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'The Interview': Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
Sat, 17 May 2025
The historian and writer is on a mission to get the best and brightest out of their lucrative jobs and into morally ambitious work. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the exciting announcement before the interview?
Hey, everyone. It's Lulu. Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know about something really exciting we have coming up here at The Interview. It's our first ever live show. It'll be at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Thursday, June 12th. I'll be talking with actor Sandra Oh. You might know her, of course, from Grey's Anatomy or Killing Eve.
I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you there. Tickets are on sale now at tribecafestival.com slash theinterview. Okay, now on to the show. Here's David.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. I bet we all know plenty of smart, accomplished, and ambitious people whose ambitions start and stop with themselves. For Rucker Bregman, those people represent a potentially world-changing opportunity.
Chapter 2: Who is Rutger Bregman and what is his mission?
Bregman is a historian and writer who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better than we're typically led to believe, and also that making it even better and more equitable is within our reach. Sounds a little off these days, doesn't it?
Even Bregman is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books, which are 2020's Humankind and 2017's Utopia for Realists, land a little less convincingly today than when they were first published. But his new book, Moral Ambition, Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, is his attempt to meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into a kind of social good.
He's trying to incentivize the kind of people I mentioned earlier, society's brightest and most privileged, to turn away from what he sees as meaningless and hollow, albeit lucrative, white-collar jobs in favor of far more exciting and even self-aggrandizing work that has the possibility of changing the world.
That's also the driving idea behind a school he's co-founded called the School for Moral Ambition, which you can think of as a kind of incubator for positive social impact. The big question for me, the source of some real skepticism, is how exactly he plans on convincing people to make that change and rethink their own values. Here's my conversation with Rutger Bregman.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, David. So your new book is essentially an argument for why and how talented, high-achieving people should direct their energies toward doing more good in the world, towards more morally ambitious behavior. Do you see your writing as morally ambitious?
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Chapter 3: What does Bregman's new book argue about moral ambition?
Well, look, the reason I wrote this book was that I actually became a little bit frustrated with myself. I had a little bit of an early midlife crisis because I was mainly spending time in this quote-unquote awareness business.
You know, you write articles, you write books, you try to convince people of certain opinions, and then you hope that some other people do the actual work of making the world a better place. And at the time, I was... working on a new book about the great moral pioneers of the past, you know, the abolitionists, the suffragettes. I wanted to learn more about them.
But as I was studying some of their biographies, I experienced this emotion that I sometimes like to describe as moral envy, where you're just standing on the sidelines and you're just wishing like, gosh, Wouldn't it be awesome to actually be in the arena, to actually have some skin in the game?
So that's when I quit that project and was like, okay, I'm going to write almost like a self-help book that will make my own life more difficult. Because once I've finished it, you know, I'm going to be the first person who will actually follow its guidance.
So what steps have you taken since writing the book to get off the sidelines into the arena?
Well, I basically quit my job. So I'm now an entrepreneur. I co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, which is an organization that helps as many people as possible to devote their career to some of the most pressing challenges we face as a species. So we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. Robin Hood famously took away the money from the rich.
Well, we take away the talent from the rich. So yeah, for example, we were recently invited by a couple of students at Harvard who are excited to start a Harvard chapter around the idea of moral ambition. And I think that's quite fitting because like, okay, here you have the most prestigious university in the world and 45% of graduates end up in consultancy or finance, right?
It's an extraordinary waste of talent.
I saw that statistic in your book. I was surprised that the number was as high as 45%. But of course, materialism is real. A desire for status is real. People want to make money. They want to be well financially compensated. So how do you incentivize someone who might otherwise be tempted to go into a line of work that I think you see as basically morally vacuous at best?
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Chapter 4: How does Rutger Bregman plan to change the career paths of talented individuals?
But then later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, she became a pretty radical suffragette and one of the main financiers of the women's right movement. She reminded me a little bit of someone like Mackenzie Scott today, you know, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S.,
So like a decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege, right? Which is important. It's important to be aware of how privileged you are. But I think it's also very important to actually use it.
You know, there's sort of the dismissal of people's career choices as boring or the idea that, you know, if they're pursuing material wealth, you know, you're sort of holding your nose about them. And there is sort of that tone of, light sarcasm or a snideness that shows up in the book also. And I was wondering, why make the choice to communicate that way?
Well, it works quite well, David. Does it? Yeah. So it's been funny. I've gotten most pushback actually from people on the left on this book and not so much from, you know, these people stuck in a corporate job. They very quickly agree, actually. These are people, you know, who... wrote these application essays about how they were going to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.
You know, they wanted to work at the UN solving world hunger. But then something happened along the way. And many of them really wonder, how do I get out? What has gone wrong here? And look, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role here, but it's not the only thing. And I would even argue that it's not the most important thing.
So if you go back a couple of decades in American history, students had a very different attitude. So there's this study called the American Freshman Survey. It's been done since the late 60s. And at that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90% said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was their most important life goal.
And today, that's just 50%. Now, in the 60s, only 50% said making as much money as possible was a really important life goal to them. Today, that's 80% to 90%. So the numbers have basically reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change. And there are examples in history where it has changed. So that makes me hopeful that we can do it again.
Yeah. What are the metrics you'll use or how will you determine whether or not your school is successful?
So it begins with selecting cause areas. In Europe, we started with fighting the tobacco industry, which was a big surprise for me, actually. But our researchers convinced us that this is one of the most neglected challenges we face. So it's the single largest preventable cause of disease, 8 million deaths still every year.
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Chapter 5: What are the historical examples of moral ambition discussed?
So we did start last year in Brussels and we send, yeah, like two small SWAT teams of dedicated lobbyists, lawyers, campaigners to make a big difference there. And now the plan is to do the same thing here in the US and in Canada.
And how does one determine for themselves what counts as sufficiently ambitious moral behavior?
Hmm. So one of the main characters in the book is this guy called Thomas Clarkson. Yeah, a British abolitionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's become sort of my personal hero, even though he's now dead for two centuries. He participated in an essay contest at Cambridge University. And just by chance, he had to answer this question, is it okay to own other human beings?
He had never really thought about the question, did his research, won first prize. And then after he attended the prize ceremony in Cambridge, he went back on his horse to London where he lived. And he was still thinking about the essay and was like, if this is actually true, then shouldn't someone do something about it? And he steps off his horse and he's like,
Well, maybe I got to be the one to do it. And you can clearly see this mix of idealism and vanity within him. On the one hand, yes, he deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people. But yeah, he's also, you know, a little bit of a vain man. You know, he likes to see himself as that historical hero who devotes his life to this great quest of abolishing slavery.
And in the first seven years, he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom on horse,
This guy can't be the benchmark. That's really the heart of my question. I'm almost getting there.
So after seven years of doing that, he had an utter and total nervous breakdown, what we would call a burnout today. So he was really gone, basically. And when I read that, I was like, okay, Thomas, you should have done your breathing exercises, right? So, yeah, he took it a little bit too far. But let's be honest. Today, a lot of people get a burnout while they do jobs they love.
don't really like all that much or that don't really contribute all that much to the welfare of the world. So if we're going to get a burnout anyway, we might as well do something useful.
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Chapter 6: How can individuals determine their level of moral ambition?
Chapter 7: What role does culture play in shaping ambitions?
And if a couple of people like Thomas Clarkson would have fallen off their horse in the year 1786 or a little bit earlier, then that would have been very bad news. The history could have looked very differently.
And, you know, the book also has this implicit idea that there is a deficit of moral ambition.
Yeah.
But I want to press on that a little because one could say that the movement to overturn Roe versus Wade was a morally motivated movement.
Oh, absolutely.
Or one could also— Maybe it would take a little fancy footwork, but one could argue that, you know, what happened on January 6th was a morally driven movement. So what do you think would account for the possibility that moral ambition on the right seems to be more ascendant at the moment or maybe more effectively utilized than moral ambition on the left?
So I've got one chapter in the book about Nader's Raiders, you know, Ralph Nader in the late sixties and the seventies built this incredible movement of young people who were like, we're not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We're going to go to Washington to lobby for the good cause.
And there's one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on at least 25 pieces of federal legislation. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act that saved, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives. It's really a beautiful example of what moral ambition can mean in practice.
And at some point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader to just go and work 100 hours a week for a pretty small salary because it was just the very coolest thing you could do. Now, right-wingers looked at that model very carefully.
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Chapter 8: How can coalitions help in the fight against injustice?
And she was sick on the day of elections. So that desire and that commitment, you know, being part of something that is much greater than you are, that is moral ambition.
But this still raises for me the question of like, what is so your issue, the equivalent one that you would accept that it was the fight to achieve it would be going on after you died is factory farming.
A couple, a couple. Look, David, I'm not going to choose. I'm not going to say like, this is the one.
I just want to know like what really drives you.
That's what I'm trying to get at, you know? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's just not, I'm not a one issue guy. We live in a world where kids die from easily preventable disease every single day. That's outrageous. We could fix that. We're like more than rich enough to fix that. We live in a world where 85% of the world population lives below the US poverty line.
Half of the world population lives on less than $7 a day. And yes, that is adjusted for purchasing power. So don't talk to me about inflation or blah, blah, blah, or that you can buy more here or there. No, this is the world we live in. It's incredibly unequal. And we could fix that. And even in wealthy countries, we're just at the beginning of history.
We have so much progress ahead of us, possibly, but it's up to us.
I think it's fair to say that your target audience for the book, and I guess in a way for the school also, it's younger people either early in their career or maybe still in the phase of considering what their career could be. And I did wonder.
Can I interrupt that, David? Yeah. So that's not true.
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