Making Sense with Sam Harris - #412 — Better Things & Better People

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Rutger Bregman about Rutger’s new book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. They discuss why it seems like we are at the hinge of human history, wealth inequality, how altruism should be rewarded, how we should think about philanthropic billionaires, effective altruism, why empathy is overrated, moral entrepreneurship, universal basic income, work and meaning, existential risk, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Rutger Bregman. Rutger, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. Yes, nice to finally connect with you. I've been seeing your stuff for a while and just read your book, your newest book, which is Moral Ambition, which is a little bit of a departure in tone. You've also written Utopia for Realists and Humankind.

This is much more of a call to action. I wanna talk about the call. You've also started the School for Moral Ambition, which I wanna talk about. But before we jump into the book, how would you summarize your focus as a historian and just as someone who comes to all these topics we're gonna talk about.

So my whole career, I've been fascinated by history. I studied history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. And initially I was a bit frustrated by academia. It seemed so insulated. I had this dream once of becoming a professor. And then maybe when I was 50 or 60, I would finally be allowed to write about the big interesting questions of history.

Like, why have we conquered the globe? Why did the Industrial Revolution start in England, in the West? Why not in India or China, for example? Those were the kind of books that I really loved. You know, Jared Diamond, for example, Gern's Germs and Steel. But it started to dawn on me that I would probably have to, you know, specialize first and, you know, write, spend four years of my life writing a PhD, which on the one hand seemed really interesting. But then on the other hand, I looked at all the PhDs that had recently been published at Utrecht University and I found all of them really boring.

So I thought, you know what, let's go into journalism. But then I found that to be quite frustrating as well. thought, you know what, let's go into journalism. But then I found that to be quite frustrating as well. You know, the relentless focus on breaking news on what happens today instead of what happens every day. And then when I was 25, I got my lucky break. It was a new journalism platform that was founded in the Netherlands called The Correspondent.

And these guys, the founders had a bit of a different news philosophy. They wanted to unbreak the news. And they said, Roker, you can come and work here and write about whatever you want and focus more on the structural forces that govern our society. So finally I could write about all kinds of hobbies of mine. For example, universal basic income. That was something that had long fascinated me. It seemed to me a really exciting idea that moves beyond the traditional political divide

of the left versus the right. So as I said, that was my lucky break. That's how I got started. And ever since then, the correspondent was my platform, my little laboratory where I could develop my ideas. So that's one of the benefits of not being a native speaker is that you have your own focus group, a tiny country that no one gives a shit about, and you can test out ideas, see what works, see what doesn't. And so that's how I've been writing my books for the past decade.

First as essays for Dutch readers, and then, yeah, reiterating, learning, changing my mind. And then at some point you're like, yeah, this is a book. Let's write it. So again, I think we're going to mostly talk about moral ambition, but, um, big picture, how would you describe the state of the world from your point of view? And I mean, there's so much is happening in, in American politics. I mean, and it has so many global implications that we've basically from, to my eye, we've created an emergency for much of the world, at least optically,

it remains to be seen what's gonna happen. You probably finished this book about a year ago, I would imagine. What's your view of the current situation? So the first line of my very first book, Utopia for Realists, was that, in the past, everything was worse. When we zoom out, we see that we've made tremendous progress in many respects.

I mean, you know this, right? The massive decline of child mortality, of extreme poverty, especially since the 1980s, progress has been speeding up. So that is wonderful news. And this was more than a decade ago. When I was a bit frustrated that it seemed we had arrived at the end of history and most of my friends on the political left, they mainly knew what they were against, against growth, against austerity, against the establishment, but they didn't really know what what could be the new utopian milestone. There's this beautiful quote from Oscar Wilde who once wrote that, you know, a map without utopia on it is not worth even glancing at because it leaves out the one island where humanity is always landing.

Now, I guess I got what I wished for. Things are not boring anymore, but not really the direction I had hoped for, I guess. So, um, I've always loved this statement from Max Rosa from our world and data. Uh, you know, the fantastic website that collects all the data on the state of the world, basically, and, um, I think it's just correct that on the one hand. Yeah. The world is really bad. We could do so much better.

The world has become better. That's also true. We have made progress. And, um, yeah, it's all of that at the same time, I would say. I just like you, I'm really, really terrified of what's going on in the United States right now. Things are also happening, happening quicker than I expected. And yeah, it's one of the big lessons of history, right? There's nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society right now.

It can radically change. And sometimes, sometimes quite quickly, both for the better and for the worse. Yeah, well, we'll come back around to existential concerns because I think one of the ways in which the things are always getting better analysis has left people dissatisfied. I'm thinking in particular the kinds of criticism and distortion Steven Pinker had to face when he released his books on this topic. I mean, Steven certainly was not arguing that progress is inevitable.

He was just asking us to acknowledge how much progress we've obviously made, very much based on the kinds of data you referenced. But many of us perceive more and more acutely how much potential energy is stored up in the system and how destructive it could be on so many fronts. AI is the latest wrinkle here, but the idea that we could just needlessly destroy the possibility of building something like a utopia, I mean, that's certainly seems within reach if we could just iron out our political problems and sideline a few prominent sociopaths.

But we do seem on the verge of screwing a lot of it up, quite needlessly. So we'll talk about that. I'll come back around to that. Yeah, I guess if I can say one thing about that, Sam. So the shape of history is just really, really weird. So in my, in my new book, more ambition, I have this one graph where I asked this simple question, what was the most important thing that happened in

whole, all of human history? Yeah. And there are a couple of candidates, right? Maybe it was the birth of the Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad. Maybe it was the rise and fall of the great empires, you know, the Roman empire, the Aztec empire, Maybe it was the invention of the wheel. Maybe it was the invention of the compass. I mean, there are so many candidates, but then you just look at some simple graphs,

growth of GDP, decline of extreme poverty, growth of carbon emissions. And all these graphs have basically the same shape, right? You see the hockey stick that starts in 1750 and it's a rocket that has been launched ever since, and it seems to be the case that we starts in 1750, and it's a rocket that has been launched ever since. And it seems to be the case that we are looking at a movie or actually were participating in a movie and we are nearing the climax, when the music is swelling

and we have no idea how this is gonna end. It could be that the rocket totally crashes quite soon and that the story will be over quite soon, or we will break out and colonize the Milky Way and maybe we will be able to build some kind of utopia and then our ancestors will look back on us and say, gosh, these people are the Asians, right? So that is so weird about being alive today is that we basically have a front row seat to the greatest show in all of human history,

and we don't know how it's gonna end. Yeah, this is a point you make toward the end of the book, when you point out quite accurately that the chronocentrism of past generations, the idea that every generation imagines that it's living at an especially significant time has almost always been delusional. And yet at this moment, it's very hard to persuade ourselves

that something isn't unique about this moment. I mean, again, AI is the development in recent years that has sharpened that up especially. But even prior to that, the pace of change and the kind of the asymptotic nature of it, and again, the reference in the graphs you just, you cited the difference between getting things close to right and getting them catastrophically wrong

in this generation seems especially important. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I find hope in the knowledge that we've been in really scary times in our history and also really immoral times in our history, when there was a counter cultural revolt of elites against the prevailing morale immorality of their time. So in the book, I write a lot about the British abolitionists, the late 18th century, who revolted against the elites who were in power back then.

Yeah. Who revolted against the elites who were in power back then. So this was a time of a huge alcoholism in parliament, you know, politicians slurring their speeches, one in five women was a prostitute in London. You had the Prince of Wales who was an extraordinary prick, even by royal standards. And then there was a movement of people like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce who said, we are going to make doing good fashionable once again. And abolitionism was just a part of that. That was one of the main projects. I think we've seen something similar in the United States with the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You know, again, the Gilded Age,

extraordinary inequality, these robber barons who had made insane amounts of money with their monopolies in railroads, for example. And they started spending the money in the most crazy ways. You know, the Vanderbilts, for example, built these huge mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was this one mansion where they recreated Venice inside the mansion with the canals, et cetera. Really bizarre. But then again, there was counter-cultural movement against it.

Other leads actually, people like Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive president, or people like Louis Brandeis, who became the people's lawyer and ended up on the Supreme Court. One of my favorite persons from this era is a woman called Elva Vanderbilt, who married into this Vanderbilt family. And initially really wanted to become part of the 400 in New York, like the richest 400 families in New York who spent the most money on the most silly things, but then, uh, yeah, she divorced, uh, she had a lot of money and became a pretty radical suffragette, an advocate for women's rights and donated a huge

amount of money to the women's rights movement. Almost a little bit like Mackenzie Scott is doing today, the wife of Jeff Bezos. So I guess that's what I'm calling for in this new book, is that again, we need a countercultural movement, especially now that things are getting a bit dark and we see so many examples of just blatant immorality. I mean, in the US, the whole Republican party is basically in a state of moral collapse. You know, I've, I've got two young kids and it's not for me, it's not really left versus right anymore. It's when, when I think about how I want to raise my kids, it's pretty much the

opposite of how these people in power are behaving like so nasty and basically like bullies all the time. But as I said, we've been here before and there have been cases in history when we overcame it. Don't you know they're making America great again? What about that project don't you like Rutger? That's so well, it depends on on yeah, what particular reference you have. I mean, as you know, I'm an advocate of tax fairness.

I think it's quite unfair that billionaires around the globe have lower effective tax rates than working class people and middle class people. I think that this can be fixed and that there are beautiful historical examples in history actually in the 1950s and the 60s when we had a much more reasonable system of taxation and actually also higher growth rates.

So yeah, make America great again. Yeah. I see some inspiration there in the past, definitely. Well, let's talk about what is aspirational here. I mean, one of the points you make in the book is that moral ambition is contagious, right? That this is, what you want is to find a mode of life that is not just a masochistic, right? Or, and, and merely moralistic, but you want something that is, that people aspire to because

it's just obviously good. I mean, it seems to me that the whole point of our being here ultimately is to make life worth living. And once we've done that, to continue to refine it and safeguard it and just make the possibilities of human happiness more and more beautiful. And to spread the wealth around, obviously, right? I mean, the thing that is so excruciating is the level of inequality in our world and how this inequality, you know, you can, whatever delusions you take on board with respect to being self-made, I mean, any five minute analysis of really any one situation reveals that it's, at bottom,

it really is all a matter of luck. I mean, just people are extraordinarily lucky not to be born in some failed state where they have the opportunity only to get killed at an early age or spectacularly injured or to die of some tropical disease that we haven't suffered in the developed world for quite some time.

So, so much of your discussion here is focused on being motivated by these disparities, to find them morally intolerable, very much in the spirit of, in which someone like Peter Singer has argued. I mean, you acknowledge in the book that you can't merely castigate people and demand that everyone sacrifice.

There's something aspirational about this. And I think we need to focus on that because even some of your past pronouncements, I mean, the moments for which you became famous, I mean, I think probably the biggest one was when you were at Davos castigating the billionaires for having all flown there on private jets. I think you said that some of like 1,500 private jets

had flown into that meeting. And then they cry when they see David Attenborough's film, right? Right, yeah, exactly. It's a funny experience. Climate change is on the menu, yeah. But my concern there is that you can be read or heard as merely demonizing wealth.

In the limit, in success, what we want is the wealth to be spread around such that the poorest people on earth live the way the richest people do now, you know, a hundred years from now. I mean, something like that, whatever is it compatible with, with physics is something we want to aspire to. So I don't think we want to be saying at the end of the day that, that wealth is the problem. Yeah. I can't agree more.

Yeah. And the left used to understand that. So social democracy, I see myself as an, as an old fashioned social Democrat, so I think at the sixties and the seventies, the left was the party of progress, right? It was the party of growth, of innovation, of building. Today you have ideologies like degrowth, for example, that to me seem to demonize wealth or luxury or whatever. And I'm like, no, like example, that to me seem to demonize wealth or luxury or whatever. And I'm like, no, like we're way too poor.

We should become much richer and then indeed, as you say, spread it around. The very first essay I ever wrote was when I was 16 years old. I had this epiphany as the son of a preacher. I grew up in the church and this is an age when you start thinking about what do I actually believe? Do I agree with all the dogmas that are served to me? And I wrote this essay about free will, like came to the conclusion that like doesn't make sense at all. Like surely it can't exist. And I guess that argument will resonate with you.

Yeah. And I guess ever, ever from that young age, that has also always been something that has driven me. Whenever we talk about inequality, I think it's especially important to zoom out, right? If you live in a rich country like I do in the Netherlands, or I'm currently living in New York, you're already part of the richest 3.5% in the world. So when we talk about inequality, we mainly have to talk about global inequality and the world needs so much more growth in that respect.

And I'm pretty optimistic that we can make that happen and that we have already made quite a bit of progress in the last couple of decades. But yeah, I can't agree more that this idea that, I don't know, it's so anti-human in a way. This is quite dominant, maybe also in environmental circles, the idea that humans are a plague or something like that, that we are a virus, that we are just bad,

and that is just something I've always deeply, deeply disagree with. Well, so let's get into the details, because I suspect my tolerance for inequality is more capacious than yours, at least by tendency. It's not clear to me that if we could spread the wealth around completely immediately, that that would be the right solution. I mean, this is one of the arguments, really the only argument for open borders. The idea that borders, national borders and the inequalities they

enshrine are totally unjustifiable ethically. And so people should be free to move everywhere. And when I look at the consequences of that, what I imagine would happen is that, okay, people would move more or less everywhere until there was no reason to move anywhere because everywhere was just as mediocre as everywhere else. And again, as I come back to this notion of aspiration, I do think we want societies that are wealthy enough so as to sustain scientific advancement and artistic expression at the highest level

and everything we celebrate as technological and cultural success in the developed world when we're not distracting ourselves by pointless conflict. So the question is, if we agree that we wanted to maintain that, if we want New York City to be a beautiful, high functioning city, right? And yet Peter Singer's analysis wouldn't allow us

to prioritize anything in New York today because life in Sub-Saharan Africa is so bad. All of those resources should obviously go there. How do you square that? How would you, I mean, if you could just start allocating funds where they should go, would you follow Peter Singer or would you have a different calculus?

Quite different. So on the one hand, I deeply admire the man. He's one of the great philosophers of our time. And there's also a lot to like about the movement that he co-founded, these effective altruists. They've gotten a lot of back press recently, especially since the SBF fiasco. But on the other hand, there's a lot to admire about them.

I guess as someone who comes from the political left, what I like most about them is their moral seriousness, the willingness to actually practice what they preach. So if I go to, I don't know, a conference of a bunch of leftists, I don't see a lot of people giving a lot of money away. I see a lot of people talking about the need for systemic change and overthrowing the patriarchy and destroying capitalism or whatever,

but very often they don't take a lot of individual responsibility. But if you go to an effective altruist conference, you will meet a lot of people who have donated kidneys to random strangers. Now, I got to admit, I still have both of my kidneys, sorry to say, but I admire the people who do that and who give a really substantial part of their income to highly effective

charities. I think just like you, I became a member of Giving What We Can and that has been a pretty transformational experience for me personally. Really changed my outlook on life when I started donating a much more substantial part of my income and the money that I have made with my books. So that's what I really admire. What I don't really like is I guess the focus on guilt. I think EA got started in the 2010s when a lot of people who I like to describe as born altruists, people who were basically always that way already when they were young, they turned vegan and gave away, you know,

the money they got from their parents to charity. They basically discovered each other in that era when social media got started. And that's how the movement got going. And I think that's beautiful, but it's not for most people. So I couldn't take most of my friends to an EA conference because it's just too weird. Right. It's a lot of people who are somewhere on the spectrum or at least neurodiverse, which is great, right?

Which is EA should just continue being EA. But I think there's a lot of room for a different kind of movement that taps into different sources of motivation. I'm personally a pluralist. I care about many things in life. I'm motivated by, well, altruism and empathy, definitely, but also motivated by other things, maybe enthusiasm, maybe even a bit of vanity. And I think that's fine to be motivated by multiple things. What we're trying to do with our organization, the School for More Ambition, and also what I'm calling for in the book is to once again,

make doing good, uh, high status to basically say, like, if you are one of those most talented, ambitious people in the world, then you shouldn't work for McKinsey, you shouldn't work for Goldman Sachs, you should be working on the most pressing issues we face as a species. And we are trying to ground this movement, not in guilt, right? for McKinsey, you shouldn't work for Goldman Sachs. You should be working on the most pressing issues we face as a species. And we are trying to ground this movement, not in guilt, right? We don't want to see drowning children everywhere. Uh, you know, the famous thought experiment from Peter Singer, where he said, um, the shell of pond.

Well, I guess most of your listeners will, will know about that. So I won't repeat the story, but yeah, I've never really liked that. It always came across as moral blackmail to me. Like now suddenly I'm supposed to see drowning kids everywhere when I take a sip from my coffee, right? That I probably soon have bought because it was too expensive. Yeah. I've never really liked that.

I would prefer to be part of a movement that is grounded in enthusiasm and excitement of, yeah, just a simple fact that we can make this world a wildly better place and that it's just really cool to be part of a small group of very dedicated idealists who want to take on some of these challenges. All right. So let's take the extreme case here. Let's take somebody like Bill Gates, who obviously lives extraordinarily well. He flies around in a private plane, which he almost certainly owns.

He probably has more than one. And he spends a fantastic amount of money on himself. He has homes all over the place. Again, I can only presume. I don't actually know Bill. But assuming he lives like most billionaires, he spends a lot of money, more than thousands of people in the developing world,

maybe more than tens of thousands of people in the developing world, maybe more than tens of thousands of people in the developing world on himself. The question is how much should we begrudge him or anyone living that way with having amassed those kinds of resources? In Bill's case, I mean, so you can, in the case of the prototypically selfish billionaire, I think that we can get to begrudging pretty quickly.

But in Bill's case, he's been really probably the most philanthropic person, if not merely of his generation, of any generation. His personal quirks aside, again, I don't know him, I just know what I read. He's done a tremendous amount of good in the world. And when I think about what is optimal for Bill, it's hard for me to see that the side of him struggling to figure out how to check his luggage at the, you

know, the Southwest counter of an airport. It's hard to see that how that's optimal. So do you think he should be flying commercially or do you think that if he saves time flying private, uh, where he's free to think about the next thing, next disease he wants to cure, if he found flying commercially as onerous as many people do, if he would be reluctant to travel to that conference where he might meet the person whose project

he would fund, et cetera, et cetera, you see the knock on effects here. I mean, my intuition is we want Bill, being Bill as freely and as happily as possible in a way that's commensurate with him being as inspired as possible to help the world in all the ways he's been helping it of late. So there's a lot to say about this.

A lot of people indeed will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires when I went to Davos and also being quite critical of billionaire philanthropy. And I think there's a good reason for that. A lot of philanthropy is just really unimpressive. It's boring people giving a lot of money to have their name on an already well-funded museum

or a university or whatever. Let's give Harvard more money. And I've always found that pretty sad. At the same time, as a historian, I know that there are beautiful exceptions. I mean, we talked about the emolationists. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.

Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.