The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Trump on Upholding Constitution: "I Don't Know" | Historian Rutger Bregman

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Jon Stewart sorts Trump's latest barrage of bulls**t into the "OK" and "NOT OK" piles, including telling kids to cut down on dolls and pencils, calling for Alcatraz to reopen, posting AI-generated images of himself as the Pope, and shrugging off the Constitution. Historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman sits down to unpack his latest book, “Moral Ambition,” which is a call to action for people, especially those with education and privilege, to devote their talent and resources to careers and causes that make the world a better place. He describes how the political left has often made the mistake of placing moral purity above political relevance, and what they can learn from conservatives about building small movements into a larger, results-oriented coalition. Bregman also addresses the problem of what he calls our “inverse welfare society,” in which most high-paying, high-status jobs are inessential, and how his organization, The School for Moral Ambition, aims to reverse that structure by helping people quit their corporate jobs and transition into careers of positive impact.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show with your host, Jon Stewart. Welcome to the Nail It Show! Thank you! My name is John Stewart. Man, do we have a show for tonight. Welcome to the Daily Show! Thank you! My name is John Stewart. Man, do we have a show for tonight.

Later on, I'm going to be joined by our guest, Rutger Bregman. He is my all-time, and I mean this, all-time favorite Dutch historian. Yeah! That's right, you heard me. Suck on that, Herman van der Donk. Yeah! That's right, you heard me. Suck on that, Herman van der Donk, who is another Dutch historian that we looked up backstage for. But first, and I'm so glad you're with us today,

let's talk about our beloved president. He's in a... He's in a... I love him! Show some respect. He's in the middle of a tough situation right now since he ran on fixing the economy. And fixing the economy is very complicated. It's very tricky.

You need professionals. But Trump is one of those guys who's like, I can do it. I know what I'm doing. He watched a YouTube video and he opened up the hood and he was like, ah, it's the wire from the carburetor. And the, no, let me do it. Oh, it's on fire. And then his wife comes out and is like,

I told you to call somebody. And then he's like, you don't believe in me. And scene. Believe in me! And scene. Now you see why I'm not in many movies. The point being, yesterday Trump sat down for an interview with NBC's Meet the Press host Kristen Welker and the challenge was clear. The president had to find a way to persuasively take credit

for the remaining good parts of the economy while subtly assigning blame to Joe Biden for the bad-on-fire parts. Let's see how Trump threaded this rhetorical needle. I think the good parts of the Trump economy and the bad parts of the Biden economy. Laughter Applause

Nailed it. Laughter He went right at it. No attempt at persuasion or allegory or metaphor to Trump, good, Biden, bad. Laughter Right at it. No attempt at persuasion or allegory or metaphor to, Trump, good, Biden, bad. He's a regular Shakespeare. Maybe Shakespeare would have been better off

with the Trump approach. Act one, scene one, Romeo and Juliet. Hey, Juliet, it's Romeo. Let's f***ing then kill ourselves. And sing. I want to thank my family. Look I'm trying very hard in this new Trump flood the zone media ecosystem strategy to not get too high or low, to not take the bait,

to find things in my life that give me pleasure or peace. For instance, a quick story. I have a niece, 11 years old, loves dolls. I was going to get her 20 or 30 of them... Laughter ...for her birthday, just to see the joy of a child. You can't put a price tag on that. It gives me great solace.

Anyway, like I said, I'm not trying to take these interviews personally. I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. Laughter First of all, I don't think we consider 11 year olds baby girls. Laughter Second of all, you don't know what she needs!

Laughter She's been through a lot this year. How many dolls would you get her? What is the appropriate number of dolls to get a beautiful She's been through a lot this year. How many dolls would you get her? What is the appropriate number of dolls to get a beautiful baby 11 year old girl Mr. President? I think they can have three dolls or four dolls. It's just not that many dolls. I mean okay sure she could have a small tea party with the dolls but her dream had been

a quasi-realistic conclave reenactment with dolls. That's what she wanted! But fine, fine! Fine! It's fine! It's fine! I'll just tell her the President of the United States said no. You know what? It doesn't matter. Dolls are not her only happy place anyway.

She also loves taking standardized tests. No, it's true. Very erudite. So I was thinking of getting her this wonderful Baby's First SAT Kit. It has all the Scantron sheets and around 250 number two pencils. She's going to go crazy. She is going to love it.

They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five. Mother f***er! How dare you! But... What kind of a man would deny this poor girl her full complement of pencils for her dream standardized testing toy kit?

Is that man A, Ebenezer Scrooge B, The Grinch C, an evil step monster or D, all of the above? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. B, the Grinch. C, an evil step monster. Or D, all of the above. Oh, that's right.

She can't answer because she's already used her entire pencil quota. I have to say, like, when Trump is talking about what people should do and gets like dolls and pencils, Trump has such a depression era view of what kids play with in 2025. Kids don't need 20 sets of those hoops you hit with a stick as you go down the street. Just one hoop is Jim Dandy. But look to be fair to Donald Trump his austerity pitch to the American people is in line with the modest way in which Trump conducts his life. Trump has a monastic view of simple living that says hey what if Saddam Hussein's palace

had a view of Central Park? They're standing in my apartment at Trump Tower. Some people consider it to be the greatest apartment in the world. And some people think it's what would look like inside Marie Antoinette's vagina. It was notoriously well appointed. Look, I do want to hand it to Trump.

If you notice a very sparing use of pencils and dolls, he does walk the walk. Here's the truth. If a Democrat had even hinted at toy rationing for American children, we'd have a full week of Fox special reports on the sobbing children of socialist America, and a boom in gun-toting patriots going, you can have my GI Joe when you pry it from a kung fu grip. But at least we're finally getting to address, in a substantive manner, Trump's chaotic stewardship of what was the world's most

stable economy, and how Americans are going to have to sacrifice financially and tamp down their consumerist impulse. And that is what has driven so much of our economy and I guess our waste. And I'm sure the president will use this interview with Welker to cheerlead the effort to a more financially responsible future for all of us. We're going to have a big beautiful parade. A military parade?

Yeah, sure. We're gonna celebrate our military. We have the greatest military in the world. People, peanuts compared to the value of doing it. We can't afford not to do it! Why don't you believe in me? If you hadn't spent so much on dolls and pencils, we weren't even talking about this.

And see. But this is the brilliance of Trump. In the same interview where he says to Americans, sorry about your Christmas, suck it up, he talks about a $90 million parade that just so happens to fall on his birthday and is totally worth it. We have the greatest missiles in the world.

We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we're going to celebrate it. I don't know, Mr. President, if you know how submarines work. But dragging them down Pennsylvania Avenue will most likely void the warranty. But this is why it's so hard to pin Trump down on everything. Because to get to substantive policy questions, you have to face down the fire hose of his nonsense

and bullshit that moves you off track, his frenetic nature that means we all end up suffering from a kind of secondhand ADHD, a viral cloud of his unfocused weaving that gives all of us brain fog. Well, no more. all of us brain fog. Well, no more. Hi, sharks.

When I saw the President of the United States starting out on tariffs and ending up on dolls and parades and pencils, I thought, there's gotta be a better way. To help Americans figure out which of the things it's okay to get upset about and which things are just him f***ing off. So I invented this chart. Let me show you how it works. First, we take something the president said. Donald Trump says that he is directing the Bureau of Prisons to reopen Alcatraz. And then we figure out, is that okay?

Sure. It's okay. It's the kind of thing that's okay to just let go. It's just a stupid thing to keep us occupied, to lose focus on his actual policies. It's okay not to take the bait, to not get sucked into. But why would you want to reopen Alcatraz? What the is that? Why would you want to do that? The president says he wants to use the island to quote, house America's most ruthless and violent offenders. And this notorious federal prison, it closed in 1963

because it was too expensive to run and repair. It's now been a museum. What? What? What? What? What? What?

What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What?

What? What? What? What? What? What? What? a museum is too good to pass up. But it'll take hundreds of millions of dollars, or I don't know how many dollars in pencils, but it's a lot. Does Doge know about this? Does Alcatraz? Alcatraz officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Because they run a museum! They're a museum. They're not, that's what they're, they're not, they're not like tough-talking wardens, they're docents with art history degrees. The only person working there is busy fixing those machines that flatten pennies. That's the only person that works there. And here's the crazy part about Trump. He throws out these crazy ideas and then those crazy ideas have days of shelf life. This is a press conference today announcing a partnership with the NFL draft. But now the NFL guys have to just sit there and nod through all this

Alcatraz nonsense. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz. Nobody's ever escaped from Alcatraz. And just represented something. One person almost got there, but they, as you know the story, they found his clothing. A lot of shark bites. A lot of problems.

Right now it's a big hulk that's sitting there rusting and rotting. It sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak and a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point. One point! There is no point! That's not... It's fine.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The chart was supposed to prevent this kind of over-emotional digression. This one's on me. I am not leading a chart-based life right now. I apologize. I can do better. I can do better.

Let's go again and judge whether or not this is an important pronouncement or a brain-fogging digression. President Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself depicted as the Pope on social media yesterday. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's just fine. It's not the most presidential thing, but Trump and the Pope do share the same taste in interior design, so it's not the worst fit.

And it's just a troll, it's not hurting anybody. I mean, Trump wasn't going to heaven anyway, so it's not like it's gonna, I'm not gonna get distracted by it. I'm not gonna, but he can't really be the Pope, can he? Can he be the Pope? The last time a non-cardinal was Pope was back in 1378, when the Italian Archbishop Bartolomeo Pregnano,

who had been a monk, was controversially chosen from outside of the College of Cardinals, and he became Pope Urban VI. So will Donald Trump follow in the 647-year-old footsteps of Bartolomeo Pregnano? No, he won't. You see what you're doing to people, Trump? MSNBC's got to waste valuable air time fact-checking your f***ing nonsense, time they could have

spent frowning, sighing, and rolling their eyes. Is there anything during this chaotic news cycle that maybe we should keep our eyes on? Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president? I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't know. That wasn't a gotcha question. Should the president uphold the constitution? On millionaire, that's not a gotcha question. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know? That wasn't a gotcha question.

Should the president uphold the Constitution? On millionaire, that'd be the warm-up question, like what color is an orange? Or name a planet with people on it. I mean, if you can't answer that the president's supposed to uphold the Constitution, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even let you become a citizen. And before you might say, well, they never told me I was

supposed to uphold. Let me refer you back to a cold day in January. Preserve, protect, and defend. Preserve, protect, and defend. The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. Were you even awake? Preserve, protect, and defend, i.e. uphold.

It's not optional. It is not an opportunity for you to lawyer shop loopholes to our nation's founding document. You took an oath in front of God and those who are fighting against God. But the important thing is this. Here's the problem. The volatility of nonsense, from consequential to truly

disorienting, is unfathomable. While we're chasing Pope and Alcatraz stories, the Trump administration has gutted funding for America's food banks. They've hollowed out the FAA to the point where Newark Airport is basically inoperable and not in its usual way. And then there's this. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. laid off nearly all workers at the National

Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The program offers monitoring and treatment for first responders and survivors diagnosed with 9-11 related health conditions. Motherf**ker! I agree! Do you know how bad you have to be to make the lives of sick 9-11 responders worse? The Trump administration is now number two on the 9-11 evil power rankings. Al-Qaeda is still number one, but you're closing the gap.

And trust me, there is nothing that you can do to distract me from making sure that those folks are going to get what they've earned from the government. The White House posting this AI image of a buff Jedi Trump to mark Star Wars Day on May 4th while touting his immigration crackdown. Ooh! Here's the thing. I know I'm not supposed to get distracted, but...

He's not a f***ing Jedi in that picture. Do you understand? Trump is presenting himself as a distracted, but... He's not a f***ing Jedi in that picture. Do you understand? Trump is presenting himself as a Jedi, but his lightsaber is red, and the only way you can have a red lightsaber is by infusing its kyber crystal with the power of your Agent 8, thereby corrupting it into a vessel for the dark side.

Therefore, therefore, every one of those photos that Trump is putting out there, he is admitting, he is admitting he's not a Jedi, but in fact, a Sith Lord. And there are always two, so the question is this. Who is he working with? And why do I know all this? Well, I happen to have an extensive collection

of Star Wars action figures. 30 to 37 of them, actually. Some call them dolls. I call them friends! When we come back, Rector Breg Daily Show, my guest tonight. Fabulous guest. He's a historian, bestselling author. His new book is called Moral Ambition.

Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. Please welcome to the program, Rutger Bregman, sir. ["The Dutch Historian"] They go crazy for the Dutch historian crowd. I know. Well, I have a lot of competition there. All the other famous Dutch historians. That's exactly. Van der Donk had it coming for a long time.

Listen, moral ambition is, in this country obviously has been somewhat outlawed, but how do you define moral ambition as something that people should be pursuing? So it's pretty simple. It's the combination of two things. It's the idealism of an activist on the one hand and the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it's the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable and to really devote your career, your precious time on this earth to make this world a much better place. Like you're trying to step into the footsteps of the great moral pioneers who came before

you, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners. But not as a hobby, as a vocation. And you have very interesting, the opening forward is so interesting. It's a story of a monk, the happiest person in the world. This brainwaves tell us this. And you tell this story and I think you're going to a place where you say, be the monk. And you basically go, this monk is wasting his life. Yeah.

Well, look, I mean, he meditated for 60,000 hours and then researchers put him in a brain scanner and declared him the happiest man alive, you know, because he had so much positive things going on there. And I read about that story and I was really angry. And it was like 60,000 hours in your own head and the world is burning? I mean, come on, there are problems to solve here. And look, I mean, Macha Ricard, that's the Buddhist monk's name. He's actually a fantastic guy, pretty morally ambitious.

So people got to read the Apple Oak as well. Um, but... Wait. Is this guy now, like, getting shit-talked all over Twitter? No, no, no. Anyway, um, the point is, I mean, there are a huge amount of self-help books out there that will teach you how to be more mindful, more relaxed, you know, be more happy.

My previous book, Humankind, was an attempt to restore people's faith in humanity. And at some point, I saw these pictures on Instagram of people reading the book saying, you know, life is wonderful. Don't worry. You know, stop following the news and just relax. And I was like, oh, I've created a monster, right? This is not so if my previous book was like a warm hug, then this is a cold shower, a

refreshing cold shower. A plunge. That's apparently that's the thing now you're supposed to do. You go to the warm thing and then you go to the cold thing. What is the piece of advice that was missing from you from the hug? How do you restore faith in humanity and then get mad at them? Look, a couple of... I want to restore face in humanity. Oh, you people are just f***ing up.

Okay, so a lot of people will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires. You know, I went to Davos. Tell them what you said at Davos, which I thought was a really interesting... Well, it was really short. Basically, you know, stop talking about your BS philanthropy and pay your taxes instead. Which was... By the way,, went over great. You get invited back every year now, right? Is that...

Not really, not really. But that was obviously, you know, nice to experience. But you got to ask yourself, like, does this make a difference? In the book, I come to the conclusion that awareness is vastly overrated, right? It's easy to go viral shouting, tax rich or destroy capitalism, kill the patriarchy. But the point is to actually do something about it, right? To really translate your ideas into actual action and then results.

And I think too often on the left side of the political spectrum, we see this obsession with moral purity and then also a certain kind of political irrelevance, right? What it really takes to change the world is to build a coalition, right? All these great movements, the abolitionists, the civil rights campaigners, they were coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another. So, I guess that's one of the pieces of

advice I have here is if people agree with you for 80% of their time, they're not your enemy, but they're your ally. Your ally. What do you say to people, because when I view the world of moral ambition or activism, I actually see it as pretty vibrant, that we may not know their names, but there are so many people that don't get the attention that are doing what you're suggesting but maybe without the access to the people that matter like that don't get

invited to Davos but are doing the the grunt work like working in the trenches trying to get their representatives to notice or trying to make a difference. What do you say to people who are saying like I have moral ambition. I'm busting my ass out here. It's very hard to get a difference. What do you say to people who are saying like, I have moral ambition, I'm busting my ass out here,

it's very hard to get a foothold. So I believe we live in a sort of inverse welfare society. So we've got the people in the so-called essential jobs, we discovered that during the pandemic, if they go on strike, then that's a disaster for all of us. On the other hand, we have huge amounts of people, educated elites, you know, who went to nice universities, who have fancy resumes.

If they go on strike, very often not all that much happens. I've got one study in the book from two Dutch economists, actually. They studied 40 countries and found that around 25% of people in the modern workforce think that their own job is socially meaningless. These are, by the way, mostly people in the- Wait, how many?

25%? Yeah. I would actually think that'd be higher. Well, it's quite a lot, John John it's five times the unemployment rate. Is it really? Yeah, yeah, one out of four jobs. Yeah, exactly. And these people, I mean last week I was at Harvard. Well look at you. It's an interesting example where you meet a lot of bright young students, right, who are generally idealistic.

But then at the same time you know that about half of them will end up in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent. So you've got consultancy, you've got corporate law, you've got finance, this gaping black hole that sucks up so many talented people who should actually work on these big problems. So, look, I am not here to preach at people already in those essential jobs.

I am actually preaching at my own people because I'm quite preaching at my own people because I'm quite angry at them. You're talking about Dutch historians. People who went to university, who had some education, who should feel this responsibility to use their skill set to make a difference. Do you consider them... Oh, you're very excited about it. Uh...

What percentage... Do you consider our system, then, of education and economics a moral failure in that regard? And is it... Are there places where what you're talking about works? Is there an analogous situation? There are places in history.

I mean, was that the press? This actually gives me hope. All right. So great about my job. You know, in the book, I talk a lot about the British abolitionists. They were the most successful abolitionists. They built this huge movement in the late 18th century, and they considered their

project to be part of a bit of a cultural revolution. They wanted to make doing good fashionable once again. What really fascinated me about them is that they were mostly entrepreneurs. So nine or 10 out of 12 of the British, the founders of the British Society for the abolition of the slave trade, they were entrepreneurs, you know, people who had built

their own companies, who had skilled them, they knew how to get things done. Right. I mean, in the Netherlands at the time, yeah, it's pretty sad. There was a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were mainly interested in their own moral purity. They didn't get much done. Right.

They were the ones who, on their Instagram pages, kept putting up the black square. Exactly. That's what it was. Exactly. I remember that. Yeah. And we've seen the same thing in the US, actually.

The move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. And now back again. But we could then go back again to perhaps another Progressive Era. I do see signs of that. So what is going on? Because to my mind, the sticking point, and maybe this is semantics, but the sticking point doesn't appear to be people who are morally ambitious, but a system that is impervious to that, that is agnostic about moral ambition. It feels like there's enough people in this country working their asses off for change

and a political system that finds a way to ignore them in favor of insurance company lobbyists or drug company. They don't have access to this. How do they get access? Yeah, sure. Look, I'm a guy who comes from the political left. So I'm all about systemic analysis. You know, I'm the guy who loves to shout like change the system.

But then writing in this book, at some point, I got this feeling that perhaps, you know, this can become a kind of excuse as well. Right. You can keep shouting like everything's wrong with the system. But systems, they consist of people, right? There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Mead, who once said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens

to change the world. And actually people on the right wing side of the political spectrum, they understand that very well. You know, Trump didn't come out of nowhere. This was a 50 year project. It started in the early seventies probably with the Powell memo, for example, you know, this corporate lawyer corporate lawyer from you know that was on the board of Philip Morris. Right. And it was like you know let's build this

whole movement to take over America and then they created the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute. Like you need some perseverance. You need the moral ambition to be fused with because on the right they fused it very well with their billionaires and their media ecosystem. Whereas on the right it perhaps because it's not as homogenous it's been a more it's more difficult is the idea for these networks of morally ambitious activists to connect with the entrepreneurs and funders and move in that direction together absolutely and that's what you're not seeing. Yeah, so I co-founded

an organization as well called the school for more ambition everything I heard with the book is going into the moral ambition. Yeah, we like to see ourselves as sort of the Robin Hood's of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away the money is sort of the Robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away the money from the rich. I know who Robin Hood is. Right? OK, well, there you go.

For those who didn't know. And I mean, that's the worthwhile endeavor, right? But you also need to take the talent. What we've seen in this country since the 60s and the 70s is that a lot of people used to go and work in those socially meaningful jobs. In academia, for example, or in government, they went to Wall Street creating BS financial products

or Silicon Valley creating these apps that make us all addicted. We need a talent shift as well as a wealth distribution. So what then is the incentive other than moral satisfaction? Do we need to teach kids that? Because that was, look, the hippies and the hippies of the 60s and they were very idealistic and then they all, you know, Reagan 60's and they were very idealistic and then they all you know Reagan came along and they were all like wait I can work at a hedge fund okay and and so what is then

do you have to create that an incentive process for for those folks how do you how do you get that talent. So people are really cynical would say like look it's all about the money right these people are just selling out and I think that's probably true for some of them. But back to those Harvard kids, for a lot of them, it's also the status of doing something that is actually cool, that is interesting.

Because let's be honest, working at McKinsey is really boring, creating the same PowerPoint every day. Right, right. I don't work there, so I don't know what they're like. Well, I've heard. So yeah, I think it's not just about the money. People are mixed bags, right? So status and what society values,

like the kind of people we put in the spotlight who get invited to shows like this. All that matters, obviously. Right, right. And is it what about sort of the everyday sort of quiet activism of living pleasantly like I think we shouldn't diminish though for whatever your status is or station is that you can within your own life make the changes that create at least a better local atmosphere because I think what what you're talking about is, you know, when you point to history, you're

really talking about inflection points. And you don't know when those will occur. And oftentimes, momentum builds to them and there's a tipping point and it moves over. I don't know how conscious it is. Can I push back on that? Please. So, again'll talk to this. Dutch people push back so nicely. Sorry.

Well, we can be different as well. I mean, there is this tendency to say things like, less is more and small is beautiful. I mean, in environmental circles, they have all these modern commandments like, don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have kids, don't use plastic straws. But then if you really focus on that individualist aspect of improving your life, like in the best possible scenario, you will have reduced your environmental footprint to zero, you've basically turned yourself into a compost heap.

It's not very ambitious. And if I look at some of these great pioneers, like also like people like Rosa Parks, like they didn't think small, they thought big, they were ambitious. So I've looked into the research and it turns out that more is actually more. Rosa Parks, like they didn't think small, they thought big, they were ambitious. So I've looked into the research and it turns out that more is actually more. So if you help one person, that's great.

If you help two, that's twice as much. Right. Mathematics. But are we like, I wasn't even talking about like, let's use less because I do think human progress is generally like, people will do what's more convenient or more. That's just kind of how how they they operate I'm just I guess I'm I'm just trying to wrap my head around what this means mm-hmm like it feels like saying to like college kids at a graduation like you f***ing bastards yeah like you think

you're gonna go into these other jobs no yeah go solve climate change yeah is that what this is that's basically it yeah. The greatest graduation speech ever you just get up there and go listen mother. What one of the things we're doing is we're starting a tax fairness fellowship. So I mean, it was nice to shout to the billionaires, you know, taxes, taxes, taxes. Now we're actually trying to recruit, you know, some of the best wealth managers, the best bankers, the best fiscal lawyers that we can find. But didn't they try this with like the ESG, the investing for better?

Was that just nonsense? I mean, that is like a thin layer of corporate responsibility over a corrupt, broken business model. I mean, come on, we've got to be much more ambitious here. We're not living in 2015 anymore where you can say, oh, I'm doing good by doing well. Ah, 2015. And let's do a TED talk about it. Those were the days.

Yeah. No, that's not, I mean, this is 2025. We have one side of the political spectrum is a total moral collapse. I mean, democratic blacksliding happening everywhere. Especially people who have some privilege, whether it's talent, whether it's wealth, whether it's your network, use it.

I mean, people on the left, for so long, things like, check your privilege. Yes, check it. And then use it. Have some skin in the game. Right, right. And is that working? I think so, yeah. It is. Yeah. So, Howard, tell me about...

And just before we go, then, so if people want to exercise this moral ambition, what is... How do they get their foot on that ladder? Do they have to come to your institute? Or is there... Yeah. So, we're building a movement now of 8,000 of them. put on that ladder do they have to come to your Institute or is there. We're building a movement now of.

I think the greatest scam in history. To do that you have to come to the did now tuition is. No there's no to issue all right we pay people to quit their job that's how it works for real, yes. Yeah, how much does that pay. Well, I mean currently we're paying like an average Dutch salary. It's enough to live on for a couple of months. And then obviously, I mean, we help people to pivot. You're really selling this.

Thank you. No, it's honestly quite exciting. We have now 24 people in Europe who quit their job to fight big tobacco, for example. It's the most evil legal industry out there. They've created the deadliest product in the history of humanity. I mean, today we have this moral outrage about smartphones, right, smartphones that make you addicted,

there's TikTok on it. Imagine a smartphone that is so addictive and also kills you. That's a cigarette. So anyway, we've recruited, yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? Yeah. Note to self, smartphone that kills you.

Awesome product launch. So the point is, actually, one of our fellows in our cohort is someone who used to work for Big Tobacco. Right. She switched sides, and she knows everything about effective marketing. And now she's using that skills to fight the industry. Right.

Well, that's fantastic. And it starts off there. And have you done it in the United States as well, or this is right now purely European? No, no, no. We're starting here. So you're starting here. Yeah. I came to New York in September. We're building out here. It's really getting started now. We're launching our first fellowships, as I said, the Texas Fairness Fellowship. And do you have some people that are lined up? Well, people can apply. So go to morroambition.org if you want to quit your job and do something useful work.

The book is Moral Ambition. Get your application now. Yes. Dr. Bergman, we're going to take your book. Fantastic. Do you think it might work? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you think I'm out of time? That is our show, ladies and gentlemen, for tonight. Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Desi Lyda! Desi! Come on! What's happening this week? Well, it's Conclave Week, John. They're electing a new pope, and I'll be in the room every day to find out what's going on. In the Conclave room? I think they only let cardinals in that room. Yeah, I know, Dum Dum. That's why I spent weeks preparing to go undercover as Cardinal Cappuccino Pizzeria. I know this Cardinal shit backwards and forwards.

Go ahead, ask me anything. Anything. OK, Cardinal Pizzeria. Who do you want to be Pope? No comprendo. I only speak the Latin. Um, nailed it. Jesus would be proud. And who is he?

All right, never mind. Desi Lydic all this week. Here it is, your moment of joy. Actually my wife thought it was cute. She said, isn't that nice? My question about it. Actually, I would not be able to be married though. That would be a lot.

I'd have to, to the best of my knowledge, popes aren't big on getting married. That's not that we know of now. No. Explore more shows from The Daily Show Podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch The Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus.