Rutger Bregman
speaker
273 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Rutger Bregman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, look, the reason I wrote this book was that I actually became a little bit frustrated with myself. I had a little bit of an early midlife crisis because I was mainly spending time in this quote-unquote awareness business.
You know, you write articles, you write books, you try to convince people of certain opinions, and then you hope that some other people do the actual work of making the world a better place. And at the time, I was... working on a new book about the great moral pioneers of the past, you know, the abolitionists, the suffragettes. I wanted to learn more about them.
But as I was studying some of their biographies, I experienced this emotion that I sometimes like to describe as moral envy, where you're just standing on the sidelines and you're just wishing like, gosh, Wouldn't it be awesome to actually be in the arena, to actually have some skin in the game?
So that's when I quit that project and was like, okay, I'm going to write almost like a self-help book that will make my own life more difficult. Because once I've finished it, you know, I'm going to be the first person who will actually follow its guidance.
Well, I basically quit my job. So I'm now an entrepreneur. I co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, which is an organization that helps as many people as possible to devote their career to some of the most pressing challenges we face as a species. So we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. Robin Hood famously took away the money from the rich.
Well, we take away the talent from the rich. So yeah, for example, we were recently invited by a couple of students at Harvard who are excited to start a Harvard chapter around the idea of moral ambition. And I think that's quite fitting because like, okay, here you have the most prestigious university in the world and 45% of graduates end up in consultancy or finance, right?
It's an extraordinary waste of talent.
Yeah, well, look, it's a free country. So if people really desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing as often as possible and to have that nice little cottage on the beach, Sure, fine. People have the right to be a little bit boring.
But I think there are quite a few people out there who indeed may be working at, say, Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who have this dang feeling, who are looking for a way out. One of the case studies in the book is about the British abolitionists.
And it was really surprising for me when I discovered that of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, there were 12 founders and 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. So these were people who had climbed the traditional ladder of success. They were quite wealthy. They were successful. But the reason we remember them today is because they became very morally ambitious.
And there's another period where this happened in the U.S. The move from the Gilded Era to the Progressive Era is, I think, a really good example where you really had some figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, obviously, Louis Brandes, or I was recently reading about Elva Vanderbilt, fascinating character, who at first was this very decadent, woman, incredibly rich.
But then later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, she became a pretty radical suffragette and one of the main financiers of the women's right movement. She reminded me a little bit of someone like Mackenzie Scott today, you know, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S.,
So like a decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege, right? Which is important. It's important to be aware of how privileged you are. But I think it's also very important to actually use it.
Well, it works quite well, David. Does it? Yeah. So it's been funny. I've gotten most pushback actually from people on the left on this book and not so much from, you know, these people stuck in a corporate job. They very quickly agree, actually. These are people, you know, who... wrote these application essays about how they were going to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.
You know, they wanted to work at the UN solving world hunger. But then something happened along the way. And many of them really wonder, how do I get out? What has gone wrong here? And look, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role here, but it's not the only thing. And I would even argue that it's not the most important thing.
So if you go back a couple of decades in American history, students had a very different attitude. So there's this study called the American Freshman Survey. It's been done since the late 60s. And at that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90% said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was their most important life goal.
And today, that's just 50%. Now, in the 60s, only 50% said making as much money as possible was a really important life goal to them. Today, that's 80% to 90%. So the numbers have basically reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change. And there are examples in history where it has changed. So that makes me hopeful that we can do it again.
So it begins with selecting cause areas. In Europe, we started with fighting the tobacco industry, which was a big surprise for me, actually. But our researchers convinced us that this is one of the most neglected challenges we face. So it's the single largest preventable cause of disease, 8 million deaths still every year.
And the number is going up in quite a few lower income countries or middle income countries. And there are very few people working on it. So, yeah, what does success look like? Well, making a substantial difference, of course. Smoking rates got to go down. We need stricter, better regulation.
So we did start last year in Brussels and we send, yeah, like two small SWAT teams of dedicated lobbyists, lawyers, campaigners to make a big difference there. And now the plan is to do the same thing here in the US and in Canada.
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