I am here with Ruter Bregman. Ruter, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. Uh yes, it's nice to finally connect with you. I've been seeing your stuff for a while and um just read your book, your newest book, which is moral ambition. Um which is a little bit of a departure in tone, but you have you've also written Utopia for realists and humankind. Um this is much more of a call to action. I want to talk about uh the call. you you've also started the the school for moral ambition which I want to talk about but before we jump into the book how would you summarize your focus as a historian and um just as as as someone who comes to all these topics we're going to talk about. So my whole career I've been fascinated by history. I studied history at Utret University in the Netherlands and um initially I was a bit frustrated by academia. Um you know it seemed so insulated. I had this dream once of becoming a professor and then maybe when I was 50 or 60 I would finally be allowed to write about the big interesting questions of history like why have we conquered the globe? Uh why did the industrial revolution start in in England in the west? Why not in India or China for example? Those were the kind of books that I really loved. You know, Jared Diamond, for example, GS Germs and Steel. Um, but it started to dawn on me that I would probably have to, you know, specialize first and, you know, write spend four years of my life writing a PhD, which on the one hand seemed really interesting, but then on the other hand, I looked at all the PhDs that had recently be been published at Utrich University, and I found all of them really boring. Um, so I I thought, you know what, let's go into journalism. Um but then I found that to be quite frustrating as well. Um you know the the relentless focus on breaking news on what happens today instead of what happens every day. Um and then when I was 25 I got my lucky break. There was a new journalism platform that was founded in the Netherlands called the correspondent. And um these guys the founders had um a bit of a different news philosophy. They wanted to unbreak the news and they said Rutgar you can come and work here and write about whatever you want um and focus more on the structural forces that you know govern our society. So finally I could write about all kinds of uh hobbies of mine for example universal basic income. That was something that had long fascinated me. It seemed to me uh a really exciting idea that moves beyond the traditional political divide of the left versus the right. Um so as I said that was my lucky break. That's how I got started. And ever since then, the correspondent was my platform, my little laboratory why where I could develop my ideas. Um, so that that's what one of the benefits of not being a native speaker is that you have your own focus group, a tiny country that no one gives a about. Uh, and you can test out ideas, see what works, see what doesn't. Um, and so that's how I've been writing my my books for the past decade. uh first as essays for Dutch readers and then um yeah uh reiterating, learning, changing my mind and then at some point you're like yeah this is a book um let's write it. So again I think we're going to mostly talk about moral ambition but um big picture how would you describe the um the state of the world from your point of view? I mean there's so much is happening in in American politics. I mean, and it's it has so many global implications. We've basically from to my eye, we've created an emergency for for much of the world. Uh, at least u at least optically. It remains to be seen what's what's going to happen. Um, what what how are you I mean it's you probably finished this book about a year ago, I would imagine. Um, what's your view of the the current situation? 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 um 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. Um, 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 um what could be the new utopian milestone. There's this beautiful quote from Oscar Wild who once wrote uh 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. Uh things are not boring anymore. Uh but not really the direction I had hoped for I guess. Um so um I've always loved this statement from Max Roser from our world in data uh you know the fantastic website that collects all the data on on the state of the world basically and um I think it's just correct that on the one hand um 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. Um and um yeah it's all of that at the same time. Uh, I would say I just like you, I'm really really terrified um of what's going on in the United States right now. Things are also happening happening quicker than I expected. Um, and yeah, it's one of the big lessons of history, right? Um, 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. Yeah. Well, we'll come back around to existential concerns because I think one of the ways in which um the uh things are always getting better analysis has left people dissatisfied. I I'm thinking in particular the the kinds of uh criticism and and distortion Steven Pinker had to face when he released his books on this topic. Um I mean Steven certainly was not arguing that that progress is inevitable. He was just asking us to acknowledge how much progress we've obviously made uh very much uh you know based on the kinds of data you you referenced but many of us perceive more and more acutely how much potential energy is stored up in the system and how destructive all it could be on so many fronts. I mean you know AI is is the latest wrinkle here. Uh but the idea that we could just needlessly destroy the possibility of of uh building a um you know something like a utopia, I mean that's certainly seem seems within reach if we could just iron out our political problems and sideline a few prominent sociopaths. Uh but we do seem on the verge of of screwing a lot of it up, you know, quite needlessly. So we'll talk about that. I'll come back around to that. Yeah, I guess if I can say one thing about that, Sam. So, the shape of history is just really really weird. Um, so in my in my new book, Moral Ambition, I have this one graph where I ask this simple question. What was the most important thing that happened in all 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, uh decline of extreme poverty, growth of um carbon emissions, and all these graphs have basically the same shape, right? You see the hockey stick that starts in in 1750, and it's a rocket that has been launched ever since. And it seems to be the case that we are, you know, looking at a movie or actually we're participating in a movie and we are nearing the climax, you know, when the music is swelling and we have no idea how this is going to end. Um, 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 uh 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 were the Asians, right? Um, so, um, that that is that that is so weird about being alive today is that we 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. Yeah, this is a point you make uh toward the end of the book when you um you point out uh you know quite accurately that that the u the chronocentrism the the of of past generations. The idea that every generation imagines that it's living at an especially significant time um has almost always been delusional and yet at this moment it's very hard to persuade ourselves that something isn't unique about about this moment. I mean again AI is is the is the development in recent years that has sharpened that up especially but even prior to that the pace of change and the kind of the asmtoic nature of it again the the referencing the graphs you just you cited um it's it's the the difference between getting things close to right and getting them catastrophically wrong in this generation seems especially important. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I find hope in the knowledge that we've been um 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. Yeah. Who revolted against the elites who were in power back then. So this was a time of uh huge alkalism in parliament. You know, politicians slurring their speeches. One in five women was a prostitute in London. Um you had the the Prince of Wales who was an in extraordinary prick even by royal standards. Um 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. Um and abolitionism was just a part of that. uh that was uh one of the main projects. I think we've seen something similar in the United States with the move from the guilded age to the progressive era. You know, again, the guilded age, extraordinary inequality, these robber barons who had made insane amounts of money with their monopolies uh 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 uh Venice inside the mansion with the canals etc. really bizarre. Uh but then again there was a countercultural movement against it of elites actually people like the Roosevelt um the the progressive president or people like Louis Brandes who became the people's lawyer and ended up on the Supreme Court. Uh, one of my favorite uh, persons from the this era is a woman called Elva Vanderbilt who married into this Vanderbilt family. Um, and initially really wanted to become part of the 400 in New York, like the richest 400 families in in New York who spent the most money on the most silly things. Um, but then uh, yeah, she divorced. uh she had a lot of money and became a pretty radical suffragette uh an advocate for women's rights and donated a huge uh amount of money to the women's rights movement almost a little bit like McKenzie Scott is doing doing today the wife of Jeff Bezos um so I guess that's what I'm calling for in this new book is that again we need a countercultural movement especially that 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 rep Republican party is basically in a state of moral collapse. Um, you know, I've I've got two young kids and, um, it's it's it's not for me, it's not really left versus right anymore. It's when 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. Um, but as I said, we've been there before and there have been cases in history when we overcame it. Don't you know they're making America great again? What what about that project don't you like Ruter? That's uh um so well it it depends on on yeah 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 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. Um so yeah make America great again. Um yeah I I see some uh some inspiration there in the past definitely. Well well let's talk about the um what is aspirational here. I mean, one of the points you make in the book is that moral ambition is contagious, right? That this is what you want is to find a a mode of life that is not just a a masochistic, right? Or and merely moralistic, but you want something that is that um people aspire to because it's just obviously good. I 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 to to continue to refine it and safeguard it and and just just make the the possibilities of human happy happiness more and more beautiful u and to spread the wealth around obviously right I mean what the thing that is so excruciating is the the u the level of inequality in our in our world and how this inequality you know you whatever delusions you take on board with respect to being self-made I mean any you know any fiveminute analys is of of really anyone's situation reveals that it's at bottom it really is all a matter of luck. I mean you just people are extraordinarily lucky not to be born in some failed state where they have uh the opportunity only to to you know get um killed at an early age or spectacularly injured or to die of some you know tropical disease that um we haven't suffered in the developed world for quite some time. Um so so so much of your discussion here is 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 but to um I mean you acknowledge in the book that you can't merely castigate people and uh demand that that that everyone sacrifice guys. There's there's something aspirational about this and I think we need to to focus on that because there's, you know, even even some of your past pronouncements, I mean, the moments for which you became famous. I mean, I think the probably the biggest one was when you were at Davos castigating the billionaires for having, you know, all flown there on on private jets. I think I think you said that something like 1500 private jets had flown into that meeting. Um, and then they cry when they see Dave Edinburgh's film. Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. A funny experience is on the menu. Yeah. But but the my concern there is that you can be read or heard as merely demonizing wealth, right? And I think I mean I think you know in in the limit in success what we want is is the wealth to be spread around such that you know the the poorest people on earth live the way the the richest people do now you know 100 years from now. I mean something like that whatever is compatible with with physics is something we want to aspire to. So I I don't think we want to be saying at the end of the day that that wealth is the problem. I can't agree more and the and the left used to understand that. So social democracy I see myself as as an oldfashioned 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. Um, today you have ide ideologies like degrowth, for example, that to me seem to demonize wealth or luxury or whatever. Uh, and I'm like, no, like we're way too poor. Uh, we should become much richer and then indeed, as you say, spread it around. Um, the the very first essay I ever wrote was when I was um 16 years old. I had this epiphany as the son of a preacher. Um uh you know I grew up in 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? Um and I wrote this essay about free will. Um like came to the conclusion that like doesn't make sense at all like surely it can't exist. Um and I I guess that argument will resonate with you. Um, and I guess ever ever from a from that young age, that has also always something been something that has driven me. Whenever we talk about inequality, I think it's especially important to to zoom out. Uh, right. Um, if you live in a rich country like I do in the Netherlands or I'm currently living in New York, um, 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 um I'm I'm pretty optimistic that we 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 I can't agree more that this idea that I don't know it's so um antihuman in a way that 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 disagreeed with. Well, so let's get into the details because I suspect my tolerance for inequality is is uh is more um capacious than yours um at least uh by tendency. I mean, it's not clear to me that we if we could spread the wealth around completely immediately that that would be the right solution. I mean to to bring every to if we could I mean this is one of the arguments really the only argument for open borders the idea that what what you you 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 the consequences of that, what I imagine uh 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. Um and I again this I come back to this this notion of aspiration. I do think we want societies that are wealthy enough that so so as to sustain, you know, be scientific advancement and, you know, artistic expression at the highest level and uh you know, everything we we have we celebrate as you the you know technological and and cultural success in the developed world when we're not distracting ourselves by by pointless conflict. Um so the question is how does in the if we agree that we wanted to maintain that you know if we want New York City to be a beautiful high functioning city right and uh and yet Peter Singer's analysis uh wouldn't allow us to prioritize anything in New York today because the life in subsaharan Africa is so bad all of those resources should obviously go there. How do you square that? How would you I if you could just start allocating funds where they should go, would you follow Peter Singer or would you have have a different calculus? Uh quite different. So on the one hand, I 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-ounded. You know, these effective altruists. Um they've gotten a lot of back bad press recently uh especially since the SBF fiasco. Um 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. You know the willing to 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 me 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 uh 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. Uh, now I got to admit I still have both of my kidneys, sorry to say, but I admire but I admire the people who do that and and who give a really substantial part of their income to highly effective charities. Um, I think just like you, I became a member of giving what we can and that has been a pretty transformational experience for me. uh personally um really changed my my outlook on life when I started donating donating a much more substantial part of my income and the money that I had made with uh my books. So that's what I really admire. What I don't really like is I guess the the focus on guilt. Um, I think EA got started in the 2010s 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 and they turned vegan and gave away, you know, the money they got from their parents to to charity. Um, they basically discovered each other um in in those in that era when social media got started and 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 um somewhat somewhere on the spectrum or at least neurodeiverse, 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. Um, I'm personally a pluralist. I care about many things in life. are motivated by well altruism and empathy definitely but also motivated by by other things maybe um enthusiasm maybe even a bit of vanity um and I think that's fine to be motivated by multiple things um what we're trying to do with our organization the school for more ambition and also what I'm calling for in the book is to once again make doing good uh high status um to basically say like if you are one of those most talented ambitious people in the world, then you shouldn't work for McKenzie. You shouldn't work for Gold Coleman Sachs. You should be working on the most pressing issues we face as a species. Um, and we are trying to ground this movement not in guilt, right? We don't want to see drowning children everywhere. Uh, you know, the famous thought experiment from Peter Singer where he said, um, if you Yeah, the shallow pond. Well, I guess most of your listeners will will know about that, so I won't repeat the story. But yeah, I've I've never really liked that. It always came across as moral blackmail to me. Like now suddenly I'm supposed to see um drowning kids everywhere when I take a sip from my coffee, right, that I probably shouldn't have bought because it was too expensive. Um yeah, I've never really liked that. I I would prefer to be part of a movement that is grounded in enthus enthusiasm and excitement uh 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. All right, so let's take the extreme case here. Let's take somebody like Bill Gates who uh obviously lives extraordinarily well. He, you know, flies around in a private plane, which he almost certainly owns. Uh, he probably has more than one. Um, and spends a fantastic amount of money on himself. He has homes all over the place. Again, I I can only presume. I don't actually know Bill. Um but um assuming he lives like most billionaires, he's he spends a lot of money uh you know more than than thousands of people in in the developing world uh 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 the having amassed those kinds of resources in Bill's case? I mean, so you you can you can in the case of a a the prototypically selfish billionaire, I think that we we can get to begrudging pretty quickly. But in Bill's case, he's been really probably the most philanthropic person, if not of his generation, of if not merely of his generation, of any generation. Um, you know, his personal quirks aside, again, I don't know him. I just know what I read. um he's done a tremendous amount of good in the world and his and when I think about what is optimal for Bill, it's hard for me to see that, you know, the sight of him struggling to figure out how to check his luggage at the, you know, the southwest counter of an airport. Um uh it's hard to see that how that's optimal. Um, so do you think he should be flying commercially or do you or do you think that if he saves time flying private uh where he's free to think about the next thing he next disease he wants to cure if he if he um found flying commercially uh as ownorous as many people do uh if he would be u reluctant to travel to that conference uh where he might meet the person whose project he would fund etc etc. you see the knock on effects here. I mean, my intuition is we want Bill being Bill uh 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. Mhm. 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. Um, 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 university. [Music]