's next. Here I was in my early 30s. I had just published humankind. I gone on a book tour and in a way, you know, all my dreams had come true. So I sort of fall into this crisis of meaning. I call it my early midlife crisis. I was like, hey, what's next? What do I do with my life now? Yeah. And what I decided at some point was to start a study of the great moral

pioneers of the past, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil right campaigners. My initial idea was to write the historical version of Peter Singer's book, The Expanding Circle. Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher who has argued that over the course of human history, our moral circle has expanded. As we moved from living in tribes to cities, from cities to nations, we have started to care about larger groups of people and started to see them as members of our moral circles. And obviously, Peter Singer has famously argued for also including animals. in our moral circle.

And I thought perhaps it would make a lot of sense to start with the mother of all movements that got started in the 18th century, in Great Britain, the most successful abolitionist movement was kick-started. But what happened to me is that as I was studying these great moral pioneers, I started experiencing an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy. I honestly became a bit jealous. Like here I was in a Dutch suburb, a little bit to the south of Utrecht, living my very comfortable life, just ordering books, reading these memoirs.

And these people were making insane sacrifices and had incredible perseverance. Thomas Clarkson, for example, my favorite abolitionist, he spent seven years traveling 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom to spread his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. And then when he was 33, which I was at the time as well, he had a total and utter burnout and I was like this guy was living life as you're supposed to live like what the hell am I doing so anyway I thought you know what I think after a decade in the awareness industry writing articles and books it's time for a next step and that's how I came up

with the idea of moral ambition that's how became one of the co-founders of the school for moral ambition and that's why my life is now 60 70 hours a week of headaches but it's more fulfilling. I love at the beginning of the book, Rutger, how you say a lot of these types of books are designed to make your life easier. This one is actually designed to make your life a little harder. But I would love to dive in to what is moral ambition exactly? Sure. So I think we're all aware that even though we have made a lot of progress and to fight against some of the great problems, we still have a lot of very big problems. 15,000 kids who die from easily preventable diseases every day. We've got global warming, still a pretty big issue. We've got the threat to our

democracies happening in many countries and obviously now most worryingly also in the United States where I currently live. So that's observation number one, big problems. Observation number two is if you want to solve big problems, you often need people and preferably very entrepreneurial, very talented and very brilliant people. Now, then you start looking, where are these people? And you will discover fairly quickly that many of them are stuck in socially meaningless jobs, or as the great anthropologist David Graber called them the bullshit jobs. So there's a recent study done by two Dutch economists. They discover that around 25% of people in the modern work for us to think that their own job is socially meaningless. There's people saying it about

their own job, right? These are people who could go on strike, and that wouldn't be all that problematic. And very often, they have gone to excellent, prestigious universities. They have fancy LinkedIn profiles. They are very talented, right? Maybe they have legal skills, maybe there are consultants, maybe they're entrepreneurs, but something has gone wrong. And we have created a system where a lot of that talent is being misallocated. Now, what is moral ambition? It's the solution. So moral ambition is the combination of two things. It's the idealism of an activist plus the ambition of an entrepreneur. It's all about devoting your career to some of these very pressing global issues. It feels like activist, entrepreneur, they're words that we hear a lot and sometimes we get really tired of hearing them. But something different happens when you put those two things together. Absolutely. This was one of the great epiphanies I had when I studied the abolitionist movement. I'm a Dutch guy, so I thought, you know, let's study the Dutch abolitionist movement. I'm sure there are great stories to tell. Turns out didn't really exist. We had a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who really didn't get anything done. Then I thought, well, let's look at the French then. They had the French Revolution. They drafted the Declaration for the rights of men. And again, yeah,

you see a bunch of writers and intellectuals who didn't get much done. In Spain, there was pretty much nothing. In Portugal, there was pretty much nothing. In the U.S., well, there were some famous abolitionists, of course, but the reality is that they didn't get much done. In the end, it obviously took a civil war. The one big exception, though, was Britain. In Great Britain, there was a huge movement of hundreds of thousands of people who turned initially against the slave trade and then later also against slavery itself. The great historian, Adam Hochschild, has called it the mother of all movements. They invented the whole modern playbook of activism.

All these things that we take for granted right now. Consumer boycotts, petitions, all kinds of propaganda. They basically were the first ones who did it. And it was also the first time that hundreds of thousands of people started advocating for the rights of other people. Obviously, we had seen other movements before where people were really angry about the way they were treated. But this was people who were really angry about how others would be treated. So anyway, I started studying this movement because I was like, okay, there's a lot to learn here. I look at some of the early players, and in particular the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,

and I discovered that of the 12 founders of this society, 10 were entrepreneurs. Yes, there was one writer, so there is a place for someone like me. There was one lawyer. But 10 out of 12 were people who had built their own companies. Most of them were Quakers. These were super pragmatic people who knew how to get shit done. They were very radical in their end goals.

They were like, okay, we're going to devote our life to fighting slavery, but we have our KPIs. And I just fell in love with this movement. And I was like, two centuries later, these people, they still speak to us. They still teach us what it really takes to make this world a waltly better place. It's really interesting that the side,

Suffragette movement in Britain seem to be particularly effective as well. Is it the case that the playbook gets laid down and get passed on from one generation to the other in the same place? What do you think the link is there? Absolutely. So two things. Obviously, people learn from the abolitionists and public opinion in itself is almost like invented and used in a way that it wasn't used before. Like, for us today, this is so normal, right? That there are polls all the time. But that was new in the 18th century. The other thing to keep in mind is that there is a certain logic in the expansion of the moral circle.

Because once you start saying, hey, all men are equal, whether they're white or black. And at some point, it becomes logical that also women say, like, hey, but what about us? Most interestingly, many of the first great suffragettes, like Elizabeth Katie Stanton, for example, in the United States or Lucretia Moe or Susan B. Anthony, they started their political career, not as suffragettes, but as abolitionists. And there's this famous moment that I write about in my book. It really shocked me. So this was the international conference of abolitionists, the first big international conference in the year 1840, a glorious event. Six years after Britain had abolished slavery throughout the empire, all these people came together, 5,000 people in

total to celebrate their victory. And one of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slaves Trade, I already mentioned him, Thomas Clarkson, he was there, he was 80 years old, he was the only one who was still alive, and he gave this beautiful speech about how they would keep going until the whole institutional slavery was banished and made illegal in every single country. And there are beautiful descriptions of how people started throwing their heads in the air and crying, and it was incredibly emotional. You read it and it's like this what historians call a historical sensation, right?

I get goosebumps just talking about it now. But then the interesting thing is, or the shocking thing is that just an hour later, the men at that conference had to decide what they would do with the women who had also attend the conference. There were many women there because they had actually played the leading role in the fight against slavery in the last years. So the men thought about it and they thought about it a bit more. And after some time they said, you know what, the women are very welcome to watch from the balconies. And they don't get the right to speak or to vote or anything like that. And so two women, American women, were present there, Lucretia Moe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They were livid.

They were very angry. They went back to the United States. And just a couple of years later, they organized the first women's right convention in U.S. history, Seneca Falls. 68 women who came to vet together and drafted this declaration for the rights of women. Now, of those 68 women, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote. This is something that people forget. When we study these movements, we always look at them with the benefit of hindsight. We know that eventually they're going to win, right?

We know that eventually the Civil Rights Act gets passed. We know that eventually slavery gets abolished, et cetera. But these people don't know that. Many of them die before they see final victory. And only one of the 68 was still alive. And she actually didn't get to pass her vote because she was sick on the day of elections. That's for me almost like a religious aspect to this, knowing that we can step into the footsteps of the great moral pioneers before us and that we can pass on the torch, even though we will encounter so many failures and disappointments. Again, I was just reading this book about the history of the suffragette movement.

Where do I happen? Yeah, here it is. Okay, so this is a, oops, sorry, everything's collapsing behind me. This is a great book by Alan Carroll Du Bois. pronounce that correctly, about the U.S. suffrage movement. And the book is full of failures, of disappointments. It's about, and they lose the election again, and they lose the referendum again, and then there's this big fight, and then it doesn't work, and they try that. And we don't realize that as we try to improve the world, right? We think about these

people, like, they were brilliant, and they had this one path to success, actually. It's like a boulevard of broken dreams and disappointments. And yeah, anyway, so, Sorry, I give way too long answers, but fascinating, isn't it? You know, when we first started planning out this podcast series, we came up with this framework for our questions. Seed, sprout, tree. So what were the seeds that were planted in childhood? What was the moment when the work really sprouted and started taking off?

And then the tree, which is the legacy that they were. these people want to leave behind that will outlast them. And that last one, which is what Rucka was just talking about, has always fascinated me the most because we have this culture that is so driven by impact and results that the idea of dedicating your life to something that you may not even live to see happen, it just goes so against the grain today.

And yet, we're in really critical need of more of it. Amy, do you know what word comes up for me while you're speaking about that is the word tradition, this idea that you belong to a tradition of something and that it's not so important what your individual legacy is. What matters more is that you are part of something that is bigger than yourself. I think about Chris Tompkins and Yasmin Lari who both had this philosophy that if you're only thinking about what you can achieve during your lifetime, you're not actually thinking wide enough, you're not thinking big enough. And I guess maybe this idea of moral ambition might inspire more people to take that longer view, both historically and also

a more expansive view, you know, of what's happening where and what you belong to. And I think if people are sitting there maybe kind of rolling their eyes at how wildly idealistic this all sounds, maybe keep on listening, because as Rutgers discovered, these big ideas are highly contagious. There was a line that I wrote down, Rutka, infected by a belief in progress. You talk about moral ambition as not only a mindset, but a mindset that can be contagious. And the question it kept coming up for me, because your first book was very much about human nature, is moral ambition something that some of us are just born with, or is it something we learn, or is it both?

Yeah, I guess the paradox of my previous book, humankind, is that on the one hand, I argue that indeed humans have evolved to work together, to be friendly, to be fundamentally social, but also to be fundamentally cultural, right? we constantly mimic one another, copy each other's behavior. We're the ultimate hurt animals. For example, the Industrial Revolution. Why did it start in Britain? Why not somewhere else? Libraries full of books have been written about this, and I don't pretend to have the thin of that answer here.

But I was very struck by the work of the historian Anthony House, who looked at 1,500 biographies of the most important inventors and scientists in this era, the 17th and the 18th century. And what he saw was that this was really a cross-section of the population. So some were posh professors, some were amateurs, some were rich, some were much poorer. But what pretty much all of them had in common is that they had friends or family members or neighbors who were also inventors. So what Anthony Howes argues is that this idea that you can do something in a different way, right, that you can invent something. That is like, a meme. It's like a bug. It's a cultural virus that needs to get into your head. And then it can start

multiplying both in your brain and the brains of others you encounter. And I think moral ambition is very similar. When you study this British abolitionist movement, you see it's a cultural revolution that's happening in Britain at the time. There are certain super spreaders of this virus. People like Thomas Clarkson, people like William Wilberforce who have the explicit goal to make doing good more fashionable. They're really successful in spreading this meme. And this, by the way, it also explains why moral ambition is never spread out evenly across the country, but it's always a local phenomenon. You see pockets of resistance, for example, of ways of doing things differently. In the book, I've got a whole chapter about resistance heroes during the Second

World War in my own country in the Netherlands. And you see the same thing. It's not a psychological phenomenon. It's a sociological phenomenon. Ninety-six percent of all people who were asked to join the resistance during the Second World War, they said yes. I think too often we spent a lot of time thinking about, oh, who are we deep down? We gaze at our navel. We pay a job coach, a lot of money to discover our true passion. But the answer to the question of who we could be and who we could become is not in ourselves. It's not in our hearts. It's not in our souls. It's out there in the world. We sometimes say, oh, it's good people who do good things. Well, I think it's exactly the other way around. You'd start doing good things and that makes you a good person. And that's a

super important distinction. When I was listening to you describe the various movements, it's kind of like in science, people stand on the shoulders of giants. Well, this is the social accrual to that. And likewise, you just described what the tech world calls seniors, but that there is obviously a seniors for social activism as well. That sounds good. You know, thumbs up, big tech. But But where does something like that exist today? You look at the climate activism movement, for example, and while it's been great at raising awareness, I'd argue pretty strongly that it hasn't really resulted in much action.

So where's the disconnect? What's going wrong? I think there's a lot to be said about this. First observation is that we have really lived through an era of extraordinary global protests. So there's one study I quote in the book that estimates that the number of protests has gone up by 300%. The Black Lives Matter protest, for example, in the U.S., where the biggest protests

in the history of the country. But we've seen it as well, in Latin America, in Turkey, basically across the globe. And there's been a backlash against that now. There's a huge backlash. And I think we also have to conclude that a lot of these movements,

while being successful, sometimes in raising awareness, have not been very effective and actually influencing policy and legislation. If you compare, Black Lives Matter to the civil rights movement, it's a really big, striking difference. The civil rights movement pushed huge packages of legislation that really changed the whole country and how people live their lives. That has not happened with BLM. Yes, locally and some cities and maybe

some states, they adopted new rules for the police to behave. Some of that is now sadly, obviously, being rolled back. But if you compare the enormous energy that was generated to the actual results. I think it's been rather disappointing. Now, why did this happen? Zainab Tufakchi's, the great sociologists. She says that the problem with online activism is that you can get a lot of people out into the street very quickly. There's this quick, one big explanation mark, right? Here we are. We're angry. But that's not the same as actually building a movement, building an organization. If you take something like the March on Washington, it took so much time to do that in the 60s because people didn't have social media back then so they were forced to build an enormous apparatus to

spend a lot of face-to-face time with one another and that's obviously essential if you want to build the trust so that's another point that's the fact she makes when people saw the march on washington people in congress knew what it would take to organize something like that and then they were like oh if people can do that then that's power but if there's now a huge protest movement today after someone says something on Twitter or something like that, in a way, it's less impressive than it was in the past because you know that too often there's not all that much behind it. I'm not attacking these people here.

It's because of structural things have changed, in this case, especially the technology. It's been a really important realization also in my own career, that awareness is just vastly overrated. A lot of people will know me for going viral by saying nasty things about billionaires. And that was fun to go to Davos and shout Texas, Texas, Texas. but now I really want to devote the next 20 years to actually make a difference. But anyway, lots more to be said about this.

It's one of the great questions of our time. It's a great answer. I also wonder about the infighting. For my research on this interview, I went and read all the criticisms of your book, which was an entertaining journey. You've come under a lot of fire. There's people who're saying that you're moral washing, and this is White Saviour Complex 2.0.

There is a lot of criticism out there. for what on the surface seems to be a pretty noble project yeah well look this is obviously a perennial problem on the left is that the people who actually agree with you for 80 percent they're way bigger at for surries than the people who agree with you for only 20 percent right it's this strange phenomenon i think sigman freud called it the narcissism of minor differences oscar wild had this remark that the whole problem with socialism is that it takes to many evenings. And in a way, it's not always that big of a problem. Sometimes it's a small group of people who make a lot of noise. Now, what moral ambition is all about, it's about

using your privilege. It's about using what you have. And that could be your human capital, could be your talent, it could be your cultural capital, your access to certain networks, or it could be your financial capital, your money. And you use that to make this world a much better place. Ten years ago, progressive said to each other, check your privilege. If you live in a country like the Netherlands where I'm from, if you have a median wage there, you're already part of the richest 3.5% in the world. And I think it's very good. If people are aware of that fact, but you know what's better than awareness, action. So I think it's important that people translate that insight to becoming a member of a great group like giving what we can, for example,

and pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to highly effective charities. The people who are currently suffering from poverty, from oppression, they don't want you to wallow in your own moral purity. They want you to make a difference to actually achieve results. So again, look at the great movements, the women's rights movement, the abolitionist movement. They were both top down and bottom up. Women's suffrage, that was very much a bottom up phenomenon of working class women with incredible courage to protest, to risk their own lives. But it was also people like Well, take Elva Vanderbilt, for example, in the United States, very, very rich, posh,

women who had inherited a fortune and who donated huge part of that to the women's right movement. You need money if you want to make a difference. Margaret Thatcher said it, well, the Good Samaritan didn't just have good intentions. He also had money. Same is true for the abolitionist movement. Like, who were financing these protests? The rates on Harper's Ferry. It wasn't financed through some corporate sponsorship.

It wasn't financed because the government said, yes, let's give some subsidies to people who want to take down slavery. No, it was a bunch of very privileged, very wealthy people in the U.S. called the Secret Six, including Garrett Smith, the richest man in New York at the time, who was like, okay, this is how I am going to exercise my privilege. That's very much what moral ambition is about, and I would love to see much more of it. I would love to know about the school for moral ambition, because you obviously now put your money, where your mouth is. And is it true that you pay people to quit their jobs? Yep, that's basically it. We've been having... You pay them a pittance. Well, actually, like world historically and globally, we pay them like the salary of a king, like a median Dutch weight. But, no, it's been so much fun. We've been hugely inspired by what Ralph Nader, the politician and lawyer did in the 60s and the 70s.

A lot of people remember him for playing a somewhat dubious role during the elections in the year 2000 when he caused El Gore the election as a third party candidate. But a lot of people have forgotten that in the 60s and the 70s, he built this extraordinary movement of the so-called Nader's Raiders. These were radical nerds who decided not to go and work for a boring law firm, but instead wanted to build a legacy that actually matters. They went to Washington. They worked for 100 hours a week to not throw Molotov cocktails at the establishment, but throw motions and big research reports. There's one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on 25 pieces of federal legislation, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

So as a historian, that was always a story in the back of my head. It was like, oh, that is possible. He convinced so many Harvard graduates and Yale graduates, It's people from the best universities to not sell out, but do something interesting instead. So, yeah, we're going to do it again. We have built multiple programs. Our moral ambition fellowships are really aimed at people with about a decade of career experience. So we really take people out if they're working at, say, McKinsey or Kirkland and Alice or some other soul-crushing place.

And we help them to focus on some of these great challenges. We now also are probably going to start in the US by bringing the movement to some of the these Ivy League campuses, because, yeah, so much talent is going to waste in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, which is like a corporate law, consultancy, and finance. It's a huge waste of talent, and we think we can help these people. Tell us a little story. Just give us a little vignette about someone at the school or about what's happening at the school right now.

If I look at our first cohort of fellows, I'm just utterly amazed by these people. One of them, she's from Belgium, and she had a big career. in marketing. She was really climbing the career ladder, making good money, being invited to all the fancy parties. But all this time, she had this nagging feeling. Like, is this it? What am I basically doing? I'm selling beer. I'm selling fast fashion. She even worked for the tobacco industry for a little while for imperial tobacco. Now, as she read this book, she heard about the school and she applied to one of our fellowships. She got in. And yeah, we said that we had a mission. for her, along with 11 others, we said, you guys are going to go to Brussels to fight big tobacco.

And it's just so amazing to see how radicalized these people have become. Once they started learning about just the pure evil of this industry, how they deliberately target kids and less privileged people to make them addicted, how they have the most brilliant chemists to make it as addictive as possible. Yeah, they were quite radicalized. And now they are incubating lobby organizations, public campaign organizations, to really take on big tobacco in Europe. So that's one example I'm super proud of. Great. I want to know what it's like for you personally. I mean, you've got a solo nerd energy in your room furiously researching history. And now you've gone into something that's inherently

super social, really busy. You've got a kid. What's that like to change from the lone researcher into the figurehead of a sprawling, unwieldy, radical organization. Well, look, I'm starting to understand why Thomas Clarkson collapsed after seven years of doing this. It's exhausting, man. People ask me this after my long. It's like, how do you feel, Ruggard? And I said, I've never felt this intense mix of pure satisfaction and total exhaustion at the same time. But someone also recently said to me, like, you don't need to stop.

you just need a break and that's important to keep in mind we're running a marathon here it's not an endless sprint so those are all new lessons that i need to learn yeah you're also in launch month so you're not time for a break right now yeah that's true that's true and look it's super enjoyable as well to do this together with the whole team we're really building a safe space for do gooders so the school for moral ambition is a place where you never have to apologize for being too idealistic or too ambitious. And that's what I deeply love about it. We've got so many people who are like, I'm going to solve this massive problem.

I'm going to do twice as much as I did last year. And yeah, here we don't laugh about that. We're not cynical. We're like, yes, yeah, we think that's going to work out. It's quite liberating as someone who comes from journalism, where, as you know, so often, the standard professional attitude is an attitude of cynicism, right? And very often the cynicism gets mistaken for, form of intelligence or something like that.

You come across as wise if you're a cynic. But I think very often the cynics are idiots and lazy. So anyway, it's been lovely. There's something you just said there about burnout. And a lot of the case studies in your book speak to this, that moral ambition can result in burnout, which also isn't a good outcome. So can we have too much moral ambition?

Like, where is the scale? Yes, of course there are limits. Now, the reason I only write about that at the end of the book is because I think that most of us need a kick in the butt. But there is a moment where you really have done enough. And I also want to emphasize that life is about so much more than morality. We don't want morality to suck up everything. I've always loved this essay from George Orwell about Mahatma Gandhi. It was a book review.

I think he wrote it in the 40s. But anyway, George Orwell took the opportunity to basically review. you, Mahatma Gandhi, the person. And he said, look, of course this is a very impressive person, but it's not really a rich, well-rounded life. Most people don't want to be a saint. Most people understand that life is about many things. I'm personally a pluralist. I think that life is about music. It's about art. It's about friendship. It's about parenthood. It's about humor. It's about wasting your time on silly stupid things. It's about many things, right? And yes, I do think that morality plays an important role in any rich life. And especially if people are already

fairly talented or ambitious, then you might as well do something useful with it. So this is like one of the options on the menu and especially people who are already interested in doing good or who are quite ambitious, but who are currently wasting that energy on not very socially impactful stuff, I think this is the book for them. I'm really curious about what's going to happen once the excitement and the hoopler and the spotlight fades away, and everyone's sitting there six months to a year from now. What do you hope is happening at that point? I think we're actually now in a great position where now we can just start to get one

or two percent better every month. It doesn't happen overnight. It's just a lot of long, hard work. We already have 12,000 members from more than 100 countries. Anyone listening to this is welcome to join our community at moralambition.org. Everyone can start their own moral ambition circle, which is a group of five to eight people who come together around the questions that we talked about in this conversation. We really do not pretend to have all the answers, but we do think we're asking the right questions.

And I think it's really the community itself that will make this sustainable. And we just see a level of engagement right now that I've just never before seen in my life. I think there are a lot of people walking around with a hole in their soul. And also this deep feeling that the moral minimum is not enough. We do our best, maybe we try to reduce our amount of footprint. We don't eat meat, maybe. We fly less. But at the same time, we have this nagging feeling that this is not going to be enough.

this is not going to save democracy. It's not going to save the climate. It's not going to save the world. We've got to be a bit more ambitious here. So in that respect, I think we've got something powerful here. And I'm really determined not to mess it up. At the same time, look, you watch soccer or American football sometimes when this silly mascot walks on the field, right? That's me. I'm not the most important person in this movement. I've got serious people who know how to build shit behind me. I'm just playing my role. What is the goal here? And how are you going to measure the? impact? I would say broadly speaking, we have two goals. One is to redefine what it means to be

successful. I realize that's a bit vague, but it's honestly what I think needs to happen here. I already mentioned that abolitionism was just a part of a broader cultural shift. This is what William Wilberforce saw is life's mission to make doing good more fashionable. And I think we can do that with a combination of action, but then also putting them in the spotlight. So I want to make a Netflix documentary about people who live the most morally ambitious lives, Spotify podcast, and you name it. Like, we've got to celebrate these people. Apart from that is, yeah, just making a tangible difference in the fight against some of these most neglected global problems, like speeding up the end of factory farming, speeding up the end of big tobacco, and to also be critical on

yourself and to change course if you realize that something is not working. This is honestly one of the big problems in philanthropy, right? You often don't have good feedback loops. You know, if an entrepreneur messes up, you go bankrupt. And if a politician messes up a lot, then at some point I think you'll be voted out of office. But in the world of doing good, as long as your marketing is good and you keep convincing funders, you can be incredibly ineffective for many, many years. So that's why you need to be in a way quite harsh on yourself and establish short feedback loops so that you can continuously feedback from reality to really hold yourself accountable and make sure that you keep making progress. Raka, when you were lost on this,

podcast, we asked you about hope and you said hope was all about action. Well, how has your relationship with hope changed over the last two years, if at all? Don't think it has changed much. For me, hope is still all about action. To be honest, I am much more worried about the state of the world than the last time we spoke, just living in the United States right now. As an immigrant who lost to say nasty things about the administration, this is a country where experts on fascism are leaving because they literally say that the lesson of 1933 is that it's better to leave sooner than later. That's the reality. And I know that's also how you look at it. For us, optimism and hope is never about only wanting to see the good. It's about being

realistic. And the world, as we have it today, it's a mixed back. I think Max Rozier from our world and data has said it best. The world is bad. It simply is. They're a terrible atrocities and problems in the world today, it's also much better than it was. We've made incredible progress. And finally, we could and should do so much better. If we bring together the right people, if we devote our careers and lives to some of these great challenges, oh my God. That for me is what Hope is all about, seeing the possibility and then trying to play your part in realizing those possibilities. I'm thinking about that quote, how the definition of failure is doing things the same way but expecting different results.

You know, the wheels are falling off in many parts of the world right now, and we do need radically different approaches. As the problems get bigger, the more talent and resources and invention we need to throw at them. Moral ambition isn't for everyone, but I think a lot of us could certainly do more. This conversation was about a lot of things for me, but what struck me most, and it was also something that Rutgers said to us back in 2023, was how much he's thinking and his real life story has changed. And I really value writers and thinkers who can stand on their past work, all of those years of research and blood, sweat and tears, and still be open to evolving and even going in a completely different direction.

And I think there's a lot to take away from that in itself. Strong opinions gently held. If you do want to find out more about the School for Moral Ambition or some of the organisations Rucker mentioned, we've popped some links in the episode notes. And don't forget to join us next week for our very first Ask Us Anything episode. Nothing is off the table for this one. So send us your questions or record your questions.

through the links in the show notes. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia

on the lands of the Gatigal and the Wurundry and Wayorong people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.