Speaker 1: 0:15

Welcome to the when Shall we Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Rutger Bregman. Rutger is a Dutch historian and author. His books Humankind A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists and how we Get there were both Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers and have been translated in 46 languages.

Speaker 2: 0:35

The Guardian described him as the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas, while TED named him one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. His TED talk Poverty Isn't a Lack of Character, it's a Lack of Cash was selected by TED curator, chris Anderson as one of the top 10 talks of 2017.

Speaker 1: 0:54

He studied history at Utrecht University and the University of California, Los Angeles, Initially considering a career as an academic historian. Rutger instead ventured into journalism. Considering a career as an academic historian, Rutger instead ventured into journalism. He began his career at the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant before moving into the independent journalism platform the Correspondent, for which he wrote for 10 years.

Speaker 2: 1:15

In 2024, Rutger co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, a non-profit organization inspired by his latest book, Moral Ambition. The initiative helps people to take steps towards an impactful career. We talk about not resting on one's laurels.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Individual versus societal responsibility.

Speaker 2: 1:34

How just being decent isn't enough.

Speaker 1: 1:37

The value of harsh feedback.

Speaker 2: 1:39

When is the best time to make people morally ambitious?

Speaker 1: 1:43

Pragmatic alliances.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Noble losers aka social media activism.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Effective altruism.

Speaker 2: 1:49

The school for moral ambition.

Speaker 1: 1:52

Let's get moral. Hi, this is Omid.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Ashtari and Natasha McElhane and with us today. We have.

Speaker 3: 2:02

Rocco Breckman.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Thanks for having me, thanks for taking the time. It's really great to have you. We're both fans of your books and we had a lot of fun with Moral Ambition. But before we want to go into that, we thought we'd talk about your previous books, and in particular. What I'd like to do is maybe talk a little bit about Utopia for Realists and the fact that in it you talk about really large policy reforms as a kind of structural change to society. Right and moral ambition shifts the burden more onto the individual in some shape or form. So can you maybe lay out the main argument of Utopia for Realists for people who may have not read it and then relate moral ambition to that and say is it a slight contradiction? Is it an evolution? Is it an addition to what you laid out in Utopia for Realists?

Speaker 3: 2:49

Sure, well, look, I have written a couple of really bad books when I was in my early 20s and I'm super happy that they've not been translated into English. But Utopia for Realists is my first book that I'm really proud of. I actually wrote it in 2013. It was published in Dutch in 2014 and in English in 2017. But I still think that a lot of the arguments in there they hold and they're maybe even more relevant today than they were a decade ago. So in the book I write a lot about automation, for example, the rise of the robots, as we called it back then. Today we just call it AI and the massive implications that would have for the way we organize our whole economy, the way we think about work and meaning, and who are the real wealth creators in our society. So it's important to keep in mind that this book was written in a very different zeitgeist.

Speaker 3: 3:47

I was, you know, a young Dutch guy the beginning of his career and I felt very frustrated with European politics at the time, which just seemed to be super, super boring. I was like what's the next big thing? Right, in the past two centuries, we've made incredible progress. We have abolished legal slavery and the slave trade. We have fought for women's right to vote and achieve that. We have, you know, had the civil rights movement, the LGBT movements. I mean, all of that has been incredible. But what's the next big thing, right? What's the next milestone of civilization? So the simple point I make in that book is that every utopian vision of the future can actually become reality. I mean not necessarily, obviously, but that what we need today is new utopian visions Because, like all these great milestones we achieved in the past, they were utopian fantasies once.

Speaker 3: 4:48

Um and in the book, I start with a quote from oscar wilde, who said this more than a century ago that a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at because it leaves out the one country where humanity is always landing, or should always attempt to land, at least. Like he said, yes, um, progress is the realization of utopias. So that book was all about can we imagine a radically different, radically better future than the one we have right now? Or the world we have right now? And um, don't, don't, don't just talk about I don't know. We're gonna do some reforms here and there, you know, some additional purchasing power, you know, maybe better health care, blah, blah, blah. No like think much more wildly, think much more radically.

Speaker 1: 5:35

That that was uh the attempt in the book and uh, I had a lot of fun writing it, to be honest yeah and yeah, as you say, I think a lot of the things that you call for are actually more important than ever. If you imagine unemployment of like 80 percent, you know what is. What is that going to mean to society writ large? And I think you address a lot of those uh questions. But now maybe put moral ambition into relation to that, especially because it's more like a, you know, individual cry to get people to individually be morally ambitious, right, rather than big strategic changes.

Speaker 3: 6:07

So I spent the first decade of my career in what I always like to call the awareness industry. Right, you write articles, you write books and you hope that some other people do the actual work of making the world a better place. I was a big believer in the power of ideas. In a way, I still am, but I've updated a little bit um. So at the end of utopia for realists, I wrote um. You know that if we just keep pushing these radical ideas and if we build a movement around it, then we can move what is called the overton window, the window of what is regarded as politically possible, and then we start changing the world.

Speaker 3: 6:47

But after doing this for 10 years, I started to have doubts. I saw that, in some respects, great ideas weren't making all that much progress. A lot of people will know me for going to Davos in 2019 and saying some nasty things about billionaires who don't pay their taxes, and that's a topic that has received a lot of awareness right. A lot of people know that this is a really bad thing, and actually people from the left but also to the right want to have a more reasonable system of taxation. But were we actually making progress?

Speaker 3: 7:22

So what then happened is that I started studying those radicals of the last two centuries, those utopian entrepreneurs who really made it happen, and I thought, you know, let's just start with abolitionism those people who devoted their lives to the fight against the slave trade and slavery, and it started to dawn on me that it was about so much more than mere awareness and ideas and dreaming big. These people were incredibly entrepreneurial. They knew how to get shit done. They built these huge machines, coalitions of people who had all kinds of different skill sets, and I got really interested in that, and that's what I've come to call moral ambition, which is the combination of the idealism and the utopianism of an activist, but also the ambition of an entrepreneur, the ability to actually achieve results and get things done. So, yeah, this is basically a bit of a critique of my previous work, but you could also say that it builds upon it, because it's still driven by the same utopian desires, the same radicalism. But now it's all about okay, how do we actually get there?

Speaker 1: 8:30

yeah, I find in humankind, which you also lay out. If we want to briefly talk about that before we deep dive more into moral ambition, is you paint a picture of humans being decent? I would rather say right, rather than this story of you know, it's all about kill or be killed. And so now, if we assume that you know people are generally decent, what are the things that are holding us back from a morally ambitious populace? Why are we kind of stuck in these situations where people are not stepping up to the plate that you're describing? What are the I guess, institutional issues that are creating that?

Speaker 3: 9:06

Yeah, yeah, you know what's funny Sometimes when I read these history books where an author says well, aristotle thought this, and Plato said that, and St Augustine believed in this. And then I'm like you know, I mean I'm not nearly as important or influential as these great figures, but maybe it'll happen that a century from now someone will look at my work and say well, rutger thought this. And then I'm like but that's not really how it works.

Speaker 3: 9:34

Like what I think on Monday could be very different, you know, compared to what I think on Wednesday. And as an author, as a thinker, you're always evolving right and your books are in conversation with one another. Like, I really appreciate Utopia for Realists and Humankind. I think they are good cases for the point that I was trying to make at the time. But I can also see that, you know, people can write a really, really good book that basically totally destroys the things I'm trying to say. Um fitzgerald said this right I think that the mark of of intelligence is that you're able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time yeah and not go crazy.

Speaker 3: 10:14

Um so all these books as I said, they are they're in conversation?

Speaker 2: 10:17

with one another, sorry, yeah no, no, I, I just I know when we came to see you talk, you spoke about this um slight horror that you had of people posting pictures of themselves on instagram when they were on holiday, reading humankind and saying sort of, you know, chill out, it's great, we're all so kind, we're beautiful species, and but what I feel that book did was it shined a light on a possibility. So you were talking earlier on about utopias, but for me, dreams, they don't have to be destinations. They can be motivational, and I feel that humankind was incredibly motivational, and now you've given us a handbook of which is quite prescriptive, but how to get that, I suppose, and how to live in an engaged and sort of active way, actually make this stuff happen. Also, another question I guess that wasn't a question, that was a defense.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Coming to your defense.

Speaker 2: 11:15

But I needed to know that Lord of the Flies was wrong, in fact, so that I'm not constantly in a stage where, oh well, let's not bother, because that's the human condition.

Speaker 2: 11:25

We are inherently selfish the fact that you were able to hack that and show all of these examples where that just wasn't the case and then, by the way, also, I think, galvanize a ton of other people to start writing about it. There are so many books around this, too many to mention, but that, I feel, you know, really tapped into that idea of collaboration. And that's why we're still here is because we are generous and we go towards generative thinking, and because one of the things that occurred to me was is it always an extremist that we behave very well? So, yes, a plane crash? Um, of course we jump in and we save the kid in the drowning in the lake. Or, of course, during covid, you go and help everyone. You can possibly help, but on a day-to-day basis, how do we tap into this inherent goodness?

Speaker 2: 12:14

in us and this desire to, because my argument is it makes us feel good to do it Just remain with the selfish thing. It makes us feel really, really good to be helpful. But your argument is in moral ambition. It's quite frightening because nothing's enough. You just keep coming back with more and more and more and more demands and I'm worried that's going to put people off.

Speaker 3: 12:36

Yeah Well, look, there's so much to say about this. Let me try and not give a too long answer. But we got to start again with the Utopia Freelist, where I was making these radical points, proposing something like a universal basic income, for example, like hey, can't we abolish poverty by just giving everyone a monthly grant? That's enough to pay for your basic needs? Now, the standard classic objection against that is this is not going to work because people are selfish, because people are lazy, they're just going to spend it on booze, they're going to watch Netflix all day, and then the whole system will collapse.

Speaker 3: 13:15

I published Utopia Freelist that I needed to dig deeper, that all these ideas that I was excited about basic income, but also a much shorter working week or a different way of doing democracy that is much more participatory it all relied on a different view of what humans are really like, and I realized that I had a pretty positive view of human nature that was just not shared by most people. I thought that most people, deep down, are pretty decent, you know, not angels, but on average, most people you know are quite nice and want to do good. Maybe we're not saints, but there's something we can work with there and then I realized that actually, in Western culture, there's this deeply embedded idea called veneer theory the notion that our civilization is only a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature, that deep down, we're just monsters, and indeed there are many examples of this. The ancient Greeks wrote about it. In Christianity we have the idea of original sin, but also some of the classic works of art. You already mentioned Lord of the Flies, about the kids shipwrecking on an island and turning into monsters. This is a story that we've been hearing a lot of times, all the time, and I worry that it sometimes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, or actually, that it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because what you assume in others is what you get out of them. So, anyway, that was Humankind, the book I worked on for five years, published in 2019 in Dutch, 2020 in English, but indeed, after that, as you mentioned, I also started to see how a more positive, or too positive, view of human nature can make you complacent, right when you'll be like just relax, be an optimist, uh, it'll all work out. And it's also true, and that's something I wrestle with in in humankind. Actually, the book is that people who have evolved to work together and evolutionary anthropologists literally, literally talk about survival of the friendliest as the driving process in the history of our species.

Speaker 3: 15:13

These people are still capable of horrible behavior. Like we do, horrible things to one another that no other animal in the animal kingdom would ever dream of doing Concentration camps, genocides, horrific warfare, dehumanization we're capable of the most horrific things and very, very often people who you know come across as decent. They love their kids, they love their neighbors, neighbors they are kind to their, to their dogs and cats. They can be very, very nasty to people who are outside their, their moral circle, outside their empathy.

Speaker 3: 15:46

Um, I think one very clear example today is how we treat animals. So I know a lot of people you know, including some my best friends, some of my loving family members, who, on a daily basis, eat animals that have been tortured in the most horrific way, and that's what factory farming is. So sometimes we study some of the atrocities of the past, like the witch hunts or slavery, and we're like, how could people do this? And then you can also ask yourself the question well, maybe there are some things we're doing today that historians of the future will be horrified by, and I think that the way we treat animals is the most obvious example here. Um, so people who you know on the surface can be really nice and decent, um, they can still, uh, do pretty terrible things, and what you then need are small groups of dedicated, pretty radical people who are willing to make other people uncomfortable and who can really push the boundaries of morality. So, anyway, it's a long answer, but I hope that clarifies it a little.

Speaker 1: 16:53

Yeah, no, it makes complete sense a little. Yeah, no, it makes. It makes complete sense, and I think that's why you know I was referring back to those books, not because they feel out of place, as a matter of fact. I think they were just not the full picture, and which is why you're coming back to, to moral ambition. Um, and let's talk about moral ambition, I I think what you seek out to do here can be perceived as quite brutal by some people. It's like you're basically going to tell people this is how you should live your life, this is the way to do it, right, and I think what that can lead to some people reacting to is that it's alienating and that they are not open to it because they feel like, hey, who's this guy was going to tell me how to live my life? And I'm sure you thought about this as you were writing the book and I was wondering did you feel like I'm going to lean into this and be really harsh about it, or what was your thinking?

Speaker 3: 17:39

Well, maybe you've experienced this as well, but sometimes you can really get fed up with people agreeing with you all the time or making it too easy for you. Like talking to Jet TPT often feels like that for me, like these AIs they always want to make you feel good and like oh, that's an excellent point.

Speaker 3: 17:57

Exactly there's such loyalists and sycophants I I often find it quite disgusting and that's the whole self-literature, self-help literature for me, or actually big parts of it uh, saying you're good the way you are, you can, you know, make your dreams a reality. Uh, I believe in you. And I was like, well, maybe I don't believe in you, right, maybe you're not good the way you are, you know, maybe you're not working hard enough, maybe you're just a, a lazy.

Speaker 3: 18:26

Well, you get what I mean, right, and and it's just that I was in a period in my, in my life you know, this is my early 30s uh, had a bit of an early midlife crisis where I just needed, like some tough medicine. I, I really needed that. Um, and that's the thing with books right, you always write the book that you want to read.

Speaker 3: 18:45

You want to read yourself got it, I get it that this is not the right book for everyone. I mean, if you're, like, totally depressed, very unsure of yourself, worry that you're not doing enough, you feel very guilty about the state of the world, and then you read a book with the first chapter that has the title no, you're Not Good the Way you Are. It may not be the most wholesome, most restorative book to read, but, as I said, it's what I I needed and I think that a lot of people need it. They, they need that kick in the butt that, in the end, can be quite energizing.

Speaker 2: 19:23

Um, I always like to say that I would say it was a great antidote to depression. In fact, because it's galvanized, it's a call to arms and it's a call to get involved.

Speaker 3: 19:32

It's a bit like a you can do something, a cold, refreshing shower right. Initially you're like oh. Initially you're like oh, but then you're like, yeah, I hope that's what the book feels like and that's also with the organization I co-founded, the School for Moral Ambition. I've been saying this to my co-founders. It's like look, we can use the power of shame and we can use the power of guilt. There is a reason that humans are pretty much the only animal in the animal kingdom with the ability to blush. So yeah, we can work with human nature here, but I wouldn't want it to make the center of everything like it's for me the right.

Speaker 3: 20:08

You're just another religion, basically well for me, the right mix is 20 shame, slash guilt and 80% enthusiasm. But yeah, a little bit of a kick in the butt is quite effective.

Speaker 1: 20:19

Yeah, I like that Tough love to an extent.

Speaker 2: 20:24

Yes, I was just going to throw in there. One of your focuses in the book is around recruiting young people who are perhaps privileged and have gone to these great Ivy League colleges and universities, and then they go and they join Goldman's or I probably shouldn't say names of places anyway. They go into private equity yeah exactly, or you know, making six figure sums of money immediately at the age of 21.

Speaker 2: 20:50

And you say you're full of resources and you're so clever and let's apply this talent to something more worthwhile and fulfilling for the rest of mankind, but also personally, probably a lot more fulfilling too.

Speaker 2: 21:03

I was thinking that's a big ask, because these people have been dreaming for however long. It's not like they got into these places easily in the first place. There's a sort of, I think, misconception around, but anyway. But the point is they do know how to apply themselves and work, which is very useful if, if your call to arms is to be met. I wonder if is, is there a version where these you're calling these people once they're bored already with these jobs, where they feel like automatons and they're uninspired and they're already feeling ground down. And yet what are they actually doing? They're making money out of people's money.

Speaker 2: 21:42

What is that? It's insubstantive. It's not something to feel good about. None of them do feel good about it. They're all very apologetic when they say what they do. So once maybe they have a little bit of money and they kind of feel well, I've got some traction there, I could maybe go back. Is that the time to try and pull them into your project? Or indeed, you know, once people are my age, when they sort of don't really care anymore and they're like well, you know, I'm pretty much what I'm going to be, so I can just take a massive risk and get involved in this.

Speaker 1: 22:12

It's easier to not give a hoot about what other people think once you have a little bit of thicker skin and you've. You know already achieved something in society and maybe you have a nest egg and you have some money to fall back on, right like, and it seems like you're focused very much on or not very much, but it sounds a little bit more like a rallying cry to the youthful rather than to the mid 40 people like me.

Speaker 2: 22:32

Yeah will you quote einstein a few times the the geniuses all do their best work before they're 30, whilst, um, they can dare to and, uh, you know that they're not too scared to try. I I almost think it's the inverse. I think we have quite a risk averse youth at the moment or so the media tells us anyway. So I was wondering about flipping that you know what's interesting.

Speaker 3: 22:55

So for physicists and for biologists or people in the exact sciences, it often holds that they do their best work before their 30s, but for historians actually it's the opposite.

Speaker 3: 23:10

so for historians they do their best work in their 50s, in thes. It's just because a lot of things have happened, so it takes a lot of time to read up on all of that stuff. But anyway, that's just a thought that came to mind. Look, I think that moral ambition isn't ideal for everyone. So at all ages you can become more morally ambitious. You can use what you have, whether that's your talent, whether that's your cultural capital, your access to certain networks, your financial capital, your money you can use that to make the world a wildly, wildly better place. I will admit that in an earlier version of the book I had a line that said something like look, if you're past the age of 30, it's you know, you're probably lost.

Speaker 3: 23:56

It's too late just because I thought it would be really fun to write, to write that, uh. But then my publisher pushed back against that, saying it's apparently not good for book sales. If you write off you know more than half of your audience, um, and it's also obviously not true. In the book I give many examples, um, of people who are well past the age of 30 and made a pretty radical shift in their careers and in their lives.

Speaker 2: 24:21

Um, we, we are really interested in getting them when they're young, though, and I am really interested in that period because you can change a cut, like it's the critical period of when people are most porous and open, and you mean then that they they can then spread that and change a culture. Is that what you're after?

Speaker 3: 24:38

Yeah, and there's also a risk in getting stuck in a certain career because the golden handcuffs tighten. You become surrounded by people who don't share all your ideas and it becomes easier to become cynical. That's the whole problem I have with this idea of earning to give. That was popular at a time, you know.

Speaker 3: 25:00

Go to goldman sachs, go to a bank, earn a lot of money and then give it away, but then I think we also got to keep into, take into account what does it do to you, to your personality, to your desires, to soul, if you work for a decade at Wall Street? Or for 20 years? Will you still be the same person after that? And maybe if you, in your spare time, you surround yourself with other people? But it's going to be hard. So, yeah, I'm really interested in the allocation of talent. Ever since I wrote Utopia for Realists, like in all my three books, I have that same line from someone who worked at facebook and said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads.

Speaker 2: 25:43

So it's a thing that I keep coming back to like.

Speaker 3: 25:49

On the left, people are very interested in the redistribution of money, which is also happens to be an interest of mine, but maybe I'm even more interested in the distribution of talent. Like what do the most talented people actually work on? And today a lot of talented people go and work, you know, at companies where they create spreadsheets for shareholders that they don't really like. They make products that they don't really believe in. They let us click more on ads, while in an alternative reality they would be working on the most pressing issues, and that is what moral ambition is. That's also why we founded the School for Moral Ambition. We think that the most driven, most entrepreneurial, most talented, the smartest, brightest people should work on the most pressing challenges that humanity faces, and currently that's not the case at all. So there's a lot of work to do there, and this book, and also the movement we're building, is an attempt to change that to redistribute a lot of talent to causes that are super important yeah, and I think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Obviously there's a when you are spending a decade in an industry, you may have already made some concessions to your own moral standards that are hard to peddle back from. As well as you bought into wholesale philosophy that your peer group is now suggesting is the value system that you should be adopting and system that you should be adopting and things that you should be chasing, that no longer makes it so easy to just jettison all that and get out. So you know, when you get people before they're kind of fully formed, it makes sense. Um, let me ask you this it feels like there is a lot of moral ambition around sometimes. You know, when you look at all these demonstrations let's not talk about that super extreme Antifa people who need to burn Teslas, but like there's a lot of people who are basically on the streets, they're trying to kind of push back.

Speaker 1: 27:42

So there seems to be some sort of ambition here, right, and I don't think that fully is necessarily the noble loser which you bring up. By the way, it would be great if you explain that, because I love that notion. I think it's a spot on notion that I see a lot around but not everybody is necessarily a noble loser. Some people are just trying to also affect change, but they're directionally pointing in various different kind of areas, right and and it may not be in an organization that's pointing in one direction. So, um, how would you try to get those people into the fold? How would you feel like they should be spending their time? How can you get them into directing their moral ambition in the right way?

Speaker 3: 28:20

So I think that too often we have a too shallow conception of what it means to make change. As I said, that was also true for myself as I read Utopia for Realists again the final chapter. It paints a too simplistic picture of what it actually takes like oh, you can just be unreasonable and unrealistic, propose these ideas, build a movement, go out in the streets, say we want universal basic income, and then, yeah, I didn't go into much detail on how that would actually happen. Um, I think effective change makers are super interested in all the tools that they need from the toolkit and what it takes to build a whole coalition of people who, by the way, often disagree with one another on quite a few things but can still agree to work for that same cause. And you need activists, definitely you need people out in the streets. I think that's particularly important today in the United States.

Speaker 3: 29:17

I recently moved to the US. I live in New York right now and it's incredibly, incredibly frightening what's going on in this country and it's incredibly important that people make their voices heard. I was super happy to see this massive no Kings protest, which was probably the biggest protest in the history of the country, bigger than the Women's March, bigger than Black Lives Matter. I was super happy to see the massive protest in Hungary recently. You know that had actually been banned by the authoritarian government, by Viktor Orban, but it was like the big pride march and probably also one of the biggest demonstration in hungarian history. So that's that's. That's incredibly important. I wouldn't want to suggest that. You know, that's not what we need, but we have to note, though, at the same time, that some of these big protest movements of the of the past decade maybe BLM is the best example have not really got us the results we desired. This was massive, like 25 million people participated, really huge but then, if you think, in terms of policy change and legislation that has been passed, it's been quite limited. There were some changes on the local level, some police forces that changed their protocols. Quite a lot of that has now been rolled back in the new Trump era, but I think, as changemakers, we got to be obsessed with actually achieving results.

Speaker 3: 30:51

In the end, it's not about how we come across like, what opinions we hold. It's not about our own moral purity. It's about actually improving the lives of the people who are currently suffering from poverty, oppression and you name it. And indeed, if you don't do that, if you focus too much on how the activism feels for you and how you will be perceived by your direct peers, then you risk indeed becoming a noble loser, someone who's indeed very noble but who just keeps losing. And we've sadly seen many examples of that.

Speaker 3: 31:22

People who, for example, who refused to vote for Kamala Harris during the last election because she didn't say the right things about Palestine and Israel, and look where that got us right. I think if you're really morally serious, then you're also willing to make trade-offs. Um, and particularly right now in this country where I live, it's incredibly important to actually win elections, um, and that requires coalition building, that requires making compromises, that sometimes requires just shutting the hell up right, not saying certain things that you believe deep down inside but that are just not very helpful, um, or may backfire even. Um.

Speaker 2: 32:03

so yeah, that's that's, that's all super important so, in order to recruit, you need to find common ground, is your yes, and look, I wouldn't't say like, coalition building is everything Like.

Speaker 3: 32:17

You can also go too far in the other direction, where it's like, oh, like, we always got to be agreeable. You can't be controversial. Yeah, sometimes you can be quite controversial, right, I think, for some causes like the. Also take the climate movement. Um, also take the climate movement. I think there's pretty good evidence that extinction rebellion, with its very confrontational tactics, has achieved really good results.

Speaker 3: 32:42

Actually, um, if you talk to some of these best climate activists, including my mother, who you know keeps getting arrested all the time she's the only one in the family, at 68 years old, who keeps getting arrested um, she would say like, look, I'm not in the business of being popular, I don't care about that. We're putting pressure on politicians and there's good evidence from political science um, sometimes they call it the greta effect that indeed, climate change became a much more salient issue for politicians after 2019 and the massive climate demonstration and fridays for future movement, and then that makes it easier also for green entrepreneurs to pitch their new products to sell more evs. Um, so I often find it funny that a lot of people who are actually part of the same movement really dislike one another. So I know quite a few entrepreneurs who are all like yeah, I don't like these climate activists and I'm not like you're selling way more products than you otherwise would have had right because of them, because of them, because they they, they keep it salient, right, they keep.

Speaker 3: 33:47

They make sure that we're talking about this, and in politics, one of the essential things is to control the agenda. It's not even like are you, do people like you? It's like are we talking about the right subject? And if these climate activists wouldn't have done what they did, we would have talked about other things.

Speaker 3: 34:03

Um, I don't know, about migration, for example, about other culture, war stuff, um so um, I'm just I'm just being super pragmatic about this, because we also know that some climate activists can backfire Activism can backfire, so it always really depends. I'll give you another example. In the 90s there was a lot of very radical activism for animal rights, including quite some violent activism that totally backfired and that discredited the movement for 20 years. So these people were saying that they were helping animals in factory farms, but they were doing the opposite in reality. Um, so that that that's.

Speaker 2: 34:44

That's an uncomfortable discussion and it's hard sometimes to have this conversation, but it's an incredibly important conversation to have one of the things that you emphasize in the book is the toolkit, and that science and tech are often the place where these things start. And then, well, I guess maybe it's both ways.

Speaker 2: 35:04

You've just described how activism has given opportunities to green tech I suppose, but what I got from it was that it's the people who are in the reeds, who who are sowing these seeds very, very early on that then later we always think it's. The Rosa Parks was the first part of that journey, and of course you talk about the latticework and all of the things, the meetings that had been proliferating before that moment. I thought that was a really lovely invitation for people who are perhaps more number crunchy or more comfortable behind a desk or more comfortable being invisible.

Speaker 3: 35:43

I suppose, um, would you tell us a bit about being behind the scenes but being incredibly effective and influential sure, absolutely often we only remember the people in the spotlights, indeed the Rosa Parkses, the Martin Luther Kings, who are great at giving speeches, but then we run the risk of starting to think that it was all about them. I don't want to deny that Martin Luther Kings gave great speeches, so that's undeniable and that was very, very helpful. But there was so much more that was necessary. Like two hours before Martin Luther King was about to give his famous I have a dream speech. The audio system didn't work anymore, the microphone didn't work anymore. It had been demolished by white racists by white racists.

Speaker 3: 36:35

So the people who fixed the audio system pretty important right For the course of human history. Otherwise no one could have heard Martin Luther King give his famous speech. So that's just one tiny example. As I studied the British abolitionist movement, which was the most successful abolitionist movement in the late 18th and the early 19th century, I was just amazed by learning about all these different roles that were played in the movement. So you had Thomas Clarkson, who is a little bit like the charismatic campaigner, a little bit like the MLK of that movement. So, yeah, he was super important. He traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom to spread his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. But then you also had someone like James Stephen, for example, my favorite lawyer in the history of our species.

Speaker 3: 37:25

He was a radical nerd he knew everything about maritime law.

Speaker 3: 37:28

He was just obsessed with all the crazy little details. He was just obsessed with all the crazy little details and he came up with a brilliant trick in 1806 that really laid the groundwork for abolishing the slave trade. Because up until that point, every single year, william Wilberforce the politician who was also quite important had been proposing to abolish the slave trade but couldn't get a majority for it. And then James Stephen, his friend, came up to him and said look, I've got an idea. What if we do not ban the english slave trade but instead we ban the foreign slave trade? And and england? At the time, you know, they were at war with france, with napoleon. And it made perfect sense like, why would you allow the French to keep supplying their colonies with enslaved people? Like why would you? Why would you not hijack those ships right and liberate the enslaved people? That makes a lot of sense, right?

Speaker 3: 38:24

Um, so this was quickly passed in in Westminster, in parliament. There were only around what is it? 30 to 40 politicians, parliamentarians, present at the time. Like it was a no-brainer. And it was probably only James Stephen who realized what this would mean, because what the conservative politicians didn't realize was that actually almost all British ships were also sailing under foreign flags. So in one pen stroke they were banishing around three quarters, or banning around three quarters, of the British slave trade.

Speaker 3: 38:59

Um now, why did these British ships sail on the foreign flags? Because they were, uh, dodging legislation, like there were some very limited legislation that limited the amount of enslaved people that you could put on a British slave ship, and they weren't even willing to comply with that and said you know what, we'll sail on their Spanish flag or on the foreign flag. So, anyway, that was like a brilliant legal trick and James Stephen, historians have argued, was probably the only one who fully realized what was going to happen, and it was just too late for the slave trade lobby. They were like shit, what has just happened? And it's those kinds of stories that I really love that just show you. Yeah, as we talked about, there are so many different people you need with different skill sets.

Speaker 2: 39:49

And what is the overall mission? I feel we haven't really addressed what the School for Moral Ambition is trying to achieve.

Speaker 3: 39:56

So we like to see ourselves as the robin hoods of talent. We want to convince and lure the most ambitious, most talented people to work on those most pressing issues. Um, that's basically it. Now, the way we do that is, we've and and.

Speaker 2: 40:14

When you say pressing issues, you mean climate, you mean child poverty, you mean do you want to make a list of what your priorities are?

Speaker 3: 40:22

So I always like to call it the Gandalf-Frodo model of doing good. Gandalf didn't ask Frodo about his passion. He said, no, this is the most important thing that needs to happen right now. You throw the ring into the mountain and then we're all safe. So we work with so-called prioritization researchers that's a relatively new branch of social science of really smart people who continuously think about that question what is the world's to-do list? And then you're obviously looking for challenges that are very big, very big problems. But you're also looking for the more pressing issues right, the things that really have to happen now, and the more neglected issues, because if you work on something where you know already a lot of people are working on it, then you're going to make less impact. So, to give you a simple example, take something like climate change very pressing, very big problem. We've got the solution. Is it very neglected? We would say less and lesser. I mean millions of people are working on it. There's been a huge awakening. There are, you know are brilliant entrepreneurs. Clean electricity is, you know, doing quite well. Evs are being adopted globally.

Speaker 3: 41:32

But there are some really neglected aspects to the fight against climate change as well, and food is the most obvious example. That's about 20% of our emissions, mostly meat and dairy, and we've been making very little progress here. It's also controversial. Most people like to ignore it because most people, you know they really like eating their meat and their dairy. So we've chosen that as one of our cause areas. That's the model we work with. So you can go to a lot of schools or to a lot of career accelerators or incubation programs and you come there with your own dreams and desires.

Speaker 3: 42:11

For us, it's very different. We're like no, we don't give a shit about your passion. To put it bluntly, um, like we've. We've talked to a bunch of gandalfs and they've. They create the mission statement for you and that's what you're going to work on. What we have seen is that our fellows become incredibly passionate about it. So one other cause we work on is the fight against big tobacco. Smoking is still the single largest preventable cause of disease globally. It's bigger than HIV, aids, malaria, tuberculosis, car crashes, wars, natural disasters all of that combined, it's 8 million deaths every year. It's like imagine a jumbo jet crashing, you know, fully loaded. It's like imagine a jumbo jet crashing, you know, fully loaded. Now imagine that happening every 30 minutes, for 24 hours for 365 days every year.

Speaker 2: 43:03

That's big tobacco. How do you know that? Where's the data for that? How do?

Speaker 3: 43:10

you separate that from air pollution. Let's say there's a fantastic website called Our World in Data that collects data on this stuff, and there's a lot of research that has gone into this question, like it's obviously not, um, super easy.

Speaker 3: 43:22

It's not like an earthquake where you can just, you know, fairly, you can just do a straightforward count where you can see, okay, so many people have have died. But even with natural disasters it can sometimes be difficult, right, we know that with um fukushima evacuation, that a lot of people after the Fukushima disaster died not because of radiation or anything like that, but because of the evacuations and all the problems that caused. Anyway, um, for us, it's super important to to find, uh, yourself a really wise gandalf that has done the research and then become passionate about what gandalf tells you that needs to happen. Um, and our flagship program are these fellowships. Uh, we, we build these small groups of very ambitious, very talented people who, um, make leap, who quit their current jobs. We've had people who had very prestigious jobs at McKinsey, at corporate law firms. We've had some entrepreneurs, people who were really climbing that conventional career ladder and, yeah, who were giving up quite a lot.

Speaker 3: 44:33

You know the opportunity costs were pretty substantial, leaving quite a lot. You know, the opportunity costs were pretty substantial and leaving quite a lot of money on the table as well, but they were like. You know what? This is the kind of life I want to live. When I look back on my life, um, when I lie on my deathbed, I'm not going to think about. You know, all the powerpoints that I didn't care about, or all the meetings that I didn't want to be in. I want to think about. You know the actual impact that I didn't care about, or all the meetings that I didn't want to be in. I want to think about. You know the actual impact that I made and the movement that I wanted to be a part of.

Speaker 1: 45:00

Can you tell me a little bit more practically what that actually means in terms of the school? So you give them financing, you give them, like, some sort of training. Do people apply If somebody is listening right now and they feel inspired by it? Like how can we demystify this whole?

Speaker 3: 45:15

thing. So in europe, we've just, uh, launched our second round of fellowships. We've we've just finished the first year and, um, it's pretty simple. It starts with applications. A lot of people apply who are like, yes, I want to do this, I want to quit my job and work on something that's super important. Um, we announce the fellowship topics in advance, so people know that it's important.

Speaker 3: 45:33

We announced the fellowship topics in advance, so people know that it's going to be either the food transition or the fight against big tobacco. We're now also expanding to the fight for tax fairness, to implement a global billionaire's tax and fight against tax avoidance and tax evasion by the ultra rich, so people know about the causes they're going to work on. Then we select a team of, as I said, incredibly ambitious, incredibly talented people who have diverse skill sets. It's incredibly important that you have the right mix of people with different backgrounds. Some people have, like these, classic consultancy backgrounds. Some are more entrepreneurial. Some come from underprivileged backgrounds but have lived experience. That is super important. So, yeah, we create these, like I always like to call them, swat teams.

Speaker 1: 46:22

SWAT teams, yeah, of super dedicated people, and I assume it's also different from topic to topic, right?

Speaker 3: 46:28

Yeah, sure it really depends If we're going to work on tax fairness, we're going to recruit a lot of nerds, so I can assure you that that's probably not going to be a super diverse group, right, If you look for fiscal specialists. You know that's a lot of guys who don't see a lot of sun.

Speaker 1: 46:45

Closing tax loops is not very sexy, right, For us it's all about actually achieving the results For Big Tobacco.

Speaker 3: 46:50

we had more creative people that we needed because there was a huge lack of awareness here storytelling some great marketeers.

Speaker 2: 46:58

I just wanted to intercept that. I think the story around tax avoidance is huge and shouldn't be left only to people hiding in the dark trying to change little bits of policy. To me, you need a spokesperson or a big advocate who is perhaps in the public eye, is perhaps earning an absolute fortune and pays all of their taxes and doesn't have an offshore account and wouldn't ever consider not paying their taxes. That, to me, is a really important narrative and one we don't have For some reason. All of these people that everyone follows and everyone worships do well, many of them do it.

Speaker 3: 47:34

Yeah, yeah yeah, and they're not being vilified, yeah so here again, I think it's really important to listen to the gandalfs. So we've asked a bunch of researchers to really closely analyze the cause area where we currently stand and what they came back with to us. They basically said look, there's a lot of awareness raising in this space. There are a lot of great organizations, like oxfam, like patriotic millionaires, for example. Maybe you know them. It's a bunch of quite wealthy people who say tax me more. Um, and the vast majority of people already agree.

Speaker 3: 48:09

Again, polling is quite consistent people from the left to the right want higher taxes on the rich. What's really lacking here is policy entrepreneurship. We don't have the right people in the right room at the right time. We don't have the knowledge on how to actually close these loopholes. So for us, this is again, it's not an ideological thing. It's also very important that it doesn't start with me as one of the co-founders saying like I believe that this should happen. It doesn't start with me as one of the co-founders saying like I believe that this should happen. It's quite a collaborative research process where you're really looking for what are the gaps here, and I agree that absolutely, storytelling is important here. So definitely, we'll keep doing that, but you can only spend $1 or euro once. You can only spend one hour once, so we think it's really a moral duty to continuously think okay, what's really lacking here? How can we add the most, without saying that all the other stuff is unimportant or doesn't matter or anything like that. It's just like some things are higher on the to-do list.

Speaker 1: 49:17

This is actually a great segue to a question that I wanted to ask you and, by the way, I feel like you can always bring spokespeople in after you know you need a crack team that addresses the policy issues, and then you can bring. I know bill gates and who says tax me more or something.

Speaker 3: 49:30

Look, it's also what I mean, it's what I'm doing. Uh, I, I'm doing a lot of that and we have, like, our funders of the tax fairness fellowship are great examples of people that we love to put in the spotlight. Uh, so if you know of more wealthy people who want higher taxes on themselves, please all refer them on me, because I can assure you, this is one of the most difficult causes to fundraise for.

Speaker 2: 49:51

But then I call myself out, I use Amazon and yet I find out. You know, a few years back they didn't pay one pound tax in this country. Okay, legally and legitimately. But there was enough loopholes not to. Or people sometimes don't know that. Let's say, capital gains tax is something not to be avoided. It's something you pay because you can afford a second home, but it's so in the culture to avoid that tax. Sure, sure, look. So there is. I mean.

Speaker 3: 50:22

I use Amazon as well, I don't feel guilty about that. For me, as I said, it's not about moral purity. I don't think it hurts Amazon very much if a few very principled people say you know, I'm going to avoid that company, I'm going to make my life much less convenient. To avoid that, I think it's much smarter to use that same energy to try and, as I said, build a movement to actually make those billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. I make this point in the first chapter of the book about the environmental movement, that parts of it have become really obsessed with something like the environmental footprint. You don't fly, you don't eat meat, you don't have kids. At some point you live in a tiny house with your vegetable garden, you've reduced your footprint to zero and you might as well not have existed right then death is your highest contribution. I think that's not nearly ambitious enough. So I would really encourage people to think a bit less about their individual consumer choices and much more about them being a political animal. And you know, I think we can be much more about them being a political animal and I think we can be much more ambitious.

Speaker 3: 51:30

It is important to practice what you preach right, especially if you're a bit more of a public figure. Right, I don't eat meat, but I don't think that that is like my great contribution to the world or anything like that. I think I can set higher standards, and maybe one thing to add. So when we have selected those fellows, they get a month of training, um, and then they spent six months at one of our partner organizations. This is also incredibly important. Too many people start new charities, new ngos, yeah, with the idea oh, I've got it all figured out. That is not true. There are amazing organizations out there doing great work.

Speaker 1: 52:06

So again, you mentioned a few of them in the book, exactly so this is all about coalition building.

Speaker 3: 52:12

We are actually supplying these organizations with talent that they often wouldn't be able to get access to.

Speaker 2: 52:21

Can you name some of the partner charities?

Speaker 3: 52:22

Oh yeah, so many, now More than 20. Like in Europe, for example, we work with the Good Food Institute, which is an amazing organization that lobbies for what is what are called alternative proteins right, that are more sustainable alternatives to meat and dairy. Um, they said that they were looking for someone who really understands brussels, really understands how the sausage gets made in brussels, how legislation gets passed, and we were able to provide them with a fellow who could do exactly that. Um, so that's just uh. That's just uh an example. Now, the end goal is obviously that these fellows spend the rest of their careers, um, in these high impact cause areas, so we basically pay them seven months of a stipend and we get 30 years of impact in return.

Speaker 3: 53:12

That's uh, that's the goal and now, actually we're not working with students, but we work with people who, on average, have around 10 years of working experience. They who have already proved their worth on the conventional career ladder. Some of them are. We're actually about to, you know, become a partner in one of these fancy firms, and that's the moment when we take them out.

Speaker 2: 53:33

And we're like okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 53:35

When they're partnered, they're lost.

Speaker 3: 53:37

That's very hard to get somebody out but also, as you know, many of these companies have this up or out system. And it's genuinely very difficult to make it all the way to the top, exactly so we genuinely very difficult to to make it all the way to the top exactly.

Speaker 1: 53:50

So we sort of um, just sit sitting on the sidelines like vultures when, when people are out there being yeah, taken to the school of moral, ambition right.

Speaker 3: 53:58

So what's the word? We piggy, piggy something on their efforts.

Speaker 1: 54:02

Piggyback, piggyback yeah yeah, yeah, you triggered something earlier in my mind and I always wanted to ask you this again. I feel I know the answer, but I'd love you to articulate it, and that is the Moral Ambition playbook is very much, I would say, lends a lot from the Effective Altruism playbook, in the sense that it's all about, you know, the data matters, the numbers matter, the output matters. It's not about how you feel or what, emotionally, is going on right. That resonates a lot with me.

Speaker 1: 54:30

But on the flip side, what is obviously, you know we're humans, right, and what we do in proximity to other humans is the thing that actually makes us feel good and motivates us. If I carry up that bag for the old lady, like, that actually makes my whole day right and so, yeah, I've automated a lot of my donating right and, by the way, against malaria is one of the charities I've been giving for 10 years because of this. But, at the same time, how can we get people to get emotionally invested in this, in in this work, even though you're trying to help people that are usually very far away from you, yeah, where you don't have the empathy loop that kicks in right away, or where you feel this gratification and satisfaction, because that has to be part of the journey too in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 55:09

Yeah, yeah, for those who don't know this, it's perhaps good to explain a bit more about effective altruism.

Speaker 3: 55:16

So this is a movement that started 15 years ago and it was a critique of conventional philanthropy. They were basically saying look, we've got a lot of good intentions here, we've got very nice brochures, but what's actually being done with this money? And not just in terms of like, what are the overhead costs? That's like a classic obsession from some people that I personally don't care about all that much, but more like is this actually helping people and animals? And do we know? And if we know, how do we know? Like, is the evidence actually good?

Speaker 3: 55:50

So you had a think tank that was launched by Holden Kornoski. It's called GiveWell, and Holden Kornoski was a guy who worked at Wall Street and just with a couple of friends he was like okay, we want to give quite a lot to charity. They started their giving club, but you know, they wanted to judge the charities just how they would judge stocks and companies when they would invest, and they were just shocked how low quality the evidence was. So that was one of the ways in which effective altruism got started. They were like hey, we can do so much more good now. One of the most profound discoveries they made early on was that the difference between an average charity and the best charity is not like three or four times, but more like 100 or 1000 times. So if you think really hard about how you're going to spend $100, if you're going to spend it on an average charity, let's say, it will have a hundred dollars of impact. If you're going to spend it on a great charity, it might be a hundred thousand or a million dollars of impact, so that is incredibly important, and they would also actually argue that this is a moral imperative, because, as we talked about, money is scarce. Time is scarce. We can only spend every dollar or euro once, so if we can do more good with the same resources, then we should probably do it.

Speaker 3: 57:12

One of their favorite examples was treating blindness, so if you train a guide dog in a country like the US or the UK or the Netherlands, where I'm from, it costs you around $40,000. And that is wonderful. I mean, guide dogs are awesome, and they are a great help to people who are visually impaired. The uncomfortable thing, though, is that for the same amount of money, you can heal hundreds, literally hundreds of people from trachoma, which is a disease that is quite common in quite poor countries and that also leads to blindness common in quite poor countries and that also leads to blindness.

Speaker 3: 57:51

So, if you have the choice to, let's say, you can heal a hundred people from blindness or help one person, what you should, should you do? And I would say that, yes, you should probably do the thing that helps the most right. Or, to put it differently, why would you help fewer people, less? Is that really better? So I think this was a really important and profound insight from effective altruism. But, yeah, some people were put off by it because, indeed, it almost became too rational. They developed all these spreadsheets right. Sometimes it came across as if everything can be calculated, which is obviously not possible.

Speaker 2: 58:29

Quantifiable yeah.

Speaker 3: 58:30

To be honest, I think that the best criticisms of effective altruism are often from other effective altruists.

Speaker 3: 58:37

So, I think that often media and people who haven't spent much time studying it present a very shallow and stereotypical view of what the movement actually is, and what I appreciated about it the most, honestly, when I encountered it for the first time, was the moral seriousness of these people. So if I go to a conference of some of my left-wing friends, I talk to a lot of people who are like abolish the patriarchy, fight capitalism, fight the oligarchs. And then I look at what they do in their own personal lives and they just live, like you know, normal lives.

Speaker 1: 59:12

They're part of the system, they don't.

Speaker 3: 59:15

And then I'm not talking about you know their individual consumer behaviors, but just how they spend their time right. And then I go to an EA conference and I'm just amazed by how deeply morally serious these people are. You will meet many people who have donated their kidneys to complete strangers, so that's pretty cool. The one downside was that it seemed to be a quite nerdy movement that appeals to a certain group of radical nerds. I really don't think it's true that they're solely motivated.

Speaker 2: 59:44

I don't know why you have this negative connotation around nerds.

Speaker 3: 59:49

Well, for me it's not a negative connotation, it's just that.

Speaker 1: 59:53

It's not as inclusive that way you know. Therefore, look again, this is all about the coalition building.

Speaker 3: 59:59

So, as I said, I spent a lot of time studying the British abolitionist movement. Initially it was mainly the Quakers who were driving that movement. They were very weird. They were a little bit like EAers today.

Speaker 2: 1:00:09

They were like this small.

Speaker 3: 1:00:10

Protestant sect who believed in radical equality of the sexes and of people, but they just couldn't get much stuff done because most people were like, okay, you're very weird, right.

Speaker 1: 1:00:22

Outliers.

Speaker 3: 1:00:22

Yeah, yeah, the normies you know, weren't really enthusiastic about the Quakers, and what then happened is that the evangelicals joined the coalition. The evangelicals were much more charismatic, much more mainstream and, yeah, it's that moment when the abolitionist movement really took off. And I guess that's the realization I had in 2022, 2023, when we started thinking about the School for More Ambition. Realization I had in 2022, 2023, when we started thinking about the School for More Ambition. Is that perhaps what the evangelicals for the Quakers?

Speaker 3: 1:00:53

that that's also what we need for effective altruism, that some of these ideas are really powerful but some people are just motivated by different things, right, it's not just pure altruism for many of us.

Speaker 1: 1:01:10

It could also be just excitement or enthusiasm or the desire to be part of a cool group. Right, I think we can. Yeah, we're both right. Yeah, yeah, sure, you just want the other one as well.

Speaker 3: 1:01:14

For me it's all that at the same time, like if you ask me why, yes, exactly, am I working on that this? Well, it's genuine empathy and compassion for millions and billions of animals and people who are suffering. It is vanity. It's like I will admit that you know I just when I see my own name on a book, I like that, and I think that's true for many authors. It is also genuine excitement, enthusiasm. This is the coolest thing I've ever worked on. It is indeed the desire to work with other cool people, not to be boring. I was just joking about that the other day. I mean, imagine a documentary on Netflix that follows 12 fellows in the first few years when they work at McKinsey. I mean, that would be the most boring documentary ever right, that would be great to treat your insomnia.

Speaker 3: 1:02:05

You would immediately fall asleep, probably. Now. Imagine 12 of our Moral Ambition fellows. Imagine a documentary like that. People who quit their jobs take on some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species the next pandemic, lead poisoning, factory farming and you follow them as they encounter all these challenges and they have their setbacks and they try to overcome them. I would want to watch that right. It's much more interesting. So anyway, humans are mixed bags and I think that's totally fine that we're motivated by different things.

Speaker 2: 1:02:38

The kinds of people that you've described, even though you say you know, perhaps they went into banking and making money in McKinsey and whatever, and you pull them out after 10 years if they don't get that promotion or if they're going to make a sideways movement anyway. Let's say there's that cohort, then there's maybe the cohort that you managed to grab at the beginning, who've just graduated and are very idealistic and want to change the world. And there must be a maverick grain in all of those people to think differently enough to take a risk and to come and jump onto your ship, which is relatively new. What about the people who perhaps don't feel that they have a skill set that they could offer at your school? I know you're saying you know well, you know food, waste and sure, and you can maybe not smoke and you can maybe not eat meat, but that's not enough. What's your call to action for the rest of us?

Speaker 3: 1:03:26

Yeah, so this is another program that we've developed and it's called our Moral Ambition Circles. So these are small groups of six to eight people who come together around these questions. What are some of the most pressing issues we face as a species? What are my own superpowers? What's the match between those two? What's the first step I can take? How can we hold each other accountable and can we rely on each other's networks um to take that, those first steps?

Speaker 3: 1:03:57

We now have 15 000 members from more than 100 countries. Like, we've got hundreds of moral ambition circles around the globe, and we've developed this curriculum for free. So anyone can do this. You can go to our website, moralambitionorg, start their own moral ambition circle and, yeah, start their journey. So, yeah, the way we look at it, it's a whole pipeline, right? People can read the book, for example, learn about moral ambition, or listen to a podcast like this. Then they can start a circle. Then maybe after that, they can apply to a fellowship, because we do believe in the power of really thoroughly searching for talent. Right, that is a real skill, and one of my co-founders is really good at that, but sometimes the best people find you right We've had that with volunteers as well.

Speaker 3: 1:04:47

Just people knock on our doors and are like here I am, this is what I can do, and they're like, okay, awesome. And honestly, that's been the most exhilarating thing about co-founding the school for more ambition is just how many amazing people who have just offered, you know, for free to help us out. We've got the most brilliant pro bono lawyers, the most brilliant pro bono marketeers, um, people you know, helping us to organize events. There are so many people with awesome skill sets out there and sometimes the biggest difficulty we have is like challenging all the energy because there's a lot of it, um, but yeah, that once again reminds me of the point that I was trying to make in humankind is that people are wonderful, really people are absolutely wonderful whenever we ask something like hey, can anyone help us with this?

Speaker 3: 1:05:35

we got like too many people saying, yes, sure, I can help out. I guess that's the that's. That's really the message for everyone. Anyone can be morally ambitious, and I'm also not saying that it has to go through us. There are many other awesome organizations out there, but yeah, if people are interested, moralambitionorg and start your own circle.

Speaker 1: 1:05:53

Rutger, I really like all your books that you've written so far and I know you said this is your last one because you wanna actually be more practical and I'm quite excited to follow the School of Moral Ambition to see where it goes. But I really do hope you have another book or two in you. We'll see about that. But yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. Appreciate you and what you're doing out there. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 1:06:14

This was wonderful. Thanks for having me.