The Current - Rutger Bregman wants you to quit your job and make the world a better place

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

From climate change to poverty or infant mortality, the world is facing a lot of big problems. And the historian Rutger Bregman says you — yes, you — are the exact right person to solve them. Bregman makes the case to Matt Galloway that today’s workforce should focus on “moral ambition” — channeling their entrepreneurial spirits toward social problems, rather than toiling in meaningless jobs

We learned about Leo Schofield's fight for innocence in season one of Bone Valley. Now, he and author Gilbert King are back with season two. This time, they dig deeper into the history of the man who confessed to killing Leo's wife. Do I want to talk to him? Do I really forgive him? This is the man that murdered my wife, and I've been through hell on earth because of it. I'm Kathleen Goltar, and this week on Crime Story, how Leo Schofield chose to forgive the man who destroyed his life. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. No, you're not just fine the way you are. It's a jarring message and it's the title of the first chapter of Rutger Bregman's new book. He is a Dutch historian and he argues in this book that too many people with talent and skills are stuck doing work that is mindless, pointless, perhaps even harmful. And that even though on the surface we might be considered successful, it's not enough. Rutger Bregman says we need to aim higher and think more about what will change this world for the better. That book is called Moral Ambition. Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. He's in New York City. Rucker, good morning.

Thanks for having me, Matt. Good morning. Good morning. Why aren't we just fine the way we are? Well, we have some pretty big problems globally. I'm sure you're aware of the fact that 15,000 kids are dying from easily preventable diseases every day. We have got another pandemic perhaps just around the corner. We've got democratic backsliding, the threat of nuclear war. There are a lot of big issues. And then at the same time, if we want to solve these big issues, we need people, right? And preferably very talented people. But then what we see is that a lot of talented entrepreneurial people are currently stuck in

pretty socially meaningless jobs. And it's not just me saying it, it's people themselves saying it about their own work. So there's one study I quote in the book, done by a couple of economists, and they had this huge data set in which people were asked, what do you think about the value of your job? What happens if you go on strike? Is that a problem? Yes or no? Turns out that 25% of people in the modern workforce doubt the social value of their work. And these are not the teachers, the nurses, or the care workers, not the people with these so called essential jobs. Now, there are very often people with nice resumes who went to fancy universities, beautiful LinkedIn profiles. But yeah, at the end of the day, they wonder, do I really contribute

something? And I consider that waste the greatest waste of our time. These are ambitious people, but they aren't morally ambitious people in your eyes. What is moral ambition? It's the combination of two things, I would say. The idealism of an activist on the one hand, that yearning to make this world a much better place and the entrepreneurialism of an entrepreneur, the ambition of an entrepreneur. It's really when those things come together, I think something really magical starts to

happen. So in my book, I look at a lot of examples of people throughout history, the great moral pioneers who led the abolitionist movement or the fight for women's rights, but also the moral pioneers of today who do not believe that small is beautiful or less is more, but who really think that more is more and that in the fight against injustice, winning is a moral duty. Pete You mentioned the abolitionist movement. Talk a little bit about that and give people a sense as to what was so remarkable about where the idea to abolish slavery came from and how it actually

was pulled off. Jared So, maybe I should make this a bit personal. You know, I spend about a decade of my career in what I like to call the awareness industry. So that means you write articles, you write books, you express your opinions, you go on radio shows, you say what's wrong in the world in the hope that some other people will do the actual work of making this world a better place. And after my previous book, Humankind, and also after some experience, like some people will remember me for going to Davos and saying some nasty things about billionaires

and who often aren't paying their taxes. These are the people that you went and tore them apart and said what, 1,500 people flew on their private jets to hear David Attenborough talk about climate change. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway. Had a lot of fun doing that. But I had honestly a bit of an early midlife crisis a couple of years ago, because I was wondering, does this actually make any

difference? Isn't it vastly overrated? So I started studying some of the great moral pioneers, and I thought it would make sense to just start with abolitionism, indeed, the greatest movement for human rights that this world has ever seen. And as I studied their biographies and their memoirs, I started to experience an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy. You know, here I was in my comfortable writing room, reading about these people who gave it everything they had, made big sacrifices and lived lives that are really worth remembering, who were morally incredibly ambitious. I guess one of the epiphanies for me was when I discovered that the British Society for

the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was arguably the most successful abolitionist society, it was founded by 12 individuals. One was a writer, so I guess there is a place for someone like me. One was a lawyer, yes, they can be useful sometimes, but 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. People who had built their own companies, scaled their own companies, basically people who knew how to get shit done.

And that's very much what we need right now in the fight against some of the greatest problems. I mean, the interesting thing about that is that you could imagine, and it speaks to this, you could imagine somebody saying, I'm not the right type of person to do this. This is a big issue and I get it and somebody needs to do it, but it's not me. And that's an example of anybody being the right type of person. But you also talk about in the second world war, the resistance heroes and how that kind

of untangles that idea that there is a right type of person who's gonna solve the big problems. Yeah, so Aristotle said this long ago, if you wanna be a harpist, well, you start with playing the harp. If you wanna be a builder, you start with building. So it's not because you are a good person

that you do good things. No, it's the other way around. You do good things, and that you are a good person that you do good things. No, it's the other way around. You do good things and that makes you a good person. In my book, I talk about the origin of the industrial revolution, for example, and about the fantastic work by Anthony Howes, the historian, on this question. Why did it start in Britain at the time? He went through 1500 biographies of some of the great inventors back then, and he couldn't really find much that they had in common apart from one thing is that they pretty much all had people

in their immediate surroundings, like friends or family members or neighbors who were also inventors. So he came to the conclusion that it's almost like a mindset. It's a contagious mindset. And indeed, I think this is true for moral ambition as well. I look at another study in the book of resistance heroes during the Second World War. And what researchers also discovered there that there wasn't such a thing as the psychology of the resistance hero, because again, we're talking about a cross section of the population, people from the left to the right, young, old, poor, rich. No, it's all about the sociology.

So in my own country, the Netherlands, what you see is that there are really local pockets of resistance and it starts spreading. The best predictive factor, and if you want to answer this question, like why did people join the resistance, yes or no, it was the mere matter of being asked. So, in 96% of all cases, when people were asked to help persecuted Jews, they said yes. And again, that was one of those epiphanies for me, because I think often we get stuck by gazing at our navel and thinking like, oh, I'm not that kind of person. But that's just not really how it works. We also get stuck by thinking maybe it's not that I'm the right, not the right type of

person, but these other people who might want to join us, well, they're not the right type of people as well. You talked about the illusion of awareness. What is the illusion of purity? Yeah, this is a problem that's very persistent on the modern left, sadly. When we study these great movements, what we see is that they were always coalitions. Coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another. So my rule of thumb is if people agree with you for 80% of the time, then they're not your enemy, but they're your ally. But sadly, what we see in, I think especially, online activism is indeed this yearning for purity,

this idea that you can only work with the people who agree on basically 99.9% of all your opinions. In other words. Give me an example of that. I mean, in the New York Times, you talked about Cory Booker, who stood up, how long did he talk for? In the United States, he talked for 25 hours or something like that. I mean, in the New York Times, you talked about Cory Booker, who stood up. How long did he talk for? In the United States, he talked for 25 hours or something like that. People thought he was a hero until he wasn't. Yeah. Well, then a lot of Palestine activists are like, well, he's actually pro-Israel, so therefore we can't work with him. I thought a particularly striking example

was a couple of years ago when we saw Roe v. Wade, the federal right to abortion being taken down. On the one hand, it was a lesson in perseverance. So often right-wingers, they understand, they understand this very well. Like they, they started this movement in the early nineties with the Alliance for Defending Freedom, they build a whole ecosystem of committed clerks and lawyers who launched hundreds of strategic lawsuits and it all built up to that moment of the Dops decision. Now at that time when Roe v. Wade was being repealed by the Supreme Court, what were the

main pro-choice groups doing in the United States? They were fighting each other, right? There was a huge internal battle going on about who was the wakest of all. And it was honestly very sad to see. Sometimes it has to do something with this doctrine of intersectionality. I think it's a powerful insight, an important insight, that different forms of discrimination can intersect and they can stack up on each other. And that should, in be, you know,

a reason to build a broader coalition. But I think what very often happens is that then some activists don't wanna work with people who don't agree on, yeah, basically on all the right opinions that you have to hold. So this is just a way to be 100% pure and 0% effective. You say that change can start in quiet places a way to be 100% pure and 0% effective. You say that change can start in quiet places

where other people don't think to go. Give me an example of that. So take a big problem like climate change. You could ask yourself the question, what was the best time to be a climate activist? Now I would say, not today actually, because today it's a pretty sizable movement, right? Millions and millions of people care deeply about it.

The best time to have been a climate activist was probably in the 60s or the 70s when the movement was still pretty small. And like your addition, like what you would contribute would have made a much bigger impact. So a morally ambitious person would ask him or herself the question, what are the problems today that are where climate change was in the 60s and the 70s? You really try and focus on the neglected problems. Again, this is about thinking like an

entrepreneur. You've got to look for the gap in the market, right? And I think this is also true for the market of doing good. Did you know Canadian news is still banned on Instagram and Facebook? And this August will mark two years since that ban began. So if you can't trust the algorithm to keep you updated, trust World Report instead. I'm John Northcott. I'm Marcia Young. And we want to unblock you from the news that matters most. Give us 10 minutes every morning and we'll give you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the world.

You can find and follow World Report wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think those big problems are really solvable? I mean, whether it's climate change, homelessness, poverty, those are issues that people will often see as intractable. We can nibble around the edges, but the belief is we'll never get to the meat of it. Do you believe that those big wicked problems are actually solvable? No, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the big lessons of history, obviously. We've made massive progress in the fight against poverty, and you obviously also see huge national differences. Like, I mean, take something

like homelessness. I come from the Netherlands and then one big shock indeed when you move to New York, as I recently did, is that the homelessness problem is so much bigger here. But I think just the fact that some countries have made so much more progress does mean that, obviously, it's tractable. Pete Why do you think in the face of that pessimism wins out in some communities, that there has been progress made on some of those big problems, but it's easier to say, just throw your hands up and say that this is impossible and that the world is actually getting worse? Well, I think there are good reasons to be pretty pessimistic today, especially if you

live in a country like the US, I'm not afraid to use the F word anymore. To me, it's also not a surprise that quite a few experts in fascism are now leaving from the US to Canada, because indeed one of the lessons of 1933 was that it's better to leave earlier than too late. Look, I was recently spending some time studying the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution. And what really struck me is that at the time the Bolsheviks, they weren't very popular, actually. And what brought them to power in the end was apathy. People were just totally fed up

with the status quo, with the regime. They were like, oh, these Bolsheviks, they're total idiots and they won't last more than a month in power, but let them try, like we don't care anymore. And that is, that is the danger I'm most worried about right now is that I see some people turning inward who are like, you know what, I'm going to stop following the news, I'll just, you know, wake me up when the next big thing happens. And I think that's incredibly dangerous. You say in the book, Martin Luther King never said, I have a nightmare. He said, I have a dream. Why does that matter? Well, I think it's important to have a positive, a hopeful view of how we can

a positive, a hopeful view of how we can make this world a wildly better place. If we look at the impact of technology, for example, when I watch Netflix or any other of the streamers, it's mostly dystopian science fiction, right? Everything has turned into black mirror, but technology is not some force of nature that just happens to us. Take something like AI, technology is not some force of nature that just happens to us. Take something like AI, maybe the most powerful technology that humanity has ever invented and often the way we talk about it is as if it's all inevitable. All the power will have to be concentrated with these big tech companies that we really cannot regulate it because we're in a race with China and I think that's the big fallacy. We have agency here. The quote that I come back to again and again in my book is

from Margaret Mead. She said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful and committed citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And this has been my obsession as a historian for my whole career to study those groups, whether it's the Bolsheviks, or thesheviks or the group around Hitler or the neoliberals who arose in the 1950s, but also the abolitionists, also the suffragettes. It was such small groups, as I said, only 12 founders. Like my book is an attempt to

make people see that we are not just bystanders, we are agents, right? We can make a difference. I guess one of the reasons why people might question that agency, and again, you raise this in the book, is that they think, well, my individual actions can't mean anything. This is a systemic problem. You kind of pin that on the left in some ways, saying that people will say that it doesn't start hollering about changing the system whenever personal responsibility comes up. But why isn't that true? That people will see a bigger system at work and say, I can't do anything about this because this larger thing is the problem. Well, look, I'm a guy who comes from the political left and I've always been super annoyed with all those self-help books that will tell you to pull yourself up by your own

bootstraps and that success is a choice and you can just get rich by believing you will get rich or something like that. It's all hogwash. And it's always a bit like a conservative or a right-wing excuse, right? An excuse for all the systemic injustices. But writing this book also made me wonder whether there is a similar left-wing excuse. And those are the people who, whenever personal responsibility comes up, will start hollering and shouting that it's all the fault of the system, you know, it's all the fault of capitalism or the patriarchy or whatever. And at some point, that can also become an excuse not to

do anything yourself. A decade ago or so, progressives started telling each other that we need to check our privilege. And yes, I think that's important. But you know what's even more important is to use it, to use it to make this world a wildly better place. If you live in a country like the US, Canada or the Netherlands, and you have a median wage, you're already part of the richest three, maybe 2% of people in the world. You're in an exceptional position in the whole history of humanity, right? You can make a difference. This is what I think is so fascinating about the original Margaret Mead quote.

She said, Small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. Now, it's the second line that I think is the most interesting one and the most brutal one. She's basically saying most people don't change the world because they see themselves as mere cocks in the machine and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can I go back to something that you said earlier and you mentioned the example of Roe v. Wade and the overturning of that. Does a book like this presume that we agree, that we all agree

on what makes an action moral? Because you can imagine that the people who fought for years in strategic ways to make it more difficult for women to get an abortion, that they might have believed that that was a morally righteous path for them. Absolutely. So look, I am not a moral philosopher. I'm not a professional ethicist, but I do see myself as basically an old fashioned

European social Democrat. So I believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I think that, as I said, the fight against slavery and slave trade was one of the great movements. And that basically everything came out of that. You know, after women had played a leading role in the fight against slavery, at some point they were also like, well, we want some additional rights as well. Thank you. And out of that came the union movement and the workers' rights movement and the civil

rights movement and the LGBT movement, et cetera. And I think, by the way, now the fight for animal rights is the next frontier. So that is basically the tradition I see myself working in. I know that there are a lot of people on the other side of the political spectrum who just don't agree with that, who are like, no, not everyone is equal. Like if you, for example, if you're an American, then you are more important than others and we want to kick out all the immigrants, for example. Then my book is not for you, I guess. Do you think that there are things that the left can learn from the right in terms of

how successful the right has been to create change and gain power and solidify power? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a great show on, I think it's Disney Plus about the equal rights amendment. One group wanted to push through this amendment that would really solidify equal rights for both men and women. And then there was a huge counter movement of more conservative women who basically successfully blocked the passage of that referendum. And the whole series is really a masterclass in coalition building. The right wingers were much better at overcoming their differences. And indeed, I think that sometimes progressives can learn from that. Take something like food, for example.

I have co-founded an organization called the School for Moral Ambition, and we want to help as many people as possible to quit their BS job and work on some of the most pressing issues. Now in Europe, one of the cause areas we focus on is food, because that is the most neglected aspect of the fight against climate change. It's 20% of emissions. But as you know, it's a touchy subject, right? Food is very personal. So if we go to Brussels and we start shouting, go vegan, go vegan, go vegan, I don't think we would achieve very much. No, what we've done instead is we've built a huge coalition of small farmers, of environmental groups, of consumer advocates who are like, you know what, the status quo that we

have right now, it's not good. We need more diversity. We need to give alternative proteins a chance. Can you tell me about the school and what part of this and the thrust of the book in some ways is that, you know, it's never too late to step up, but also training yourself to do this good work. What are you trying to do? This isn't the actual thing, the school. What are you trying to do with it? What we're trying to build is a magnet for ambitious and talented people who feel this yearning in their soul to make a bigger difference in the fight against some of these challenges.

We're now a movement of 12,000 members across 100 countries. And many of them have started a so-called moral ambition circle. So this is a group of around five to eight people who struggle with these questions and who wanna find out like, okay, what are my superpowers? What are some of the greatest challenges we face?

What's the match between those two? And most importantly, what am I gonna do? At the end of the program, people are invited to make a promise to each other to actually get started. We also organize so-called more ambitious fellowships. These are SWAT teams of around 12 people who quit their job. We pay them to quit their job. Everything I earn with that book is going into the movement.

And then we sent them after one of these great challenges. So this is what we call the Gandalf-Frodo model of doing good. Gandalf never asked Frodo, hey Frodo, what's your passion? He wasn't really interested in that. He was like, hey Frodo, there's a really big problem. You gotta throw the ring into the mountain. So we work with so-called prioritization researchers who do extensive research into the question,

like, what's the world's to-do list? What are the most pressing issues that really need to be fixed right now? You say not to use this book as a weapon, but as something to whip yourself into shape, that don't use it to hold it over somebody else saying, you're not doing this, but to actually use this as a point of inspiration. Just what would you say to somebody who they're listening to this and they think, you know what, it's not for me, somebody else will do this work, I'm comfortable where I am. And again, maybe it's that illusion of awareness that I understand there's a problem, but I can't get there, that I'm not that right person and somebody else will take care of it. What would you say to them? When we study Nazi Germany in 1933, 1934, yeah, we really gotta keep in mind that people back then didn't know how the story was gonna end. The same is true for the abolitionists

in 1787 who walked into churchyard number two, and these people had to suffer through so many disappointments and so many failures. They didn't know that they were going to win in the end. So I think this is really a problem when we study these historical heroes is that we forget that they were people just like us. Like Thomas Clarkson, my favorite abolitionist, he was just an insecure overachiever when he was 24, 25, a student at Cambridge University when he first learned about the horrors of the slave trade. And it just kept nagging at him. And he was like, but if this is really true, then shouldn't someone do something about this? And I guess that's my main point. Whenever you think, hey, shouldn't someone do something about it, it's probably you who should do it.

It's a real pleasure to talk to you about this book. What did you say at the beginning? It's the kind of book that you half wish you never picked up because it'll make you want to change your life. Yeah, the kind of book that I half wish I didn't write. It's really powerful and I'm fascinated by the work that you're doing with the school, but also just how you lay that out in the book. Thank you for talking to us. Thanks for having me. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast.