Are you morally ambitious? With Rutger Bregman (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. Today's episode is part two of our conversation with historian and author Rutger Bregman. If you missed part one, we recommend going back an episode to hear Bregman lay out his vision for how moral ambition can drive real change.

Let's return now to the conversation with our host, Tim Harford.

Tell us a bit more about the School for Moral Ambition. Because you just dropped that little bombshell in that you're quitting as an author, at least for the moment. So where is it? How does it work? What are you doing? Yeah, so we got started last year in Europe, continental Europe. We've got our offices in Amsterdam. And what we try to build is a magnet for really ambitious people.

We think that the most ambitious, driven people should work on the most pressing global problems. And sadly, that's currently not the case. A good friend of mine, he studied at Oxford,

He always talks about the Bermuda Triangle of talent. He's got a book out now, just now, in Dutch. It really should be translated to English if any publisher is listening to this. Well, my publisher is listening. But anyway, it's the Bermuda Triangle of talent. So it's consultancy, it is corporate law, and it is finance. It's this dark chasm that sucks up so many of our best and brightest, and we never hear from them again, right?

It's honestly quite sad. And these people could go on and do great things. They could build an Against Malaria Foundation. They could join government. They could build other great startups, lobby for good causes, whatever. There's so much work that needs to be done preventing the next pandemic. Every day, 15,000 kids die from easily preventable diseases. But anyway. So...

As I said, we're the Robin Hoods of talent and we are coming to liberate them. That's the goal. But, yeah, we're really open for everyone. We now have 8,000 members in 80-plus countries. So we've also developed something called the Moral Ambition Circle.

This was actually partially inspired by a book you'll remember. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In, more than a decade ago now, she kick-started this movement of women who wanted to break through the corporate glass ceiling. And I thought it was a pretty awesome example of how you can use a book to start a movement.

So that's also what we've done. We've created a curriculum for people who are interested in the questions that I raise in the book. We don't have all the answers, but they're like, "Okay, let's see how can I apply this in my own life? What are some of the most neglected, tractable, and important problems we face as a species?

What are my superpowers? What am I actually good at? What's the match between those two? How can I take the first step? And who are we going to ask? Who are we going to call to help us with this? How can we hold each other accountable? And then at the end of the program, obviously, you're invited to make a pledge. To make it public and say, this is what I'm going to do.

It could be quitting your job. We have caused a lot of people already to quit their job. I'm very proud to say that. But it could be starting a new organization. It could also be that you want to be an entrepreneur, like your wife. Maybe at the oil company, say, you know, I'm going to cause some trouble here. That's very necessary as well. So it just depends on your specific skill set and your situation. Yeah. I was a management consultant once. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.

It was my... I was going to say it's my first grown-up job, but I was a university lecturer for a year, so I guess that maybe is a grown-up job. How did you get out? They threw me out. One of my colleagues... So I started wearing jeans to work. They were quite smart jeans, but... Because I was allergic to my suit. And one of...

One of my colleagues asked me, like, why are you wearing jeans? And I'm like, oh, I wear this suit and it brings me out in a rash. And she said, Tim, you only need to be able to do two things to do this job. Talk bullshit and wear a suit. And you can't do either of them. So, yeah.

It lasted three months. Sad loss for management consulting. The person who kicked you out, that was a great gift to all of us. Can I say something nice about you, Tim? If you want. I'm not going to stop you. So, I was, as I said, I was in my early 20s, and initially I had envisioned a career as a professor, as an academic, right?

I really loved history and I wrote these long and complicated essays in which I quoted all these philosophers that I barely understood. But apparently it worked, I got good grades. But there was this moment, as I said, I was studying in Los Angeles where once again I had written a long paper about something that I didn't really understand. And I read it again at some point and I was like, what am I actually doing here? Isn't it weird that academics write in a language that is so inaccessible?

And the nice thing about this country I was in, the United States, is that books were so cheap. So I could buy some of your books, I bought some of Malcolm Gladwell's books, some of my other favorite authors like Jared Diamond, for example, and a whole new world opened up to me. I was like, "Oh, so you can actually do history and economics and anthropology in a way that normal people understand it, and that it's actually enjoyable to read it." I was like, "That is awesome."

Thanks, Tim, for showing a young man the way. You're welcome. I'm very happy to be bracketed with Malcolm and Jared Diamond. This emphasises a point to bring it back to moral ambition that people make career choices for not necessarily very sensible reasons.

I mean, I don't really know why I decided to become a management consultant. Somebody said, "Oh, we work on really interesting problems here." It's a lie. They're not interesting problems, and they don't want to solve them either. They just want to cause new and billable problems. But I didn't know that, and I wasn't really thinking about it. I'm like, "Oh, yeah, sure, I guess I'll do that for a bit." And thank goodness I'm

I was out in three months. You were an academic, presumably you didn't really, it seems that academia performed really as anybody would expect, but you hadn't really thought about what academia would be like. So we kind of, we're young, our brains are only half grown, we don't know anything, we make strange decisions, and then we end up in these careers

potentially for the rest of our lives. So it's important to kind of get the message out to people. Is there a moment of maximum leverage? Are you hoping to reach the, is it the 17-year-olds? Is it the 35-year-olds? Is it the 51-year-olds? Don't say it's the 51-year-olds. I quite like my life. I don't want to change. It's awful.

Well, actually, Tim, I had an early version of the manuscript in which I said something like, if you're past the age of 30, then it's over. You know, you've got your mortgage, you've got kids, and most people past that age don't really change their life anymore.

Now, my publisher helped me remove that passage because it's bad for sales, apparently. No, no, I was just joking. I changed my mind about it because I kept coming across examples of people who did become really morally ambitious later in their career, actually. So, we see that in our moral ambition circles, really. It's people of all ages who are interested in this question.

Obviously, the benefit if you're young, if you're a teenager, if you're in your 20s, and you haven't yet written the constitution for the rest of your life. So you're in this very flexible period. So yes, it is important to get them when they're young. In my book, I talk about a fantastic school here in London called Ambitious Impact.

And I describe it as the Hogwarts for do-gooders. It's a place where young entrepreneurs come if they want to build a very effective, high-impact nonprofit. And it's awesome. And they're super young. And the founder, Joey Savai, I think he advises most of these people, like, don't wait. If you're still in university, get out.

You know, come here. Let's let's go. There's not a moment to waste but as I said the their beautiful example of people later in their career making a pivot making a shift and the benefit obviously if you Are older than you have more experience which is very valuable. You sometimes have more capital or you have zero

Fs to give, right? Which is also nice. I think that's really powerful with people past the age of 50 is that they sometimes have this kind of independence where they just don't care all that much anymore about what people think. And they're like, now I'm going to do what I actually care about. And if that's moral ambition, then let's go. Talk to me. I'm curious about...

effective altruism, which has received a wonderful publicity boost from Sam Bankman-Fried recently. Just tell me what you think effective altruism is and tell me how you see that as being the same or different to your ideas of moral ambition. - So in the book I study a lot of movements that I admire. I talk a lot about the abolitionists, about the suffragettes,

about Nader's Raiders, you know, the group around Ralph Nader in the 60s and the 70s, who were such effective lobbyists. And I also talk extensively, indeed, about the effective altruists. And honestly, I think they've gotten a bit of a bad press and they've been treated quite unfairly. There are a lot of awesome people in this movement, honestly. If you go to a conference and you meet so many people who have

donated their kidneys to random strangers, giving away a lot of their wealth to highly effective charities, you know, actually practicing what they preach. I find that quite refreshing, the deep moral seriousness of these people.

I do have my quibbles here and there. I think mainly cultural. It's a very nerdy movement, which is good for them, right? But I think that some of those ideas deserve a much broader audience. Sometimes I like to joke that with the School for Moral Ambition, we're trying to build EA for neurotypicals. That is, you know, founded on or grounded in, how do you say that?

broader view of human psychology, right? We're not just motivated by altruism or empathy, but we can also be motivated by just sheer enthusiasm because we don't want to do cool things or by maybe the desire to belong, you know, to be part

part of a group or vanity. And honestly, I think that's fine. If I look in the mirror, I don't see some kind of saint or something like that. I mean, if you publish a book with your name on it, you know, you have to be a little bit of a narcissist, right? So, yeah, guilty as charged. But at the same time, I'm generally idealistic. I generally care about the issues I write about in the book. I really...

fucking hate factory farming, and I really think we should tax the rich, you know? And I really feel badly about the incredible inequality in the world, and I want to make sacrifices and work the rest of my career to make a difference in that regard. Humans are mixed bags, right? And that's fine. So that's the kind of movement that I'd like to build. But maybe an interesting parallel to make here is...

to the British abolitionist movement. Initially, that movement was led by the Quakers, and God bless them, you know? Awesome group of people who very early on came out in favor of equality, right? This was a group that...

very early granted women the right to talk, for example, in their meeting houses, their churches. I think, what is it, one in five books in the 17th century written by women were written by Quakers, even though they were less than 1% of the population.

But they didn't get much done until they started allying with the evangelicals, right? Which was which a much broader group so I thought that maybe We could build for EA what the evangelicals were for the Quakers. Yeah, you see what I mean? Yeah, I mean the yeah, it strikes me the EA Move almost at the EA guys because it does feel quite quite bro ish but that they they are

concerned, above all, with trying to work out what is the most effective way, if you have $1,000, what is the most effective way to spend $1,000. I'm really, really interested in that question, which I think is a really important question. And this other question, which is like, well, how can you persuade people to donate $1,000 to do some good? And they're like, yeah, yeah, okay, someone else is thinking about that. And actually, they're probably right. Somebody else...

A lot of people have been thinking about that. Maybe too many people have been thinking about how to get people to donate money

without thinking about how to spend the money effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my other criticisms would be is that effective altruism in general is not very critical of the way power is currently distributed in society. And in that respect, I am more left-wing or maybe a more old-fashioned social democrat where I care more about just the injustice of the present and

about the fact that so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, and I have a deeper discomfort with philanthropy, for example. I'm not against philanthropy at all, but something like the fight against tax avoidance and tax evasion, I've probably never heard any effective altruists talk about that, but for me it's one of the core causes. - When I look at America at the moment, and you live there right now, which is-- - Interesting. - Yeah, I'm sure.

And one of the things that I see in the new administration, there's a lot of things we could say that kind of have been said a million times and don't need to be said here. But one thing that you can say is that this is a group of people with ambition. And I think some of them would say they have moral ambition. I'm not asking you to defend anything that they're doing. But I am interested in what you think people coming from your perspective can learn by looking at

Doge and the White House and so on at the moment? We can learn so much. Maybe you remember the chapter in my first book, Utopia for Realists, about the rise of neoliberalism, how it got started in the 1950s with the Mont Pelerin Society. A small group of economists and philosophers coming together in Switzerland, realizing that they were, you know, the outcasts at the time, all

politicians and most economists, they were Keynesians, right? And they were like, we're going to grow the state and the state is going to solve all the big problems of today. And this group of people realized that they really needed, um,

a long-term strategy. They needed to start building out a whole ecosystem of think tanks, universities, to wait for the moment when a crisis would come, when they could start injecting their ideas into the public debate. There's another famous moment in the early 70s in the US, when at a Disney resort,

a small group of business leaders came together around the so-called Powell Memo. This was written by Lewis Powell. He was on the board of Philip Morris. He had spent much of his life railing against the scientific evidence on the dangers of smoking, but he had bigger ambitions than just protecting big tobacco. He was like, we are gonna do a complete political takeover, a corporate takeover of this country.

And out of that came the Heritage Foundation, now infamous for Project 2025, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society. These people have a perseverance that is often utterly lacking on the other side of the political spectrum.

I admire that. Maybe the final example here is the anti-abortion movement. That got started in the late 80s, early 90s. The, what is it, the Alliance for Freedom or something, what it's called. They built a whole network of 5,000 committed clerks and lawyers.

who launched so many lawsuits and that all built up to that moment when the Dobbs decision was made and Roe v. Wade was cancelled. And at the time, by the way, all the pro-choice groups were not really fighting the enemy but were involved in internal infighting.

about what the right way to be a feminist is or something like that. It was deeply depressing to see. So yes, we can learn a lot from these people, especially about the power of perseverance and long-term planning. - Yeah. - I hope you don't mind if I ask a couple of questions that are not actually about the book. So just one or two things, or not directly about the message of the book. So last time we met, you made me climb up a wall in South London,

and interview you while basically suspended by my fingertips in mortal fear of my life.

It's a real story. Yeah, the FT had this thing called Pursuits with the FT, where FT journalists would go and interview people while pursuing some pursuit of their choice. So Steve Levitt made me lose at poker to him while interviewing him. Michael Lewis made me explain an obscure German board game to him and then beat him at the obscure German board game while interviewing him. But you were the worst.

We had to go bouldering. Anyway, the point is, what do you like about bouldering? And do you think that that is a...

It's a choice of sport that is revealing of a particular personality type. Well, I remember we had a couple of good metaphors there. So you have the math, right? You always fall back on it. That's like the basic income that you can always rely on. And what I like about it is it's a very cooperative sport. People are incredibly helpful. You just go to a boulder hall where you've never been before and people can see that you're trying to solve the puzzle and people just can't help you

helping each other. It's just so irresistible when you see someone struggling trying to find it out. So I deeply laugh about that. It's just...

It really shows how cooperative people can be. I think that's true. At the same time, you're on your own. It's not a team sport. And you're the only one who can climb the walls. So it also is a sport that empowers and celebrates the individual as well. I mean, I see that strain in your writing. You're very impressed by an individual's

to make the right choice or to make the wrong choice or to change the world in a way that is, I think, not particularly leftist. That's true, yeah. My whole life, I have loved climbing ladders or climbing walls. So...

When I was a teenager, I was actually quite lazy. My main interests were playing poker, playing FIFA and getting a 5.5. So in the Dutch grading system, it goes from 1 to 10 and a 5.5 is like a bare pass. So that was like the perfect grade because then you would know you wouldn't have spent one minute too much on a particular task. So that was my favorite grade.

Then I started studying history, and the main reason I wanted to study history is, well, one, I liked it, obviously, but it also seemed really easy to me, so I wasn't very ambitious back then. But then I joined this student society, and I became part of, I guess you would call it a fraternity, a bunch of

guys who were quite a bit older than me and they were very pretentious, you know, reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and all these great philosophers and they were bringing me to the concert building in Amsterdam and attending lectures of philosophers and historians. And it was the first time in my life that my definition of success changed. So suddenly the 5.5 wasn't the coolest thing anymore. Suddenly knowing a lot about basically everything.

or at least pretending to know a lot about basically everything. That was the new coolest thing in my life and I wanted to climb that ladder. And that's obviously what this book is about. It's betting on that this is something we can pull off, that you can change people's definition of success. Now, as you know, I spent about a decade in my career with that, the dream that Thomas Clarkson also had. Yeah, honestly wanting to become a best-selling writer.

books like your books. I read Jared Diamond's books. I read Gladwell's books and I thought, this is the most awesome thing. I want to do that as well. But then, yeah, you've climbed the ladder and you get a bit bored, don't you? There's a quote in the book. People spend their lives climbing the ladder and they realize it's propped against the wrong wall. Do you feel that way?

I very much started to feel that, yeah. I was just like, I can't... I'm still very proud of Humankind, my previous book, but I was like, I don't think I can do this again. Again, spent five years writing a big idea book. I don't think I can do this the rest of my life. You're a boulderer, you can do the high-level traverse. You don't have to climb all the way down the ladder and...

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Just one question. So you, as everyone can hear, you speak really good, compelling English, but you didn't write the book in English, you wrote the book in Dutch, and it's translated by Erica Moore, who's done a great job as far as I can work out. She's extraordinary. She's one of the most perfectionist people I've ever met. But I'm curious as to...

I have my books in translation, but I don't speak any of the languages they're translated into. So I just, for me, it's just a relationship of trust. Like, you know what you're doing. You know, I hope they love the book in South Korea. I don't know. But you're able to read your book in English and understand it. And so I'm wondering what the relationship with Erica is like, what it feels like,

to see somebody else rendering your ideas in a language that you speak fluently anyway? I was just curious. So, I have my own laboratory. It's called The Netherlands. It's a focus group of about 80 million people.

And I can, you know, test out all my ideas there. And that's been really great for me ever since, you know, I started working on Utopia Freelance. So I work for this, or worked, used to work for this journalism platform called The Correspondent. And all the different chapters in all of my books were initially essays. And that's been really great. So then I first have all those essays. Then I

make it into a book and then the process with Erica starts. And yeah, she's a funny translator because she doesn't stick to translating. She's a very opinionated translator. So she behaves like an editor as well. She's like, that's BS. I don't think so. That's incorrect. I fact check this. And usually she's right. So yeah, that's been a great relationship we had. And I always felt whenever I helped

The English edition of my book in my hands was like, yeah, this is the real thing. It's gone through a whole process.

Very often, one of the chapters would be like the 11th or the 12th version. But also because pretty much all my role models, the writers I really look up to, they're all English, right? And I almost only read English non-fiction, right? I don't read that much in Dutch, actually, apart from the newspapers. So I think there's also something about my writing style that is quite English or Anglo-Saxon, at least. So then when the book is translated...

everything clicks into place. You're really shamelessly pandering to the audience at this point. This idea of like, "Oh, it's only the real thing if it's in English." Everyone is like, "Yes." I mean, yes. Honestly, foreigners are fundamentally not really serious, are they? If they were serious, they'd be English. But yeah, okay.

Good. It's good to hear that that's how you feel about us. I'm not sure we deserve it. Look, we should get some questions from this wonderful audience. Can I say one thing about that, Tim? Yeah. It's just very hard to be charismatic in Dutch. It's...

It's just... We remember the Obama "Hope and Change" speeches, right? And at the time, you had a couple of comedians, I remember, in the Netherlands who just used to translate those speeches and then do them in Dutch. And it would be hilarious.

Hope and verandering. It's like you can't be charismatic in Dutch. And sometimes, you know, I'm trying to appeal to certain emotions and yeah, it works better in English. What works better in Dutch? What works better in Dutch? I mean, sort of Italian is the language of the seducer. Insulting people works better in Dutch. Okay.

Good to know. Good to know. Okay. Let's get some questions. We have microphones roving around. I can see... Why did you move to New York? Why did you move to the United States? I don't think you've posted about it or talked about it, but I'm so curious as to why you chose the U.S. Yeah, increasingly wondering that myself.

me and my family moved there to start building the US chapter of the School for Moral Ambition. So we've now got our headquarters in Amsterdam, but moved to New York to prepare for the launch there as well. And the great thing about books is that, as you know, Tim, there are great excuses to go on a publicity tour. And I have done two big publicity tours before with Utopia Freelance and Humankind, so I now know what a book can do. But especially after Humankind, I also felt this...

a strange emptiness afterwards, like you have all this energy, so many people caring about an idea, but then what is actually happening? And with this book, I was like, can we actually use that energy to start a movement, right? To get each and every one of you in a moral ambition circle, or go to moralambition.org, join the movement, et cetera. So that's what we want to do.

Already started it in Europe, and now also got to get it started in the US. I'm actually speaking at Harvard next week, where there's also a lot of talent going to waste. Yeah, yeah. But why New York? Because you could have gone to Silicon Valley, you could have gone to Shanghai, you could have gone to somewhere in Europe. What was it about New York that was like,

If I'm going to set up this center, New York is the place it has to be. New Yorkers all know the answer, right? Because everyone else is joking. But why did you feel New York? I think because it's the media capital of the world. It's the place where you go if you have a really ambitious story to tell. I'm not necessarily saying that that's the place you'd only be working, right? Our fellowships

either Europe-focused or US-focused or global-focused. We're doing a couple of things. So in Europe, we're working on fighting big tobacco. We're working on accelerating the transition towards sustainable proteins, which is the most neglected part of the fight against climate change and is obviously also about doing something about factory farming. In the US, we're going to launch also a food transition fellowship and...

a tax fairness fellowship, which is actually also going to be a global fellowship because you need to work on both sides of the ocean. And finally, what we're going to do is to work together with Ambitious Impact, you know, the Hogwarts for do-gooders, to launch a Found Me to Give fellowship. So we're recruiting a bunch of really driven, talented young entrepreneurs who want to build a high-growth startup that

has a shot at becoming a unicorn, with one catch, these young entrepreneurs make the pledge at the beginning of their journey to donate at least 50% of what they earn when they eventually sell the company. Because that's another experience I had since I co-founded this organization is I became much more interested in money. Got to be honest about that. Margaret Thatcher had this beautiful saying when she said that the good Samaritan, he didn't just have good intentions.

he also had money. And if there's one thing that the fight against some of the most pressing issues we face lacks, it's money. As I said, we're currently working on fighting big tobacco and it's just, I mean, it's an $800 billion industry. It's bigger than Apple, Google and Meta combined. And it's just deeply shocking to see how few people are working on it, even though it's the single largest preventable cause of disease. I mean, imagine Tim, imagine a smartphone

You know something as addictive as a smartphone with TikTok on it and it kills you. Imagine that, it's a cigarette. And almost no one's doing anything about it. That was a very long answer to your very interesting question. So that's why I'm in New York right now. Big tobacco, very interesting topic. Right, yes. So we have Mike over here as well.

Oh, hi. I was just wondering, did any politicians or any political parties take the ideas and more actionable bits of humankind, the what do we do section, did they ever take them on board? Did they ever do anything with them that you're aware of? And if not, why not, do you think?

The specific political parties about humankind or this book? Yeah, the ideas in humankind about, you know, democracy and micro-democracies and what we could do. Did anyone ever run with that ball that you threw up in the air? Well, do politicians in general ever listen to a word you say? And if so, who? I like to think so. I think, yeah, I've seen that quite a lot, actually. So, my first book was about, mainly about basic income. And when I first wrote about it, it was a pretty

Pretty forgotten idea, right, Tim? But we've seen a wave of basic income experiments across the world, and that was really cool to see. With some mixed evidence, there was actually recently a study in the US that was less promising, but we've seen amazing experiments in lower-income countries and middle-income countries as well, where this is being taken really seriously. I mean, USAID has sadly been taken down, obviously.

but they have came out not that long ago saying cash transfers should perhaps become the benchmark, right? When we help people in poverty. When it comes to the ideas in humankind,

Yeah, I think you see an increasing interest in ideas like participatory democracy, for example. I don't think that was necessarily caused by the book or anything. It was already happening in Ireland. You had the citizens' assembly that I think was very effective. I see that happening in many other European countries as well where governments locally and provincially and sometimes also on the national level are experimenting with those kinds of participatory democracy.

So, yeah, I see some really cool examples. In that book, I've got the one example of Buurtzorg, you know, a fantastic healthcare organization that has ditched all the managers. And, yeah, they've been getting a lot of visitors from other organizations who are like, well, we'd love to ditch all the managers as well. And it's especially interesting how many managers are interested in ditching managers. Yeah. Like, it's...

It's fascinating. I mean, nobody has to deal with more bullshit from managers than other managers. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is their fate. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Connor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts.