The Rich Roll Podcast - Let’s Make The World Wildly Better: Rutger Bregman On Moral Ambition

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, bestselling author, and the guy who went viral telling Davos billionaires to pay their taxes. This conversation is a salve for the crisis of meaning percolating through modern life. We explore Rutger's pragmatic antidote—moral ambition—and discuss why a quarter of workers believe their jobs are socially useless, what the abolitionists teach us about coalition-building, and why factory farming may be the ethical abomination future historians judge us for most harshly. Rutger's conviction is rare and infectious. By the end of our conversation, I was so inspired that I committed $25K to his organization’s new US Food System Reform Program, a cause area that is deeply important to me. Final Note: Through December 31st, every dollar to moralambition.org/food is matched.  I hope you’ll consider joining me today in making a donation to this impactful organization. See the links in our newsletter, on our website, and in our Substack. Let’s lean into our own moral ambition and do something truly meaningful, together. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉🏼https://www.on.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.ROKA.com/RICHROLL AG1: Get their best offer ever – Welcome Kit, Omega 3's, D3+K2, Flavor Sampler, plus AGZ sleep supplement FREE ($126 in gifts)👉🏼https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll Bon Charge: Get 15% OFF all my favorite wellness products w/ code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.boncharge.com BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉🏼https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼http://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

When I studied the great moral pioneers of the past, I don't read biographies of people who were very relaxed. They were working their ass up. We think that Follow Your Passion is probably the worst career advice ever invented in the history of humanity. Let's not just check our privilege. Let's use it to make a massive difference. If you can achieve your goals in your own lifetime, then I think you're not thinking big enough. And this is a movement that's way bigger than us. So we're in the midst of the holiday season, and so many of us are trying to get our heads around what we're going to do differently in 2026.

And in thinking about this, I think what I want to do is offer you something to think about, something I've said, many times before, but bears repeating around this time of year. And that is this. We are all far more capable than we permit ourselves to believe. Each and every one of us is in possession of a reservoir of potential. We've barely begun to tap. That is just begging to be expressed into reality. And I say this as somebody for whom hopefulness comes hard. I am hardwired to dismiss these kinds of optimistic proclamations as pretty much nothing more than pure polliana drivel. But at the same time, I actually know for a fact that this statement is true. I've experienced it myself and I have witnessed it many, many times as true in others as well. So basically what I'm saying is that I

need to be constantly reminded that transformation is our birthright. And all of us possess the agency to change for the better. And the impending new year is really just this opportunity to ritualize this fact and render it into reality. So to set our minds right, I can think of nobody better than Rutger Bregman to help us consider what's possible, both for ourselves and the broader world. And as somebody who can help us incite the expression of our interchange agent in the interest of our future betterment. And I say this because Rutger is a guy who dreams big. And today, he brings to the table a big call to action, asking us to use what we have, whether it's our privilege or our resources, or most importantly, our human capital, to take on the world's

most pressing challenges. What we need, what the world needs is more moral ambition, which is the title of Rucker's new book and the topic of today's conversation. Rucker, for those unaware is one of the most compelling moral philosophers and public intellectuals working today, a Dutch historian and author who has a talent for clearly diagnosing the crisis of meaning that so many of us feel, which he marries with a refreshing pragmatism for charting a more fulfilling life path forward in service to a better world. And so to put a finer point on it, Rucker believes that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth or prestige or security, during this time in which a staggering number of people report that their jobs feel socially

useless, what we actually hunger for is contribution for a life in service of something larger than ourselves. Over the course of a couple hours, Rucker and I discuss our current cultural moment of widespread disillusionment and how to dispel it with individual action. We talk about the moral catastrophe of our modern factory farming system. We discuss resolving the illusion of free will with personal agency to produce change. We discuss the mission behind the school for moral ambition, which is the nonprofit that Rucker founded, and why we need to make doing good prestigious again. This has a little bit of something for everyone, but if you're somebody who feels like something in your life is missing, that you're not using your gifts the way that you could, or that you're

waiting for permission to step into a more meaningful life. If that's you, this episode is definitely appointment pod and mandatory listening. Ruckers' challenge is simple, but it's actually quite profound. Make your life about something more than yourself. And as my friend Scott Harrison says, do not fear work that has no end. And this is where meaning lives. Final note, before we get into it, Right now, the School for Moral Ambition, is raising funds for food system reform. In my opinion, eradicating the ills of factory farming is worthy of your moral ambition, and Rucker's organization is even matching every contribution, meaning that every dollar donated will be doubled.

So to learn more and to contribute to making a difference, I did in case you're wondering, please go to moralambition.org slash food. All right, so let's get into it and let's get mobilized. Good gear disappears. When you have it, you're not thinking about what's on your feet or what you're wearing. You're just immersed in doing the thing. On understands this, and it's why they make this wide array of stunning running and hiking gear that just works the way you wanted to, just like the Cloud Ultra Trail Shoe for exploring nature.

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Thank you for being here. You're here, you know, on the heels of putting out this book called Moral Ambition, and you've got this new school, the school of moral ambition. So moral ambition is sort of the topic of the day today. But before we can go any further, you know, I want to allow you to define this phrase. It's pretty simple. So I think we're all aware that we face some enormous challenges as a species, like the age-old challenges of poverty and disease. like still terrible diseases, killing so many people, like, especially the neglected ones,

like tuberculosis, killing, what is it, 1.2 million people every year, malaria, 600,000. But we've got existential risks as well, as well. The threat of the next pandemic is just around the corner. The rise of AI could be pretty dangerous as well. Climate change. I mean, we're all aware of these big, big problems. Now, what do we need to do in order to take on these challenges? I think we need people, and preferably really.

really, really talented people. And our analysis is pretty simple. What we see is that a lot of really talented entrepreneurial people are currently stuck in jobs that don't really make the world a much better place. So moral ambition is the antidote to that. It is the will to use what you have, your privilege, your financial capital, your cultural capital, but most importantly, your human capital, like what you can do with your hands and with your brain, you use that to build a legacy that actually matters,

to be remembered by the historians because they're kind of proud of you. So that's what it is. On a macro level, there are sort of forces working against this and forces that are kind of marshalling energy around moving towards it. On the moving towards it piece,

not only are a vast number of people in jobs that are, you know, essentially not moving society forward, they're jobs that are leaving people or kind of moving people in the direction of their own existential crisis because there is no, they're not deriving enough meaning

from what they spend all day doing every single day, which is sort of an energizing force that might make people more receptive to these ideas that you're talking about. In terms of the forces working against it, like the average person is going to say, well, you're asking a lot of me. I'm just trying to put food on the table.

I'm aware of all these looming threats out there, but there's only so much I can do. And my priority is to just take care of my family. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's first talk about the scale of the problem, like the amount of talent that currently gets wasted. So there's one study that was done a few years ago in which 100,000 people were asked about the social value of their job. So it's important to say that I'm not judging people's jobs, right? It's people asking themselves the question. I think like, okay, what happens if I go on strike?

Does that really matter for society, yes or now? And it turns out that around 25% of old people in modern developed economies think that their own job is probably, yeah, socially useless. I think the technical term here is bullshit job. That's what academics call it. And that is really astounding because that's five times the unemployment rate. And then if you dig into the numbers, what you see is that it's not the plumbers and the teachers and the nurses and the care workers that we're talking about. Obviously not, right?

If they go on strike, we've discovered that during the pandemic. They have the essential jobs, right? They're the shoulders that carry us all. But what you see when you look at these numbers is that certain job categories are overrepresented. So the usual suspects are the bankers, the consultants, the corporate lawyers. It's what one friend of mine. The Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, one friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, indeed, consultancy, finance, corporate law. But it's also, like, marketeers score very highly there, and managers. And I really do not want to say that all these jobs, by definition, are socially useless. I just think it's really striking that people say it about their own jobs, especially when we face such big challenges as a species. So that's one thing. Then on the other hand, yes, I mean, I'm not saying this is the easy path. I mean, there's one message that I want to get across in this book, Moral Ambition, is that, look, if you want to be more mindful, happy, relaxed, whatever, I mean, you can go to the bookstore, there are hundreds, thousands of books out there in the self-help category that promise you exactly that, right?

This book is not about living an easier life. When I studied the great moral pioneers of the past, you know, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the humanitarians, I don't read biographs. of people who were very relaxed or mindful or whatever, they were working their ass up and they paid a substantial price in many cases, but they lived lives worth remembering. In terms of obstacles in people's way, in terms of kind of accessing what you're trying to convey and taking action on it, to me it feels like there's two forces working against it.

One is the biggest one, which is the incentive structure. you know, upon which, you know, we've created this society. And the second is sort of secondary, and that is that there is sort of a PR problem around this. Like it's a, it's the way that it's messaged and marketed. So maybe take the incentive structure aspect of this first. I have been building this movement now for two years. And one thing we've discovered is that when you go to, say, the typical banker on Wall Street or a successful corporate lawyer and you say, oh you're such a greedy person right you're an immoral person why why don't you work on these great

challenges that person's going to be like oh you know don't bother me right what are you complaining like you can't you compete or something like that or what are you doing you know like reflect on your own life indeed don't be such immoralizing pain in the ass so that's one thing we've discovered that it's much more effective to say like hey you've got only one life on this planet on average, a career loss for around 80,000 hours, so that's 10,000 working days, that's 2,000 work weeks. And what you do with that precious time on this beautiful planet, right? It's one of the most important questions that you have to answer. And do you really want to spend your whole life in a cubicle, you know, making products, selling services that people don't really care about?

We've discovered that that is a much more effective approach if you want to convince people to make a change in their lives. What I've learned from studying these great movements of the past is that they all had something in common. They were really successful at making doing good more prestigious. So if you study, for example, the most successful abolitionist movement, which was not in the US, but it was actually in Britain, it was way more successful there. And you would have asked people like William Wilberforce, who was one of the leaders of that movement, you would have asked him about his main mission in life. He wouldn't even have said abolishing the slave trade or abolishing slavery. He would have said my mission in life is to change the incentive structure, is to make doing good fashionable, to bring virtue back in vogue, and to convince people that life ultimately is about something else than just yourself. So that is, I think, what we've got to try and do.

Essentially, you have to make it cool, basically. Right now, all of the incentives of our modern culture are pointing in the direction of, you know, property, power, and prestige, right? Like, these are the things that we reward, we reward people for achieving. These are, you know, the seeds of all of our aspirations for as long as we can remember. It's emblazoned on every billboard and every television commercial and just reaffirmed from, you know, as far back as we can remember to today, such that we don't even. really question it, right? And so on some level, we're sort of not to, not, we can't be blamed. We're sort of living reactively based upon, you know, the, the rules of the game that have been, you know, passed on to us. And so it's, it's not a surprise that an ambitious young person

is going to study hard to get into a good school. And then when they enter into the, you know, the career center at their college or university, they're going to be looking at consultancy jobs, McKinsey and places like that or corporate law or finance because if they can acquire one of those jobs, they're on this upward trajectory towards property, prestige, and power. And on top of that, I think human beings are hardwired to seek out security, not just financial security, but some kind of psychological buffer against the uncertainty of being in a human body and living a human life. And on some level, we convince ourselves that these jobs work to immunize us against all of those uncertainties that make us so fundamentally

uncomfortable. So I think what people want fundamentally in the end, what all of us want is recognition, some kind of status, a pat on the back, someone saying, hey, well done, you're a valuable member of the community. So every society has an honor code that says We value these things. We don't really value those things. What I think is really interesting to see it as a historian is that honor codes are never fixed. You know, they are cultural artifacts. They can change.

And you can really see that in American history. So there's one fascinating study called the American Freshman Survey that goes back all the way to the late 60s. Students Ross at the beginning of their student career, what are your most important values? Like, what are your most important goals in life? Now, back in the 60s, the vast majority of students said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life is their most important life goal. About 90% of students said that. Only 50% of students said that making a lot of money was one of the most important life goals. Today, as you can expect, those numbers have flipped.

So now it's 90% saying it's all about the money. And only 50% saying it's all about that meaningful philosophy of life. And so how do you make sense of that? But it's, I would say it's, there's also some hope here because it tells us that this is not human nature, but it is human culture, right? It is the, the result of decades and decades of storytelling of, some would say, propaganda, you know, relentlessly hammering down a certain message about what life is about, about what success looks like. And if I'm thinking about what is like the fundamental problem we face as a species, it's not that there are not enough people working on. these big challenges from poverty to inequality to climate or whatever, it is that we have the wrong honor code, right? If we would fix that, then we would be so much easier to recruit

a lot of brilliant and talented people. So as a historian, when you reflect on the 60s in that moment, how did that honor code come to be and what happened to denigrate it or shift it? Okay, so that is a really big question, right? You can write a library full of books about that. But understanding that is a means of building a pathway back to something that resembles that. Yeah. I would say the usual story goes something like this. So after the Second World War, there was a great spirit of cooperation. People were like, okay, this can never happen again. We rely on each other to make this world a much better place.

You had both in Europe and the U.S., you had strong governments that really relied on the solidarity of very privileged people. So it's hard to remember nowadays, but tax rates for the rich were way higher back then, up to 80, 90% marginal tax rates for the very rich. You had much higher inheritance taxes. I think that was all part of a social contract where elites and people with more privilege agreed that you got to get back. you got to give back a lot and not just in philanthropy, you know, it's not just about putting your name on a building at Harvard. It's about doing many different kinds of things. And then slowly, maybe it was because the memory of the war started to disappear. Maybe it was also because of the failures of that economic model, right?

In the 70s, we have massive inflation. We had massive strikes. Like, the economy really was not doing well. And then new politicians came along like Margaret Tatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan famously in the US who said, you know what, it's time for something else and that's usually called neoliberalism and at the heart of that philosophy

was the idea that if you just rely on the selfishness of people if you just let people do whatever they want that in the end everyone's going to benefit there was a lot of power in that idea and it did really seem to work for quite some time right? The economy started growing again stock markets exploded but I think now we've come to the realization that over the years our society

hollowed out and our social contract broke and that people started to get really really angry at the winners of this system of globalization and markets opening up and you name it and I think that explains a lot of the pathologies that we see today most famously obviously the rise of the maga movement and the success of Trump I think they all capitalize on that deep, seething anger that people feel portrayed by elites. Yeah. It's difficult to ask for moral ambition when there is so much economic disparity. And, you know, somebody who's struggling and looking around and there just isn't a lot of opportunity,

that just feels like a very, you know, convenient ambition, but not an accessible one. Yeah, yeah. So I've got to be really clear. in this book I'm quite harsh for the people who already have a lot but don't do much this is your this is your brand record but I just think that these people deserve a bit of a kick in the ass some people say that shame doesn't work I disagree I think we need to use the full motivational spectrum like we humans are very multi-layered fascinating creatures sometimes we do things out of excitement but yeah there's a reason why we humans are pretty

much the only animal in the animal kingdom with the ability to blush. And I think we got to use that. Weaponize that. Yeah. But I'm really not saying that. I mean, this message is obviously not aimed at the teachers of the nurses who are already, you know, who are the social fabric, right? But on the other hand, I also don't want to say that more ambition can be for everyone. Like, I've got one case study in the book, the extraordinary story of Rosa Parks that not a lot of people know. She was a humble seamstress, but also one of the greatest strategists of the civil rights movement. She's often portrayed nowadays as someone, you know, we only remember her of, you know, just not standing up. We just remember that one courageous act of what she did in that bus.

But she was so much more than that. She was an incredible organizer. And the whole movement behind that was so smart, so strategic. They planned it all out, the bus boycott. So, yeah. I think it is fair to say that we are in the midst of this epidemic in which there is a crisis of meaning in people's lives. Like, you know, we're sort of living day to day and we're allowing ourselves to be distracted and sort of complacent and just, you know, reclining into the most comfortable version of our lives that we can afford. And as you grow older, you start to, you know, feel a yearn for something more, something more meaningful. And that can take, obviously, many shapes or forms and, you know, the quality and the extent of that can vary. But I think that that is a common sensibility and very much like of the moment right now. And so this roadmap towards how to become more morally ambitious and where to put that energy and how to channel it, how to think about it, how to contextualize it,

and then translate it into action is really what this book is about. It is a call to action in that regard. And through that lens, almost a salve for this ailment that I think is commonly shared. Can I tell you a personal story about this? So what I've experienced in my own life regarding this crisis of meaning. I am the son of a pastor. So always as a boy growing up in church, looking at my dad, talking about the big questions of life. where do we come from? Where do we go? What is sacred? And what are we supposed to do

with our precious time on this earth? Like when I grew up, those were very, very important questions. But as so many teenagers of 16, 17 years old, I have my crisis of meaning. I remember this moment when I came to the realization that free will cannot possibly exist. And I was, you know, walking around in a day. I was like, oh my God, I've made a major philosophical discovery. Everyone should know. Nothing makes sense anymore. Like, why do we punish people? Why would we reward people? I mean, everything is just cause and effect. And I didn't choose my parents. I didn't choose the way I was brought up. Like, I can say yes or no, but all of that is already predetermined. Like, it took me some, a few years to find out that actually that was one

of the first thoughts that philosophers ever had, you know, going back to the ancient Greeks. But anyway, that was that moment in my life where indeed meaning seemed to disappear. And it was like, you know, it felt like falling off a cliff. And so I would say that my whole body of work, all books that I've written, all revolve around those big questions, where do we come from, where do we go? And how can we find meaning when the old stories don't really make sense anymore, at least not to me, in the era of science and everything we know about the age of the planet and evolution? and you name it. And I think I've found some answers. And one of those answers is in some individuals that I really, really admire.

So what I remember is when I was 19 years old, I was following a lecture series about, it was actually a lecture series about atheism by a Dutch professor called Hermel Philipsa. And he was saying that every person needs to have his or her own intellectual hero. And I never really thought about that. But the idea of an intellectual hero is that it is someone who has been heroic in changing his or her mind, being really open to the facts and the evidence. And so I was back home in my student dormitory, and I started looking like, maybe I can find someone like that. And after a few hours, I stumbled upon this guy called Bertrand Russell.

Maybe you've heard of him, the British philosopher. And I just became obsessed with this guy who lived such a rich life. You know, he had four, he had four marriages. He was imprisoned twice for his pacifism. He, you know, was behind major philosophical breakthroughs. He was a brilliant mathematician. He won the Nobel Prize for literature. He almost died in a plane crash.

Later, he would joke that he survived because he was a smoker. He was in the smoking compartment of the plane. And there the door opened and then the non-smoking compartment, the door didn't open. But anyway, the point is that what I saw here is like, oh, but this. is what life is about it's about living incredibly rich life in service of others um and i think that has basically become my religion is that we have been given this incredible gift of what is it if we're lucky 80 years 4 000 weeks i think that's the number um and um yeah we got to use it well and and try and make our own life in a monument that that stands in time i think that's the only kind of

of immortality that we can have. I don't believe in life after death or anything like that, even though I would say I'm agnostic. But the one thing I do know is that no one can take away this life from me, right? This podcast, when we finished it, it will forever stand as a monument in time, right? It will always have happened. And that is for me what life is all about. Disabusing yourself of the illusion of free will as a young person.

You sort of accelerated your existential crisis. You know, it's unusual for a person that young to be thinking about those types of ideas on a profound level. But it kind of accelerated that search for meaning, you know, decades earlier than that kind of descends on most people. And what's interesting about that is it can lead, you know, there's a fork in the road. It can lead to despair and powerlessness. or it can, you know, allow you to figure out something to latch onto or, you know, having a North Star like Russell, you know, to point to to kind of direct your thought and your actions. But in your case, what's also interesting, and I never really thought this

through all that deeply, is the connection between the illusion of free will and your notion of justice, which, you know, is at the center of your humankind book, like this idea that if there is no free will, then there's no rationale for punishing people for their misdeeds. Like, rehabilitation should be the only thing that is, that is, you know, deserving of our attention. Yeah, yeah. I think if we look at the moral progress we've made over the last two to three centuries, it's all been about expanding the moral circle. So the mother of all moral movements is, in my view, the abolitionist movement, those men and women who fought against. probably the greatest moral atrocity that...

Well, let's spend a little bit of time exploring that because I think there's a lot of confusion around the origin of that movement. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. One of the things that surprised me was that, initially I thought that it was mostly a secular enlightenment movement of, I don't know, French philosophers saying, hey, people have human rights

and therefore we ought to abolish this. But actually, in France, you know, the country of the French Revolution with the Declaration of Human Rights, abolitionism really didn't take off. It was a total failure. In my own country, I was born and I live in the Netherlands. Abolitionism was also a total failure.

You know, you had a bunch of, yeah, we would call them social justice warriors today. There were a bunch of Calvinists who were mainly interested in their own moral purity, but they didn't get anything done. Then in Spain, we had pretty much nothing in Portugal, almost nothing in the U.S. people often don't realize this but abolitionism was also a failure in the US like take the Liberty Party which was the only political party that was against slavery

it didn't win a single election anywhere you had the Liberator which was the newspaper for abolitionists it had only 3,000 subscribers there's one anecdote that I've always found fascinating of this guy who campaigned for Abraham Lincoln just shortly before the Civil War and he went to the south and he came back and he said oh my god what happened to me it's so shocking

they called me a fool they called me an idiot they called me all kinds of things but worst of all they called me an abolitionist and that was like the worst thing that can happen to you the only thing that was where it was different was in britain where it became this hugely successful movement and it was let not by yeah by secular philosophers but it was led by quakers this weird religious Protestant sect and by evangelicals, this new charismatic movement of people, yeah, who wanted to renew their faith. And it was like 1780s, early 1780s, right? And it started with just like, I don't know, like 12 people, right? Yeah, it's really incredible. So the British society for the abolition of the slave trade was founded by 12 individuals. one of them was a writer

one of them was I would say an amateur theologian but 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs that was one of those big epiphanies for me is like okay so you need those kind of people who actually know how to build something how to scale it all these people

have been really successful right they had become fairly rich but I think the reason we remember them today is not because they were wealthy or anything like that I mean that's nice but a lot of people are wealthy that's not that special. Why historians still write about them today is because they used what they have, both their

talent, their skill set, and their resources to build this enormous movement that changed the course of history. And indeed, it's just incredible how small it was initially. There's this quote from Margaret Meath, you know, the anthropologist who said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. Mm-hmm. That's the antidote to the sense of powerlessness that we all have. But fundamental to that story is the idea that, you know, quote unquote, a coalition is a group of people who are solution-oriented problem solvers who can get over their secondary differences to solve their primary problem. Yeah.

And when I think about that in the context of our current moment, it seems almost quaint. Like, I feel like we're in. in a culture that is affirming the very opposite. It's about digging in our heels and holding our ground and refusing to reach across the aisle to compromise in any kind of meaningful way with respective parties quibbling amongst themselves and really caught up in those secondary and tertiary differences and thus neutered in their ability to solve,

to even approach solving whatever their primary problem is. Would you agree with that as an accurate assessment of, like, the moment? I think that's pretty accurate, Rick. Look, as a historian, what I really love about history is that you have access to these amazing coaches and therapists, right? You can read the memoirs and the biographies of some of the great pioneers of the past, and you can learn from them. What I experienced when I was reading about someone like Thomas Clarkson, for example, he was probably the most important abolitionist. of all time. Not many people remember him today, but there's a lot of historians who argue that if he would have fallen off his horse in 1785, the world could have looked very, very differently.

Like he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom, spread the abolitionist propaganda everywhere, you know, really let the charge. And in the end, you know, Britain abolished the slave trade and then forced 80% of other countries to stop slave trading. So the effects were absolutely enormous. Now, what I experienced when I read his memoirs was this emotion that I, like to describe as moral envy. So I was just reading about what he was doing, and I just got jealous of someone like him who was actually in the arena. And, you know, at that time, I had spent about a decade of my career in the pundits industry,

you know, expressing my opinion, saying what's wrong, and what other people should do that make this world a better place. And I was kind of fed up with myself. And then reading about those people and learning from them and realizing, hey, Yeah, we can talk to the dead and the debt talk back to us and they're calling out and saying like, hey, this great, as I said, it's like the model of all movements. Everything came out of that. You know, many suffragettes who fought for the women's right to vote. Initially, they were abolitionists, right?

So that grew out of abolitionism and out of that grew the civil rights movement. And out of that grew the environmental movement, right? There's such a clear connection between all these things. And the journey isn't finished yet. And you can read, you know, the memoirs of these people. And you can learn from how they were effective. And often they were effective in such surprising ways. They were way more pragmatic than you would expect.

They were not these like, how do you say that? Those morally pure people who keep shaming each everyone. Idealists scolds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were just laser focused on actually achieving results. I'll give you one example that really struck me. So from our perspective today, you would say, as an abolitionist, what you do is to just call out the horrors of this system, right? That's what you probably do, right?

I don't know, you create pamphlets, you talk to politicians and you say like... People just understand. Yeah, it's an information and education problem. Yeah, that's what you would think. And it was partially that. Like, there was definitely the need for quite some abolitionist propaganda. But what they also experienced is that a lot of people just didn't care all that much. a lot of politicians especially in Westminster were like yeah but like those people don't vote for us

like it's not as if the people in the colonies who are currently suffering they're not you know they don't have the right to vote so um but then what what these abolition is discovered is that about 20% of British sailors were also dying during these voyages an astounding number that was actually higher than the death rate among enslaved people um why is that? well because the enslaved people were capital investments, right? You, as a slave captain, you'd still want to sell them. But one of your employees, those white sailors, who are obviously also the perpetrators in this system,

well, if they would die along the way, you wouldn't have to pay their wages, so that would increase your profit. This was something that the abolitionist has discovered, and they wielded it as an incredibly powerful weapon. You know, they went to the prime minister, William Pitt, and they said, look, What's happening to our boys? Are you okay with that? And suddenly it became this big thing, right?

And I just love that pragmatism, right? In history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And the people and the animals who currently suffer from oppression or exploitation or whatever, they don't care about the fact that you're right, you know, or you stand on the right side of history. They want you to actually win. So the holidays are awesome. I think we can all agree on that. But, you know, not without their irresistible temptations.

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So the lesson for the active or the aspiring activist in the, that story that you just told is that awareness is an important piece in this puzzle but only to the extent that it agitates action, right? And in the context of activism, the best strategy is often to appeal to the self-interest of the opposing party rather than, you know, kind of shame them or appeal to their inner altruistic nature, right? So in that example, elucidating the fact that, you know, this is a problem for all these white sailors is something that these people were prepared to, they were able to receive that and develop empathy for that. So it's like the first step in this movement moving towards

the ultimate goal, but a very pragmatic one that then creates energy, creates change, and then you're kind of on your way. You can build upon that, right? Rather than just, you know, try to go for the whole bag at the outset. And then, be disappointed, but be proud of your failure because you held the line and you didn't like, you know, make any concessions along the way, which is unrealistic as history bears out when you really understand how all these changes occurred over time. And look, Rich, people shouldn't misunderstand me. I do not think that history teaches simple lessons like you ought to be a moderate or you

ought to be a radical. It depends. So I'll give you another example later on in the 1820s when the 60s. slave trade was already abolished, but slavery not. You had two groups in the movement. You had the so-called gradualists. Those were people like Wilberforce that I mentioned and Clarkson. They were already quite old by them.

And they were like, yeah, we're going to gradually face out slavery. But it wasn't happening. You know, the West Indian lobby was stalling. It was just going way, way too slow. And then a new generation of younger activists, mainly women, people like Elizabeth Hayrick, We're like, you know what? We're tired of what they call the slumber of the daddies. I think this is an interesting thing that often happens in these movements

is that you have a new generation that gets pretty angry at the older generation. And the old generation, yeah, feelings are really hurt. But sometimes it's exactly what we need. And indeed, they started calling for what they called immediatism. Like we want to abolish slavery right now. The moment is right now. And especially once some big revolts broke out on Jamaica, for example, in the early 1830s, I mean, that was the moment.

And I think at that time, that was the correct political analysis. Like, we shouldn't wait anymore. We should get a strike when the iron of history is hot. So let's go. So there are no, like, simple pragmatic lessons here, like, do this or do that. It really depends on the circumstances. But there's one overarching lessons that I think a lesson that's always true is be laser-focused on actually achieving the results.

You mentioned, you know, being inspired by these morally ambitious people, you know, that speaks to the status piece, like rebranding, like on the marketing aspect of this, like how do you rebrand status away from, you know, things like mansions and Ferraris and make it about meaningful impact, right? And I do think that there is, like, look, we're in this sort of turbocharged Gordon Gecko, Greed is good. kind of like experience right now, but percolating up in the younger generation is like this different relationship with culture. Like they're obviously every new generation is going to have a reactionary, you know, perspective on, on their forebears. And I do think that that younger people really think about meaning an impact in a way that, you know, I didn't when I was young. And so that speaks to sort of the hopefulness aspect of the work that you do. Like, is that, are you reading it the same way?

I've become increasingly hopeful, actually, in the last two years. So I told you about the crisis of meaning I had after being a historian and a writer for a decade. I felt this moral envy of the people who are actually in the arena. And I thought, you know what, now is the time to actually start building something. So I co-founded this organization called The School for Moral Ambition. And we like to see ourselves as the robin hoods of talent. So taking away the talent from big boring corporates and giving it to the most important causes of our time.

We started here in the US. I mean, just recently we launched our first fellowship at Harvard where there's an enormous waste of talent going on. I think about 40% of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy and finance. If you add big tech, then it's about 60%. So we started there. And it's been really encouraging to see

how excited students are. So we've got hundreds of kids applying. And we've also been, you know, testing different messages a little bit. Like one poster that did best in our focus group was something simple like you didn't fight your way into Harvard to end up in a bullshit job. Like, is this really what you want to do with your one precious life? And that hurts when they hear that. They're like, oh, yeah, fuck, yeah.

You're deferting people away from the Bermuda triangle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there are many different ways to do this. So we also have an accessible program for everyone. These are so-called more ambition circles, groups of six to eight people who come together around a program that we've created that is accessible for free. So we've got 20,000 members now for more than 100 countries who are all... How long ago did you co-found this? I mean, less than two years ago. It's been an incredible journey. Like this message is resonating so hard. Like, we feel we've really struck something in the zeitgeist that, yeah, a lot of people were waiting for something like this. And it's coming from two directions. So you have students, you're recruiting students, but you're also recruiting people who are already in the workforce and are having their disillusionment experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got started in Europe last year with so-called mid-career fellowships. So these are people who, on average, have about a decade of work experience. they are, in some cases, about to become a partner at one of those prestigious firms, but something's really nagged at them. And so then we launch our programs and we say, this is only for the best of the best of the best. Like we very deliberately make it very exclusive. prestigious. Yeah, I'm not going to lie.

So it has status attached to it. Yeah, it's super hard to get into one of our fellowships. But then if you do it, you join one of those small groups of thoughtful. committed citizens, right? You join a SWAT team of people who want to take on the system. In Europe, we chose two big causes. One was the transformation of our food system. We can talk about that later, perhaps.

We see that as one of the greatest problems of today, like the way we treat billions of animals. The other one was the fight against big tobacco, which is still probably the deadliest industry out there, like smoking kills seven, eight million people every year. It's a single large preventable causes. disease. Except for Bertrand Russell. Yeah, yeah, well, it's saved him. That's a good point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could be the patron saint of your, that arm of the organization. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But it's been so cool to see what happens when these small groups come together, what they're able to achieve, how they radicalize each other. And like our fellows, they can't ever go back again. Like we, I'll give you one example.

We had a guy who was about to become partner at McKinsey, and McKinsey had giving him a letter, you know, when he joined our fellowship, saying, like, hey, if you ever want to come back, like, you're very, very welcome because this guy's really, really good. And, like, already in the first week, they had this little ritual where they collectively burnt that letter, like, no going back. So that's one of the ways to indeed do it, to really convey that message. Like, doing good is the coolest thing you can do with your... Once you onboard these people, then what? Like, how are you, you know, from an organization point of view, how are you, or, you know, creating a situation where they can actually

make that impact? Like, what exactly are these people then doing? Yeah, so obviously it's a lot of team building. It's a lot of training. We connect them to specific causes. There are a lot of movements out there that help people to find their passion, follow their passion. We don't really believe in that. We think that follow your passion is probably the worst career advice ever invented in the history of humanity. Yeah, a lot of people have silly passions. or not the right passion, or they could have a much, much bigger impact if they would have a different passion.

So we use what I always jokingly refer to as the Gandalf Frodo model of doing good. So I'm sure you're familiar with the story. One day, Gandalf knocks on Frodo's door and says, hey, there's a pretty bad situation down south in the country. Evil Wizard has arisen, and I want you to go to Mordor

and throw this little ring. into the mountain because apparently that's, you know, going to kill him. So can you please do that? So if you analyze that story closely, what you will notice is that Gandalf didn't ask Fredo, hey Frodo, what's your passion, right? He said, no, this is like the big thing. This is at the top of the world's to do list. So that's really how we like to think.

We work with so-called prioritization researchers. They think really long and hard about what are the most sizable, solvable, and sorely neglected. That last one is really, really important. The triple S test. The triple S, yes. What are the biggest challenges out there? And that's what you're going to do. Now, later, people really become very passionate.

Don't get me wrong. Like, passion plays an enormous role. But once they start learning about these causes, right? We had a whole cohort of people starting to work on big tobacco. Initially, many of them were like, yeah, I mean, isn't that something from the 90s? Like, is that really the big challenge right now? Then we started educating them. We started teaching them about how horrible this industry.

is probably the most evil legal industry out there. You should talk to them now, right? They're super passionate. So from a psychological perspective, the premise is that passion is a byproduct of engaging yourself in, like leveraging your compassion and then taking action, like gives birth to passion that maybe didn't pre-exist that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we should be passionate on a higher level.

So you can be really passionate about living a meaningful life or doing a lot of good, right? I've got one story in the book about this guy called Rob Mater who founded, it's arguably the best charity right now in existence. So if you want to save a child's life, they have basically the best return on investment. They can save for about $5,000 one child's life, which is just an incredible thing if you think about it. It's a lot of money, but still, for a lot of people, it's... Malaria. This is malaria, indeed. So they have developed one of the most effective interventions in global health,

distributing insecticide-treated malaria bed nets. And he has built this enormous operation. Now, initially, like, he was from the corporate world. He was a really successful first consultant, then a manager. And in 2003, he was watching the BBC. He tried to switch of his television, but then press the wrong button. So purely by accident, suddenly he was looking at a documentary about this little girl called Terry who had suffered terrible burn wounds, like really terrible.

She was two years old and ended up in a fire. And he was so moved by that. He was a young father. He had young kids himself. And I mean, anyone can watch that documentary. And if you're not crying by the end of it, you should see a therapist because it's very, very moving. So he was like, I want to do something. And in the first year, he started this massive fundraiser for Terry.

They raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. and that obviously was great for her. It really transformed her life. But then in the second year, I mean, he was an entrepreneur. He was thinking like, okay, we've spent so much energy and we have one wonderful, beautiful little girl. Can we do more? So that's when he got into that Gandalfroto thing

of changing the world, and he started talking to the experts. He was like, hey, what's the biggest thing that is threatening kids today? Like, what's killing most kids in the world right now? And at that time, the single biggest killer of children was malaria. It was seven jumbo jets every single day crashing. I mean, just imagine one jumbo jet crashing full of kids. I mean, that in and of itself, it's hard to wrap your head around the tragedy.

Now, imagine it happening seven times a day. And the stopgap is just mosquito netting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a super effective intervention. Which, you know, bang for your buckwise is the best investment of philanthropic dollars. in terms of lives saved, right? And this idea, or that becomes a major example at the core of effective altruism,

you know, what Will McCaskill talks about and all the people that are behind that. So I want to ask you about your thoughts generally about philanthropy and maybe even more specifically about effective altruism because it seems like effective altruism is a good idea that fell into, ill repute by dint of some bad behavior on behalf of some of the individuals

who associated themselves with that movement, right? But the movement itself still is effectively altruistic. Yeah, yeah, as far as I can tell. There's a lot to say about this. The first thing I'll say is that a lot of people know me for going to Davos a couple of years ago and talking to billionaires and saying like,

you know, stop talking about your BS philanthropy and maybe start paying your taxes. So I'm very skeptical of a lot of philanthropy out there. I think that very often it can be a distraction or, I don't know, some kind of PR operation. It's sort of greenwashing to make you feel better about your bank account. There's a lot of that.

The second thing I'll say is that there are awesome exceptions. So we've been talking about the abolitionists, we've been talking about the suffragettes. They were not funded by the government. They didn't get nice government subsidies. They were fighting the government. They didn't have fancies corporate sponsorship deals. They were fighting these big corporations.

So how were they financed by these exceptional philanthropists? Like in New York, the early 19th century, you had Garrett Smith. I'm proud to say a Dutchman, Gerrit Smith, we would say. And he was the richest man in New York at the time. And he bankrolled pretty much the whole abolitionist movement. So you need people like that. Now, what I love about effective altruism, a few things. One thing that I really like is if you go to an effective altruism conference and you talk to people, you meet a lot of people who are for real, who are morally serious, who are donating a very significant amount of their money, you know, often at least 10%, maybe 20, 30, 40%.

You will meet quite a few people who have donated their kidneys to random strangers because they're like, hey, that's a relatively small sacrifice for me, but I can change someone else's life. I think that's just impressive and I think that needs to be and deserves to be celebrated when people really have that skin in the game I'm a guy who comes from the left side of the political spectrum and what I've seen a lot there

is people shouting, change the system abolished capitalism, destroyed a patriarchy but they're not really doing all that much themselves. So I always admire it when people practice what they preach. There were a few things that I didn't really like about effective altruism. I think parts of the movement

were really grounded in guilt there's this famous thought experiment from the philosopher Peter Singer that I'm sure you're familiar with the shallow pond yeah yeah so for those who don't know it you walk by a shallow pond and a kid is drowning

a toddler two years old would you save the kit obviously you would now what would you do if you're wearing your very fancy shoes you know your very expensive fancy shoes would you still save the kit even though you would ruin your shoes Most people would say, yes, we'd definitely do it.

But then if you're willing to make, you know, a financial sacrifice to save a kid, then why don't you donate, you know, much more money to these highly effective charities? Because that's the world we live in. Maybe it's not as visceral, you know, or as visible as the shallow pond example, but they're basically shallow ponds everywhere. And, you know, we mostly walk by them, all those drowning kids. So it's a powerful thought experiment, but my feeling, are about it that it feels like a form of moral blackmail. It's like now I'm suddenly

supposed to feel guilty about all the suffering in the world. And that's just not the kind of life I want to live. The other ripple in that is proximity, right? Like if it's your child, like it doesn't matter what you're wearing or if it's your neighbor's child. But if it's some stranger, then you're then doing a different kind of mental calculus, you know, about, you know, wading into the pond, which is sort of an ethical glitch in the human, you know, kind of framework, I suppose. But it is holding us hostage to guilt and shame. And yet at the same time, you're, you're, you're, you're, you said earlier, like, it's okay, you know, we should, we should, we should, we should use shame from time to time. A little bit. And, you know, guilt, uh, can be, you know, I think you

used 20% as a rule. Like, it's okay if like 20% of your motivation is inspired by some degree of guilt. Yeah, but 80% should be enthusiasm in my view. So that's one thing. The other thing that I didn't really like about EA is that they had this idea of earning to give. So they were convincing a lot of young people. Well, that was at the core of what led to the sort of demise of the public reputation of it. Yeah, probably. Yeah. So they were convincing. We should let us make as much, We'll make, we're going to make all this money and we're going to give it away. So you should like, you know, clear the runway to allow us to do that. Yeah, yeah.

And then the most famous example was obviously Sandbegma Freed, yeah. Who founded FDX and turned out to be a scammer. Yeah, so that's pretty terrible. On the other hand, as I said, like it's always easy to criticize those people who actually try something. And as someone who's building something myself, like capital matters, money matters. Like, there's this hilarious quote from Margaret Thatcher who said that the Good Samaritan didn't just have good intentions. He also had money. And that's definitely what we need in the fight against some of these great challenges that we face.

So it became very fashionable two, three years ago to Dunk on EA. I'm glad that it has become less fashionable, maybe also because, you know, the world is now a much darker place. And people have different priorities now. But the core of your message is less about philanthropy. It's not about like, okay, where are you putting your dollars? It's like where are you pulling up your sleeves and actually getting involved and doing things, right? Can I say one other thing about it, Rich? So I spoke about the British abolitionist movement, right, and about the coalition between the Quakers and the evangelicals.

So I sometimes like to think that these effect of altruists are a little bit like the Quakers. You know, they're really weird. They have very strong fundamental philosophical beliefs about inequality. They are really willing to practice what they preach. And the Quakers were just like that. They were very weird. But that's also what, you know, made them stand on the right side of history. They were the first ones to allow women to speak to the congregation, which was seen as scandalous at the time.

But obviously now, we think that's pretty cool that they did that. But the Quakers for a long time were not really effective, or at least they were not really able to break through because people looked at them and were like, yeah, you're just too weird. The movement, the Abolitions Movement, only really took off once the Quakers started working together with the Evangelicals. And the evangelicals were much more mainstream. Yeah, there were a much larger movement as well. So that's sometimes what I think is that what the evangelicals were for the Quakers. That's what we need right now for the effect of altruists.

I guess that's what we're trying to build at the School for Moral Ambition, a much broader and more mainstream movement of people who still want to push for the moral maximum. The Quakers were also the first organized group to speak to the sentience of animals from a perspective of compassion, right? Which brings us to our current food system. And I think I'm interested in exploring that as a specific kind of test case. of everything that you stand for and what the school is all about. Because in many ways, factory farming and our relationship to farmed animals and our food system is, to some degree or another, an analogous situation to the abolitionist movement that you described previously. So talk a little bit about where your heads at in terms of our food system now.

and the ways in which you aspire to change it. So here's one of the most fascinating questions I think we can ask, which is how will the historians of the future look back at us? Like for us, it's easy to look back on, say, the ancient Romans and be horrified by some of the things they did, right? The gladiator fights throwing naked women before the lions, the slavery. And then we look back and we say to ourselves, well, luckily we are so civilized, right?

We are the moral ones. The interesting thing is that every civilization throughout history has said that about himself. So the Romans also thought that. They were like, we're super civilized. We don't sacrifice kids anymore. Like these barbarians, they sacrifice children for the gods. Like, we don't do that.

We're super moral. And then, yeah, you start wondering, like, what will the historians of the 22nd century say about us? Like, are there some things we do today that may be considered more catastrophes by our great-great-grandchildren. And it's obviously a really hard question to answer. It's not like we have a time machine or anything like that.

But I think we have certain clues. One clue we have is that we could look at these moral pioneers of the past and think, like, did they have other ideas? Or is there a certain mechanism behind their thinking? What really struck me is that so many of these abolitionists also deeply, deeply cared about animal rights. So the very first abolitionist in the United States was this fascinating character called Benjamin Lay.

He was a dwarf. He lived in a cave near Philadelphia. And he was probably the first vegan in the country. The word vegan didn't exist back then, but he was really against animal exploitation. Now, if you look at the great intellectual in the abolitionist movement, who, you know, did most of the research,

who supplied most of the arguments that the abolitionists used. That was a guy called Anthony Benezay. He was also a vegetarian, which was, I mean, that was a very strange thing to be at the time. But for them, it was a logical thing. Like, once you start expanding the moral circle, right? You recognize the divine light in each and every one of us.

Then it's kind of like, why stop at the boundary of humanity, right? Why not include animals? Because in so many ways they're so similar. to us. So that was one really fascinating clue for me. And what happened is that I think it was in 2017. I was reading this book that everyone was reading at the time, you know, by Yvonneau Harari, the brilliant Israeli historian, Sapiens. And for people who have read that book, they'll recognize that. I mean, it's a big book about human history and it doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever. It just, you know, it talks about

Jenghis Khan, it talks about the Nazis, and you know, Harari is not the kind of guy who's, you know, the moralizing preacher saying like, oh, that was bad and that was bad. But then at the very end of the book, he discusses factory farming. And he makes this offhand comment saying, yeah, that's probably the greatest moral atrocity in all of human history, responsible for more suffering than all wars combined. And then he included some of the numbers

that just blew me away completely. You know, I was a pretty fanatic carnivore up until that point, and I had no idea the size, the enormity of the suffering here. So that was a big moment for me when I started thinking like, hey, maybe this, if you are so morally ambitious, then maybe this is one of the great challenges to focus on. And that book changed your personal relationship with food? Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny actually. It was a few weeks before Christmas. And my wife and I were buying a Christmas tree in Utrecht at Yon Skarkov, which is this really lovely square in the middle of Utrecht. It was a little bit to the south of Amsterdam. It was our annual tradition. We buy the Christmas tree together, and we were carrying it back home. And she was in front and I was in the back.

And I made this offhand comment saying, you know, I've decided to become a vegetarian. And she got so angry. What are you doing just before Christmas? But, yeah, it didn't take long for her to go veggie as well. Just because the arguments are so compelling. Let's go over some of the numbers here. We slaughter 80 billion animals every single year.

If you compare that to the number of humans that live since the dawn of humanity, I mean, that's $117 billion. So it takes us just a year and a half to slaughter as many animals in one year. Now, let's take a different comparison. This is the one that Harari used that really blew me away. You have two scales, and on one scale, you put all the wild animals that currently walk on this earth. All the animals that were familiar with from the David Attenborough movies and documentaries, right? The giraffies, the elephants, the lions, you name it.

They're all over here. Collectively, they would weigh about 100 million tons. now on the other side we have all the farmed animals so that let's let's say just three animals in particular we've got the chickens we've got the pigs and we've got the cows collectively they weigh seven times as much 700 million tons so when we talk about animals in this world today I mean 100 million 700 million we're mostly talking about just a few species that are exploited on just at this enormous scale every single year so that that was one thing thing that I hadn't realized before, just how enormous this is.

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to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code ritual. It's unquestionably an ethical abomination. The human mind will go to great lengths to perform all manner of mental gymnastics to rationalize this and compartmentalize it as a necessity to survive. And it doesn't matter how many people in the world. are thriving on a plant-based diet, there will be a battery of arguments about why they're either the exception or they're lying or some reason why

that example doesn't apply to them. And I think fundamentally, that gets at the inner compassion within every human being because nobody really wants to confront the fact that they are actively engaged in this atrocity. That it's so, violates our belief in our own compassion that we can't accept the reality of it.

And so we have to come up with some kind of rubric that allows us to get up in the morning and feel like we're good people. Yeah. So I'm a guy who likes to debate, right? And I get invited for a lot of debates, on economics, on raising taxes on the rich, for example. And when journalists or editors invite me for something like that, they never have any issue with finding an opponent.

When it's about taxation, for example, it's very easy for them to find someone on the other side of the political spectrum who's like, no, that will ruin the economy. And then we have a good debate, right? But when it's about factory farming, I sometimes get these calls from journalists. We're like, hey, Roger, we've seen this piece by you

on factory farming. We would love to do a debate on television. And I'm like, well, good luck finding someone who wants to debate me on that. And they're like, no, we're going to fight someone. And then a few days later, they're like, yeah, no one wants to debate. Because nobody is in favor of this.

No. It is the ultimate, you know, It's the ultimate bipartisan issue, right? And makes it fertile ground for coalition building. This is a problem that is massive but also solvable because public perception and the reality of it is so offensive to our moral sensibility. Still, I think we have to dig in a little bit and talk about some of the details here. Because if I think back, you know, to 2017, when I first looked at those numbers and I started doing more research, it was a little bit like a door had opened. in my mind and it was suddenly open to learning more, I was just shocked that there are so many

things about the way our meat is produced that I did not know. Like just some basic facts. I feel really silly about it now, but like the first time I realized, oh wait, pigs, for example, like pigs never go outside, right? So 99% of all pigs are inside their whole life. Now, how is that possible, right? If you think about it, that's kind of weird. Like normally, if you would put a lot of humans inside their whole life. At some point, you know, they would get sick, you don't have vitamin D, they die. But then I started learning about this, well, in a way you could say amazing technological system called factory farming, which is a very recent invention.

I'll talk you through some of the great innovation. So in the 1920s, they for the first time discovered vitamin D. So now, for the first time, they could put hundreds or thousands of tens of thousands of animals inside and just give them the supplements and they wouldn't get sick because of vitamin D deficiency. In the 30s, they discovered antibiotics, which is obviously also very necessary

because if you just put a lot of animals together and there's an infection disease, boom, everyone dies. But if you just, you know, give them antibiotics all the time, justice prevention, not just whether they get sick, but it's in their feet all the time. Well, another problem solved. Then in the 40s, they started hacking the genetics of these animals. So I had never realized that what we eat today, like broiler chickens are a good example.

There are these highly advanced technological innovations. A little bit like how the tobacco industry created this extraordinary innovation called the cigarette that is the most addictive product in the history of humanity. A huge amount of R&D went into that. But the same is true for poultry. So there are two companies. in the world right now. Cop Ventras in Avijagan

that produce about 90% of all the broilers in the world. So that's just two species. One is called the COP 500, TM, and the other one is the Ross 3008. So if anywhere on the world, you're eating a chicken sandwich right now, you're probably eating one of those chickens.

And they have been bred relentlessly to be as productive as possible. and if you look at some of the images of chickens in the 1950s like they were so small they were so thin and now there are just huge Frankenstein chickens you know that grow incredibly quickly if a human baby would grow as quickly like in two months it would weigh what is it 150 200 kilograms um so it's just an enormous feat of innovation the the obviously incredibly sad aspect of this is that While they were optimizing for growth, they were also optimizing for suffering. So these chickens live a life of relentless torture, basically.

There was one recent Danish study in which they found out that pretty much all these animals become lame and cripple. There was a study in the late 90s where they had like two sources of food, food without painkiller, and then food with pain killer. And they discovered that if you give them the opportunity, these chickens want the painkiller all the time. Like, they're always in pain. And I feel so silly about it now because these are really very basic facts.

And I could go on about, you know, pigs and gestation grates and how we treat mother pigs. But I would really encourage people still to, you know, open that little door in their heart or in their brain or wherever it is and just do some really basic research. Because for me, it was all new, actually. I'd been pushing it away.

Well, like the tobacco industry, these food conglomerates put a premium on ensuring a lack of transparency. Like there's a concerted effort to prevent you from understanding what's actually going on. And despite their best efforts to drape it with terminology, like, you know, like free range and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, like painting little natural farms on the packaging and the like, there's nothing natural about it, right? And, you know, in the context of coalition building around this and pragmatism for somebody who doesn't, who lacks that understanding or isn't naturally inclined to, you know, be compassionate about this, the self-interest piece is, listen, you're eating these, this food that you think is natural and good for you. and it's, you know, it's injected with all these, you know, all this, all these antibiotics and, you know, they're all hormone dysregulated and, like, they're, like, you know, basically walking around in their own feces, and, you know, there's just all, there's any number of reasons

why, like, you should be concerned about your personal health with respect to your consumption of this, right? And that, you know, creates a beginning place to build on. Yeah. We really got to build a broad, massive coalition. just like the abolitionists did, just like the suffragettes did. These were movements of people who very often disagreed with one another on many, many things. But they did agree on that one thing, that the status quo is just not okay, and that that needs to change.

So some people can come into this movement for health reasons. They're like, hey, I'm interested in exploring a plant-based diet because I think that might be healthier. Other people may be like, oh, it's more about food security. or it's about economics, like we want to be the technological powerhouse, and this seems like a very promising area of innovation. Other people may come in for climate reasons, right? Because food is 20% of emissions. 80% of all arable land is used for animal husbandry, right?

That's all factory farming, basically. People love to dunk on vegans for consuming too much soy. But actually, it's mostly... All the soy goes to feed. It goes to defeat, yeah, indeed. So that is a massive problem. It's the main cause of deforestation. There are many, many reasons to care about this issue.

There's national security issues. There's economic reasons. We're subsidizing all of this, right? So from an economic stability perspective, there's many, many on-ramps, which I think positions this issue as relatively unique because there's many ways to appeal to people's sensibilities to get them engaged with it. But here's one big thing we learned. So the modern animal welfare movement started in the 1970s, and a lot of activists thought

that we would only have to, well, first educate people and then convince them to go vegan. I mean, that's basically been the main strategy for many, many years now. It's just relentlessly shouting, go vegan, go vegan, go vegan. And shaming people. And shaming people quite a bit as well. And the results have been pretty underwhelming. So the number of vegetarians and vegans, sometimes it goes up a bit. Now it seems to be going down a bit again.

It just doesn't seem to be very effective. Now, as a historian, when I look at that, I am really reminded of abolitionism in America in the 19th century, and I see the same mistakes that people make. So this is a really interesting story. Again, to compare the British and the U.S. abolitionist movement, The British movement, as I said, was super successful. At some point, they did have a boycott, but it was a very simple boycott. They said, you know what?

Sugar and tea. That's not okay. Let's boycott sugar and tea. That was super charismatic, obviously, because the British and their tea, that's a thing. And so they were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of people who refused to put sugar in their tea. Now, the slaveholders didn't really care about that at all. Actually, the economic effects were very limited, or at least you couldn't witness them in the data. But it was a great way to recruit people into the movement.

Now, what U.S. abolitionists did a few decades later is they were way more radical. They did the same thing as what vegans do today. They say, like, okay, no more products that are in any way involved with slavery. This was called the Free Produce Movement. They had their own shops that sold like all kinds of things from food to umbrellas, and all the products in those shops didn't have anything to do, or at least pretended that they didn't have anything to do with slavery. This movement was a total, total failure.

It was one of the reasons why evolutionists became so unpopular in the U.S. Because all these products were very low quality. They were very expensive. Like the sacrifice was just way too big. And it was mainly, yeah, people who were very full of themselves, like these morally pure social justice warriors who got along with it. And that just did not make doing good prestigious. And I think there's a big lesson to learn here. He became like a weirdo Quaker type person.

Yeah, yeah. And it didn't take up. So I think we're now at a really hopeful movement, actually, in the animal rights movement where a lot of the best activists and a lot of the best organizations are realizing that, hey, what we did in the past didn't work. I mean, it's still great if people want to change their diet. That's wonderful. And we got to educate people.

But we got to build a really broad movement. And we've got to draw in a lot more people. And if we say you're only allowed into the movement. if you, you know, check every product for, oh, is there a little bit of milk powder in here, then this is not going to work. Or, you know, plant-based isn't vegan and, like, all these, like, arbitrary distinctions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, actually, people who eat meat should be welcomed into the movement, in my view,

because there are a lot of people who, for multiple reasons, maybe they find it hard to stop eating meat, or maybe for their health, there are sometimes legitimate reasons. I want them in the movement as well. Of course. If you're a hunter who just can't abide by factor, refarming, there shouldn't be a bar to you participating in this movement. Like, all comers should be welcome, and all forms of activism are necessary. Like, sometimes somebody's very

affected by the PETA person who throws, you know, fake blood on somebody's fur coat. You know, it's like, it doesn't work for me, but like, I'm sure some people have been, you know, kind of moved by that. But, you know, other people are going to be impacted in, you know, other different ways. And so I think we need all, it's not like this is bad and this is good. I think all voices are necessary, but the broadest coalition possible is really the message here, right?

Yeah. Yeah, brought coalition and again, focus on what actually works. So in this country, in the U.S., there's been some really great progress in putting pressure on big corporations, for example. I always like to call this the Jenghis Khan method of changing the world. So you're probably familiar with how Jenghis Khan conquered.

Like he went to one city and he said, okay, you can surrender. Do you want that? Yes or no? And then sometimes people said no. And then he raised the whole city. And then he went to the next city and said, hey, you see what I did over there? Do you want to surrender? Yes or no? And that's what somebody, the activists do.

They go to one corporation and they say like, hey, we're going to raise hell if you do not get your poultry out of cages, for example. Like there have been a lot of success in K3 eggs pledges, which is like a massive change. I mean, obviously it's not like the vegan perfect paradise, yeah. But there's, I think, a lot of fairly low-hanging fruit that would reduce the amount of suffering immensely. And again, if we think, sorry, I'm the historian, so I always go back to the examples of the past. Like, the British abolitionist had a big debate in 1787. Like, should we call our society the society for the abolitionists? of the slave trade or the society for the abolition of slavery.

And it was only the Groundsville Sharp, the theologian, who said, oh, it's got to be the abolition of slavery, right? He was the radical one. But then the entrepreneurs, all of them, the 10 entrepreneurs in that society, they said, look, that's just not going to work. We need to be more pragmatic here. If we're going to say abolish slavery outright right now, that's just completely going to backfire on Westminster.

like private property is absolutely holy in this empire that is something for later first we put pressure on the slave trade itself because if we abolish the slave trade then the flow of enslaved people to the colony stop and that will force slaveholders to treat their enslaved people better because and this was the dark dark reality

is that there was a continuous inflow of enslaved people necessary because so many people were dying that's how horrible the system was. Now, again, what I admire here is the pragmatism, just that focus on actually getting things done. And then obviously, after the slave trade was abolished, it was about, okay, what's the next step?

And I think we ought to think about the movement against factory farming in the same way. If you can achieve your goals in your own lifetime, then I think you're not thinking big enough. And this is a movement that's way bigger than us. I honestly think that when I'm on my, deathbed factory farming might still be with us. I really hope not, but currently it's only growing. The modern food system parallel to the historic example that you just provided would be not going

to ConAgra or Tyson and saying, you need to stop doing what you're doing, see how bad it is, and just them like saying, oh my goodness, you're right and stopping. It's never going to happen, right? So you have to appeal to their self-interest. So an example of that would be like, listen, you know, tastes are changing or, you know, people really don't like the way that you're raising food. And if you want to survive as a corporation, you're going to have to diversify, you know, your investment. And you're going to have to start investing in these alternative proteins or turning these farms, you know, that have been monocroped forever into regenerative farms that can produce a diversity of foods that, you know, over time in the long run, will benefit your corporate. Like some version of that that they can hear, right,

and can receive because they can see a path forward, right? So that's the pragmatic kind of approach to this. It's not boycotting McDonald's. It's sitting down with the CEO of McDonald's and discussing an alternative future for this corporation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my favorite animal rights activists in this country is a woman called Leo Gretz.

I think you know her as well. Yeah, she's been on the show. Yeah, of mercy for animals. And I, again, I see her as a modern-day Thomas Clarkson, like very pragmatic. Like, Thomas Clarkson was not just someone who advocated against the slave trade, but he also advocated for sailors, for these white sailors who were, in his view, being abused. And I think that Leah is doing something similar. It's like she cares deeply, very deeply about animal suffering.

But she also realizes that in the current system, it's not just the animals who are being. exploited. It's also the farmers. So this is one of the other great innovations, you know, after vitamin D, after antibiotics, after, you know, the genetics, genetic innovation. There was also a market innovation. So in the U.S., we've seen what they call the vertical integration of the whole system. Basically, all these farmers are indentured servants. They have massive loans, even if they would want to quit their job. They find it very hard. There's this guy called Greg Watts, who works together with Leah. He's a former poultry farmer.

And yeah, these people have just been seduced by these big corporations to take on these massive loans with big promises of like how much money you're going to make. But there's a huge amount of farmers in this country who live below the poverty line, right? There's a very high suicide rate among farmers. So I think they deserve slaughterhouse workers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pastoral notion of all of this that, you know, seems to still proliferate is a complete myth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I recently became a dad and just, you know, reading these books about farms to my kids, it's just a surreal experience. It's like the kind of propaganda. Like, what we read in those books has absolutely nothing to do with the way our food is actually produced. The ultimate pragmatist in this world, though, I think is Bruce Friedrich. And he's doing what you talk about, which is. you know leveraging entrepreneurship um to build a better future uh food system for everybody and he doesn't get caught up in ideology it's very like um solutions oriented yeah yeah and i love that

so we work actually with the good food institute that he founded in in europe um we have many fellows that work on the food transition and we want to get started in the u.s as well and one aspect to that is indeed technological innovation. If you look at how we are tackling climate change, it has been with an enormous amount of R&D. In my book, I talk about the story of solar energy, which is now the cheapest energy source in all of human history. Now, that didn't come out of nothing. There is a story of very morally ambitious people behind that. Initially, the technology was invented in the US, you know, at Bell Labs, but then nothing really was done with it. Carter, put solar panels on the White House, but they were removed by Reagan.

It was a colossal political miscalculation. They called it solar socialism or something like that. It has been really unfortunate that that became politicized in that way. And then it took until the 90s for this guy called Hans Josefell, who's an amazing politician-slash-buret. If you look at a photo of him, you're not like, okay, this is one of the great heroes of the 20th century. But he is. He convinced the German government to spend an enormous amount of money on subsidizing. solar energy. So Germany spent about 200 billion euros on it, which is more than half of all

investment, basically. And then the Chinese developed this enormous industry, actually producing all these solar panels. And the cost just kept going down, down, down, down. And as I said, now it's the cheapest source of energy. And it's one of our most important tools that we have in a fight against climate change. And I think that we need similar things in the food system. Right? The system as we have it right now is just utterly crazy. It's exploiting animals on a massive scale. It's exploiting people on a massive scale. It's wrecking the environment. It's responsible for most deforestation. And the vast majority of people, when they hear about it, they're against it. So this is a completely bipartisan issue. It's just that somehow we find it really hard to talk about it because we've maneuvered ourselves into a space where, yeah, the conversation is often dominated by these purists. And we've got to be much more pragmatic and say, like, okay, how are we actually going to work together,

build the companies, the all kinds of initiatives that bring us forward. And the responsibility can't rest on the shoulders of the average citizen or consumer to make personal choices differently, right? Like, until we change the environment, it's a lot to ask. the average person, that it's all on them to make a different choice.

And I think this is where technology or the rapid advancement of all these technological breakthroughs actually works at cross-purposes with how the average consumer kind of interfaces with this problem, because it does contribute to this sense of, A, like, well, first there's the learned helplessness. It's such a big problem. I can't do anything about it, so I'm just going to do whatever I'm going to do, because it won't make a difference anyway. But on top of that, there is this sense, well, all these people are investing in this tech.

Like, well, there'll be some breakthrough and it'll get solved. And so I'm absolved of having to actually do anything about it because these other people who are focused on it will just do it for me. I think it's also important to emphasize that it would be a mistake to think that, you know, technology alone is going to solve this. So I'm excited about some of the innovation, you know, I always when I'm in the U.S., I love, eating a lot of impossible burgers because like the idiots in Europe have banned them because there's like some genetic modification going on there that is entirely okay for your health. I mean, I think it didn't, it didn't help the movement that some of these plant-based foods were overly processed.

And I think people within the movement trying to say otherwise was a, you know, basically ended up hurting the credibility. of the movement, right? It's just like, yeah, these are not like fruits and vegetables, like there's some processing going on here. And you can measure them up against, you know, poultry, beef and pork, and perhaps they come out on the positive side of that. And there's a good reason for, you know, environmentally why, you know, you should think about these products. But I think there was a, maybe a lack of transparency or just honesty about this that was weaponized by vested interests and, you know, lobbying efforts to turn public opinion against these things. And so what we've seen, because I've been in this for a long time, right?

What we've seen is a shift away, like five years ago, six years ago, like it was all about plant-based, like this was on the rise. People were very enthusiastic about it and very engaged with it. Plant-based and vegan restaurants are popping up all over the place, like fast food chain plant-based restaurants were proliferating across America, and there was a lot of enthusiasm around this, and then the tide shifted. It kind of coincided with a political shift. These things were one and the same, and it also conjures our relationship with masculinity, and it gets very complicated in that regard.

But the point being that all this enthusiasm evaporated, and it became very much about a meat-centric approach to the diet and all this plant-based stuff is nonsense and a lot of vegan restaurants closed and the plant-based section of the average grocery store which was expanding has now contracted and we're in a very different moment with this and I think it's a it's an opportunity for the leaders of this movement to really reflect upon how we got to this place yeah Because, to your point, there is massive consensus that factory farming is an ill, and we can start there without being purest about the rest of it. Because if we can solve that, we're solving the vast majority of this problem in terms of crafting this wildly better world that you talk about. And there is still such low-hanging fruit.

I'll give you one example. So in Europe, we've made massive progress in the fight against the killing of male chicks. again, this is something that I didn't know not that long ago and I was absolutely horrified by to discover that but yeah, with laying hands obviously produce X but then

yeah, their brothers don't produce X so what the industry does is you know just shortly after they're born they're all putting either into the grinder or suffocated people can look this up on YouTube like initially when I first saw this I was like

this must be AI or something like this must be unreal but that's just what happens 8 billion milk chips are yeah it's all a horrendous nightmare you know the separation of calves from their money so like the all of it

but just the scale of it is enormous but here we've made a lot of progress because now we have new technology it's called enovo sexing and they can see already in the egg like is this a female chick or a milk chick and so they can

make sure that the milk checks don't get are not born and in Europe this has quickly become the standard in the US now it's it's becoming more and more common. But this is like just super low-hink-thew.

It's very cheap. It's very incremental progress. And it's even good for the industry because the industry has to spend less money on killing all these chicks, right? And that's just where we're at. Is that also with like cage-free eggs, for example, like you pay, what is it?

Like maybe a few cents extra on a whole box of eggs. Like pretty much everyone would be willing to make that sacrifice. But like this industry is so relentlessly profit-driven. Like they've squeezed every little bit of efficiency out of these animals. And then, yeah, when we don't pay attention, then the skill of the suffering just gets immense.

But that's also, as I said, it's a reason for hope because if you have really talented, pragmatic people with some very good ideas like Leo Garchess, like Bruce Friedrich, the people we've been talking about, yeah, they can achieve tremendous things. So for the person who's listening or watching who feels inspired and, would like to be a little bit more morally ambitious in their life.

Like, and this issue speaks to them, is there, is there an on-ramp for somebody like that to get involved without having to apply for a prestigious fellowship? Yeah, yeah. So we are actually building that right now, both in Europe and in the U.S. We have, as I said, our moral ambition circles that are accessible for each and everyone. So you can go to moralambition.org, start your own group. And many of those groups are focused on tackling this issue. But we also have our fellowships in Europe, and we want to get started in the U.S. as well.

So we're now fundraising, actually, to help those really talented people here in this country to devote their career to this issue as well. I think very often we need that little nudge, right? We need to find our own little, how do you say that? I'm always inclined to use the word cult, like your hardcore group of do-gooters who are like, yes, let's take this on. So, yeah, everyone's very welcome to join us in that fight. were to offer to contribute some money towards this, is that possible for me to do? That would be amazing, Rich. Yeah.

That would be amazing. It's the philanthropy piece, though. You know, it's like, I don't know how morally ambitious it is, but it is something that I would like to do and can do. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a fundraiser going on right now at moralambition.org slash food. And, yeah, I mean, if you, perhaps we could go to.

match where we match foundations up until we've got one other foundation that's willing to chip in as well so if you can get to say a hundred thousand dollars and then we match the donations then yeah what we will do is to use that money to yeah to recruit some really really talents of people to devote their career to this issue because if there's there's basically two things that we lack here it's obviously capital but it's also the talent um right that's what we need in it right now um all right so if i contribute $25,000, you'll match that. I'll do $25, and we've got another donor that's willing to do 50, so that's up to 100. Okay.

How does that sound? Well, that's a done deal. Okay. And then if people are listening to this and feel inspired to contribute as well, they can do that. Yeah, yeah. So we've got this $100K match. That's you, me, the other foundation that has agreed to work with us. And then, yeah, for every dollar, you know that it's going to be doubled by us.

So in the best scenario, we have 200K or even more. And then we're really able to launch at least one fellowship here in the US where we're really going to recruit some of the most talented people with the most grit we can find to devote their career, their life to this issue. And I'll tell you, there are a lot of people out there. So we already flaunted the idea. We had 2,000 people already filling in an expression of interest for them. We have about 30 host organizations that are.

excited to host these people. So the energy is already there. I'll give you one other example. We recently started at Harvard, you know, our Moral Ambition University Fellowship. What was so encouraging is when we were talking to these young students, this was the issue they were most interested about. Not just climate change in general, not poverty in general. They were again and again, they wanted to talk to us about food and changing the food system. They're like, yes, this is one of the things that I want to devote my life to. Because indeed, it is, It's not just about doing good. It's about meaning as well.

There is something really exciting about looking at a very, very high mountain and thinking, huh, can I climb that one? As a non-American who spends a lot of time in America and is, you know, at all these universities and you're meeting and talking to all different kinds of people, and being a historian, it almost gives you this, you know, Alexander de Tocqueville kind of perspective on the America experiment. And I'm curious about that perspective, because from my perspective, there's no place like the United States when it comes to ambition and entrepreneurialism and that sense of possibility, right? This is where you come to build things. And people encourage you to do that and celebrate that spirit.

But it's also this place where my feeling is our very precious relationship with, quote, unquote, liberty, like our personal liberties feels a little out of balance in comparison to where I feel like it should be, which is that our liberty is only available as a function of our collective responsibility to each other. And so we hear a lot about, I've banged on about this on the podcast before. So forgive me if you're listening or watching and you've heard me give this speech in the past. But essentially, we only get those liberties because we share this collective responsibility. And we don't really talk a lot about the responsibility piece, but we spend a lot of time talking about like our liberty to do what we want to do whenever we want to do it, you know, in an unbridled way. Right. And so how do you look at all of that? and make sense of it.

So first I got to say, as someone who recently lived a year in Brooklyn, as an immigrant, I love this country. I love the ambition, the entrepreneurialism. It was really a breath of fresh air. I'm a Dutch patriot as well. There's so much to love about my own country, maybe the Dutch directness in particular. Like we say what we mean and vice versa. But, yeah, it's just the ambitrust.

the willingness to think big. I remember being here, you know, shortly after I arrived and there was one of our U.S. board members organized this little dinner for me in Manhattan and she had, you know, basically recruited who is who, you know, some really successful entrepreneurs, some really successful people, media, to give me advice. And if I would have done that in the Netherlands, like the vast majority of people would have said, like, hey, you're trying to build this global movement to take on the greatest challenges we face. I, uh, I, uh, Well, that's probably not going to work. But here in New York was like, yeah, of course that's going to work. Like, tell us how we can help. And that's really what you need if you're young and ambitious and you want to build something. I think that if you look at American history, there's this continuous fight between two notions of what liberty is. There is indeed the shallow view of freedom that is very common today, which is just the freedom of Lee Milo. Let me do whatever I want.

You know, let me just follow my own passion. and fulfill my own desire. It's the Gordon Gecko, greed is good kind of freedom. And I wouldn't say that that is entirely bad. I think you need a decent amount of that in a healthy, liberal society. But I think we've moved way too far in that direction. And now we've got to go back to an older, more deeper conception of what freedom is actually like. And that's the freedom to bind yourself.

That's the freedom to make sacrifices. I think a simple example here is what we do when we get married. So when I got married, I saw that as one of the greatest expressions of freedom in my life. Like here I stand. I voluntarily make the commitment to someone I love deeply. And I say, you know, I am going to be faithful to you and I'm going to bind myself in a way. But that's what I want to do. Like that's the kind of man I want to be.

That could also be something that we do in our work, right? I've made this pledge in a way to my co-founders where I said, this is not some kind of project that I'm going to do for three or six or 12 months. I'm going to spend my life building this organization, building this movement. It's going to be really hard. We're going to have really hard moments. But I make the promise now that we're going to keep going. And for me, that's a deeper form of freedom that you see reflected in some of the greatest periods in American history.

So today, we often say that we're living through the second gilded age, right? The first Gilded Age was the late 19th century, and indeed the similarities are so striking. There's a fantastic book by Robert Putnam about this, and in that book, he pulls a great trick where he, you know, gives a whole description about, you know, the corruption, the immorality of elites, you know, people dodging their taxes, you know, basically the decadence of that time. And you think, like, he's talking about today, right? He's talking about 2025. And then he's like, no, this is actually the late 19th century that I'm talking about. You also had these big robber barrens, you know, that made massive amounts of money on their monopolies.

Back then, it was trains. Today, it's AI. But again, the similarities are striking. Yeah, I mean, what we're experiencing now is not new. Yeah, yeah. So that was also the shallow conception of freedom that was dominating in the U.S. But that, what came after that was the progressive era, led by people like Louis Brandies, the People's Lawyer, who ended up on the Supreme Court. But most famously, one of my great heroes in history, Theodore Roosevelt, the historian. The president who set things like, and I'm paraphrasing here, to complain about a problem and not propose a solution, that's called whining. He has this famous quote about, it's not the critic who counts, but it's the man in the arena, you know, the person who actually tries, who falls down and stands up again, who just keeps going and who's not one of those whiners who always stands on the sidelines, but never, you know, can say, like, I actually tried, I actually did something.

And America's original conservationist. Yeah, yeah. And the Boy Scouts got started in the early 20th century also as a reaction to that era of decadence. It's so interesting. The similarities are everywhere. And I feel that we're now at a crossroads where we can go further down this really dark path. And I think it could be way darker than it is right now. I think we can really move into an authoritarian era.

I've spent quite some time studying revolutions like the Russian Revolution What you see when you study 1917 is not people who are super excited about the communists taking over No, not at all People thought Lenin was an idiot They really didn't like him

But they were just utterly apathetic They were like, you know We hate the Tsar, we hate the royal family We hate the incompetent liberals who replaced And we hate everyone You know what, we'll plug out And sure, Lenin, you take over, you won't last for six weeks either, but six weeks became 70 years. And I really worry that that could happen in the U.S. as well.

Like, people are increasingly apathetic. And, yeah. And people weren't as distracted then as they are now also. We've got like big tech is the new big alcohol industry, basically. So the problems are real and as are the threats. And yet you're able to. hold on to hopefulness. Well, and that's like, history gives me hope here.

Because after the Gilded Age, we got the progressive era. So it was a double movement. It was a bottom-up movement of people joining unions, political parties, saying enough is enough. But it was also a top-down movement of elites who were like, hey, let's not just check our privilege. Let's use it to make a massive difference. And I think that's what we desperately need right now. Like, across the West, we have been betrayed. by elites from the left to the right.

I mean, that's the one thing that, in my view, Maga and Trump is absolutely correct about is that we've been betrayed on a pretty massive skill by people who should have known better. And what we now need is what I'd like to call a kind of skin in the game elite. Like people who don't just whine and moan, but they'll actually practice what they preach.

And instead of just pointing fingers, they're like, okay, this is the problem, and this is what I'm doing. Now, do you want to join me? I have to imagine that there is this hunger, there is this desire to get plugged in to something that can, you know, lead me in that direction. You know what I mean? And I think one of the missing pieces here or what makes solving this problem of taking moral ambition and putting it into action is the fact that we don't have the third spaces that we used to have. It's like people just, they go to work and they go home. There's no, you know, the religious institutions are on the decline and after school programs and YMCA's and boys clubs or wherever people gathered when they weren't working and they weren't at home has sort of devolved, right?

It isn't what it, so, and those were, those are kind of like crucibles for community engagement, right, in getting people to care about their neighbors and giving them a sense of. of agency and purpose and direction in terms of channeling that sense of meaning that you get out of being of service. And so it's just that, you know, it's like the easy access to the opportunities to connect those two things are not what they once were. So this has been going on for a long time, right? We talked about how this shallow conception of liberty arose since the 1950s and the 60s. We talked about the American freshman survey, and our students had a very different conception of what it means to live a meaningful life. We talked about Robert Putnam, the sociologist. Now, some people will be familiar with his most famous book called Bowling Alone that was published now more than 20 years ago, I think 25 years ago.

And he made the exact same diagnosis that you just made. Like, the communities are just collapsing across the country. That's why the book was called Bowling Alone. There used to be these bowling organizations where people would come together and bowl together, but now very often people were bowling alone. Here's this fascinating statistic, shocking statistic, that from the 60s to, I think, the 90s, people got around six hours of additional leisure because of technology, because of automation, and they followed all of that into watching television.

So what we see today with people being addicted to their screens, it's not a new thing. It's just been getting worse and worse and worse. And especially if you look at teenagers right now, I mean, some of the stats just absolutely blow you away. Like I recently saw this one of teenagers that they now spend 70% less time hosting or attending parties than they did in 2003 when I was 15. So, like, I'm already old compared to this new generation. And it's just Silicon Valley is absolutely wrecking the whole experience of what it means to be a teenager, this beautiful face in life when you're exploring, when you're finding new things out, where you're making mistakes. But that's got to be a face-to-face thing, right? But face-to-face time is collapsing in all of society.

Now, again, I do see reasons for hope because just like with factory farming, the vast majority of people is against this. There was recently a poll that found out that with a three to one margin, people want more regulation, right? They want like a massive regulation of these technologies. And Silicon Valley is, I think, currently awakening a dragon. I'll give you one historical metaphor here. There were two great historical moral movements in the 19th century that we all know that we talked about, the abolitionists and the suffragettes.

But there was a third one that we've forgotten about. That was just as big. And this was called the temperance movement. The temperance movement was the movement against big alcohol. So at the time, Americans were consuming three, four times as much alcohol as today. There was hardly any regulation. And this industry was ruthlessly exploiting huge. weaknesses. Like so many laborers would come home and, you know, spend all their wages

on the bottle, beat up their wives. It was just this horrible thing. And then what happened was this huge bipartisan, one of the biggest democratic movements we've seen in history, led by workers, by women, by pastors, by teachers, by evangelicals, you name it. It was this incredible coalition who didn't agree about many, many things, but they did agree on this one thing. Like, we want to reclaim our humanity. We think that real freedom is the power of choice and that alcohol is taken away that power of choice. Like the alcohol industry was using that shallow conception of freedom. Like, you just, you can drink alcohol if you want. But then they had a deeper conception of freedom, which was like, we want to protect ourselves against these sirens that are

wrecking our lives. That's what democracy is about. And I think what we need right now is what I would call a neo-temperance movement. And that's not just going to be about, you know, banning phones and schools. I think that's just the simple beginnings. I think it's got to be much broader and it's got to be much more radical. We also got to be aware that it doesn't go too far because, as you probably know, temperance ended up in prohibition, which wasn't a very good idea. But that's also my warning to Silicon Valley is that this may be arising.

It's actually what I would be predicting that we could see that in the next five years is is a broad coalition of people who are just livid and really angry and want to reclaim their humanity. It's very difficult to predict that future because the technology is advancing so rapidly, and we really can't say the impact that AI is going to have on this. Other than, you know, it's perhaps engineering the irrelevancy of the social media platform. It's like, you know, the creator of this is engineering its own, like sort of more. mortality on some level, and we don't know, but it's going to be interesting, I guess. And if you can remain hopeful amidst all of this, then that gives me hope.

Well, this is the one thing that we learned from history is that there's nothing inevitable about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. It can all change quite radically, and it's often, that change is often led by small groups of people. If we go back to that market meat quote, never doubt the power of small groups. groups are thought for committed citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. It's a pretty brutal quote.

He's basically saying that the vast majority of people are hurt animals. They just live their lives. But that fact in and of itself means that you don't need to convince each and everyone. You just need a relatively small group of people who are for real and who want to make the necessary sacrifices. And they could really change the course of history. I guess I would say to that, that to the extent that somebody who's listening or watching feels that their life is lacking meaning or some degree of fulfillment, the solution to that is finding a way to make your life about something more than yourself. And as my friend Scott Harrison from Charity Water is fond of saying, do not fear work that has no end. end. And so I think finding some avenue of energizing yourself or plugging yourself into some

issue that you have enthusiasm for and perhaps a tinge of guilt as well, is the path forward to discovering the meaning that your life currently lacks because it is truly in service that we find ourselves. And all of the, you know, kind of the nourishment of life, that we miss when we're pursuing property, prestige, and power. And I think there is real status in this. You know, these people that so inspired you or, you know, made you reflect on your own choices loom large because they are of the highest status. Like, throughout history, the people who did the right thing when it was hard to do the right thing

and, you know, stood up and took action, these are the people that, you know, have the most endearing legacies of any human beings that have ever lived. And that never goes out of style no matter the decade, right? And so to the extent that we can celebrate that a little bit more and refresh the marketing campaign around it to make it a little more aspirational and cool, I think that that is a worthy investment of all of our time and energy.

Thanks, Rich. Yeah, it was great to talk to you, man. Likewise. This is really cool. Thank you so much for you. And if people want to get involved in food system reform by donating some money alongside us, again, the website to do that is... Moroambition.org slash food. There you go.

And people can also just go to moralambition.org to join our community. Yeah. I think it's... Yeah, I think that's so true what you said. It is about community. It's so much easier to do it together. So that's what we're building is fun. It's very courageous what you're doing.

You know, it's one thing to go to Davos and talk some shit in front of some billionaires. It's fun to do that. It's another thing to then, you know, write these really, you know, well-researched and well-thought-out books. And then it's another thing to then reflect on that and say, that's not enough. Like, you know, like winning the, you know, attention economy game is fine. And it makes me feel, my ego feel good. But fundamentally, like, you're still not taking your own medicine until, you know, You went and founded this school and have made this your mission.

And that's very rare. And it really is something to celebrate. And it is an act of courage. Thank you. Yeah. So I really appreciate you being here today and setting an example for the rest of us. Thank you. Cheers.

All right, everybody. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoy the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, Visit today's episode page at richroll.com, where you will find the entire podcast archive, as well as my books, Finding Ultra, the voicing change series, and the plant power way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free, actually.

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