Are you morally ambitious? With Rutger Bregman (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. Today I'm here with Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. Conor, what have we got coming up on today's episode? Well, we've got a real treat for our audience today with Rutger Bregman returning to the podcast.

Many of you will know him for his sort of viral takedown of the elites at Davos when he basically scolded the audience for talking about philanthropy and all the ways billionaires can help society, conveniently leaving out the kind of big thing, which is tax. And he had this sort of viral clip on social media in which he said, I feel like I'm at a firefighters conference and we're not allowed to talk about water.

And that was sort of his big announcement to the world stage. But he's been writing these brilliant books and people may be aware of Utopia for Realists was his first one. Then Humankind, which was this sort of brilliant and counter factual analysis of human nature, where instead of people thinking the Lord of the Flies type thing, if we're all left on an island, we'll all become savages and start killing each other. Actually, when a plane really crashed.

and people were left stranded, they all tried to help each other. So kind of looking at sort of some stereotypes and looking to...

you know, inject a bit of positivity about humans. Yeah, absolutely. And his new book, Moral Ambition, is kind of a natural follow up to that theme, right? In that it's very optimistic, but it's kind of focused on practical things we can do to actually improve the world as opposed to being mired in pessimism and feeling stuck, which I'm sure many of us do feel. So what does Rukta go into in Moral Ambition? And what's his kind of

takeaways there? Yeah, well, actually, the first time I ever heard of Rutger Bregman, he, I think, was on like Owen Jones's podcast. And he said, if everyone in society was paid based on their contribution to society, bin collectors would be the most well-paid people in society, because basically without bin collectors, everything goes to shit, quite literally. And I think he's taken that idea and really looked at, are the jobs we're doing providing value to society? And if they're not,

what does that do for us all if we're all just trying to make money and not having meaning? And rather than just sort of talking about it in Moral Ambition, he's very much going into here's the practical ways you can not just make money but also have meaning in your life. So I think he's tired of raising awareness of these things and now he's very much in the weeds of practical ways in which we can all make money but also contribute to society. Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of in the title there, Moral Ambition, kind of about reimagining success and what...

kind of ambitious people who often get sucked into careers that say consulting or banking that potentially they end up being a bit unfulfilled in and want to do something with a greater difference.

So we had the pleasure of welcoming Rukta to the Intelligence Squared stage this April. We had live events with him in London and in Edinburgh. So Rukta joined us live on stage at the Emmanuel Center in London in conversation with the Financial Times' Tim Hartford. Today's episode is part one of that conversation. If you'd like to hear the full episode ad-free, why not become an Intelligence Squared member? You can

You can head over to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership or tap the IQ2 Extra button on Apple. Now let's join the conversation live with host Tim Harford.

They're not going to stop applauding until you stop applauding, Rutgers. Wow, thank you so much. I'm a fan of you, Tim. It's great to be on stage together. Yeah, you're only human. You're only human. I was like a little student at UCLA in 2011, you know, on exchange there. And I was very sad because I missed my girlfriend and I thought Los Angeles was really ugly. But I found solace in your books. So I'm like a surrogate girlfriend? That's good.

I guess so, yeah. Wow, I mean, this is already gone. I knew this evening would take us to unexpected places. Been on stage for about 45 seconds. I have to say, Rutger has a habit of surprising. I think it was you who emailed me. I don't think it was your editor or some representative. I think you emailed me about maybe 10 years ago saying, hey, I've got this book called

I'd really like for you to take a look at it. You have no idea how many people email me and say, I've got this book, I'd really like you to take a look at it. And the books are...

And it was a self-published book, which is a very bad sign as well. It's not a good sign. And people want me to read the books, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the books are really demanding to be read. But the book was Utopia for Realists. And I'm like, oh, a book about basic income, whatever, okay. And I start reading.

And it's really good. It's really good. And so I was happy to endorse the book. And then I was so excited to see how well it did, deservedly well. And then Rugga's second book, Humankind, came out just as the really big hit of that year was COVID. But Humankind was also a success. And it was such a timely book because it was reminding us that we...

we actually have more moral resources than we think. People under pressure behave better than we think they do. And that message was arriving just as I think people were proving it to be true and making enormous sacrifices all around the world for each other's benefit. And the new book is "Moral Ambition",

Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. I feel seen, thank you. And it's terrific. I can't even... Trevor Noah has said it's amazing. Adam Grant, Rory Stewart, Hannah Ritchie, Steven Pinker, George Monbiot. I mean, everybody thinks it's wonderful. It is wonderful. It is a book that will change your life.

I mean, this is part of the problem, Rutger, because you keep writing these books that change people's lives. And people will have these blurbs, "Read this book, it will change your life." Like, that's a good thing? It's not obvious that that's a good thing. And one of the first points you make in this book is you want to change people's lives and not necessarily in a good way. You want to actually make people regret that they ever picked this thing up. Well, half regret, that's the word I use, yeah. I wanted to write a book that would change my own life.

because after humankind,

I had a little bit of an early midlife crisis. I was 33, 34, was quite glad and excited by how well that book did, and I received a lot of wonderful messages from readers around the globe. But there was one thing that increasingly started to bug me, annoy me. It was those photos of people on Instagram reading the book saying,

"Oh, I love my holiday here in Bali or some other tropical paradise. And humans are wonderful. We're decent. We're a product of survival of the friendliest. Stop following the news, everyone. Be happy. Enjoy life." And the message. And I was like, "Oh, no. I've created a monster."

If humankind was the warm hug we all needed in April of 2020, then this is the cold shower that we all need in April of 2025. Whenever I read your books, I love reading them, but there is this sort of sense I have of you just kind of grabbing me by the lapels and lifting me up and going, "Now listen.

"This is important." I'm like, "Okay, it's important, I'll read the book." But you really grab people's attention. But what's the cold shower? What is it that you are?

You're demanding of people, really. Because you are demanding something of people, I think. Yes. So the book is about what I consider to be one of the greatest wastes of our time, which I already talked about in Utopia for Realists. It's the waste of talent. There are so many talented, experienced, potentially driven people online

working in jobs or working on endeavors that don't really make the world a better place. Sometimes there are like okay jobs, like take the typical consultant for example, I wouldn't say that it's all socially meaningless, all socially useless, but you're an economist. Like an economist would say, oh there are some opportunity costs here, right? If you've gone to a great university, maybe Oxford, maybe Cambridge, and then you end up at McKinsey,

well, maybe not the best allocation of talent. So that's something that has always frustrated me and that I also saw happening on the other side of the political spectrum. So I obviously come from the left side of the political spectrum, but then I saw a lot of my friends being stuck in

the awareness phase of making a difference, right? And I also saw it when I looked in the mirror, honestly. You know, you write these articles, you write these books, you go to Davos and you say nasty things about billionaires in the hope that some other people will do the actual work of making the world a better place and implementing those wealth taxes and you name it, and then it doesn't happen, and then you say it again, and it still doesn't happen, and at some point you've got to wonder, well,

maybe I'm doing something wrong, right? So that is really the problem that I'm trying to tackle here. Can we move towards a world where driven, ambitious, talented people work on the most important global problems? And so one of the things that I found immediately compelling about the argument was the examples that you gave. So for example, Thomas Clarkson. So just tell us, I had not heard of this guy. Tell us a bit about him.

Yeah, his story had a huge impact on me, honestly. I read about him in one of my favourite books. It's called Buried to Change by Adam Hochschild, the great historian. And that's a fantastic book of the British abolitionist movement. I became utterly obsessed with this movement.

I had always assumed as a historian that the reason the slave trade and slavery were abolished was just because of the Industrial Revolution. I just thought that the old economic system didn't work anymore and that therefore people could move away from slavery. That is totally wrong. If you actually study those movements, what you see is that abolitionism was a failure almost everywhere. So I'm from the Netherlands, and the Netherlands...

Well, we didn't really have an abolitionist movement. We did have a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were mainly interested in their own purity, but they got nothing done. In France, you had a bunch of writers and intellectuals

Well, you can expect what happened there, not much. In Spain and Portugal, it's pretty much the same. But in Britain, this huge movement got started. Hundreds of thousands of people got involved in fighting the slave trade. Some of the first big consumer boycotts happened here. British people refusing to put sugar in their tea.

And it all started in 1787 at George Yard number two. I was there today. It's now the office of a private equity firm, which is quite telling. So inspiring. In May 1787, 12 individuals walked into the print shop that was established there. And what I find so fascinating is that of those 12 individuals, nine were entrepreneurs.

So, not civil servants, not writers, not intellectuals, no, people who had built their own companies, scaled their own companies, and started building a legacy that mattered.

But I got really excited when I discovered that one of 12 was a writer. So I was like, ha, so there is a place for someone like me, actually. And that, indeed, was Thomas Clarkson. An extraordinary life story. I guess why it had such a big impact on me is that he had this mix of vanity and genuine idealism.

that I recognize in myself. It's like, yeah, humans are mixed bags. But he sort of talked his way into it. So he was doing an essay question to get a scholarship or something. I forget the details. And the essay question was basically, is slavery okay or not? So he's like, I don't know anything about slavery, but I need to get into this

So he goes away and he researches it. And then he comes back and he's utterly transformed himself for the pure power of moral reasoning into an abolitionist who is going to devote the next...

- Yeah. - Absolutely to the core. - So I wouldn't say it was the pure power of moral reasoning. There's indeed this very famous moment in 1785. He had just won the essay contest, won first prize, and he was in his way back from the University of Cambridge, the Senate House, where he got, there was this nice ceremony, and he was on the way back to London where he lived on his horse, obviously, trains didn't exist back then, cars didn't exist. So he was on his horse near the village of Waits Mill,

And he kept thinking about what he had just written and he thought, well, if this is really true, then shouldn't someone do something about it? And you read that passage in his memoirs, and again, it's this fascinating mix of vanity and idealism because he could suddenly see himself as the world historical hero who would do it, you know, who would devote the rest of his life to fighting the slave trade and slavery.

And the point is, for me, is that he did it. He did spend the next 60 years fighting slavery. Actually, in those first seven years, he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom, spreading his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. At the time, he was the only full-time employee, if you will, of the abolitionist movement. Later, William Wilberforce got all the credit, and Wilberforce was important.

But Clarkson, he was the real deal. Yeah, yeah. So this is a person with real moral ambition. And here, from our contemporary perspective, we're like, oh, yeah, well, of course, he's on the right side of history and great. I mean, it's an impressive story. But in a way, the story that stayed with me even more was the story of the Dutch colonists.

New Lander, yes. New Lander. I was going to ask you how to pronounce it. And this really is a striking story because, okay, the Nazis have occupied the Netherlands and everybody who is Jewish is in the most terrible danger.

So the right thing to do is not in doubt. Nobody is sitting there going, well, I wonder, you know, well, a few people are on the side of the Nazis, but most people, the rights and wrongs are not in doubt. Nobody needs to sort of campaign to say, you know what, we think Nazis are bad. That argument is one, but the question is who actually has the courage to hide the

a Jewish family in their barn or in their basement. And hearing you tell that story really made me think about the world in a very different way. Yeah, so I think we all...

recognize that feeling. Maybe some of you remember it from being in history class when you were a teenager and hearing about what happened in the Second World War and thinking, what would I have done if I was alive back then? And then thinking, oh, well, I guess we'll never know. Well...

I guess the good news is that we are living through times right now where, I mean, I currently live in New York in the United States and yeah, we might be tested quite soon or already. But yeah, that was also a question that has fascinated me from a very early age and for this

I really dug into it. I read a lot about the psychology of the resistance hero. I initially assumed that there must be something that these resistance heroes had in common. Maybe a certain genetic profile, maybe a certain upbringing. Yeah, could be anything, nature, nurture. And there were some big research projects. So you had Samuel and Paul Olliner, two American professors who interviewed hundreds

hundreds of resistance heroes after the war in the 70s and the 80s. There's this big book that they've written called The Altruistic Personality Project, so

I ordered it, I read the thing, I went to the appendix where all the statistical evidence, you know, all the graphs, etc. are there. And I saw these long lists where again and again I saw these two letters, NS, NS, NS, NS, meaning non-significant. Again and again, the statistical findings were non-significant. Welcome to social science. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it really seemed to be a cross-section of the population. There's another researcher, Eva Vogelman, who also did hundreds of interviews with resistance heroes, and she attended a lot of ceremonies in Israel at Yad Vashem, where people are honored as the righteous among the nations because they...

risk their own lives to help persecuted Jews. And again, she was struck that it was as if you walked into a subway train. Like really, again, a cross-section of the population.

There were a few things maybe, maybe in the upbringing, for example, but anyway, the evidence seemed very weak and the effect sizes, as a statistician would say, weren't very large. But then in the 90s, there was actually a group of two economists who looked again at the data from the Olliners

And they saw, hey, wait a minute, there is something going on here. There is one factor that seems to predict very well whether people joined the resistance yes or no. And it was the simple matter of being asked. So it's a great paper with the title The Importance of Being Asked. Because in 96% of all cases, people said yes.

Now, obviously, there was some selection going on. Like, if you suspected that someone had sympathies for the Nazis, it would probably have been a little bit dangerous to ask, like, do you want to hide some persecuted Jews in your cellar? But for me, it was, again, a powerful insight that, hey, maybe this is how it works. It's not about the psychology of resistance. No, it's about the sociology.

And that also explains why resistance during the war wasn't like evenly distributed over the country. No, it was a very localized phenomenon where you had certain super spreaders of the resistance virus

asking a lot of people to join the resistance. And I've got one case study of that in the book, a man named Arnold Dowis, a very stubborn man, very neuro-etypical, but he just kept asking people like, "Do you have a place? Do you have a place?" And he wouldn't take no for an answer. And that worked incredibly well. - Yeah, I mean, it is extraordinary. It's just like you see this guy knocking on the door and you're like, "Oh no." And he comes in, he sits down on your kitchen table and says, "Look, I've got this family, they need help."

Yeah, it's really the funniest stories. Yeah, and people are like... They don't know how to say no to him. There's this one story of that he arrives at a farmer's house in Drenthe, which is in the east of the Netherlands. And again, he has a husband and a wife who really need a place to hide.

And then, yeah, he rings the bell of a farmer, farmer Nienhuis. That's the proper accent. And he says, yeah, look, I've got someone who needs a place. And then the farmer says, no, really can't do that, blah, blah, blah. But he says, yeah, no problem. He's already here. Oh, and come in. Oh, and his wife is here as well. Come in, come in, come in. And well, that's settled then. Goodbye. And yeah, like the farmer is just utterly dumbstruck. But the point is, yeah, the couple survived the war. Yeah.

Yeah.

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21 plus and present in Virginia. Must be first online real money wager. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fandor.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. So for us today, you are demanding of people, I don't think it's unfair to say you're demanding this, more moral courage, more moral ambition. People should actually really be

directing their lives towards making a real difference. So what is it that we learn from that particular story that's relevant today about what it takes to summon up that courage? - So again, the power of asking other people to join.

There's actually, I mean, Rob Martyr is in the audience today. Where are you, Rob? And I've got a whole chapter about him and how he founded the Against Malaria Foundation, which is arguably the most effective charity that exists in the world today. And it's not just me saying it, but it's very smart economists, you know, at the think tank GiveWell saying that. And one of the things I learned from Rob is also the power of asking other people. So,

I mean, Rob, you've been asking people for a long time now, can you help, right? If you need legal support, for example, just call people up and ask them to help. If you need support with finances, call people up and ask them. So Rob has the 20-minute rule, for example. He thinks about, okay, how much can I achieve in 20 minutes if I'm really careful and think hard about who am I going to ask, for example. I think that's a simple and easy

powerful insight, is that in that way, moral ambition can be quite contagious. For me, one of the simple lines, but important lines in the book is you don't do good things because you are a good person. No, you become a good person if you do good things. So just get started and ask people to join. - Yeah. So one question that the book arose in my mind, I started thinking, as I was reading it, I started thinking about my wife.

who was, in the 1990s, one of a cohort of people studying environmental management at Imperial College here in London. And this particular course is still running, but at the time I think it was quite groundbreaking. And all these young people were worried about climate change, were worried about environmental degradation, wanted to get this master's degree

to understand how to save the world. And it was quite techy. It's a degree for nerds. And then at the end of the year together, they're friends for life, they're all still kind of in contact with each other. They made different decisions about what to do. They all had the same goal. Some of them joined NGOs.

A lot of them dabbled in a little bit of light eco-terrorism, but you know, all the paint was... All washable paint. Dabbled in eco-terrorism. I'm not going to name any names. That's a nice thing to have on your resume. Yeah. But some of them went off to join green banks. Some of them became consultants for mobile phone companies to help them make their supply chains more ethical. Some of them joined oil companies.

Because they're like, if you're going to fight climate change, you need to be in an oil company because the oil companies are the people who need to change. My wife was one of the people who joined an oil company. And all of them were in touch with each other talking about this decision. Like, we all know what we want to do. We are all agreed about what we want to do. But what is the right path? So what would your advice be if you had them all now? Or even better, if you go back in time to 1998 and you could say, okay...

This is how to think about this problem, because I think knowing what to do is a problem. I think it makes a lot of sense. You need the whole toolbox, right? So...

Sometimes people like to dunk on Extinction Rebellion activists, for example, saying like, oh, that is not effective. That's not how it works. But then the Extinction Rebellion activists may dunk on, I don't know, climate entrepreneurs who are building green solutions. Like, oh, that's not how it works. And then you've got the lobbyists saying, no, actually what you need is more lobbying in the back corridors of power and to really influence the legislation. Well, maybe we need all of it. I mean, my mother was recently arrested once again. She gets...

She's the only one in the family who keeps getting arrested. She was at an Extinction Rebellion protest in The Hague in the Netherlands.

I think Extinction Rebellion has been super effective. There's a great think tank called the Social Change Lab. They've done some good empirical research. That really shows that XR has been successful in raising the saliency of climate change, which put more pressure on politicians, you know, and therefore has helped to pass legislation, which will in turn help entrepreneurs to get more subsidies, you know, for their green products. So,

I don't think we need to make a choice here. It just depends on the specific situation. So studying the British abolitionist movement, for example, what was initially necessary was gradualism. You needed very entrepreneurial, pragmatic people who were like,

Okay, there's a very long way to go here. It's not going to work if we just start shouting Abolish slavery right away. That's it's that is so toxic. That is so radical. No one will listen to us So they made two really pragmatic decisions. They said okay. We'll go after the slave trade first it was a tough decision, but very smart because

because they could use a very effective argument against that. They could say, "Look, the reason we got to abolish the slave trade is not just because it's so immoral and slavery is bad. No, it's also because our boys are suffering on these slave ships." At the time, 20% of white sailors were dying on these voyages.

And that was a very effective argument in Westminster at the time when William Pitt, you know, the prime minister here at this, he was suddenly like, "Ooh, we gotta abolish the slave trade." For us, that's really bizarre to think, like, "Oh, was that the most effective thing?" Well, this is what these gradualists realized. And they also said, "Look, we're gonna phase out the slave trade."

And then at some point when they had succeeded, the slave trade was abolished in 1807, it became important to become more radical. So there's this fascinating moment in the 1820s when women took over the abolitionist movement. And they talked about the slumber of the daddies. You know, they talked about Wilberforce and Clarkson. And they were like, come on, you've got to be a bit more radical now. And they were absolutely.

You were absolutely right. The time had come to say, okay, it's time for, as it was called, immediateism. We need to abolish it now. You have brilliant abolitionists like Elizabeth Hayrick, for example, who wrote this powerful book about it.

Yeah, it's just the situation had changed. So that is what moral ambition is about. It's about doing what works, seeing winning as your moral duty. And sometimes we need smart lobbyists. Sometimes we need people working at an oil company. Sometimes we need people like my mother, you know, getting arrested once again. It depends. Yeah. Do you worry about, how should I phrase this? I wrote it down. I'm going to have a look at what I wrote down.

So, we live in a world, it seems to me, where there's a lot of shallow, polarised, let's not even call it thinking. It's like there's a shallow discourse. And one of the easiest ways to have a shallow discourse is to frame things in terms of moral terms, right and wrong.

So, I mean, the most tedious kind of centrist politicians' argument, it's astonishing how often I hear politicians say this, is they're like, well, we're doing this because it's the right thing to do. You're like, that's not an argument. That's just a totally, obviously you think it's the right thing to do, that's why you're doing it. But, like, you've not made any kind of actual factual arguments about the efficacy of your policy. It's just like, we're doing it because it's the right thing to do.

It's not far away from we're doing it because we're doing it. And at the same time, on a sort of darker side, I see a lot of online discourse where political argument is basically framed of like, what is the worst moral smear that we can throw at the other side? So we'll call them child abusers, we'll call them Nazis, we'll call them racists, whatever it is.

and this deploying of moral language as a substitute for real action, but also as a substitute for real debate or engagement with the issues. So I guess what I'm getting at is there is a way in which some

Sometimes framing things as a moral issue makes us stupider and angrier and less willing to talk to each other. So just, you know, what are your thoughts? So I think that moral ambition is the opposite of being moralistic.

This is really not a book that is meant to, you know, you don't use it as a stick to beat others with, but you use it as a stick to beat yourself with, you know, to get going, to do something yourself. That's honestly what I also wanted to get out of it. You know, I've changed my career quite radically. This is going to be, sorry Bloomsbury, but this is going to be the last book for me for quite a while. It led me to co-found an organization called the School for Moral Ambition,

And we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hood of talent. So we help really talented, driven people to quit their jobs and to focus on some of the most pressing issues of our time. Everything I earn with the book, everything I earn tonight, we're all using that to lure these talented people away. So that for me is moral ambition. We have seen way too much finger pointing. Also on my side of the political spectrum, we've seen the

a couple of years ago with the great awokening, all these social justice warriors shaming and canceling other people on social media. And I was also utterly fed up with that. I have some, yeah, some critiques of all those left-wingers who keep talking about, "Oh, we need to change the system because the system is so bad."

and we need to overthrow the patriarchy and overthrow capitalism and blah, blah, blah. But at some point, all this talk about systemic change becomes an excuse not to do anything yourself, right? So...

Yeah, I keep coming back to that quote from Margaret Mead. And tweeting furiously about the patriarchy is not... No, no. Okay, fine. Not really, is it? Okay, I'll delete my account. I'm not saying, like, awareness is not utterly... Awareness is not unimportant. Sure, there is a place for social media. Yeah. But it is vastly...

In the book, I call this the attitude of the noble loser, right? The person who... You are in Britain, you know. Yeah? Yeah. We love noble losers, but go on. Do you? Yeah, yeah. We're very much in favour of that. I didn't know that. Okay, well, I don't like them very much. These people who...

who say like, oh, we lost the elections once again, but we stood on the right side of history. We have all the right opinions. - I was thinking about football, okay. - Okay, okay, okay. - I misunderstood. - Yeah, well, let's put it like this. The people who are currently really suffering from oppression, from homelessness, from poverty, all the animals who are currently being tortured in factory farms, they don't care about your purity. They want you to win. So yeah.

the vegans who are like, "Oh, is there a little bit of milk powder in here?" I mean, come on. I think that the billions of cows don't really care about you consuming some milligrams of milk powder. They want you to build an effective coalition from the left to the right to actually influence the legislation so that we can end this moral atrocity once and for all. You can applaud if you like. Thanks. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared.

This episode was produced by Connor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Welcome to It Takes Energy, presented by Energy Transfer, where we talk all things oil and natural gas. Oil and gas drive our economy, ensure our country's security, and open pathways to brighter futures.

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