Let’s Make The World Wildly Better: Rutger Bregman On Moral Ambition

29:24But it kind of accelerated that search for meaning decades earlier than that kind of descends on most people. And what's interesting about that is it can lead, there's a fork in the road. It can lead to despair and powerlessness, or it can allow you to figure out something to latch onto or having a North Star like Russell to point to kind of direct your thought and your actions. But in your case, what's also interesting, and I never really thought this through all that deeply, is the connection between the illusion of free will and your notion of justice, which is at the center of your Humankind book.

30:09Like this idea that if there is no free will, then there's no rationale for punishing people for their misdeeds. It's like rehabilitation should be the only thing that is deserving of our attention. Yeah, yeah. I think if we look at the moral progress we've made over the last two to three centuries, it's all been about expanding the moral circle. So the mother of all moral movements is, in my view, the abolitionist movement, those men and women who fought against probably the greatest moral atrocity that ever existed. Let's spend a little bit of time exploring that because I think there's a lot of confusion around the origin of that movement.

30:50Oh, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that surprised me was that initially I thought that it was mostly a secular enlightenment movement of, I don't know, French philosophers saying, hey, people have human rights and therefore we ought to abolish this. But actually in France, the country of the French Revolution with the Declaration of Human Rights, abolitionism really didn't take off. It was a total failure. In my own country, I was born and I live in the Netherlands, abolitionism was also a total failure. You had a bunch of, yeah, we would call them social justice warriors today. There were a bunch of Calvinists who were mainly interested in their own moral purity, but they didn't get anything done.

31:32Then in Spain, we had pretty much nothing. In Portugal, almost nothing. In the US, people often don't realize this, but abolitionism was also a failure in the US. Take the Liberty Party, which was the only political party that was against slavery. It didn't win a single election anywhere. You had the Liberator, which was the newspaper for abolitionists. It had only 3 ,000 subscribers. stories um there's one anecdote that i've always found fascinating of this guy who campaigned for abraham lincoln just shortly before the civil war and he he went to the south and he came back and he said oh my god what happened to me it's so shocking they called me a fool they called me an idiot they called me all kinds of things but worst of all they called me an abolitionist uh and that was like the worst thing that can happen to you uh the only thing that was where it was different was in Britain, where it became this hugely successful movement.

32:29And it was led not by, yeah, by secular philosophers, but it was led by Quakers, this weird religious Protestant sect, and by evangelicals, this new charismatic movement of people, yeah, who wanted to renew their faith. And it was that coalition. And it was like 1780s, like early 1780s, right? And it started with just like, I don't know, like 12 people, right? Yeah, it's really incredible. So the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded by 12 individuals. One of them was a writer. One of them was, I would say, an amateur theologian, but 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. That was one of those big epiphanies for me.

33:12It's like, okay, so you need those kind of people who actually know how to build something, how to scale it. All these people have been really successful, right? They had become fairly rich. But I think the reason we remember them today is not because they were wealthy or anything like that. I mean, that's nice, but a lot of people are wealthy. That's not that special. Why historians still write about them today is because they used what they had, both their talent, their skill set, and their resources to build this enormous movement that changed the course of history. And indeed, it's just incredible how small it was initially.

33:49There's this quote from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, who said that we should never doubt the power of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. That's the antidote to the sense of powerlessness that we all have. But fundamental to that story is the idea that, quote unquote, a coalition is a group of people who are solution-oriented problem solvers who can get over their secondary differences to solve their primary problem. And when I think about that in the context of our current moment, it seems almost quaint. Like I feel like we're in a culture that is affirming the very opposite.

34:35It's about digging in our heels and holding our ground and refusing to reach across the aisle to compromise in any kind of meaningful way with respective parties quibbling amongst themselves and really caught up in those secondary and tertiary differences and thus neutered in their ability to solve, to even approach solving whatever their primary problem is. Would you agree with that as an accurate assessment? of like the moment? I think that's pretty accurate, Rich. Look, as a historian, what I really love about history is that you have access to these amazing coaches and therapists, right? You can read the memoirs and the biographies of some of the great pioneers of the past and you can learn from them.

35:23What I experienced when I was reading about someone like Thomas Clarkson, for example, he was probably the most important abolitionist of all time. Not many people remember him today, But there's a lot of historians who argue that if he would have fallen off his horse in 1785, the wall could have looked very, very differently. Like he traveled 35 ,000 miles across the United Kingdom, spread the abolitionist propaganda everywhere, you know, really led the charge. And in the end, you know, Britain abolished the slave trade and then forced 80 % of other countries to stop slave trading. So the effects were absolutely enormous.

35:56Now, what I experienced when I read his memoirs was this emotion that I like to describe as moral envy. So I was just reading about what he was doing and I just got jealous of someone like him who was actually in the arena. And, you know, at that time I had spent about a decade of my career in the pundits industry, you know, expressing my opinion, saying what's wrong and what other people should do to make this world a better place. and was kind of fed up with myself. And then reading about those people and learning from them and realizing, hey, yeah, we can talk to the dead and the dead talk back to us.

36:36And they're calling out and saying like, hey, this great, as I said, it's like the model of all movements. Everything came out of that. You know, many suffragettes who fought for the women's right to vote, initially they were abolitionists, right? So that grew out of abolitionism and out of that grew the civil rights movement and out of that grew the environmental movement, right? There's such a clear connection between all these things. And the journey isn't finished yet. And you can read the memoirs of these people and you can learn from how they were effective. And often they were effective in such surprising ways.

37:08They were way more pragmatic than you would expect. They were not these like, how do you say that? Those morally pure people who keep shaming each other. Idealist skulls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were just laser focused on actually achieving results. I'll give you one example that really struck me. So from our perspective today, you would say as an abolitionist, what you do is to just call out the horrors of this system, right? That's what you probably do, right? I don't know. You create pamphlets. You talk to politicians. People just understand. It's an information and education problem. Yeah, that's what you would think.

37:50And it was partially that. There was definitely the need for quite some abolitionist propaganda. But what they also experienced is that a lot of people just didn't care all that much. A lot of politicians, especially in Westminster, were like, yeah, but those people don't vote for us. It's not as if the people in the colonies are currently suffering. They don't have the right to vote. But then what these abolitionists discovered is that about 20 % of British sailors were also dying during these voyages. an astounding number that was actually higher than the death rate among enslaved people. Why is that?

38:29Well, because the enslaved people were capital investments, right? As a slave captain, you'd still want to sell them. But one of your employees, those white sailors, who are obviously also the perpetrators in the system, well, if they would die along the way, you wouldn't have to pay their wages. So that would increase your profit. This was something that the abolitionists discovered. and they wielded it as an incredibly powerful weapon. You know, they went to the prime minister, William Pitt, and they said, look, what's happening to our boys? Are you okay with that? And suddenly it became this big thing, right?

39:03And I just love that pragmatism, right? In history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And the people and the animals who currently suffer from oppression or exploitation or whatever, they don't care about the fact that you're right, you know, or you stand on the right side of history. They want you to actually win. So the holidays are awesome. I think we can all agree on that. But, you know, not without their irresistible temptations. Cookies everywhere, pie at every gathering, the sugary fruit thing your aunt made. And listen, you know, I'm not immune, but neither is your gut, meaning your microbiome is absolutely paying attention to what's going on.

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42:17So the lesson for the active or the aspiring activist in that story that you just told is that awareness is an important piece in this puzzle, but only to the extent that it agitates action, right? And in the context of activism, the best strategy is often to appeal to the self-interest of the opposing party rather than kind of shame them or appeal to their inner altruistic nature, right? So in that example, elucidating the fact that this is a problem for all these white sailors is something that these people were prepared to – they were able to receive that and develop empathy for that. So it's like the first step in this movement moving towards the ultimate goal, but a very pragmatic one that then creates energy, creates change, and then you're kind of on your way.

43:14Yeah, yeah. You can build upon that, right? Rather than just try to go for the whole bag at the outset and then be disappointed, but be proud of your failure because you held the line and you didn't make any concessions along the way, which is unrealistic as history bears out when you really understand how all these changes occurred over time. And look, Rich, people shouldn't misunderstand me. I do not think that history teaches simple lessons like you ought to be a moderate or you ought to be a radical. It depends. So I'll give you another example. Later on in the 1820s when the slave trade was already abolished, but slavery not, you had two groups in the movement.

43:56You had the so-called gradualists. Those were people like Wilberforce that I mentioned and Clarkson. They were already quite old by then. And they were like, yeah, we're going to gradually phase out slavery. But it wasn't happening. You know, the West Indian lobby was stalling. It was just going way, way too slow. And then a new generation of younger activists, mainly women, people like Elizabeth Hayrick, were like, you know what? We're tired of what they call the slumber of the daddies. I think this is an interesting thing that often happens in these movements is that you have a new generation that gets pretty angry at the older generation.

44:32And the older generation, yeah, feelings are really hurt. But sometimes it's exactly what we need. And indeed, they started calling for what they called immediatism. Like we want to abolish slavery right now. The moment is right now. And especially once some big revolts broke out on Jamaica, for example, in the early 1830s. I mean, that was the moment. And I think at that time, that was the correct political analysis. Like we shouldn't wait anymore. We should get a strike when the irony of history is hot. So let's go. So there are no like simple pragmatic lessons here. Like do this or do that.

45:05It really depends on the circumstances. But there's one overarching lesson that I think, lesson that's always true, is be laser focused on actually achieving the results. You mentioned being inspired by these morally ambitious people. That speaks to the status piece, like rebranding, like on the marketing aspect of this. It's like how do you rebrand status away from, you know, things like mansions in Ferraris and make it about meaningful impact, right? And I do think that there is like, look, we're in this sort of turbocharged Gordon Gekko, greed is good kind of like experience right now. But percolating up in the younger generation is like this different relationship with culture.

45:56Like, obviously, every new generation is going to have a reactionary perspective on their forebears. And I do think that younger people really think about meaning and impact in a way that I didn't when I was young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that speaks to sort of the hopefulness aspect of the work that you do. Are you reading it the same way? I've become increasingly hopeful, actually, in the last two years. Interesting. I told you about the crisis of meaning I had after being a historian and a writer for a decade. I felt this moral envy of the people who are actually in the arena. And I thought, you know what, now is the time to actually start building something.

46:38So I co-founded this organization called The School for Moral Ambition. And we like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent. So taking away the talent from big, boring corporates and giving it to the most important causes of our time. We started here in the US. I mean, just recently, we launched our first fellowship at Harvard, where there's an enormous waste of talent going on. I think about 40 % of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy and finance. If you add big tech, then it's about 60%. So we started there, and it's been really encouraging to see how excited students are. So we've got hundreds of kids applying.

47:16And we've also been, you know, testing different messages a little bit. But like one poster that did best in our focus group was something simple like, you didn't fight your way into Harvard to end up in a bullshit job. Like, is this really what you want to do with your one precious life? And that hurts when they hear that. They're like, oh, yeah, fuck yeah. You're diverting people away from the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And there are many different ways to do this. So we also have an accessible program for everyone. These are so-called more ambition circles, groups of six to eight people who come together around a program that we've created that is accessible for free.

47:57So we've got 20 ,000 members now from more than 100 countries who are all... How long ago did you co-found this? I mean, less than two years ago. Wow. It's been an incredible journey. Like this message is resonating so hard. Like we feel we've really struck something in the zeitgeist that a lot of people were waiting for something like this. And it's coming from two directions. You have students, you're recruiting students, but you're also recruiting people who are already in the workforce and are having their disillusionment experience. Yeah, we got started in Europe last year with so-called mid-career fellowships.

48:32So these are people who on average have about a decade of work experience. they are in some cases about to become a partner at one of those prestigious firms but something's really negative at that and so then we we've we launch our programs and we say this is only for the best of the best of the best like we very deliberately make it very exclusive prestigious yeah i'm not gonna lie so it has status attached yeah it's it's it's super hard to get into one of our fellowships um but then if you do it you join one of those small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens, right? You join a SWAT team of people who want to take on the system.

49:12In Europe, we chose two big causes. One was the transformation of our food system. We can talk about that later, perhaps. We see that as one of the greatest problems of today, like the way we treat billions of animals. The other one was the fight against big tobacco, which is the most still probably the deadliest industry out there. Like smoking kills seven, eight million people every year it's a single large preventable cause of disease except for Bertrand Russell yeah yeah well it's saved him that's a good point yeah yeah yeah he could be the patron saint of your yeah that arm of the organization exactly yeah yeah yeah but it's been so cool to see what happens when these small groups come together what they're able to achieve how they radicalize each other and like our fellows they they can't ever go back again like we had I'll give you one example we We had a guy who was about to become partner at McKinsey.

50:04And McKinsey had given him a letter, you know, when he joined our fellowship saying like, hey, if you ever want to come back, you're very, very welcome because this guy is really, really good. And like already in the first week, they had this little ritual where they collectively burnt that letter, like no going back. So that's one of the ways to indeed do it, to really convey that message. Like doing good is the coolest thing you can do. Once you onboard these people, then what? Like, how are you, you know, from an organizational point of view, how are you creating a situation where they can actually make that impact?

50:40Like, what exactly are these people then doing? Yeah, so obviously it's a lot of team building. It's a lot of training. We connect them to specific causes. There are a lot of movements out there that help people to find their passion, follow their passion. We don't really believe in that. We think that follow your passion is probably the worst career advice ever invented in the history of humanity. Yeah, a lot of people have silly passions or not the right passion, or they could have a much, much bigger impact if they would have a different passion. So we use what I always jokingly refer to as the Gandalf-Frodo model of doing good.

51:17So I'm sure you're familiar with the story. one day Gandalf knocks on Frodo's door and says hey there's a pretty bad situation down south in the country evil wizard has arisen and I want you to go to Mordor and throw this little ring into the mountain because apparently that's going to kill him so can you please do that so if you analyze that story closely what you will notice is that Gandalf didn't ask Frodo hey Frodo what's your passion? He said, no, this is like the big thing. This is at the top of the world's to-do list. So that's really how we like to think. We work with so-called prioritization researchers.

51:55They think really long and hard about what are the most sizable, solvable, and sorely neglected. That last one is really, really important. The triple S test. The triple S, yes. What are the biggest challenges out there? And that's what you're going to do. Now, later, people really become very passionate. Don't get me wrong. Passion plays an enormous role. but once they start learning about these causes right we had a whole cohort of people starting to work on big tobacco initially many of them were like yeah i mean isn't that something from the 90s like is that really the big challenge right now then we started educating them we started teaching them about how horrible this industry is probably the most evil legal industry out there you should talk to them now right they're super passionate so from a psychological perspective, the premise is that passion is a byproduct of engaging yourself in, like, leveraging your compassion and then taking action, like, gives birth to passion that maybe didn't pre-exist that endeavor.

52:58Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we should be passionate on a higher level. So, you can be really passionate about living a meaningful life or doing a lot of good, right? I've got one story in the book about this guy called Rob Mater who founded, it's arguably the best charity right now in existence. So if you want to save a child's life, they have basically the best return on investment. They can save for about$5 ,000 one child's life, which is just an incredible thing if you think about it. It's a lot of money, but still for a lot of people, it's malaria. This is malaria indeed. So they have developed one of the most effective interventions in global health, distributing insecticide-treated malaria bed nets.

53:44And he has built this enormous operation. Now, initially, like he was from the corporate world. He was a really successful first consultant, then a manager. And in 2003, he was watching the BBC. He tried to switch off his television, but then pressed the wrong button. So purely by accident, suddenly he was looking at a documentary about this little girl called Terry who had suffered terrible burn wounds, like really terrible. She was two years old and ended up in a fire. And he was so moved by that. He was a young father. He had young kids himself. And I mean, anyone can watch that documentary.

54:19And if you're not crying by the end of it, you should see a therapist because it's very, very moving. So he was like, I want to do something. And in the first year, he started this massive fundraiser for Terry. They raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. And that obviously was great for her. It really transformed her life. But then in the second year, I mean, he was an entrepreneur he was thinking like okay we've we spent so much energy and we help one wonderful beautiful little girl can we do more so that's when he got into that gandalfrodo thing of you know changing the world and he started talking to the experts he was like hey what's the biggest thing that is threatening kids today like what's killing most kids in the world right now and at that time the single biggest killer of children was malaria it was seven jumbo jets every single day crashing.

55:05I mean, just imagine one jumbo jet crashing full of kids. I mean, that in and of itself, it's hard to wrap your head around the tragedy. Now imagine it happening seven times a day. And the stopgap is just mosquito netting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a super effective intervention. Which, you know, bang for your buck wise, you know, is the best investment of philanthropic dollars in terms of lives saved, right? And this idea or that becomes a major example at the core of effective altruism, what Will McCaskill talks about and all the people that are behind that. So I want to ask you about your thoughts generally about philanthropy and maybe even more specifically about effective altruism.

55:53because it seems like effective altruism is a good idea that fell into ill repute by dint of some bad behavior on behalf of some of the individuals who associated themselves with that movement, right? But the movement itself still is effectively altruistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As far as I can tell. There's a lot to say about this. The first thing I'll say is that a lot of people know me for going to Davos a couple of years ago and talking to billionaires and saying, like, you know, stop talking about your BS philanthropy and maybe start paying your taxes. So I'm very skeptical of a lot of philanthropy out there.

56:33I think that very often it can be a distraction or, I don't know, some kind of PR operation. It's sort of greenwashing to make you feel better about your bank account. There's a lot of that. The second thing I'll say is that there are awesome exceptions. So we've been talking about the abolitionists. We've been talking about the suffragettes. They were not funded by the government. They didn't get nice government subsidies. They were fighting the government. They didn't have fancy corporate sponsorship deals. They were fighting these big corporations. So how were they financed? By these exceptional philanthropists.

57:07Like in New York, the early 19th century, you had Gerrit Smith. I'm proud to say a Dutchman. Gerrit Smith, we would say. and he was the richest man in New York at the time and he bankrolled pretty much the whole abolitionist movement. So you need people like that. Now, what I love about effective altruism, a few things. One thing that I really like is if you go to an effective altruism conference and you talk to people, you meet a lot of people who are for real, who are morally serious, who are donating a very significant amount of their money, you know, often at least 10%, maybe 20, 30, 40%. you will meet quite a few people who have donated their kidneys to random strangers because they're like, hey, that's a relatively small sacrifice for me, but I can change someone else's life.

57:53I think that's just impressive. And I think that needs to be and deserves to be celebrated when people really have that skin in the game. You know, I'm a guy who comes from the left side of the political spectrum. And what I've seen a lot there is people shouting, change the system, abolish capitalism, destroy the patriarchy, but they're not really doing all that much themselves. So I always admire it when people practice what they preach. There were a few things that I didn't really like about effective altruism. I think parts of the movement were really grounded in guilt. There's this famous thought experiment from the philosopher Peter Singer that I'm sure you're familiar with.

58:30The shallow pond. Yeah, so for those who don't know it, you walk by a shallow pond and a kid is drowning, a toddler, two years old. Would you save the kid? Obviously, you would. Now, what would you do if you're wearing your very fancy shoes, your very expensive fancy shoes? Would you still save the kid, even though you would ruin your shoes? Most people would say, yes, we definitely do it. But then if you're willing to make a financial sacrifice to save a kid, then why don't you donate much more money to these highly effective charities? Because that's the world we live in. Maybe it's not as visceral or as visible as the shallow pond example, but they're basically shallow ponds everywhere.

59:15And we mostly walk by them, all those drowning kids. So it's a powerful thought experiment, but my feelings are about it that it feels like a form of moral blackmail. It's like now I'm suddenly supposed to feel guilty about all the suffering in the world. And that's just not the kind of life I want to live. The other ripple in that is proximity, right? Like if it's your child, like it doesn't matter what you're wearing or if it's your neighbor's child. But if it's some stranger, then you're then doing a different kind of mental calculus about wading into the pond, which is sort of an ethical glitch in the human kind of framework, I suppose.

1:00:02But it is holding us hostage to guilt and shame. And yet at the same time, you said earlier, like, it's okay. You know, we should use shame from time to time. A little bit. And, you know, guilt can be, you know, I think you used 20 % as a rule. Like, it's okay if like 20 % of your motivation is inspired by some degree of guilt. Yeah, but 80 % should be enthusiasm in my view. So that's one thing. The other thing that I didn't really like about EA is that they had this idea of earning to give. So they were convincing a lot of young people. Well, that was at the core of what led to the sort of demise of the public reputation of it.

1:00:45Yeah, probably. Yeah. So they were convincing. We should let us make as much. We're going to make all this money and we're going to give it away. So you should like, you know, clear the runway to allow us to do that. Yeah. And then the most famous example was obviously Sam Begmafrid who founded FTX and turned out to be a scammer. Yeah. So that's pretty terrible. on the other hand as I said it's always easy to criticize those people who actually try something and as someone who's building something myself like capital matters, money matters there's this hilarious quote from Margaret Thatcher who said that the good Samaritan didn't just have good intentions he also had money and that's definitely what we need in the fight against some of these great challenges that we face So it became very fashionable two, three years ago to dunk on EA.

1:01:35I'm glad that it has become less fashionable. Maybe also because, you know, the world is now a much darker place and people have different priorities now. But the core of your message is less about philanthropy. It's not about like, okay, where are you putting your dollars? It's like where are you putting, you know, where are you rolling up your sleeves and actually getting involved and doing things, right? Can I say one other thing about it, Rich? so i i spoke about the british abolitionist movement right and about the the coalition between the quakers and the evangelicals so i sometimes like to think that these effective altruists are a little bit like the quakers you know they're they're really weird they have very strong fundamental philosophical beliefs about inequality they are really willing to practice what they preach and the quakers were just like that um they were very weird but that's also what you know made them stand on the right side of history and they were the first ones to allow women to speak to the congregation um which was seen as scandalous at the time but obviously now we think that's pretty cool that they did that um but the quakers for a long time were not really effective or at least they were not really able to break through because people looked at them and were like yeah you're just too weird the movement the abolitionist movement only really took off once the Quakers started working together with the evangelicals.

1:02:55And the evangelicals were much more mainstream. Yeah, there were a much larger movement as well. So that's sometimes what I think is that what the evangelicals were for the Quakers, that's what we need right now for the effects of altruists. And I guess that's what we're trying to build at the School for Moral Ambition, a much broader, more mainstream movement of people who still want to push for of the moral maximum. The Quakers were also the first organized group to speak to the sentience of animals from a perspective of compassion, right? Which brings us to our current food system. Yeah. And I think I'm interested in exploring that as a specific kind of test case of everything that you stand for and what the school is all about.

1:03:43Because in many ways, uh factory farming and our relationship to farmed animals and our food system is to some degree or another an analogous situation to the abolitionist movement that you described. previously. So talk a little bit about where your head's at in terms of our food system now and the ways in which you aspire to change it. So here's one of the most fascinating questions I think we can ask, which is how will the historians of the future look back at us? For us, it's easy to look back on, say, the ancient Romans and be horrified by some of the things they did right the gladiator fights throwing naked women before the lions the slavery um and then we look back and we say to ourselves well luckily we are so civilized right we are the moral ones the interesting thing is that every civilization throughout history has said that about himself um so the romans also thought that they were like we're super civilized we don't sacrifice kids anymore like these barbarians they sacrifice children for the gods like we don't do that we're super moral um and then yeah you start wondering like what will the historians of the 22nd century say about us like are there some things we do today that may be considered more catastrophes by our great great grandchildren um and it's obviously a really hard question to answer um it's not like we have a time machine or anything like that but i think we can we have certain clues one clue we have is that we could look at these these moral pioneers of the past and think like, did they have other ideas?

1:05:27Or is there a certain mechanism behind their thinking? What really struck me is that so many of these abolitionists also deeply, deeply cared about animal rights. So the very first abolitionist in the United States was this fascinating character called Benjamin Lay. He was a dwarf. He lived in a cave near Philadelphia. And he was probably the first vegan in the country. The word vegan didn't exist back then. But he was really against animal exploitation. Now, if you look at the great intellectual in the abolitionist movement who did most of the research, who supplied most of the arguments that the abolitionists used, that was a guy called Anthony Benazze.

1:06:11He was also a vegetarian, which was, I mean, that was a very strange thing to be at the time. But for them, it was a logical thing. Once you start expanding the moral circle, you recognize the divine light in each and every one of us, then it's kind of like, why stop at the boundary of humanity? Why not include animals? Because in so many ways, they're so similar to us. so that was one really fascinating clue for me and what what happened is that I think it was in 2017 I was reading this book that everyone's reading at the time you know by Yuval Noah Harari the brilliant Israeli historian sapiens and for people who have read that book they they they'll recognize that I mean it's a big book about human history and it doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever.

1:07:03It just, you know, it talks about Genghis Khan, it talks about the Nazis. And, you know, Harari is not the kind of guy who's, you know, the moralizing preacher saying like, oh, that was bad and that was bad. But then the very end of the book, he discusses factory farming and he makes this offhand comment saying, yeah, that's probably the greatest moral atrocity in all human history, responsible for more suffering than all wars combined. And then he included some of the numbers, that just blew me away completely. You know, I was a pretty fanatic carnivore up until that point. And I had no idea the size, the enormity of the suffering here.

1:07:42So that was a big moment for me when I started thinking like, hey, maybe this, if you are so morally ambitious, then maybe this is one of the great challenges to focus on. And that book changed your personal relationship with food? Yeah, it's funny, actually. It was a few weeks before Christmas. And my wife and I were buying a Christmas tree in Utrecht, Janskjarkov, which is this really lovely square in the middle of Utrecht. It was a little bit to the south of Amsterdam. It was our annual tradition. We buy the Christmas tree together, and we were carrying it back home. And she was in front, and I was in the back.

1:08:18And I made this offhand comment saying, you know, I've decided to become a vegetarian. And she got so angry. What are you doing just before Christmas? But yeah, it didn't take long for her to go veggie as well. Just because the arguments are so compelling. Let's go over some of the numbers here. We slaughter 80 billion animals every single year. If you compare that to the number of humans that live since the dawn of humanity, I mean, that's 117 billion. So it takes us just a year and a half to slaughter as many animals in one year. um now let's let's take a different comparison this is the one that harari used that really blew me away you have two scales and on one scale you put all the wild animals that currently walk walk on this earth um all the animals that we're familiar with from the david attenborough movies and documentaries right the giraffes the elephants the lions you name it they're all over here collectively they would weigh about a hundred a million tons now on the other side we have all the farmed animals so that let's let's say just three animals in particular we've got the chickens we've got the pigs and we've got the cows collectively they weigh seven times as much 700 million tons so when we talk about animals in this world today i mean 100 million 700 million We're mostly talking about just a few species that are exploited on just this enormous scale every single year.

1:09:51So that was one thing that I hadn't realized before, just how enormous this is.

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1:13:00it's unquestionably an ethical abomination the human mind will go to great lengths to perform all manner of mental gymnastics to rationalize this and compartmentalize it as a necessity to survive and it doesn't matter how many people in the world are thriving on a plant-based diet There will be a battery of arguments about why they're either the exception or they're lying or some reason why that example doesn't apply to them. And I think fundamentally that gets at the inner compassion within every human being because nobody really wants to confront the fact that they are actively engaged in this atrocity.

1:13:46You know, that it so violates our belief in our own compassion that we can't accept the reality of it. And so we have to come up with some kind of rubric that allows us to get up in the morning and feel like we're good people. Yeah. So I'm a guy who likes to debate, right? And I get invited for a lot of debates on economics, on raising taxes on the rich, for example. And when journalists or editors invite me for something like that, like they never have any issue with finding an opponent. When it's about taxation, for example, it's very easy for them to find someone on the other side of the political spectrum who's like, no, that will ruin the economy.

1:14:26And then we have a good debate, right? But when it's about factory farming, I sometimes get these calls from journalists who are like, hey, Rutger, we've seen this piece by you on factory farming. We would love to do a debate on television. And I'm like, well, good luck finding someone who wants to debate me on that. And they're like, no, we're going to find someone. And then a few days later, they're like, yeah, no one wants to debate it. Because nobody is in favor of this. It is the ultimate bipartisan issue and makes it fertile ground for coalition building. This is a problem that is massive but also solvable because public perception and the reality of it is so offensive to our moral sensibility.

1:15:04Still, I think we have to dig in a little bit and talk about some of the details here. Because if I think back to 2017, when I first looked at those numbers and I started doing more research, it was a little bit like a door had opened in my mind and it was suddenly open to learning more. I was just shocked that there are so many things about the way our meat is produced that I did not know. Like just some basic facts. I feel really silly about it now, but like the first time I realized, oh, wait, pigs, for example. Like pigs never go outside, right? So 99 % of all pigs are inside their whole life.

1:15:43Now, how is that possible, right? If you think about it, that's kind of weird. Like normally if you would put a lot of humans inside their whole life, at some point, you know, they would get sick. You don't have vitamin D, they die. But then I started learning about this, well, in a way you could say amazing technological system called factory farming, which is a very recent invention. I'll talk you through some of the great innovation. So in the 1920s, they for the first time discovered vitamin D. So now for the first time, they could put hundreds or thousands of tens of thousands of animals inside and just give them the supplements.

1:16:19And they wouldn't get sick because of vitamin D deficiency. In the 30s, they discovered antibiotics, which is obviously also very necessary because if you just put a lot of animals together and there's an infection disease, boom, everyone dies. But if you just give them antibiotics all the time, just as prevention, not just when they get sick, but it's in their feet all the time, well, another problem solved. Then in the 40s, they started hacking the genetics of these animals. So I had never realized that what we eat today, like broiler chickens are a good example. There are these highly advanced technological innovations, a little bit like how the tobacco industry created this extraordinary innovation called the cigarette that is the most addictive product in the history of humanity.

1:17:09A huge amount of R &D went into that. But the same is true for poultry. So there are two companies in the world right now, cop ventris and aviagen that produce about 90 % of all the broilers in the world. So that's just two species. One is called the cop 500 TM and the other one is the Ross 308. So if anywhere in the world you're eating a chicken sandwich right now, you're probably eating, you know, one of those chickens and they have been bred relentlessly to be as productive as possible. And if you look at some of the images of chickens in the 1950s, like they were so small, they were so thin.

1:17:54And now there are just huge Frankenstein chickens that grow incredibly quickly. If a human baby would grow as quickly, like in two months, it would weigh, what is it? 150, 200 kilograms. So it's just an enormous feat of innovation. The obviously incredibly sad aspect of this is that while they were optimizing for growth, they were also optimizing for suffering. So these chickens live a life of relentless torture, basically. There was one recent Danish study in which they found out that pretty much all these animals become lame and cripple. There was a study in the late 90s where they had like two, how do you say that, sources of food, food without painkiller and then food with it with painkiller they discovered that if you give them the opportunity these chickens want the painkiller all the time like they're always in pain and i don't i feel so silly about it now because these are really very basic facts and i could go on about you know pigs and gestation crates and how we treat mother pigs but i would really encourage people still to you know open that little door in their heart or in their brain or wherever it is and just do some really basic research.

1:19:13Because for me, it was all new, actually. I'd been pushing it away. Well, like the tobacco industry, these food conglomerates put a premium on ensuring a lack of transparency. Like there's a concerted effort to prevent you from understanding what's actually going on. And despite their best efforts to drape it with terminology like free range and all that kind of stuff and painting little natural farms on the packaging and the like, there's nothing natural about it, right? And in the context of coalition building around this and pragmatism for somebody who lacks that understanding or isn't naturally inclined to, you know, be compassionate about this.

1:20:05The self-interest piece is, listen, you're eating these, this food that you think is natural and good for you. And it's, you know, it's injected with all these, you know, all this, all these antibiotics and, you know, they're all hormone dysregulated and like, they're, they're like, you know, basically walking around in their own feces. And, you know, there's just all, there's any number of reasons why, like, you should be concerned about your personal health with respect to your consumption of this, right? And that creates a beginning place to build on. Yeah. We really got to build a broad, massive coalition, just like the abolitionists did, just like the suffragettes did.

1:20:46These were movements of people who very often disagreed with one another on many, many things. but they did agree on that one thing that the status quo is just not okay and that that needs to change. So some people can come into this movement for health reasons. You know, they're like, hey, I'm interested in exploring a plant-based diet because I think that might be healthier. Other people may be like, oh, it's more about food security or it's about economics. Like we want to be the technological powerhouse and this seems like a very promising area of innovation. Other people may come in for climate reasons, right?

1:21:22Because food is 20 % of emissions. 80 % of all arable land is used for animal husbandry, right? That's all factory farming, basically. People love to dunk on vegans for consuming too much soy. But actually, it's mostly - Yeah, all the soy goes to feed. Goes to the feed, yeah, indeed. So that is a massive problem. It's the main cause of deforestation. There are many, many reasons to care about this issue. There's national security reasons. There's economic reasons. We're subsidizing all of this, right? So from an economic stability perspective, there's many, many on-ramps, which I think positions this issue as relatively unique because there's many ways to appeal to people's sensibilities to get them engaged with it.

1:22:13But here's one big thing we learned. So the modern animal welfare movement started in the 1970s. And a lot of activists thought that we would only have to, well, first educate people and then convince them to go vegan. I mean, that's basically been the main strategy for many, many years now. It's just relentlessly shouting, go vegan, go vegan, go vegan. And shaming people. And shaming people quite a bit as well. They don't want to. And the results have been pretty underwhelming. So the number of vegetarians and vegans, sometimes it goes up a bit. Now it seems to be going down a bit again. It just doesn't seem to be very effective.

1:22:50Now, as a historian, when I look at that, I am really reminded of abolitionism in America in the 19th century. And I see the same mistakes that people make. So this is a really interesting story. Again, to compare the British and the U.S. abolitionist movement. The British movement, as I said, was super successful. At some point, they did have a boycott, but it was a very simple boycott. They said, you know what? Sugar and tea. That's not okay. Let's boycott sugar and tea. That was super charismatic, obviously, because the British and their tea, that's a thing. And so they were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of people who refused to put sugar in their tea.

1:23:27Now, the slaveholders didn't really care about that at all. Actually, the economic effects were very limited, or at least you couldn't witness them in the data. But it was a great way to recruit people into the movement. Now, what US abolitionists did a few decades later is they were way more radical. They did the same thing as what vegans do today. They say like, okay, no more products that are in any way involved with slavery. This was called the free produce movement. They had their own shops that sold like all kinds of things from food to umbrellas. And all the products in those shops didn't have anything to do, or at least pretended that they didn't have anything to do with slavery.

1:24:05This movement was a total, total failure. It was one of the reasons why abolitionists became so unpopular in the US because all these products were very low quality. They were very expensive. Like the sacrifice was just way too big. And it was mainly, yeah, people who are very full of themselves, like these morally pure social justice warriors who got along with it. And that just did not make doing good prestigious. And I think there's a big lesson to learn here. He became like a weirdo Quaker type person. Yeah, yeah. And it didn't take up. So I think we're now at a really hopeful movement, actually, in the animal rights movement, where a lot of the best activists and a lot of the best organizations are realizing that, hey, what we did in the past didn't work.

1:24:50I mean, it's still great if people want to change their diet. That's wonderful. And we've got to educate people. But we've got to build a really broad movement. And we've got to draw in a lot more people. And if we say you're only allowed into the movement if you check every product for, oh, is there a little bit of milk powder in here, then this is not going to work. Or plant-based isn't vegan and all these arbitrary distinctions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also actually people who eat meat should be welcomed into the movement in my view because there are a lot of people who for multiple reasons, maybe they find it hard to stop eating meat or maybe for their health, there are sometimes legitimate reasons.

1:25:28I want them in the movement as well. Of course, if you're a hunter who just can't abide by factory farming, there shouldn't be a bar to you participating in this movement. Like, all comers should be welcome, and all forms of activism are necessary. Like, sometimes somebody's very affected by the PETA person who throws, you know, fake blood on somebody's fur coat. You know, it's like, it doesn't work for me, but, like, I'm sure some people have been, you know, kind of moved by that. But, you know, other people are going to be impacted in, you know, other different ways. And so I think we need all, it's not like this is bad and this is good.

1:26:06I think all voices are necessary, but the broadest coalition possible is really the message here, right? Yeah, broad coalition. And again, focus on what actually works. So in this country, in the US, there's been some really great progress in putting pressure on big corporations, for example. I always like to call this the Genghis Khan method of changing the world. So you're probably familiar with how Genghis Khan conquered. Like he went to one city and he said, okay, you can surrender. Do you want that? Yes or no? And then sometimes people said no. And then he raised the whole city. And then he went to the next city and said, hey, you see what I did over there?

1:26:45Do you want to surrender? Yes or no? And that's what some of the activists do. They go to one corporation and they say like, hey, we're going to raise hell if you do not get your poultry out of cages, for example. Like there's been a lot of success in cage-free eggs pledges, which is like a massive change. I mean, obviously, it's not like the vegan perfect paradise yet. But there's, I think, a lot of fairly low-hanging fruit that would reduce the amount of suffering immensely. And again, if we think, sorry, I'm the historian, so I always go back to the examples of the past. Like the British abolitionists had a big debate in 1787.

1:27:23Like, should we call our society the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade or the Society for the Abolition of Slavery? And it was only the Gransville Sharp, the theologian, who said, oh, it's got to be the abolition of slavery, right? He was the radical one. But then the entrepreneurs, all of them, the 10 entrepreneurs in that society, society, they said, look, that's just not going to work. We need to be more pragmatic here. If we're going to say like abolish slavery outright right now, that's just completely going to backfire in Westminster. Like private property is absolutely holy in this empire.

1:27:59That is something for later. First, we put pressure on the slave trade itself, because if we abolish the slave trade, then the flow of enslaved people to the colonies stop. And that will force slaveholders to treat their enslaved people better. Because, and this was the dark, dark reality, is that there was a continuous inflow of enslaved people necessary because so many people were dying. That's how horrible the system was. Now, again, what I admire here is the pragmatism, just that focus on actually getting things done. And then obviously after the slave trade was abolished, it was about, okay, what's the next step?

1:28:38And I think we ought to think about the movement against factory farming in the same way. If you can achieve your goals in your own lifetime, then I think you're not thinking big enough. And this is a movement that's way bigger than us. I honestly think that when I'm on my deathbed, factory farming might still be with us. I really hope not, but currently it's only growing. The modern food system parallel to the historic example that you just provided would be not going to ConAgra or Tyson and saying, you need to stop doing what you're doing, see how bad it is, and just them saying, oh my goodness, you're right, and stopping.

1:29:21It's never going to happen, right? So you have to appeal to their self-interest. So an example of that would be like, listen, tastes are changing or people really don't like the way that you're raising food. And if you want to survive as a corporation, you're going to have to diversify your investment and you're going to have to start investing in these alternative proteins or turning these farms that have been monocropped forever into regenerative farms that can produce a diversity of foods that over time in the long run will benefit your corporate. Like some version of that that they can hear and can receive because they can see a path forward.

1:30:02So that's the pragmatic kind of approach to this. It's not boycotting McDonald's, it's sitting down with the CEO of McDonald's and discussing, you know, an alternative future for this corporation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my favorite animal rights activists in this country is a woman called Lea Gertes. I think you know her as well. She's been on the show. Yeah, of Mercy for Animals. And again, I see her as a modern day Thomas Clarkson, like very pragmatic. Like Thomas Clarkson was not just someone who advocated against the slave trade, but he also advocated for sailors, for these white sailors who were, in his view, being abused.

1:30:39And I think that Leah is doing something similar. It's like she cares deeply, very deeply about animal suffering. But she also realizes that in the current system, it's not just the animals who are being exploited. It's also the farmers. So this is one of the other great innovations. You know, after vitamin D, after antibiotics, after, you know, the genetics, genetic innovation, there was also a market innovation. So in the US, we've seen what they call the vertical integration of the whole system. Basically, all these farmers are indentured servants. They have massive loans. Even if they would want to quit their job, they find it very hard.

1:31:21There's this guy called Greg Watts who works together with Leah. He's a former poultry farmer. And yeah, these people have just been seduced by these big corporations to take on these massive loans with big promises of like how much money you're going to make. But there's a huge amount of farmers in this country who live below the poverty line, right? There's a very high suicide rate among farmers. Not to mention slaughterhouse workers as well. The pastoral notion of all of this that seems to still proliferate is a complete myth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I recently became a dad and just, you know, reading these books about farms to my kids is just a surreal experience.

1:32:04It's like the kind of propaganda, like what we read in those books has absolutely nothing to do with the way our food is actually produced. The ultimate pragmatist in this world, though, I think is Bruce Friedrich. And he's doing what you talk about, which is, you know, leveraging entrepreneurship to build a better future food system for everybody. And he doesn't get caught up in ideology. It's very like solutions oriented. Yeah, yeah. And I love that. So we work actually with the Good Food Institute that he founded in Europe. We have many fellows that work on the food transition and we want to get started in the US as well.

1:32:47And one aspect to that is indeed technological innovation. If you look at how we are tackling climate change, it has been with an enormous amount of R &D. In my book, I talk about the story of solar energy, which is now the cheapest energy source in all of human history. Now, that didn't come out of nothing. There is a story of very morally ambitious people behind that. Initially, the technology was invented in the US, you know, at Bell Labs, but then nothing really was done with it. And Carter put solar panels on the White House, but they were removed by Reagan. Colossal political miscalculation.

1:33:25They called it solar socialism or something like that. It has been really unfortunate that that became politicized in that way. And then it took until the 90s for this guy called Hans-Josef Fell, who's an amazing politician slash bureaucrat. If you look at a photo of him, you're not like, okay, this is one of the great heroes of the 20th century. But he is. he convinced the German government to spend an enormous amount of money on subsidizing solar energy. So Germany spent about 200 billion euros on it, which is more than half of all investment, basically. And then the Chinese developed this enormous industry actually producing all these solar panels.

1:34:02And the cost just kept going down, down, down, down, down. And as I said, now it's the cheapest source of energy. And it's one of our most important tools that we have in the fight against climate change. And I think that we need similar things in the food system, right? The system as we have it right now is just utterly crazy. It's exploiting animals on a massive scale. It's exploiting people on a massive scale. It's wrecking the environment. It's, you know, responsible for most deforestation. And the vast majority of people, when they hear about it, they're against it. So this is a completely bipartisan issue.

1:34:37It's just that somehow we We find it really hard to talk about it because we've maneuvered ourselves into a space where, yeah, the conversation is often dominated by these purists. And we've got to be much more pragmatic and say, like, OK, how are we actually going to work together, build the companies, all kinds of initiatives that bring us forward? And the responsibility can't rest on the shoulders of the average citizen or consumer to make personal choices differently, right? Like, until we change the environment, it's a lot to ask the average person that it's all on them to make a different choice.

1:35:20And I think this is where technology or the rapid advancement of all these technological breakthroughs actually works at cross purposes with how the average consumer kind of interfaces with this problem. Because it does contribute to this sense of, A, like, well, first there's the learned helplessness. Like, it's such a big problem, I can't do anything about it, so I'm just going to do whatever I'm going to do because it won't make a difference anyway. But on top of that, there is this sense, well, you know, all these people are investing in this tech. Well, there'll be some breakthrough and it'll get solved.

1:35:56And so I'm absolved of having to actually do anything about it because these other people who are focused on it will just do it for me. I think it's also important to emphasize that it would be a mistake to think that, you know, technology alone is going to solve this. So I'm excited about some of the innovation. You know, I always, when I'm in the US, I love eating a lot of Impossible Burgers because, like, the idiots in Europe have banned them because there's, like, some genetic modification going on there that is entirely okay for your health. Yeah, I mean, I think it didn't help the movement that some of these plant-based foods were overly processed.

1:36:34And I think people within the movement trying to say otherwise basically ended up hurting the credibility of the movement, right? It's just like, yeah, these are not like fruits and vegetables. Like there's some processing going on here. And you can measure them up against poultry, beef, and pork. And perhaps they come out on the positive side of that. And there's a good reason for environmentally why you should think about these products. But I think there was maybe a lack of transparency or just honesty about this that was weaponized by vested interests and lobbying efforts to turn public opinion against these things.

1:37:19And so what we've seen, because I've been in this for a long time, right? What we've seen is a shift away, like five years ago, six years ago, like it was all about plant-based. Like this was on the rise. People were very enthusiastic about it and very engaged with it. Plant-based and vegan restaurants are popping up all over the place. Like fast food chain plant-based restaurants were proliferating across America. And there was a lot of enthusiasm around this. And then the tide shifted. You know, it kind of coincided with a political shift. These things were one in the same. And it also conjures our relationship with masculinity.

1:37:59and like it gets very complicated in that regard. But the point being that all this enthusiasm evaporated and it became very much about a meat-centric approach to the diet and all this plant-based stuff is nonsense. And a lot of vegan restaurants closed and the plant-based section of the average grocery store, which was expanding, has now contracted. And we're in a very different moment with this. And I think it's an opportunity for the leaders of this movement to really reflect upon how we got to this place. Yeah. Because, to your point, there is massive consensus that factory farming is an ill, and we can start there without being purist about the rest of it.

1:38:44Because if we can solve that, we're solving the vast majority of this problem in terms of, like, crafting this wildly better world that you talk about. And there is still such low-hanging fruit. I'll give you one example. So in Europe, we've made massive progress in the fight against the killing of male chicks. Again, this is something that I didn't know not that long ago, and I was absolutely horrified to discover that. But yeah, with laying hands, obviously produce X. But then, yeah, their brothers don't produce X. So what the industry does is, you know, just shortly after they're born, they're all put either into the grinder or suffocated.

1:39:28People can look this up on YouTube. Like initially when I first saw this, I was like, this must be AI or something. Like this must be unreal. But that's just what happens. Eight billion. Yeah, it's all a horrendous nightmare. You know, the separation of calves from their, like all of it. But just the scale of it is enormous. But here we've made a lot of progress because now we have new technology. It's called Innovo sexing. And they can see already in the egg, like, is this a female chick or a male chick? And so they can make sure that the male chicks don't get, are not born. And in Europe, this has quickly become the standard.

1:40:01In the U.S. now, it's becoming more and more common. But this is like just super low-hung food. It's very cheap. Very incremental progress. And it's even good for the industry because the industry has to spend less money on killing all these chicks, right? And that's just where we're at, is that also with cage-free eggs, for example, you pay, what is it, maybe a few cents extra on a whole box of eggs? Pretty much everyone would be willing to make that sacrifice. But this industry is so relentlessly profit-driven. Like they've squeezed every little bit of efficiency out of these animals. And then, yeah, when we don't pay attention, then the skill of the suffering just gets immense.

1:40:44But that's also, as I said, it's a reason for hope. Because if you have really talented, pragmatic people with some very good ideas, like Leo Garchez, like Bruce Friedrich, the people we've been talking about, yeah, they can achieve tremendous things. So for the person who's listening or watching who feels inspired and would like to be a little bit more morally ambitious in their life. And this issue speaks to them. Is there an on-ramp for somebody like that to get involved without having to apply for a prestigious fellowship? Yeah, yeah. So we are actually building that right now, both in Europe and in the U.S.

1:41:21We have, as I said, our moral ambition circles that are accessible for each and everyone. So you can go to moralambition.org, start your own group. and many of those groups are focused on tackling this issue. But we also have our fellowships in Europe and we want to get started in the US as well. So we're now fundraising actually to help those really talented people here in this country to devote their career to this issue as well. I think very often we need that little nudge, right? We need to find our own little, how do you say that? I'm always inclined to use the word cult, like your hardcore group of do-gooders who are like, yes, let's take this on.

1:41:59So yeah, everyone's very welcome to join us in that fight. If I were to offer to contribute some money towards this, is that possible for me to do? That would be amazing, Rich. That would be amazing. It's the philanthropy piece, though. I don't know how morally ambitious it is, but it is something that I would like to do and can do. That's amazing. Yeah. So we have a fundraiser going on right now at moralambition.org slash food. And, yeah, I mean, perhaps we could go to a match where we match foundations up until we've got one other foundation that's willing to chip in as well. So if you can get to, say,$100 ,000 and then we match the donations, then, yeah, what we will do is to use that money to recruit some really, really talented people to devote their career to this issue.

1:42:53Because there's basically two things that we lack here. It's obviously capital, but it's also the talent. That's what we need right now. All right. So if I contribute$25 ,000, you'll match that. I'll do$25 ,000, and we've got another donor that's willing to do$50 ,000. So that's up to$100 ,000. Okay. How does that sound? Well, that's a done deal. Okay. And then if people are listening to this and feel inspired to contribute as well, they can do that? Yeah, yeah. So we've got this$100 ,000 match. That's you, me, the other foundation that has agreed to work with us. And then, yeah, for every dollar, you know, that it's going to be doubled by us.

1:43:32So in the best scenario, we have 200K or even more. And then we're really able to launch at least one fellowship here in the US where we're really going to recruit some of the most talented people with the most grit we can find to devote their career, their life to this issue. And I'll tell you, there are a lot of people out there. So we already flaunted the idea. we had 2 ,000 people already filling in an expression of interest for them. We have about 30 host organizations that are excited to host these people. So the energy is already there. I'll give you one other example. We recently started at Harvard, you know, our Moral Ambition University Fellowship.

1:44:12What was so encouraging is when we were talking to these young students, this was the issue they were most interested about. Not just climate change in general, not poverty in general. they were again and again, they wanted to talk to us about food and changing the food system. They're like, yes, this is one of the things that I want to devote my life to. Because indeed, it's not just about doing good. It's about meaning as well. There is something really exciting about looking at a very, very high mountain and thinking, huh, can I climb that one? As a non-American who spends a lot of time in America and is at all these universities and you're meeting and talking to all different kinds of people.

1:44:53And being a historian, it almost gives you this, you know, Alexander de Tocqueville kind of perspective on the America experiment. And I'm curious about that perspective, because from my perspective, there's no place like the United States when it comes to ambition and entrepreneurialism and that sense of possibility, This is where you come to build things, and people encourage you to do that and celebrate that spirit. But it's also this place where my feeling is our very precious relationship with, quote-unquote, liberty, like our personal liberties, feels a little out of balance in comparison to where I feel like it should be, which is that our liberty is only available as a function of our collective responsibility to each other.

1:45:52And so we hear a lot about – I've banged on about this on the podcast before, so forgive me if you're listening or watching and you've heard me give this speech in the past. But essentially, we only get those liberties because we share this collective responsibility. And we don't really talk a lot about the responsibility piece, but we spend a lot of time talking about our liberty to do what we want to do whenever we want to do it in an unbridled way. Right. And so how do you look at all of that and make sense of it? So first, I got to say, as someone who recently lived a year in Brooklyn as an immigrant, I love this country.

1:46:31I love the ambition, the entrepreneurialism. It was really a breath of fresh air. I'm a Dutch patriot as well. There's so much to love about my own country. Maybe the Dutch directness in particular, like we say what we mean and vice versa. but yeah, it's just the ambition, the willingness to think big. I remember being here, you know, shortly after I arrived and there was one of our US board members organized this little dinner for me in Manhattan. And she had, you know, basically recruited a who is who, you know, some really successful entrepreneurs, some really successful people, media to give me advice.

1:47:13And if I would have done that in the Netherlands, like the vast majority of people would have said like, like, hey, you're trying to build this global movement to take on the greatest challenges we face. Well, that's probably not going to work. But here in New York, I was like, yeah, of course that's going to work. Tell us how we can help. And that's really what you need if you're young and ambitious and you want to build something. I think that if you look at American history, there's this continuous fight between two notions of what liberty is. There is indeed the shallow view of freedom that is very common today, which is just the freedom of Lee Milo.

1:47:48Let me do whatever I want. Let me just follow my own passion, fulfill my own desires. It's the Gordon Gekko greed is good kind of freedom. And I wouldn't say that that is entirely bad. I think you need a decent amount of that in a healthy liberal society. But I think we've moved way too far in that direction. And now we got to go back to an older, more deeper conception of what freedom is actually like. And that's the freedom to bind yourself. That's the freedom to make sacrifices. I think a simple example here is what we do when we get married. So when I got married, I saw that as one of the greatest expressions of freedom in my life.

1:48:32Here I stand. I voluntarily make the commitment to someone I love deeply. And I say, I am going to be faithful to you and I'm going to bind myself in a way, but that's what I want to do. Like, that's the kind of man I want to be. That could also be something that we do in our work, right? I've made this pledge in a way to my co-founders where I said, this is not some kind of project that I'm going to do for three or six or 12 months. I'm going to spend my life building this organization, building this movement. It's going to be really hard. We're going to have really hard moments, but I make the promise now that we're going to keep going.

1:49:10And for me, that's a deeper form of freedom that you see reflected in some of the greatest periods in American history. So today, we often say that we're living through the Second Gilded Age, right? The First Gilded Age was the late 19th century. And indeed, the similarities are so striking. There's a fantastic book by Robert Putnam about this. And in that book, he pulls a great trick where he gives a whole description about the corruption, the immorality of elites, It's, you know, people dodging their taxes, you know, basically the decadence of that time. And you think like, he's talking about today, right?

1:49:44He's talking about 2025. And then he's like, no, this is actually the late 19th century that I'm talking about. You also had these big robber barons, you know, that made massive amounts of money on their monopolies. Back then it was trains. Today it's AI. But again, the similarities are striking. I mean, what we're experiencing now is not new. Yeah, yeah. So that was also the shallow conception of freedom that was dominating in the US. But what came after that was the progressive era led by people like Louis Brandes, the people's lawyer who ended up on the Supreme Court. But most famously, one of my great heroes in history, Theodore Roosevelt, the historian, the president who set things like, and I'm paraphrasing here, to complain about a problem and not propose a solution.

1:50:31That's called whining. He has this famous quote about, it's not the critic who counts, but it's the man in the arena. The person who actually tries, who falls down and stands up again, who just keeps going and who's not one of those whiners who always stands on the sidelines but never can say, I actually tried. I actually did something. And America's original conservationist. Yeah. And the Boy Scouts got started in the early 20th century also as a reaction to that era of decadence. It's so interesting. The similarities are everywhere. And I feel that we're now at a crossroads where we can go further down this really dark path.

1:51:12And I think it could be way darker than it is right now. I think we can really move into an authoritarian era. I've spent quite some time studying revolutions like the Russian Revolution what you see when you study 1917 is not people who are super excited about the communists taking over no not at all people thought Lenin was an idiot they really didn't like him but they were just utterly apathetic they were like you know we hate the Tsar we hate the royal family we hate the incompetent liberals who replaced them we hate everyone you know what we'll plug out um and sure lennon you you take over you won't last for six weeks either but six weeks became 70 years and i really worry that that could happen in the u.s as well like people are increasingly apathetic and yeah and they are people weren't as distracted then as they are now also we've got we've got like design big tech is the new big alcohol industry, basically.

1:52:10So the problems are real, as are the threats, and yet you're able to hold on to hopefulness. Well, and that's like, history gives me hope here, because after the Gilded Age, we got the progressive era. So it was a double movement. It was a bottom-up movement of people joining unions, political parties, saying enough is enough. But it was also a top-down movement of elites who were like, hey, let's not just check our privilege. Let's use it to make a massive difference. And I think that's what we desperately need right now. Like across the West, we have been betrayed by elites from the left to the right.

1:52:49I mean, that's the one thing that I, in my view, MAGA and Trump is absolutely correct about is that we've been betrayed on a pretty massive scale by people who should have known better. And what we now need is what I'd like to call a kind of skin in the game elite, like people who don't just whine and moan, but who actually practice what they preach. And instead of just pointing fingers, they're like, okay, this is the problem and this is what I'm doing. Now, do you want to join me? I have to imagine that there is this hunger, there is this desire to get plugged in to something that can lead me in that direction.

1:53:28You know what I mean? And I think one of the missing pieces here or what makes solving this problem of taking moral ambition and putting it into action is the fact that we don't have the third spaces that we used to have. You know, it's like people just, they go to work and they go home. There's no, you know, the religious institutions are on the decline and after school programs and YMCAs and boys clubs or wherever people gathered when they weren't working and they weren't at home has sort of devolved, right? And those are kind of like crucibles for community engagement, right? In getting people to care about their neighbors and giving them a sense of agency and purpose and direction in terms of channeling that sense of meaning that you get out of being of service.

1:54:26And so it's just that, you know, it's like the easy access to the opportunities to connect those two things are not what they once were. So this has been going on for a long time, right? We talked about how this shallow conception of liberty arose since the 1950s and the 60s. We talked about the American Freshman Survey and how students had a very different conception of what it means to live a meaningful life. We talked about Robert Putnam, the sociologist. Now, some people will be familiar with his most famous book called Bowling Alone that was published now more than 20 years ago, I think 25 years ago.

1:55:01And he made the exact same diagnosis that you just made. Like the communities are just collapsing across the country. That's why the book was called Bowling Alone. There used to be these bowling organizations where people would come together and bowl together. But now, very often people were bowling alone. um here's this fascinating statistic shocking statistic that you know from the 60s to i think the 90s people got around six hours of additional leisure because of technology because of automation uh and they followed all of that into watching television so what we see today with people being addicted to their screens it's not a new thing it's just been getting worse and worse and worse and especially if you look at teenagers right now i mean some of the stats just absolutely blow you away like i recently saw this one of of teenagers um that they now spend 70 percent less time hosting or attending parties than they did in 2003 when i was 15 so like i'm already old uh compared to this new generation and it's just silicon valley is absolutely wrecking the whole experience of what it means to be a teenager this beautiful face in life when you're exploring when and you're finding new things out, where you're making mistakes.

1:56:22But that's got to be a face-to-face thing, right? But face-to-face time is collapsing in all of society. Now, again, I do see reasons for hope because just like with factory farming, the vast majority of people is against this. There was recently a poll that found out that with a three-to-one margin, people want more regulation, right? They want like a massive regulation of these technologies. And Silicon Valley is, I think, currently awakening a dragon. I'll give you one historical metaphor here. There were two great historical moral movements in the 19th century that we all know that we talked about, the abolitionists and the suffragettes.

1:57:04But there was a third one that we've forgotten about that was just as big. And this was called the temperance movement. The temperance movement was the movement against big alcohol. So at the time, Americans were consuming three, four times as much alcohol as today. There was hardly any regulation, and this industry was ruthlessly exploiting human weaknesses. So many laborers would come home and spend all their wages on the bottle, beat up their wives. It was just this horrible thing. And then what happened was this huge bipartisan, one of the biggest democratic movements we've seen in history, led by workers, by women, by pastors, by teachers, by evangelicals, you name it.

1:57:47It was this incredible coalition who didn't agree about many, many things, but they did agree on this one thing. Like, we want to reclaim our humanity. We think that real freedom is the power of choice and that alcohol is taking away that power of choice. Like, the alcohol industry was using that shallow conception of freedom. Like, you can drink alcohol if you want. But then they had a deeper conception of freedom, which was like, we want to protect ourselves against these sirens that are wrecking our lives. That's what democracy is about. And I think what we need right now is what I would call a neo-temperance movement.

1:58:22And that's not just going to be about banning phones in schools. I think that's just the simple beginnings. I think it's got to be much broader and it's got to be much more radical. We also got to be aware that it doesn't go too far because as you probably know, temperance ended up in prohibition, which wasn't a very good idea. But that's also my warning to Silicon Valley is that this may be arising. It's actually what I would be predicting that we could see that in the next five years is a broad coalition of people who are just livid and really angry and want to reclaim their humanity. It's very difficult to predict that future because the technology is advancing so rapidly and we really can't say the impact that AI is going to have on this other than, you know, it's perhaps engineering the irrelevancy of the social media platform.

1:59:13It's like the creator of this is engineering its own sort of mortality on some level. And we don't know. But it's going to be interesting, I guess. And if you can remain hopeful amidst all of this, then that gives me hope. Well, this is the one thing that we learned from history is that there's nothing inevitable about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. It can all change quite radically. and it's often, that change is often led by small groups of people. If we go back to that Margaret Mead quote, never doubt the power of small groups are thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world.

1:59:51In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. It's a pretty brutal quote. She's basically saying that the vast majority of people are herd animals. They just live their lives. But that fact in and of itself means that you don't need to convince each and everyone. You just needed a relatively small group of people who are for real and who want to make the necessary sacrifices, and they could really change the course of history. I guess I would say to that that… To the extent that somebody who's listening or watching feels that their life is lacking meaning or some degree of fulfillment, the solution to that is finding a way to make a way to make a way to make it.

2:00:37yourself. And as my friend Scott Harrison from Charity Water is fond of saying, do not fear work that has no end. And so, I think finding some avenue of energizing yourself or plugging yourself into some issue that you have enthusiasm for and perhaps a tinge of guilt as well, is the path forward to discovering the meaning that your life currently lacks. Because it is truly in service that we find ourselves and all of the nourishment of life that we miss when we're pursuing property, prestige, and power. And I think there is real status in this. These people that so inspired you or made you reflect on your own choices loom large because they are of the highest status.

2:01:35Like throughout history, the people who did the right thing when it was hard to do the right thing and stood up and took action, these are the people that have the most endearing legacies of any human beings that have ever lived. And that never goes out of style no matter the decade, right? And so to the extent that we can celebrate that a little bit more and refresh the marketing campaign around it to make it a little more aspirational and cool, I think that that is a worthy investment of all of our time and energy. Yeah. Thanks, Rich. Yeah, it was great to talk to you, man. Likewise. This was really cool.

2:02:13And if people want to get involved in food system reform by donating some money alongside us, again, the website to do that is? Moralambition.org slash food. There you go. And people can also just go to Moralambition.org to join our community. Yeah. I think that's so true what you said. It is about community. It's so much easier to do it together. So that's what we're building. It's very courageous what you're doing. It's one thing to go to Davos and talk some shit in front of some billionaires. It's fun to do that. It's another thing to then write these really well-researched and well-thought-out books.

2:02:56And then it's another thing to then reflect on that and say, that's not enough. Winning the attention economy game is fine, and it makes my ego feel good. but fundamentally, like you're still not taking your own medicine until you went and founded this school and have made this your mission. And that's very rare and it really is something to celebrate and it is an act of courage. Thank you. Yeah, so I really appreciate you being here today and setting an example for the rest of us. Thank you. Cheers.

2:03:31All right, everybody, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit today's episode page at richroll.com where you will find the entire podcast archive as well as my books, Finding Ultra, the Voicing Change series, and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free, actually. All you gotta do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review or drop a comment.

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