Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Conversations With Coleman – "Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough?"

Podcast: Conversations With Coleman
Host: Coleman Hughes (The Free Press)
Guest: Rutger Bregman, Dutch historian and author
Date: February 16, 2026
Theme: Examining the concept of moral ambition—choosing life paths and careers that maximize positive impact on the world, with insights into the historical power of idealistic movements, the potential and limits of universal basic income, and how individuals can align their talents with meaningful progress.

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Episode Overview

Coleman Hughes interviews Rutger Bregman about his new book on "moral ambition" and the broader question: Are talented people's lives ambitious enough in a moral sense—not just for themselves, but for humanity? Bregman explains his call for young people (and everyone) to take on bigger, neglected global problems rather than settle for safe or prestigious but ultimately limited careers. The conversation covers topics such as universal basic income (UBI), historical abolitionism, the legacy of activism, risks and limits of moral ambition, and reflections on kindness and human nature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rutger Bregman's Intellectual Journey and Influence

• Origins & Career Path
  • Bregman shares how the internet age gave him a platform as a Dutch historian to participate in global conversations [02:26].
  • Inspired by authors like Jared Diamond and American blogosphere writers (e.g., Ezra Klein).
  • Opted out of a traditional academic PhD in favor of tackling "the big questions" and writing for a broad audience [02:26–03:56].

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2. Universal Basic Income: Evidence and Challenges

• UBI's Track Record & New Evidence

  • Cash transfers to the poor in developing countries, especially via NGOs like GiveDirectly, have compellingly positive results [06:13–09:51].
  • "Cash seems to be...perhaps even the best tool that we have in the fight against poverty and particularly extreme poverty." – Rutger Bregman [06:39]

• Rich Countries vs. Developing Countries

  • Results from UBI trials in wealthy nations are less impressive—somewhat positive but not transformative, especially concerning health and mental health [09:00–09:51].
  • Bregman notes the evidence "seemed more promising a decade ago" for rich countries:
    “…if I'm really honest…it still looks pretty good, but not like fantastic, magical or anything like that.” [09:22]

• UBI Models & Philanthropy

  • Philanthropy can sometimes bypass the Sisyphean policy debates of government funding:
    "If there's any billionaire listening...let's pull an entire country out of extreme poverty. We basically know how to do it right now." [07:36]

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3. Infrastructure vs. Aid: Development Solutions

• Infrastructure & Economic Growth
  • Coleman highlights the transformative power of infrastructure (roads, traffic lights) from his travels in West Africa [11:47–13:53].
  • Bregman on the limits of Randomista-style interventions and the need for effective institutions for long-term prosperity [13:53–16:18].
  • "You're not going to get infrastructure by sprinkling some money around in poor villages." [15:09]

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4. Defining Moral Ambition

• What Is Moral Ambition?
  • "It is the desire to make this world a wildly better place and to use what you have...to make the biggest possible impact for as many people as possible." – Rutger Bregman [16:28]
  • Contrasts with advice like "follow your passion":
    “The odds are that your passion isn’t that important. Or at least it’s often a great way to limit your impact.” [17:00]
    • Prefers prioritization frameworks like ITN (Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness) [17:44].

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5. Lessons from Abolitionism: How Big Change Happens

• History's Most Morally Ambitious People

  • Bregman dives deep into abolitionism—arguably history's greatest human rights movement [18:31–24:18].
  • Britain was the standout: “It was a total failure everywhere, with one exception. Great Britain. Great Britain. It was a huge success.” [19:54]
  • Highlights Thomas Clarkson as a "lynchpin" whose life's dedication arguably catalyzed the movement:
    “If Clarkson would have died in 1785 or 6...the whole course of human history could have looked very differently.” [22:40]

• Pragmatism vs. Purity in Movements

  • British abolitionists prioritized pragmatic incremental steps (e.g., targeting the slave trade first, not slavery as a whole) [27:03–30:52].
  • American abolitionists sometimes hurt their cause by focusing more on personal purity than achievable progress:
    "They came across as...more focused on their own moral purity than on actually achieving results." [28:34]

• Power and Morality

  • Britain’s willingness to use naval and military power was crucial to abolition’s global spread:
    “The lesson of 19th century Britain is that if you have big humanitarian beliefs, you better also have the power to enforce those beliefs, otherwise no one's going to listen.” [38:21]

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6. The Limits and Dangers of Moral Ambition

• Potential Downsides

  • Coleman raises the risk of “bad” or deluded moral ambition causing harm (e.g., RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine activism) [53:29–55:08].
  • Bregman insists on humility and continual re-evaluation—history may judge some moral crusaders harshly in retrospect (e.g., animal rights today) [55:08–58:55].

• Examples of Expanding the Moral Circle

  • Past “fanatics” sometimes turn out to be correct in hindsight (e.g., early abolitionists, animal welfare activists) [59:18–62:00].
  • “Studying history makes you humble about your own morality.” [59:36]

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7. Kindness, Human Nature, and Optimism

• "Humankind" Thesis
  • Bregman argues that humans evolved for friendliness and cooperation—“survival of the friendliest”—contrary to the “veneer theory” of civilization [62:53–67:12].
  • "60, 70 years of sociological evidence...the opposite happens [in disasters]. In moments like that, you get an explosion of altruism.” [66:02]
  • Acknowledges human capacity for violence and the role of environment and institutions.

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8. Modern Role Models and Institutions

• Bill Gates & Philanthropy

  • Bill Gates widely cited—but as the exception, not the rule [42:27–44:05].
  • "I also think it's important though, to point out that he's the exception." [42:31]

• Elon Musk & Cults

  • “Definitely. Very high [moral ambition],” says Bregman on Musk, even as he comments on Musk’s recent troubling direction [46:08].
  • Distinguishes between cult-like dedication and cults of personality and how well-organized small groups can have outsized impact (right-wing think tanks, Federalist Society, etc.) [46:59–48:28].

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9. Mobilizing the Young: School for Moral Ambition

• Bregman’s Personal Mission
  • Co-founding the School for Moral Ambition to encourage talented young people to take on “the most important pressing global problems” rather than defaulting to prestigious but empty careers [67:23–70:30].
  • Early successes: “Almost 10% of Harvard juniors applied...the message that did best in our focus group was something like, you didn’t fight your way into Harvard to end up in a bullshit job.” [70:04]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the need for moral ambition:
  “Too many [talented people] are currently withering away at McKinsey or JP Morgan or some hedge fund...I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not saying that’s immoral. I would just say it’s kind of boring, right?” – Rutger Bregman [67:23]

• On practical vs. pure approach to reform:
  “They came across as these very morally pure people who were more focused on their own moral purity than on actually achieving results...In Britain you had a very successful boycott campaign because it was much smaller in scope.” – Rutger Bregman [28:34]

• On history and humility:
  “History is weird, and very often the right thing happens for the wrong reason.” – Rutger Bregman [35:59]

• On expanding the moral circle:
  “For me, it’s not a surprise that so many of the first abolitionists...also cared deeply about animal rights...Once you get into that mindset of expanding the moral circle…then it only becomes logical to push the boundaries and include more people and in this case, more sentient creatures.” – Rutger Bregman [57:09]

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Key Timestamps

• Intro & Opening Theme – [00:49–01:08]
• Bregman’s Background & Utopia for Realists – [01:47–03:56]
• Universal Basic Income: Evidence & Results – [05:00–11:47]
• Aid vs. Infrastructure – [11:47–16:18]
• Defining Moral Ambition – [16:18–18:22]
• Abolitionism: Case Study in Moral Ambition – [18:22–33:44]
• Power, Global Slavery, and History’s Lessons – [33:44–40:02]
• Modern Philanthropy & Moral Role Models (Gates, Musk, Quakers) – [41:43–46:08]
• Institutional Power: Cults, Right vs. Left – [46:08–51:13]
• Challenges and Dangers of Moral Ambition – [53:29–59:18]
• Human Nature and the Possibility of Progress – [62:00–67:12]
• Personal Mission & School for Moral Ambition – [67:23–70:30]

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Final Reflections

The discussion closes with a call to action for listeners—especially young, talented individuals—to step beyond comfort and incremental impact, aiming instead for the kinds of pursuits that move the moral needle for entire societies. Bregman hopes to inspire a new generation to “take on some of these dragons” with the same pragmatic idealism as history’s great reformers.

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For listeners seeking substance, this is an episode full of challenging ideas, historical wisdom, and gentle, thoughtful provocations about how to live a morally ambitious life.

Transcript

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[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Rutger Bregman. Rutger is a Dutch historian and best selling author of Utopia for Humankind and today's topic moral how to stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.

[Host - Advertiser]

This episode is a call to reflect.

[Coleman Hughes]

On whether the line of work you have chosen in life is ambitious enough. Not in terms of how much money you make, but in terms of how much good you're doing. Rutger believes that the smartest and most talented people should be choosing much bigger problems to solve. In the course of this conversation, we also talk about how cults have changed.

[Host - Advertiser]

History, how the British Empire stamped out.

[Coleman Hughes]

Slavery around the world, and much more. So without further ado, Rucker Bregman. Okay, Rutger Bregman, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[Rutger Bregman]

Thanks for having me.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I remember your book Utopia for Realists was a very big deal when, when I was in college. And so you've been on my radar for a long time and I think I heard you on several podcasts back then, but I don't actually know your story before then. How did you get to be a person that at that point was writing about universal basic income and the future of economics as technological progress advances? And you've written two books, I think, since then and we'll talk about that. But what's your story? How did you come to care about that issue and become such a prominent figure?

[Rutger Bregman]

Well, that's really cool to hear that you're already reading Utopia Franklin. I mean that was I think 12 years ago when I wrote it in Dutch, at least it came out a few years later in English. And I guess, you know, I am a product of the Internet that age, I think a career like mine, a Dutch historian, you know, having at least a bit of a voice on the global stage would have been impossible, say 20, 30 years ago. When I was a student, I was always fascinated by history. But at some point I decided, you know what a PhD, it's not really the route that I want to, want to go down. It seemed too specialized. And I was obsessed with really the big questions of history, like where do we come from, where do we go? What makes our species special? I loved authors like Jared diamond. And yeah, at that time I was very much in the American blogosphere. So I was writing in Dutch, but I was reading people like, well, Matthew Iglesias, Ezra Klein, you know, who had just started Vox.com, so I guess I felt like I was participating in those conversations. It's just that it was kind of a one way thing because I was writing in Dutch. So yeah, at some point I had the opportunity to write that first book, Utopia for Realist. Now, Basic Income, the idea of a universal Basic income was a very obscure idea back then. Very little had been written about it.

[Coleman Hughes]

Almost as pre. Andrew Yang.

[Rutger Bregman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andrew Yang actually saw me speak about basic income at Ted in 2017. Now I'm not entirely sure if that's when he got the idea. I think he suggested that to me. Don't want to take all the credit, but it is true that when I started talking about it, it was an obscure idea. I was reading people like Dylan Matthews for example, who was [e-mail] at the time, just a few other bloggers who were like, hey, this is an idea that we should take seriously once again. Now, because I'm trained as a historian, I was immediately like, has this ever happened before? And it turns out there were big experiments with Basic income in the 1960s and 1970s, and I think I was the first one to really start writing about those experiments again for a broader audience. Obviously the academic papers were there all those years, but I guess I unsealed those for a bigger audience.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Before we get to your, your newer books, a couple questions on Basic Income. It's a topic I haven't touched in this podcast on a long time. I think it, it rose in salience, in particular with, with Andrew Yang, and I think it's declined in salience since then. You don't hear as many people talking about it, at least from what I can tell in mainstream media. What is the literature say now on Basic Income now that there's been more and more studies? You know, from what I've seen, it's that, you know, it, it gets quite good results on most Most studies that look at it, but those are small scale and by definition, if you were to do this at a societal level, we'd see a mix of impacts that are not identical to what we see in studies. Right. It would be more complex and it would have second order and third order effects. And then there's the how you pay for a question. So it seems to me the literature gives a bunch of good results and that's promising, but most of the important questions are still unanswered by that literature. Does that seem like a fair characterization? What do you think?

[Rutger Bregman]

I guess I'm a bit more optimistic. So if I look back at the last 12 years, everything that's happened since I wrote that first book, I mean, we've got so much more evidence right now, particularly for poor and for middle income countries. The evidence looks really, really good. In fact, it looks great. Like cash seems to be one of the best, perhaps even the best tool that we have in the fight against poverty and particularly extreme poverty. There's this fantastic NGO that I already wrote about back then, GIFT directly, that was fairly small at the time. Now it's huge. And yeah, all the stuff they do, it just looks incredibly good. They're a very rigorous ngo, so they continuously fund all these huge randomized control trials and again and again and again, it just seems to work really well. I mean, the real experts on the poorest lives are the poor themselves and they spend most of that money in a really sensible way. So like the classic objections that people have to giving away free money to really poor people, like, oh, they'll all spend it on drugs or alcohol, that just really does not turn out to be true. In fact, in many cases, spending on, so called, what is it, sin goods like tobacco and alcohol, they actually go down. So I think that evidence is really strong and encouraging. In fact, I was talking to Nick Allardis, the CEO of GiveDirectly the other day and they have some really ambitious big plans out there. Like if there's any billionaire listening to this show, they could call Nick and say, okay, let's pull an entire country out of extreme poverty. We basically know how to do it right now they could do it for Malawi, it will cost a couple of billion dollars. But yeah, Michael Dell recently did something similar for American kids. So I can't see why we can't do it for kids that are way, way poorer now for richer countries, the evidence is more mixed. I think it's still fairly positive. But if I'm really honest and I think that's important to be intellectually honest about this. I had hoped for better results. So there has been one huge study that was actually financed partially by Sam Altman. Really well done, very rigorous in the United States. And yeah, the results were kind of disappointing. They were also not very bad. But I would have suspected bigger improvements in health, for example. Mental health. Yeah, just in general, more things that would excite me. But at least in that particular study you didn't see much of that. Now there have been other studies like you've got big basic, big income fans who then say like, well here's like a dozen other studies and that's true. So I guess the big meta analyses still have to be written. But my general view is that basic income is, is much more like the welfare state as we know it. So I mean I see myself as an old fashioned European socio democrat. I'm pretty enthusiastic about the power of the welfare state if it's well designed and well constructed. And basic income I think can and perhaps in the future should be a part of that. Especially with the rise of AI and the labor market that could start breaking down. But maybe I'm less bullish on it than I was a decade ago when yeah, the evidence seemed, I'll have to be honest, for rich countries the evidence seemed more promising a decade ago than it does now. It still looks pretty good, but not like fantastic, magical or anything like that.

[Coleman Hughes]

So the right model for ubi, at least the most optimistic model, the place where it works best is essentially wealthy philanthropists and philanthropic organizations donating UBI to developing countries. Is that right? And that gets you totally around the issue of how do you pay for it and what is the new tax structure? What knock on effects happen as a result of the new tax and is it a VAT tax and is it a sales tax and so on and so forth.

[Rutger Bregman]

Yeah, yeah. And governments could do it as well. I mean obviously the size of development aid has shrunk a lot. I mean, Elon Musk has taken the chainsaw to usaid. But the same thing has been happening in the uk, in the Netherlands where I'm from. I mean development aid budgets are being gutted everywhere. I was a proponent of pretty rigorous reform of development aid, not destroying it altogether. And yeah, one of the biggest reforms that I would have proposed was like, okay, give way more to really the poorest countries and give much more in cash. In fact, I think cash should be the benchmark. Whenever you try to help people who are much poorer than you are in another country, you should always ask yourself, why not just give them money? Because so often, you know, paternalistic people drive around in their white SUVs, I don't know, giving people all kinds of courses or whatever. There's, you know, the famous saying, don't give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish. By far the stupidest saying in this whole space because maybe the man doesn't like fish, maybe he's a vegetarian, maybe he can make way more money with another business idea. Right? Just, just give the guy the money and he'll probably have a better idea than you have.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So with regard to teach a man to fish versus giving man a fish, it's also, I mean, it is a good lesson in many scenarios in life. But like any aphorism, it's not well suited for every scenario. There's also scenarios where you can give someone fish while you're teaching them to fish in the interim. Right. I mean, I was recently in Ghana for 10 days and it was my first time. I'd never been to West Africa. And what struck me, and this is obvious, but the importance of it is impressed upon you when you're staying somewhere for a while, is how important infrastructure is. The difference between having paved roads on 100% of your journey and paved roads on 80% of your journey is not like a 20% difference. It's like an order of magnitude difference. The difference between having enough traffic lights in a city and not having enough traffic lights in a city or half of the traffic lights not working is an incredible difference. And it's the entire pace of the economy slows as a result. Ghana has all of these quite interesting UNESCO sites, slave castles, tourist locations, they're just almost impossible to get to. If the country had better infrastructure, it would be like a one hour drive and that would lower the cost of traveling there. It would incentivize so much more tourism. And in reality it's like a four hour drive. And it's like the drive is incredibly stressful because of the lack of infrastructure. So what does all that do to depress the economy? In other words, how much do you think about infrastructure? Obviously this is not an either or situation. You can give people cash and then also have a conversation about how does the infrastructure of these places improve so that they can experience the economic progress that East Asia did and that the west did before that? How much do you think about infrastructure as a problem for the developing world?

[Rutger Bregman]

So there's this huge debate in economics. What I wrote about in Utopia for Realists was one School of people who are called the Randomistas. This was quite a revolution within economics of people who said, let's just approach this like medicine, right? You've got a group that you give the medicine, you got a control group, and then you compare those groups and then you can see like how effective your intervention actually is. And that works for stuff like handing out insecticide treated malaria bed nets, or for giving people money. And then indeed, you can see that some things work really well, like cash, like bed nets. And some things really don't work all that well, like handing out school books, for example, or subsidizing school uniforms or building schools or whatever. There's a lot of stuff that really doesn't work all that well. So I think that has been a really important move in economics. There are still a lot of critics out there who say that, look, this all sounds nice, but it's like it's a very small beer in the end. It's all about what makes a country actually rich, what causes economic development. And that is rooted in institutions, probably effective institutions that are able to build the things like you just mentioned, like infrastructure. You're not going to get infrastructure by sprinkling some money around in poor villages. And there's a lot to be said for that approach as well. For me, it's not either. Or in my simplistic view of the world, it's like less malaria is probably good, that will probably help you in that quest to build better institutions in poorer countries. But no, you should not think that that is going to be some panacea. In the end, what you need is indeed an effective government that realizes, well, indeed, we would like to have those roads leading to those UNESCO heritage sites and then make a lot of money on tourism. So, yeah, super complex question, and I really don't want to suggest that philanthropy or development aid is going to be the answer here anyway. And we know this, the most obvious example is obviously China. That's the biggest reason why extreme poverty has declined so much globally. And that had absolutely nothing to do with development aid and everything to do with institutions opening up markets and making a shitload of money.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Okay, so let's get on to your recent book. Your recent book is about moral ambition. Define that phrase for me.

[Rutger Bregman]

So it's pretty simple. It is the desire to make this world a wildly better place and to use what you have. Your scarce resources, most importantly your time, but also your talent, your capital, your access to certain cultural networks, your podcast, anything you have to make the biggest possible impact for as many people as possible. That's, that's moral ambition.

[Coleman Hughes]

Is follow your dreams. Good advice.

[Rutger Bregman]

I would say no. Follow your passion is obviously the most popular career advice among career coaches. The problem though is that the odds are that your passion isn't that important. Or at least it's often a great way to limit your impact. I often like to make the analogy of Gandalf and Frodo. Gandalf never asked Frodo to follow his passion. He said, look, I'm an old wise wizard. This is like the list of important problems. And throwing that ring into the mountain is probably the most important task right now. And that's how you do the most good. So what I really like is the approach of. Some people will be familiar with the approach of effective altruists who work with so called prioritization researchers. And what these people do is they spend a lot of time thinking about what are the most pressing global issues that we face. There's a really simple framework for this called the ITN framework. So you focus on the most important, the most tractable and the most neglected issues. And probably that last variable, the neglected bit, is probably the most important one because so many people focus on the same issues. And that's again a great way to limit your impact to do what all the others are already doing.

[Coleman Hughes]

Which living human being do you think has done the most good in his or her lifetime? And you have to pick one.

[Rutger Bregman]

Huh? That's a really hard question. So I spent a lot of time for this book studying the abolitionist movement, which in my view is the greatest movement for human rights that this world has ever seen. And initially I was like, let's write about the Dutch abolitionist, because I'm Dutch myself. And I thought that's probably been highly neglected. And I thought, surely there's an interesting story to tell there. Well, it would have been a very short book because there was hardly any abolitionism in the Netherlands in the 18th century and the 19th century. In the mid-1850s, there was one petition drive and the abolitionists managed to gather about 7, 800 signatures. And that was about it. Now, just for context, ten years later there was a petition against the Catholics and that one got 200,000 signatures. Just to give you an idea about the moral priorities of my fellow countrymen. In France, it was pretty much the same. So in France you had a bunch of writers and intellectuals advocating against the slave trade and against slavery. They got very little done. In Spain, there was pretty much nothing. In Portugal there was. There was so little that like the Book about abolitionism in Portugal is called the Sounds of Silence. I think that pretty much says it all. In the US People often forget this, but abolitionism in the United States was also a failure. It was extremely unpopular. At its height, The Liberator, the main abolitionist newspaper, had only 3,000 subscribers. The Liberty Party, which was the only political party in favor of abolition, never won any election anywhere. Just before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, or a guy who campaigned for Abraham Lincoln, came back from the south and said, oh, all kinds of terrible things have happened to me. They called me an idiot. They called me a fool, but what's worse, they called me an abolitionist. It was worse than being a vegan today. So it was a total failure everywhere, with one exception. Great Britain. Great Britain. It was a huge success. Hundreds of thousands of people started advocating against the slave trade, and then later against slavery. Britain also happened to be the big imperial power at the time. And later they forced 80%, 80% of other countries to also stop slave trading. So it was a highly contingent thing. And then if you zoom in on the British abolitionist movement, you realize that there were a few people who were absolutely crucial. If they would have fallen off their horse in 1785, history could have looked very differently. So people like Olauda Equiano, who wrote the biggest bestseller in the 1790s on his journey as a slave who paid for his own freedom. And that had some extraordinary adventures, had a big impact on the public debate. People like William Wilberforce, most famously the politician in Westminster who kept bringing that bill to the floor of Parliament year after year after year, kept pushing. But I think by far the most important was this guy called Thomas Clarkson. He was a student at Cambridge University in 1785 who just participated in an essay contest. And by coincidence, that year, the students had to answer this question of, is it okay to own and sell other human beings? And he had never really thought about it, but, you know, he participated in these kind of things because he wanted glory. He wanted to become famous and have a big career for himself in the Church for England. Church of England. And so he won first prize. And then there's this famous moment when, you know, he traveled from Cambridge, where he just won the prize, back to London, where he lived. He was near the city of Wadesmill. Kept thinking about what he had just read and written and thought, you know, if this is really true and someone ought to do something about it. And almost a little bit like, I don't know, a Silicon Valley startup entrepreneur with, you know, these people are Burning with energy, he devoted everything. He really gave it everything he had and spent 60 years fighting the slave trade. He traveled 35,000 miles up and down the United Kingdom spreading the abolitionist propaganda everywhere. He founded hundreds of local committees. And, yeah, the biggest experts on British abolitionism, I think most of them would agree that Thomas Clarkson was the most important one. In fact, there's one guy, Christopher Leslie Brown, who in my view is the greatest historian of British abolitionism. And I think he would even argue that if Clarkson would have died in 1785 or 6, fallen off his horse, that the whole course of human history could have looked very differently. Because, remember again, abolitionism was very contingent. It was really because Britain was able to force 80% of other countries to stop slave trading that abolitionism eventually triumphed. Now, if Britain wouldn't have done that, to me, it is entirely understandable and thinkable that slavery could have gone on for way longer. Way longer. But there's nothing about human nature that says, oh, we eventually will find it abhorrent, just like we find factory farm. Most people find factory farming. Okay, right now. And that may be seen as something deeply morally abhorrent by people in the future. And in the 1750s, the vast majority of people, whether they were Muslim or Christian or secular Enlightenment philosophers, they were all like, yeah, slavery, yeah, that's just. That's just normal. We've always done that.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So, okay, one, one question about the slave trade. So about abolitionism in particular. So I agree that Britain was the driving force behind global abolition. And in fact, much of what they did was resented and viewed as a part of their colonial legacy by. By the rest of the world and viewed as a cynical cover for colonial ambition. And you could argue, you know, motives are always mixed. And so projecting power and abolishing the slave trade went hand in hand. I think that's a good thing. Ultimately, I think there was more good than bad, which came from that aspect. But when you talk about American abolitionism being a failure, I think this is. I think that claim needs some more context, which is that I think Americans in the north who were against slavery. You know, the Republican Party was founded as an anti slavery party. And that, as you know, but just for my audience, was different than abolition. Abolitionists were viewed as extreme activists who believe that slavery in the south should end immediately.

[Rutger Bregman]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

And slaves should be emancipated. Much of the rest of the north, especially over time, over the course of the first half of the 19th century, they became anti slavery, which was the more moderate position that Slavery was a sin. Slavery was immoral. However, to simply end it overnight would cause more practical problems than it was worth. So the correct position was to contain it, to not let any new slave states into the Union. And then the idea was ultimately it would hopefully would die out or whatever. And that was Abraham Lincoln and that was a Republican party and so forth. And so it's easy for me to imagine because those people actually did think slavery was immoral. They believed it was a sin. That their view was tempered by the political, by the politics and by the practicality, meaning they understood if the north, if the whole north just did what the abolitionists said, there could be a bloody civil war on, on a scale that was unimaginable. And that actually is what happened. You know, ultimately that war did happen. So is it that it was a failure or is it that abolition was the, it was the extreme version and gave energy to the overall anti slavery movement, which in turn did hasten the end of slavery.

[Rutger Bregman]

So you're absolutely right to say that the circumstances in the US and Britain were obviously very, very different. Like for British people, like slavery did exist. There were people, I think around 10 to 15,000 people in London in the 1780s who were enslaved. But obviously it was not a huge phenomenon. And for most people it was something that happened far away on slave ships, in colonies places where they'd never been. So it was easier to virtue signal, if you will, and to be against the slave trade because you would not suffer big consequences, perhaps in your own life. But what I found really striking when I compared these two movements, American abolitionism and British abolitionism, is that British abolitionism was so much more pragmatic. It was really laser focused on actually achieving results. I'll give you one example. In the US you had the so called free produce movement, very similar to the most pure vegans today who are like, oh, is there a tiny little bit of milk powder in this that I can't consume it? The free produce movement was also like, I will refuse to buy any product that has any slave labor involved. I refuse to do that. So you had these free produce shops that were really unpopular because the quality of the products was very low. It was expensive. And in this way, I think American abolitionists didn't pay themselves a service. They came across as these very morally pure people who were more focused on their own moral purity than on actually achieving results. Now in Britain you had a very successful boycott campaign because it was much smaller in scope. So you had a huge boycott of sugar and tea. Now Obviously, this was highly charismatic. Right. Everyone knows the British people. They love their tea. They love the sugar in their tea. So for hundreds of thousands of people to suddenly not do that anymore, it didn't make a big economic impact. If you look at the statistics, the economic statistics, you can't even see anything. But it was a great way to galvanize the movement and to increase awareness. And that is something that struck me again and again and again. Another simple example is that the British abolitionists early on decided that they would first focus on taking down the slave trade and not on taking down slavery as such, because they thought, you know what? In the end, we want to take down the whole system. But that is going to be politically completely impossible, completely toxic. If we want to suggest that we even touch the property of people in the colonies, I don't know. That's indeed to cause some kind of civil war. But for canceling and ending the slave trade, we have some pretty pragmatic arguments. And you know what struck me most is that they started saying, hey, it is actually our own white British boys who really suffer the most from the slave trade. Because it turned out they did some really good investigative journalism, that the percentage of white sailors that died on these voyages was actually higher than. Than the number of, or the percentage of enslaved people. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to suggest any moral equivalency here, because I'm talking about the perpetrators. But what I admire about the abolitionists is that they were smart enough to recognize the political power of this argument. They went to the politicians. They went to the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, and said, hey, our boys are dying. We ought to do something about this. And suddenly, a lot of politicians were very interested.

[Host - Advertiser]

Why was it higher?

[Coleman Hughes]

I mean, I have to imagine, you know, they were. Maybe they were all getting scurvy and conditions were horrible. But shouldn't it have been higher for slaves packed in the bottom of a ship than. Than the people sailing the ship?

[Rutger Bregman]

Yeah, there's some really horrid economics behind this, but it does make sense if you think about it. Enslaved people were property, so you didn't want them to die because you wanted to sell them. These sailors, they were not property. They were employees. If they would die, then you wouldn't have to pay their wages at the end of the voyage, so you would actually make more money if they would die. Obviously, you didn't want too many of them to die because otherwise you wouldn't get home. But, yeah, I think that was the basic Economic mechanism behind it.

[Coleman Hughes]

At the same time, though, wasn't there a famous case in Britain where people had insurance policies for the slaves that they were taking on these ships, and so they could basically try to commit insurance fraud by killing the slaves, throwing the slaves overboard? And there was a famous case there, right?

[Rutger Bregman]

Yeah, that's the famous case of the Zork, which was originally actually a Dutch ship that was hijacked by the British. Recently, a fantastic book has been published about it. I just read it. But indeed, this was a case of, what is it, about 150 enslaved people being thrown overboard. And that case went to court not because of murder, not because of mass murder, but because of insurance fraud. The owners of the slave ship tried indeed to claim the insurance money, and then the insurance company said, we don't really believe your story of what happened there. Now, this became a really important case to galvanize the abolitionist movement because a lot of Equiano, the abolitionists that I mentioned, brought this to the attention of Grenville Sharp, another one of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. And they started to make a lot of noise about it in the British press. It is really a beautiful example of where rigorous journalism, raising awareness, campaigning can make a big difference. And you gotta imagine that this is really the first time that this happened in all of human history. This the book to read about this is Adam Hochschild's book, Bury the Chains, where he really describes how these people had to invent everything, you know, design a logo, create that abolitionist propaganda, if you will, do petitions on a skill that people had never seen before. It was really the first movement in all of human history where people advocated for the rights of others. Obviously, there had always been movements where people advocated for their own rights, but this had never happened happened before, at least not to my knowledge, where people, hundreds of thousands of people, started advocating for other people's rights.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, so as you know, we still have slavery in the world today.

[Rutger Bregman]

Well, it's just coming back in Afghanistan.

[Coleman Hughes]

Legally in Afghanistan, you know, certain countries in Africa. There's a very good book that came out last year by Justin Morozi called Captives and Companions, which is a history of slavery in the Islamic world. But he has visited locations in Africa and talked recently, like in the past five to 10 years to actual slaves or very recently freed slaves. And there it's a problem of entrenched local custom. You're talking about tribes and localities where slavery has been the norm for hundreds of years, if not longer. That are so remote that they've. They were untouched, really, by the British abolitionist activism and still persist to this day in areas where the government has very little state capacity. If they have a functional police force, it's not one that penetrates the whole country and regularly polices black markets that reflect local customs and so forth. And this is a very tough problem to solve. You know, the lesson of. I think our mutual admiration for what the British did is that they really were not afraid to use force. They were not afraid to use their. Their role as. As the global superpower and really just force people to stop slave trading fully against their will. Is there any lesson to be learned there for America? Because, you know, America is a superpower today. I think, you know, in principle, we could make stamping out the remaining traces of slavery around the world a high priority, but that would require a level of comfort with exerting force that I think we don't have. And, and in general, I think the issue of global slavery is. Is underrated now. So how, if at all, should we incorporate trying to reduce slavery around the world into our current foreign policy?

[Rutger Bregman]

So, a couple of things let me first say. You know, I'm really trained as a historian, and I have little patience for people who want to treat this issue or this story as, you know, a kind of Disney story where you have the good guys and the bad guys. History is weird, and very often the right thing happens for the wrong reason. If you ask the question, why did the British start this massive campaign against the slave trade? Why did they spend up to 2% of GDP for decades on this? It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in all of human history. You know, like four, five, six times as much as the British spend on development aid these days. Well, it was a mix of motivations initially. I think it was mostly, indeed quite moral, or at least Christian motivations that the nation felt it had this sin of perpetuating slavery and the slave trade for so long and that now it really needed to get rid of it and do its best at some point. Also, you know, very imperialistic motivations became a big motive. You know, about the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century when they cut up the whole continent and often anti slavery and imperialism, you know, were just two sides of the same coin. But the fact that, you know, they were fighting slavery in the slave trade, that was a really good thing. And if you read about, like, for example, how did I think this was the mid-1850s when the British approached the king of Lagos and said, hey, we thought about it for a while and we don't think slavery is good. Can you please stop doing that? And the king said, we've been doing that since forever. What's the problem? I think I'd rather not stop. And then the British bombed the whole city and 5,000 people died. And then a new king came to power and they were like, yeah, what do you think about slavery? And he was like, yeah, yeah, I think let's abolish it. So you're absolutely right. Power was crucial here. This is, by the way, maybe a little bit off topic, but this is my big frustration with Europe these days, is that it's become a continent that speaks a lot about morality and international law, et cetera, but it doesn't have the power to actually back it up. The lesson of 19th century Britain is that if you have big humanitarian beliefs, you better also have the power to enforce those beliefs, otherwise no one's going to listen. Now, we have made tremendous moral progress. I think that is really important to say. Up until last month, every single country in the whole world had made slavery illegal. As I said, the evil Taliban has recently made it legal again. But yeah, the fact that it's moved into illegality pretty much everywhere, that is huge moral progress. Still. There are tens of millions of enslaved people, but it is not normal the way it was in the 1850s for us. Freedom of labor. We're so used to it, and it's so easy to forget that that was actually not the case throughout most of history. Democracy is a very recent, precious, fragile thing. And that's, by the way, also something to keep in mind as we move into the AI era and we face some pretty massive concentration of power. Like history doesn't suggest to us that we will always keep making moral progress. So for me, this is really a battle of ideas. In the end, as I said, I see myself as an old fashioned European social democrat. I see myself as someone who's part of that universalist tradition. I think you had people like Peter Singer on the show who said that moral progress has mainly been about expanding the moral circle. I think we're still in the middle of that fight. And I think now, actually in quite a few places around the world, we seem to be losing that fight.

[Host - Advertiser]

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[Coleman Hughes]

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[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, let's talk more about moral ambition. Consider the case of Bill Gates. Has he been able to do so much good in his life because he had moral ambition as a young person? Or is he a case where he had normal ambition as a young person, was extremely successful, and then at some point had so much money and the cast of mind so as to pivot to becoming morally ambitious? If so, is he a model of your thesis in action? Or is he an exception that proves your rule? Or is he in a way a model for people to follow and a reason to have normal ambition rather than moral ambition as a young person?

[Rutger Bregman]

So Bill Gates is absolutely someone who is a model for people to follow. And I've said this for a long time. I also think it's important though, to point out that he's the exception. I always find it funny when people talk to me about billionaires and philanthropy. It's always like, Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Bill Gates. What about Bill Gates? What about Bill Gates?

[Coleman Hughes]

Bill Gates.

[Rutger Bregman]

Great. Yeah, we wouldn't have a malaria vaccine without him. We actually have two effective malaria vaccines without him. And probably he was the Thomas Clarkson for malaria vaccines. Right. He spent so much money on it two decades ago when very few people were interested in it. People from the left to the right, even like the leftiest social Democrats in Sweden didn't give a damn about malaria. And then, yeah, the Microsoft billionaire comes along and says, I think this is really important. I've looked into it and I'm going to spend a shitload of money on it. Well, that's great. And that's legacy. Recently, though, there was an analysis of people who had signed the Giving Pledge. You know, the initiative of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, of people who promise to give away at least half of their wealth before they die. Well, you know, on average, the wealth of the people who had signed onto it has grown by about 280% in the last 15 years. Eight couples have died without fulfilling the pledge. Only one living couple, John Arnold and his wife, have actually fulfilled the pledge. Well, great credit to them. But I do think that is something. I think that's basically what they did. Like, if you promise something and you don't do it, then that's lying. Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

As you point out in your book, Quakers didn't do this because it would set them up to lie.

[Rutger Bregman]

Right. Yeah. Well, the Quakers. The Quakers. If only we had more Quakers. Yeah, it's a really. I became obsessed with the Quakers at some point. It's so interesting that indeed the abolitionist movement was driven by such a small, radical religious group. Honestly, I was very much influenced by the New Atheists when I was, say, 17, 18 years old. I was reading my Sam Harris, I was reading my Christopher Hitchens, and I had kind of assumed that slavery ended because of the Enlightenment, that there were just great philosophers like Voltaire, like David Hume, like John Locke, who came up with really powerful arguments about human rights, and that that was the main driving force that ended the most horrible things that humans have ever done, or one of the most horrible things that humans have ever done to one another. Turns out, no, not really. I wouldn't say the Enlightenment was unimportant. It did definitely play a role. But, yeah, study British abolitionism and you realize how religious it was. I mean, the establishment was also incredibly religious. Like, all the Christian arguments in favor of slavery were also there. But, yeah, these Quakers, like Benjamin Lay, who was the very first abolitionist in the us, Anthony Benezet, who was like the podcaster, if you will, the intellectual of the movement, was a Quaker. And then people like Clarkson and Wilberforce, also deeply, deeply religious. In fact, they felt that God had punished Great Britain because of slavery. And that's why they had lost America. That was basically their read of world history. And that's why they felt now we need to do better and give it everything we have and abolish slavery everywhere.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right, okay. Does Elon Musk have high moral ambition?

[Rutger Bregman]

Oh, yeah, definitely. Very high. So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that moral ambition. I mean, it depends a lot on whose morality we're talking about. Obviously, I said to you before that I'm talking about a particular type of morality, the universalism, you know, the desire to expand the moral circle. Now, Elon Musk is a profoundly mixed bag. I think those people on the left who call him stupid or don't recognize that he's an absolute genius and one of the greatest entrepreneurs, probably even the greatest of our era. Yeah, they're very annoying. I mean, just a Tesla, just SpaceX, just one of those companies is already enough, you know, to be in the history books forever, but to do multiple of those companies, and that's just. This is absolutely incredible. I think he also completely lost it in recent years, and I think he's now going into a very dark direction. But, yeah, that's definitely moral ambition. Honestly, Coleman, what has inspired me a lot, or what I've always been fascinated by was basically the success of right wingers in the United States. So maybe you remember that the last chapter of Utopia for Realists was about the rise of neoliberalism, the rise of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Van Hayek, people who really understand what small groups of very dedicated people can do if they want to change the world. Peter Thiel always calls that a cult. A cult is the opposite of a consultancy firm. People at a consultancy firm don't believe in anything. They jump from project to project. But people in a cult, they have that one big secret that they believe in, and they're willing to fight for it. They're willing to die for it, just like the abolitionists. And if I look at the right versus the left in America in the last 30 to 40 years, then I think right wingers have been way better at building those institutions, building those cults. From the Federalist Society to the Heritage Foundation. I kind of admire these people. They understand what it takes. I mean, their morality is not my morality. But, yeah, they teach us a great lesson in social physics, if you will, of how it actually works.

[Coleman Hughes]

Thinking off the top of my head, might that be because people on the right understand and live out the reality that most of the important cultural institutions from any national museum they visit to Hollywood movies, to elite colleges, skews against their values and against their image of themselves and so forth, and doesn't reflect them. So they, they are more likely to have a self concept of being, of needing to be Luke Skywalker and crew against the. What they would see as kind of the evil empire of the left that controls everything. And that lends itself to a psychology of cultish project management, more so than would be the case on the left.

[Rutger Bregman]

So I'm inclined to disagree just because I know of many historical examples of very successive progressive cults, you know, who were initially very small and not taken seriously and their ideas were dismissed as utopian, but then over time they were really successful in influencing.

[Coleman Hughes]

I think that will go along with my point though, in the sense that those progressive cults, they were cults at a time when their values were not reflected in the major institutions.

[Rutger Bregman]

Right, sure, that makes sense. Yeah. You could argue though that take the great awokening. I mean, the first woke social justice warriors in 20, when was it 14 or 15. They were probably the minority, right? And they were pretty successful in taking over. So I guess my main problem though with the cults that we have seen on the left side of the political spectrum in, let's say the last decade is that they were mainly focused on, I don't know, using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world instead of actually building institutions, passing legislation. In the book, I compared the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, for example. And even though Black Lives Matter was huge, as you know, it was one of the biggest, just if you look at the numbers, one of the biggest protest movements in American history, maybe even the biggest, but it passed no substantial legislation whatsoever. And, well, I don't have to tell you this. Its main slogan was one of the most unpopular slogans in history with Defund the police. So in that sense, I think we can really learn something from, in my case, my adversaries, especially when they're actually effective in changing things and building power.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, so a big goal of your book, I think, is to help especially young people or spur them to pick bigger problems to solve, to not restrict themselves to the formula of getting a safe job, to really be ambitious and dedicate their life to some larger and important mission. As life improves around the world, does it get harder and harder to successfully have a moral ambition? Because the easier problems by definition get solved, which leaves the. The harder and harder problems to solve.

[Rutger Bregman]

You could also argue the other way around, that it becomes easier once people get richer it becomes easier to just have that, say, middle class lifestyle and then you have more time and resources to spend on other things that perhaps are way more important than the job in that cubicle that you used to have. So I think the opportunities to be morally ambitious are enormous these days. Um, it is true that, you know, the problems that we tend to focus on. I also found an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. There are often problems that don't have a business model. You know, I happen to believe in the power of capitalism. I believe in the power of markets. Like, there's no social democrat that you have to convince that markets can be really, really powerful. But they're powerful. When there's a business model, like when people are rich enough to buy iPhones and companies can make great iPhones, then sure, markets can do a good job. But when you have like say, pandemic prevention or malaria, tuberculosis or factory farming, all those kind of issues that don't really have a business model. Yeah. Then you need to come up with something else. You need to come up with a movement that convinces people to spend way more money on this, sometimes more philanthropic money, convinces governments to spend more money on it and convinces really talented people to, to work on it, even though they would gain less conventional prestige with a job like that.

[Coleman Hughes]

Is there a danger in more and more people becoming morally ambitious? And that danger looks something like this. Not all of them are going to turn out like Bill Gates and pick really a great problem to solve malaria. In that case, some of them are going to become more like, say, RFK Jr. And we don't have to necessarily discuss every aspect of RFK Jr's legacy to concede that it's mixed at best. And the things he has, he has advocated for, some of them have improved people's lives and some of them have not improved people's lives. Some of them have led people down roads of quack medicine and not getting vaccinated for things that they should get vaccinated for and so forth. And if, if the listener disagrees with what I just said about RFK Jr then accept it in theory, right? Accept it for the sake of argument that there are people that are going to be highly morally ambitious but are actually going to cause at best mixed consequences for the world and at worst bad consequences for the world. And those consequences will be amplified to the extent that they are more morally ambitious. Is there in danger in essentially creating bad actors that have more influence by.

[Rutger Bregman]

By.

[Coleman Hughes]

Encouraging people to be more morally ambitious? And how do you, how do you Steer people in the right direction. How do people steer themselves in the right direction?

[Rutger Bregman]

So the first thing that's really important is to be very clear about what kind of morality you're actually talking about. As I said, I'm talking about a certain tradition that goes all the way back to the abolitionists, to the suffragettes, to the civil rights campaigners, those who have, throughout history, expanded the moral circle. I do believe that there is such a thing as moral progress. I'm not trained as a moral philosopher. I know that moral philosophers, some of them, would maybe say there isn't such a thing as objective morality. But I'm just inclined to look at this as a historian and think like, hey, if you just look at the last two centuries, for me, there is a pretty clear direction. It's not a coincidence to me that many of the suffragettes had parents that were active in the abolitionist movement, and that once you give women the right to vote, then other things become more logical as well, such as the civil rights movement. And then you can start building on all those kind of things. Obviously, you make mistakes along the way, Sometimes you take things too far. But in general, I think, yeah, we have made a lot of progress, and we should try and build on that, on that Universal Declaration of Human Rights just after the Second World War. Now, the ambition is just important, is that once you have those ideals, you gotta be serious about them. Right? And I think one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I felt that those people who believe in, let's say, my values, liberal values, democratic values, the problem these days is they're not very ambitious. So if I take something like the climate movement, for example, I was just getting more and more frustrated with people who, yeah, on the one hand, saw climate change as a pretty existential threat. Like, I basically agree with that. I think it's not the biggest, but it's a really important problem that we need to solve. But then so many people are being obsessed with their own environmental footprint, you know, saying, like, oh, I don't eat meat and I don't fly and I don't have kids, and I, you know, recycle my garbage. Well, in the best possible scenario, you'll have limited your footprint to zero. You might as well die, you know, right? Then death becomes the highest ideal. That's not how we're going to win this battle. So it's really both what you need here. Maybe one thing to add is that you obviously need that epistemic humility as well. I think that when we look back or when the historians of the future will look back on us, they'll probably be horrified by some of the things we do today. Now, obviously, it's quite hard to say what it is because morality has changed so much. Like, for the Romans, it was entirely normal to throw naked women before the lions. And for the Aztecs, it was totally fine to sacrifice children to the gods. And if you study that kind of history, you become at risk of becoming a little bit nihilistic and thinking like, oh, but then maybe anything goes. I don't think you should be tempted by that, but you do need that humility. Now, I am personally willing to at least make one big bet, which is about animal welfare. For me, that's the obvious one where I think the historians of the future will be really horrified by what we're doing to animals today. But there's a logic behind that as well. For me, it's not a surprise that so many of the first abolitionists, like Wilberforce, like Benjamin Lay, also cared deeply about animal rights. Like vegetarianism was a huge thing among suffragettes. And it just makes a lot of sense because once you get into that mindset of expanding the moral circle and realizing that basically we're just part of one big family, or at least the differences between us are not as big as we often think they are. Yeah. Then it only becomes logical to push the boundaries and include more people and in this case, more sentient creatures in our moral circle.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. On the other hand, you would expect there to be an outer limit of our empathy with respect to living creatures at some point. Right. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just because we were able to expand the moral circle to all humans, regardless of race, let's say we were able to do it to pigs and chickens as well, I think you wouldn't expect us to be able to expand that to bugs.

[Rutger Bregman]

Right. Well, it's a really good example. Like, for me, that would feel very weird. I agree with you that if you ask me that right now, I don't feel empathy for. I don't know. When I kill a mosquito, I'm not like. But again, history is weird, man. And the way we live right now, it would be completely bizarre to someone, like, say, two centuries ago, and things are changing so fast right now. No, it's not incomprehensible or inconceivable to me that at some point. Yeah, maybe if science says so. And there are quite a few scientists who actually are saying that insects do suffer. And if, you know, we advance so much as a species that we're able to do, you know, actually effective interventions to improve insect welfare. I know this may come across as bizarre, but again, abolitionism was just as or very bizarre in the early 18th century when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her famous book, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, there was a British philosopher who responded by saying, what's next? A Vindication on the Rights of Horses. That's how ridiculous they thought it was to give women rights or the right to vote or anything like that. I don't know. Studying history makes you humble about your own morality. There's actually this guy that I talk about in my book who founded the Shrimp Welfare Project. And initially I was like, really? Shrimp? But then you look into it and turns out there's actually really good evidence for shrimp sentience and that the way we treat them by taking out their eyes, there's really some horrible things that we do to shrimp, and not a few. Like hundreds of billions of shrimp are farmed every year. And so, on the one hand, pretty weird guy who, in order to feel more empathy for shrimp, went to the supermarket to look at shrimp in the fridge and try and feel more empathy. But then at the same time, I'm reminded of someone like Benjamin Lay, as I said, the first abolitionist in the US who was a very radical Quaker who refused to ride on horses because he thought that was animal exploitation, who would run into churches, Quaker meeting houses, and started screaming at slaveholders. And he was really seen as one of those fanatics. So sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss the social justice warriors of today, but then we forget that, you know, some of. Not all of them, but some of the social justice warriors of the past were actually 100% right.

[Coleman Hughes]

You mentioned some of the barbarous aspects of the old world and ancient Rome. And, you know, the one that I always remember, always stands out to me, is that they had a tradition of crucifying a dog. Crucifying a dog once a year, as this ritual related to a previous war when, like, a dog didn't warn them that an enemy was coming. And so, yeah, now you've got to crucify one dog every year. And especially to an American audience, that one probably hits harder than almost any any other. How do you square all these things with your general optimism about human character and human nature? Because that was a subject of your previous book. Argue that actually human beings are more good than most people think.

[Rutger Bregman]

Yeah. So that book, Humankind, the thesis is that in general, humans have evolved to be friendly and to work together. This is really what scientists now call survival of the friendliest. They make the case that over millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us who had most kids and the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. The technical term for this is self domestication theory. So it's really interesting. If you look at domesticated animals like sheep and pigs, they have something called the domestication syndrome. Charles Darwin already noted this. They have been selected for tameness, but then other things happen as well. So they get floppy ears, for example, often white spots in their fur. And most importantly, they start displaying more childlike and playful behavior. Now, some people have noted, some scientists have noted that humans also seem to have this domestication syndrome. But then the question is, like, who domesticated us? Right? Because there's no other species that did it to us. And the answer that a lot of evolutionary anthropologists now believe in is that we did it to ourselves, that there was some evolutionary advantage, some evolutionary pressure towards cooperation, kindness and friendliness. Now, it's really important to say a couple of things about this one. This was obviously in a completely different social environment. This was when we lived in small bands of nomadic and togethers most of the time. Sometimes there were larger societies, but it was a very, very different kind of world. And yeah, obviously we're now in a very different world. And that's exactly the argument I make, that the rise of agriculture and the moment we settled down and started living in villages and cities, that's when everything changed. That's when the era of warfare started. I've got a couple of chapters in that book taking aim at people like Steven Pinker, who has a very different shape of history in his mind. So in his famous book, the Better Angels of Our Nature, he kind of suggests this. Well, he would always make all kinds of caveats, but the basic picture is one of progress, where we became less violent over time. I think that picture is wrong. I think that recent evidence suggests that actually as nomadic community gatherers, we were way more peaceful and then we became way more violent in the age. Well, basically the civilized age of agriculture and sedatism. That's the age when we invented hierarchy and slavery. And it's only very recently that we got out of that in the last, say, 200 to 100 years. So to get back to your questions, to your question, I'm absolutely not suggesting that humans are angels or anything like that. I am taking aim at this veneer theory of history, though it's often suggested that civilization is only a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature, that people are fundamentally selfish or evil or whatever. And I think that's absolutely not true. And I look at a lot of the evidence. For example, what happens after natural disasters. If people are really are so selfish, then you would suspect that when the lights go out, there's an earthquake or tsunami, that people start behaving in very horrible ways. And that's often the picture you get if you follow the press, right? You hear stories of looting. You probably remember Katrina. This was one of those cases where press was full of those stories. But we actually have 60, 70 years of sociological evidence that the opposite happens. In moments like that, you get an explosion of altruism. There's a great book by Rebecca Sat called A Paradise Built in Hell, where she goes over all the sociological and anthropological evidence. And I don't know, that suggests to me something about at least our capacity for goodness and kindness as well. As always with humans, it's highly dependent on the circumstances and the stories that we tell ourselves. But I felt that, yeah, over the years, people had become too negative about human nature. We're not angels, but there's something to work with there.

[Coleman Hughes]

I wish I could be that optimistic. Okay, final question. What is your highest moral ambition?

[Rutger Bregman]

So, honestly, Colman, after doing this for more than a decade, I was a bit frustrated with myself. I had spent years as a pundit writing about stuff like basic income, advocating for a more hopeful view of human nature. And especially after that book, I saw people on Instagram sharing photos of being on a holiday reading that book and saying, oh, life is wonderful after all. You know, just stop following the news and read this book by Rutger Brechman, and it will restore your faith in humanity. And I was like, oh, no, I've created a monster, right? I'm only making people more complacent. So with this book, Moral Ambition, I kind of wanted to read a book. I needed a book myself that would make my own life more difficult. Like, I felt like I needed a big kick in the butt. Um, and I had experienced something years earlier when, you know, I had become convinced by Yuvonoa Harari and his arguments against factory farming. And I was like, I need to write this down as soon as possible, because if it's out there in the open, in public, then I can't go back anymore. It's a little bit like Odysseus tying himself to the mast, right? You basically force yourself to be the kind of person you want to be. And so that's what I wanted to do. With this book as well. I wanted to write a book about devoting your life to some of the most important causes of our time, realizing that it would force me to do that as well. So I've co founded an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. And we have a very simple belief. We think that the most talented, most ambitious people ought to be working on the most important press in global problems. Too many of them are currently withering away at McKinsey or JP Morgan or some hedge fund. And I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying that's immoral. I would just say it's kind of boring, right? You have one life on this planet and we need people like that to take on some of these dragons. So that's what we are building and that's what we're recruiting people for. We actually just started our first fellowship at Harvard. Almost 10% of Harvard juniors applied. It was pretty exciting. The message that did best in our focus group was something like, you didn't fight your way into Harvard to end up in a bullshit job. And so instead of spending the summer after junior year at, well, some consultancy firm, we place them at some of the most high impact organizations in the country. Organizations like GiveDirectly that we talked about earlier in this conversation. We really want to convince people that it is possible to work with the best people to scratch that intellectual itch, to work 70, 80, 90 hours a week and not, you know, optimize some ads or, you know, improve some PowerPoint slides for a partner that you don't give a damn about. You can actually live a decent life and work on the most exciting, most important global problems. You can do all those things at the same time.

[Coleman Hughes]

Awesome. Well, I hope that's a call to action for any listeners to this podcast that are young, hungry for meaning, and, you know, thinking about what to do for the rest of their lives. So thank you very much, Rucker Bregman. Thanks for coming on my show.

[Rutger Bregman]

Thanks for having me, Matt.

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[Rutger Bregman]

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