'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
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What is the exciting announcement before the interview?
Hey, everyone. It's Lulu. Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know about something really exciting we have coming up here at The Interview. It's our first ever live show. It'll be at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Thursday, June 12th. I'll be talking with actor Sandra Oh. You might know her, of course, from Grey's Anatomy or Killing Eve. I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you there. Tickets are on sale now at tribecafestival.com slash theinterview. Okay, now on to the show. Here's David.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. I bet we all know plenty of smart, accomplished, and ambitious people whose ambitions start and stop with themselves. For Rucker Bregman, those people represent a potentially world-changing opportunity.
Who is Rutger Bregman and what is his mission?
Bregman is a historian and writer who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better than we're typically led to believe, and also that making it even better and more equitable is within our reach. Sounds a little off these days, doesn't it? Even Bregman is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books, which are 2020's Humankind and 2017's Utopia for Realists, land a little less convincingly today than when they were first published. But his new book, Moral Ambition, Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, is his attempt to meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into a kind of social good. He's trying to incentivize the kind of people I mentioned earlier, society's brightest and most privileged, to turn away from what he sees as meaningless and hollow, albeit lucrative, white-collar jobs in favor of far more exciting and even self-aggrandizing work that has the possibility of changing the world.
That's also the driving idea behind a school he's co-founded called the School for Moral Ambition, which you can think of as a kind of incubator for positive social impact. The big question for me, the source of some real skepticism, is how exactly he plans on convincing people to make that change and rethink their own values. Here's my conversation with Rutger Bregman.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, David. So your new book is essentially an argument for why and how talented, high-achieving people should direct their energies toward doing more good in the world, towards more morally ambitious behavior. Do you see your writing as morally ambitious?
What does Bregman's new book argue about moral ambition?
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.
So what steps have you taken since writing the book to get off the sidelines into the arena?
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the exciting announcement before the interview?
0:00–0:55
2
Who is Rutger Bregman and what is his mission?
0:55–2:38
3
What does Bregman's new book argue about moral ambition?
2:38–6:09
4
How does Rutger Bregman plan to change the career paths of talented individuals?
6:09–9:06
5
What are the historical examples of moral ambition discussed?
9:06–15:06
6
How can individuals determine their level of moral ambition?
15:06
7
What role does culture play in shaping ambitions?
13:00–34:00
8
How can coalitions help in the fight against injustice?
34:00–42:04