Rutger Bregman (3:46)

So again, I think we're going to mostly talk about moral ambition, but big picture, how would you describe the state of the world from your point of view? I mean, there's so much is happening in American politics and it has so many global implications. To my eye, we've created an emergency for much of the world, at least optically. It remains to be seen what's going to happen. You probably finished this book about a year ago, I would imagine. What's your view of the current situation?

Rutger Bregman (4:18)

So the first line of my very first book, Utopia for Realist, was that in the past, everything was worse. You know, when we zoom out, we see that we've made tremendous progress in many respects. I mean, you know, this, right, the massive decline of child mortality, of extreme poverty, especially since the 1980s, progress has been speeding up. So that is wonderful news. And this was more than a decade ago when I was a bit frustrated that it seemed we had arrived at the end of history. And most of my friends on the political left, they mainly knew what they were against, against growth, against austerity, against the establishment. But they didn't really know what the next big thing was going to be. So in that book, I wanted to say, like, come on, let's. Let's think about what could be the new utopian Milestone. There's this beautiful quote from Oscar Wilde who once wrote that, you know, a map without Utopia on it is not worth even glancing at because it leaves out the one island where humanity is always landing. Now I guess I got what I wished for. Things are not boring anymore, but not really the direction I had hoped for, I guess. So. I've always loved this statement from Max Roser from Our World in Data. You know, the fantastic website that collects all the data on the state of the world, basically. And I think it's just correct that on the one hand, yeah, the world is really bad. We could do so much better. The world has become better. That's also true. We have made progress. And yeah, it's all of that. At the same time, I would say I just like you, I'm really, really terrified of what's going on in the United States right now. Things are also happening. Happening quicker than I expected. And, yeah, it's one of the big lessons of history. Right. There's nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society right now. It can radically change and sometimes, sometimes quite quickly, both for the better and for the worse.

Rutger Bregman (6:09)

Yeah, well, we'll come back around to existential concerns because I think one of the ways in which the things are always getting better, analysis has left people dissatisfied. I'm thinking in particular the kinds of criticism and distortion Steven Pinker had to face when he released his books on this topic. I mean, Steven certainly was not arguing that progress is inevitable. He was just asking us to acknowledge how much progress we've obviously made, very much based on the kinds of data you referenced. But many of us perceive more and more acutely how much potential energy is stored up in the system and how destructive it could be on so many fronts. AI is the latest wrinkle here, but the idea that we could just needlessly destroy the possibility of building something like a utopia, I mean, that certainly seems within reach if we could just iron out our political problems and sideline a few prominent sociopaths. But we do seem on the verge of screwing a lot of it up quite needlessly. So we'll talk about that. I'll come back around to that.

Rutger Bregman (7:18)

Yeah, I guess if I can say one thing about that, Sam. So the shape of history is just really, really weird. So in my. In my new book, Moral Ambition, I have this one graph where I asked this simple question. What was the most important thing that happened in all of human history? Yeah, and there are a couple of candidates, right? Maybe it was the birth of the Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad. Maybe it was the rise and fall of the great empires, you know, the Roman Empire, the Aztec Empire. Maybe it was the invention of the wheel, maybe it was the invention of the compass. I mean, there are so many candidates, but then you just look at some simple graphs. Growth of gdp, decline of extreme poverty, growth of carbon emissions. And all these graphs have basically the same shape, right? You see the hockey stick that starts in 1750, and it's a rocket that has been launched ever since. And it seems to be the case that we are looking at a movie, or actually you were participating in a movie, and we are nearing the climax when the music is swelling and we have no idea how this is going to end. It could be that the rocket totally crashes quite soon and that the story will be over quite soon, or we will break out and colonize the Milky Way, and maybe we'll. We will be able to build some kind of utopia. And then our ancestors will look back on us and say, gosh, these people are the Asians. Right. So that, that is, that. That is so weird about being alive today is that we basically have a front row seat to the greatest show in all of human history, and we don't know how it's going to end.

Rutger Bregman (8:50)

Yeah. This is a point you make toward the end of the book when you point out quite accurately that the chronocentrism of past generations, the idea that every generation imagines that it's living at an especially significant time, has almost always been delusional. And yet at this moment, it's very hard to persuade ourselves that something isn't unique about this moment. I mean, again, AI is the development in recent years that has sharpened that up especially. But even prior to that, the pace of change and the asymptotic nature of it. And again, referencing the graphs you just cited, the difference between getting things close to right and getting them catastrophically wrong in this generation seems especially important.

Rutger Bregman (9:39)

Yeah, absolutely. I guess I find hope in the knowledge that we've been in really scary times in our history and also really immoral times in our history when there was a countercultural revolt of elites against the prevailing moral immorality of their time. So in the book, I write a lot about the British abolitionists, the late 18th century, who revolted against the elites who were in power back then. So this was a time of huge alcoholism in Parliament, you know, politicians slurring their speeches. One in five women was a prostitute in London. You had the Prince of Wales, who was an extraordinary prick even by royal standards. And Then there was a movement of people like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce who said, we are going to make doing good fashionable once again. And abolitionism was just a part of that. That was one of the main projects. I think we've seen something similar in the United States with the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You know, again, the Gilded Age, extraordinary inequality. These robber barons who have made insane amounts of money with their monopolies in railroads, for example, and they started spending the money in the most crazy ways. You know, the Vanderbilts, for example, built these huge mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was this one mansion where they recreated Venice inside the mansion with the canals, et cetera. Really bizarre. But then again, there was a countercultural movement against it of elites, actually. People like Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive president, or people like Louis Brandes, who became the people's lawyer and ended up on the Supreme Court. One of my favorite persons from this era is a woman called Elva Vanderbilt, who married into this Vanderbilt family and initially really wanted to become part of the 400 in New York, like the richest 400 families in New York who spend the most money on the most silly things. But then, yeah, she divorced, she had a lot of money and became a pretty radical suffragette, an advocate for women's rights and donated a huge amount of money to the women's rights movement. Almost a little bit like Mackenzie Scott, his doing today, the wife of Jeff Bezos. So I guess that's what I'm calling for in this new book is that again, we need a countercultural movement, especially now that things are getting a bit dark and we see so many examples of just blatant immorality. I mean, in the US the whole Republican Party is basically in a state of moral collapse. You know, I've. I've got two young kids, and it's not for me, it's not really left versus right anymore. It's when I think about how I want to raise my kids. It's pretty much the opposite of how these people in power are behaving like, so nasty and basically like bullies all the time. But as I said, we've been here before and there have been cases in history when we overcame it, touching on.

Rutger Bregman (12:30)

Their Making America Great Again. What about that project? Don't you like Rutger? That's so.

Rutger Bregman (12:36)

Well, it depends on what particular reference you have. I mean, as you know, I'm an advocate of tax fairness. I think it's quite unfair that billionaires around the globe have lower effective tax rates. Than working class people and middle class people. I think that this can be fixed and that there are beautiful historical examples in history, actually in the 1950s and the 60s when we had a much more reasonable system of taxation and actually also higher growth rates. So, yeah, make America great again. Yeah, I see some inspiration there in the past, definitely.

Rutger Bregman (13:16)

Well, let's talk about what is aspirational here. One of the points you make in the book is that moral ambition is contagious. Right. What you want is to find a mode of life that is not just masochistic and merely moralistic, but you want something that is that people aspire to because it's just obviously good. It seems to me that the whole point of our being here ultimately is to make life worth living and once we've done that, to continue to refine it and safeguard it and just make the possibilities of human happiness more and more beautiful and to spread the wealth around, obviously. Right. I mean, the thing that is so excruciating is the, the level of inequality in our world and how this inequality, whatever delusions you take on board with respect to being self made. I mean, any five minute analysis of really any one situation reveals that at bottom it really is all a matter of luck. I mean, people are extraordinarily lucky not to be born in some failed state where they have the opportunity only to, you know, get killed at an early age or spectacularly injured or to die of some tropical disease that we haven't suffered in the developed world for quite some time. So, so much of your discussion here is focused on being motivated by these disparities to find them morally intolerable. Very much in the spirit of. In which someone like Peter Singer has argued. I mean, you acknowledge in the book that you can't merely castigate people and demand that everyone sacrifice. There's something aspirational about this and I think we need to focus on that because even some of your past pronouncements, I mean, the moments for which you became famous, I think probably the biggest one was when you were at Davos castigating the billionaires for having all flown there on private jets. I think you said that something like 1500 private jets had flown into that.

Rutger Bregman (15:23)

Meeting and then they cry when they see David Attenborough's film.

Rutger Bregman (15:27)

Right, right, yeah, exactly.

Rutger Bregman (15:29)

A funny experience.

Rutger Bregman (15:30)

I was in the mov. But my concern there is that you can be read or heard as merely demonizing wealth in the limit in Success. What we want is the wealth to be spread around such that the poorest people on Earth live the way the richest people do now, a hundred years from now. I mean, something like that, whatever's compatible with physics is something we want to aspire to. So I don't think we want to be saying at the end of the day that that wealth is the problem.

Rutger Bregman (16:03)

Yeah, I can't agree more. Yeah, and the left used to understand that. So social democracy. I see myself as an old fashioned social democrat. So I think in the 60s and the 70s the left was the party of progress. Right. It was the party of growth, of innovation, of building. Today you have ideologies like degrowth, for example, that to me seem to demonize wealth or luxury or whatever. And I'm like, no, like we're way too poor, we should become much richer. And then indeed as you say, spread it around. The very first essay I ever wrote was when I was 16 years old. I had this epiphany as the son of a preacher, you know, I grew up in the church and you know, this is an age when you start thinking about what do I actually believe, Do I agree with all the dogmas that are served to me. And I wrote this essay about free will, like came to the conclusion that like doesn't make sense at all, like surely it can't exist. And I guess that argument will resonate with you.

Rutger Bregman (17:01)

Yeah.

Rutger Bregman (17:02)

And I guess ever, ever from, from that young age, that is also always something, been something that has driven me. Whenever we talk about inequality, I think it's especially important to, to zoom out. Right. If you live in a rich country like I do in the Netherlands or I'm currently living in New York, you're already part of the richest 3.5% in the world. So when we talk about inequality, we mainly have to talk about global inequality. And the world needs so much more growth in that respect. Right. And I'm pretty optimistic that we, that that we can make that happen and that we have already made quite a bit of progress in the last couple of decades. But yeah, I can't agree more that this idea that, I don't know, it's so anti human in a way. This is quite dominant. Maybe also in environmental circles the idea that humans are a plague or something like that, that we are a virus, that we are just bad and that is just something I've always deeply, deeply disagreed with.

Rutger Bregman (18:00)

Well, so let's get into the details because I suspect my tolerance for inequality is more capacious than yours, at least by tendency. I mean it's not clear to me that if we could spread the wealth around Completely immediately, that that would be the right solution. I mean, to bring, I mean, this is one of the arguments, really the only argument for open borders. The idea that borders, national borders, and the inequalities they enshrine are totally unjustifiable ethically. And so people should be free to move everywhere. And when I look at the consequences of that, what I imagine would happen is that, okay, people would move more or less everywhere until there was no reason to move anywhere because everywhere was just as mediocre as everywhere else. And again, I come back to this notion of aspiration. I do think we want societies that are wealthy enough so as to sustain scientific advancement and artistic expression at the highest level. And everything we have, we celebrate as technological and cultural success in the developed world when we're not distracting ourselves by pointless conflict. So the question is if we agree that we wanted to maintain that, if we want New York City to be a beautiful, high functioning city, and yet Peter Singer's analysis wouldn't allow us to prioritize anything in New York today because life in sub Saharan Africa is so bad, all of those resources should obviously go there. How do you square that? How would you, I mean, if you could just start allocating funds where they should go, would you follow Peter Singer or would you have a different calculus?

Rutger Bregman (19:45)

Quite different. So on the one hand, I deeply admire the man. He's one of the great philosophers of our time. And there's also a lot to like about the movement that he co founded. You know, these effective altruists, they've gotten a lot of back bad press recently, especially since the SBF fiasco. But on the other hand, there's a lot to admire about them. I guess as someone who comes from the political left, what I like most about them is their moral seriousness, the willingness to actually practice what they preach. So if I go to, I don't know, a conference of a bunch of leftists, I don't see a lot of people giving a lot of money away. I see a lot of people talking about the need for systemic change and overthrowing the patriarchy and, you know, destroying capitalism or whatever, but very often they don't take a lot of individual responsibility. But if you go to an effective altruist conference, you will meet a lot of people who have donated kidneys to random strangers. Now, I gotta admit, I still have both of my kidneys, sorry to say. Yeah, but I admire, but admire the people who do that and, and who give a really substantial part of their income to highly effective charities. I think just like You. I became a member of Giving what we can. And that has been a pretty transformational experience for me personally. Really changed my, my outlook on life when I started donating a much more substantial part of my income and the money that I had made with my books. So that's what I really admire. What I don't really like is I guess, the focus on guilt. I think EA got started in the 2000 and tens when a lot of people that, who I like to describe as born altruists, people who were basically always that way already when they were young, they turned vegan and gave away, you know, the money they got from their parents to, to charity. They basically discovered each other in that era when social media got started. And that's how the movement got going. And I think that's, that's beautiful, but it's not for most people. So I couldn't take most of my friends to an EA conference because it's just too weird. Right. It's a lot of people who are somewhere on the spectrum or at least neurodiverse, which is great, right. Which is EA should just continue being ea. But I think there's, there's a lot of room for a different kind of movement that taps into different sources of motivation. I'm personally a pluralist. I care about many things in life and motivated by, well, altruism and empathy definitely, but also motivated by, by other things, maybe enthusiasm, maybe even a bit of vanity. And I think that's fine to be motivated by multiple things. What we're trying to do with our organization, the School for Moral Ambition, and also what I'm calling for in the book is to once again make doing good high status. To basically say, like, if you are one of those most talented, ambitious people in the world, then you shouldn't work for McKinsey, you shouldn't work for Goldman Sachs. You should be working on the most pressing issues we face as a species. And we are trying to ground this movement not in guilt. Right. We don't want to see drowning children everywhere. You know the famous thought experiment from Peter Singer where he said the shallow pond. Yeah, the shallow pond. Well, I guess most of your listeners will know about that, so I won't repeat the story, but yeah, I've never really liked that. It always came across as moral blackmail to me. Like now suddenly I'm supposed to see drowning kids everywhere when I take a sip from my coffee, right. That I probably shouldn't have bought because it was too expensive. Yeah, I've never really liked that. I would Prefer to be part of a movement that is grounded in enthusiasm. Enthusiasm and excitement of. Yeah, just the simple fact that we can make this world a wildly better place and that it's just really cool to be part of a small group of very dedicated idealists who want to take on some. Some of these challenges.

Rutger Bregman (23:33)

All right, so let's take the extreme case here. Let's take somebody like Bill Gates, who obviously lives extraordinarily well. He flies around in a private plane, which he almost certainly owns. He probably has more than one and spends a fantastic amount of money on himself. He has homes all over the place. Again, I can only presume I don't actually know Bill, but assuming he lives like most billionaires, he spends a lot of money, more than thousands of people in the developing world, maybe more than tens of thousands of people in the developing world, on himself. The question is, how much should we begrudge him or anyone living that way with having amassed those kinds of resources? In Bill's case, in the case of the prototypically selfish billionaire, I think that we can get to begrudging pretty quickly. But in Bill's case, he's been really probably the most philanthropic person, if not merely of his generation, of any generation. His personal quirks aside, again, I don't know him. I just know what I read. He's done a tremendous amount of good in the world. And when I think about what is optimal for Bill, it's hard for me to see that. The sight of him struggling to figure out how to check his luggage at the southwest counter of an airport, it's hard to see how that's optimal. So do you think he should be flying commercially, or do you think that if he saves time flying private, where he's free to think about the next thing he wants, next disease he wants to cure, if he found flying commercially as onerous, as many people do, if he would be reluctant to travel to that conference where he might meet the person whose project he would fund, et cetera, et cetera. You see the knock on effects here. I mean, my intuition is we want Bill being Bill as freely and as happily as possible in a way that's commensurate with him being as inspired as possible to help the world in all the ways he's been helping it of late.

Rutger Bregman (25:37)

So there's a lot to say about this. A lot of people indeed will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires when I went to Davos and also being quite critical of billionaire philanthropy. And I think there's a good reason for that. A lot of philanthropy is just really unimpressive. You know, it's boring. People giving a lot of money to have their name on an already well funded museum or a university or whatever. You know, let's give Harvard more money. And I've always found that pretty sad. At the same time, as a historian, I know that there are beautiful exceptions. I mean, we talked about the abolitionists.

Sam Harris (26:09)

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