Q&A with Rutger Bregman | The Reith Lectures Edition

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Everyone, I want to really officially welcome you to the Q&A with Rutker on the Reed lectures. Um, it's really an honor to have you. It feels a bit like we're welcome you welcoming you into our new home, our future home, which is circle. Um, the whole team was amazed by the amount of signups. So, we thought we need a different platform to host you and thank you for making it here. We know that there has been some lastm minute changes to get here but so welcome. Um my name is Julia. I'm one of the co-founders of the school for moral ambition and for today I'll be your host um trying to get as many questions past Rker today uh to talk about the read lectures and today is pretty special because well I don't know if you've heard about the read lectures before.

[00:00:49]I'm actually quite curious, but I didn't before Rutker was invited to give me until I found out Rutkar how incredibly prestig prestigious it is and what a special opportunity and um how you can follow uh well the people who really shaped thinking of many of us nowadays by giving these re lectures and then the fact that it also was the first one that actually got censored well I think that's also what made a lot of people aware of the read lectures and think what's going on? We need to know about this. And today is the one and only chance that we actually have this live Q&A for people to join from our community and ask their questions to you themselves. So I think it's a really really special occasion to be here with each other today to actually do that. So everyone welcome. Um how we are going to do that? Well very simple. uh Retra is going to give a little introduction and then we will open the floor for your questions and there are two ways to do that. Very simple. One way is to simply raise your hand and we will give you the opportunity to ask your question yourself. So you can unmute and you can share your question for this really reminder that was also done by the BBC host that the question is a really short sentence that ends with a question mark and I will cut you if you make it a long question or want to give your own greed lecture then this is not the moment to do that. So please keep it concise.

[00:02:24]If you're not in the occasion to ask your question yourself or you feel a bit shy with so many people in the call, that's also fine. You can use the Q&A function. And if you have a really good question, other people can also upvote it. So the chances of getting your question asked is even more it's more likely that we will discuss your question. Um if you use your questions in the chat, we are not going to pick the questions from there. So please limit yourself to the Q&A function or just simply raise your hand.

[00:02:57]Okay, I think if that's all then we can go to you Rutkar. Um and I think can you please just start with a little introduction like how did it feel for you to be invited and how did you experience the whole aftermath uh with the BBC in the White House and then we'll go into the questions.

[00:03:18]>> Sure. Well, just like you, Julia, I had honestly never heard of the reflexes before they asked me. Uh, then I Googled it and I was like, "Oh, holy [ __ ] [laughter] and I was instantly nervous because apparently it's a pretty big thing." Um, and I was also thrilled to see that my great intellectual hero Burton Russell was the very first one who who gave the first series of lectures back in 1948.

[00:03:42]Um so I remember buying um uh Burton Russell's autobiography when I was a student and being so impressed with the incredible incredibly rich life he lived uh but being especially impressed by his moral courage and his intellectual courage. So he was one of those people who would follow the truth no matter what and who would say the uncomfortable thing it was if it was the right thing uh to say that. Uh he was also actually censored and cancelled at some point in his career when he came to the United States and a mother from Brooklyn. Um you know was uh worried that he would pollute and poison the minds of the youth. Um and um yeah he that that actually cost him his job. Um so that was all pretty exciting and it it was also you know an amazing opportunity to look back at the last decade. Uh, I've written three books in my career, at least three books that have been published in English. I'm pretty glad that they didn't translate the other ones because they're not very good. Uh, but I've written Utopia for Realist, my first one, Humankind, and then Moral Ambition. And so these reflectors were a great opportunity to look back on the last 10 years to think about where are we right now and and um yeah, what's next for us as a species? And I guess that a lot of us are now watching the news in horror. Um I think a lot of us are pretty scared and in my view for good reasons. Um I am continuously reminded of that moment. Uh you may remember it as well in February 2020. Um and what I remember about that moment just before the pandemic broke out is that when I looked at my timeline I basically had two groups of people. On the one hand, I had people I really respected uh such as so-called super forecasters, people who specialize in forecasting the future and who have an incredible track record at that. And they were all saying like stockpile masks right now. This is the real thing.

[00:05:49]There's a pandemic coming. And then on the other hand, um I was, you know, following, you know, the national news was going to the New York Times.com and, you know, a lot of people there were saying like, "Oh, we'll probably blow over." you know it's a small thing and don't worry go to go to bed and I very much feel that you know early 2025 is similar in two respects two respects that I want to talk about the first one is the technological revolution that we're in um yes there's a lot of hype around AI there's there's a lot about it in the news but I still have the feeling that a lot of people don't realize what's about to hit them I think the next five years are going to be absolutely wild especially a lot people on the left or you you could say liberal side of the political spectrum, they they sometimes have the attitude that you know nothing important can ever come out of Silicon Valley. Um you know it will probably be just like crypto or something like that. Um and I really disagree with that. Um, I think that, you know, when I use Claude, for example, or any other of the other chat bots as a professional writer, I am being astounded pretty much every day by the power of this technology and how quickly it is improving. And I think it's going to disrupt the very, I don't know, the very nature of humanity. Um, and as I talked about in the last wreath lectures, I think now is the time to start a broad bipartisan movement to slow this down. Basically, I'm deeply worried about both the power concentration but also about yeah how this technology is just not aligned with human flourishing. Um so that's one thing where I feel like oh my god what what is about to hit us. The other thing is the political developments are the political developments. So I was recently uh writing a script on the F-word um you know the fascism word and for a long time I was one of those historians who would always you know push back whenever people started making comparisons to Germany in the 1930s because very often I felt that you know these comparisons weren't helpful that there were simply too many differences and that you know the authoritarian tendencies or the far right or the populist tendencies that it wasn't the same thing. Um but I have basically changed my mind. If you now look at you know the best historians of fascism you will basically see well a couple of things. One many of them are currently leaving the US. One of them explicitly said that the lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later. Uh and what you also see is that some of the greatest experts on fascism have also changed their mind.

[00:08:34]uh people like Robert Paxton for example who wrote the anatomy of fascism and he's also like yeah this is basically it um especially now with the ICE rates uh with them building out you know all these deportation centers um how violent is got it got how cruel it got um yeah I I'll be honest it is a scary moment we're in right now and that means we all need to pay attention that's why I think movements like the one we're trying to build at the School for Moral Ambition are so important because what they want us to do is to plug out, to be cynical, to just stare at our screens all day and uh to think that we can't make a difference. If if moral ambition is about anything, it is about providing an antidote to that feeling of hopelessness. Um what I find so incredible about this community that we're building together is that it is so energizing, right? Whenever people come together, and we now have more than 20,000 members from more than 140 countries, um, whenever they come together, I think the most important thing that they find is is hope. They're like, "Huh, I'm not the only one who gives a damn. I'm not the only one, you know, who wants to uh do his or or her best to make this world a wildly better place." So, thank you so much for everything you all are doing. Thank you so much for being here today. And um let's get going. Julia, >> great. Thanks, [clears throat] Redker.

[00:10:05]Thanks for the warm introduction. And um I see that we have some hands raised and I want to invite Finelli to ask her first question. So Arena, please be ready. Um I'm making you a co-host right now. Um so you will be on the screen and you should be able to ask your question right now. There you are.

[00:10:32]And again, please keep it concise as agreed upon. There you go. You're still on mute.

[00:10:41]Forgive me. Okay. Um, thank you for Okay. Uh, I have a question. I listened to all the lecturers and they were made in December and now we are in in February and there was the very surprising speech of Mark Carney at the in Davos.

[00:11:05]Okay. So you are always been speaking about um little group of people very determined to do something. Okay. Uh in good and in evil. That's okay. It it happened several times. I think for example uh at the the first polit bureau in Soviet Union. Okay. They were very little people but little number of people but they got a huge success.

[00:11:40]Okay. So um what do you think now? Because current >> what is your question in what >> the question is that um since we see now on the political side scenario uh Mark Carney in Canada uh Sanchez in Spain who gave a harsh answer to Elon Musk. Okay.

[00:12:11]What do you think? Are you still convinced that uh it is necessary to be little group of people or uh should we add better to to become a political movement led by good persons that already are in such position?

[00:12:31]>> I love that question. So I really think we need both. When I study the great moral revolutions of the past two to three centuries, what I see again and again is a double movement. So take something like the abolitionist movement that I talk a lot about in my book moral ambition that I talk a lot about in the wreath lectures. Uh what you saw happening there was on the one hand you had people of a certain amount of privilege, right? People like Thomas Clarkson, the great abolitionist who went to Cambridge University. People like William Wilberforce, you know, the politician who was fairly wealthy. And these were people who actually used what they had, their opportunities, their access to power, their access to certain networks to kickstart this movement. But then the movement became so successful because hundreds of thousands of people joined it. And also it was led by people who were not that privileged at all. You know, the greatest best-selling author of the whole British abolitionist movement was a former enslaved person called Olada Ecuano, who wrote an incredible autobiography about how he was abducted, how he was sold to European slave traders, how he bought his his way to freedom, how he traveled the seven seas and then landed in London and became one of the great black abolitionists. Um, I really think we need all of that. We need the top down movement and we need the bottom up movement. We need people uniting um in parties, in unions, in movements, you name it. But we also need um an elite that actually practices what they preach. Uh like pretty much the opposite of what you could call the Epstein elite. You know, the people who talk about doing good but then in reality are pretty corrupt.

[00:14:24]>> Thank you, Edgar. Great answer. Um, hey, we're going to look at the first question that's in the live Q&A and it is from Adam. So, spotlight it right now. Uh, you frame moral ambition as a call for the intellectually and financially elite in [ __ ] jobs to seek novel causes currently given little attention in order to generate relatively high bang for buck. Does your framework in inadvertently devalue sustained commitment by those of us without means or connection sorry whipping who are already in long-term societ society purposeful like youth work jobs like youth work sorry what is the role and function of people like me in a revolution of more ambitious mortality working in financial un novel fields by Adam >> so in all my books uh I've been writing about the act of wealth creation. I've always been interested in the question of who are the real wealth creators. So for those who've read my first book, Utopia Realist, they may remember that story that I told in that book of the garbage collectors going on strike in New York in the late60s and then you know that strike last for six days and then a state of emergency had to be declared because the garbage collectors are so important, right? if they go on strike then we're all in trouble. And I compared that to a strike of bankers that happened at around the same time in 1970 in Ireland. It's the only strike of bankers that we know of in all of world history. The strike lasted for six months actually. So not six days but six months and nothing much happened. You know the economy just kept growing and after six months the bankers came back and said all right all right we'll get back to work. Um, I think the story really illustrates that our conventional view of who the wealth creators are is is often upside down. It's it's often actually the teachers and the nurses and the care workers, the those people that we um well, we described it as the essential jobs during the pandemic, right? Um I I just feel that they don't need a lecture from Ruter Breman or anyone else about moral ambition, right?

[00:16:33]Because they're already the scholars that carry us all. Now I do not want to succumb to the tyranny of low expectations. Like I want to be very clear here. Um history is full of examples of people um with little power, little privilege who still move mountains. Like in my book I've got a whole chapter about Rosa Parks who was a seamstress but still was one of the great activists, one of the great strategists of the 20th century, an incredible woman uh who changed the course of history. And there are many more examples like that. if I sometimes talk uh quite a bit about those in the Bermuda triangle of talent, right, which is consultancy, finance, and corporate law. It's not because I think these people are always so great. It's because I think these people deserve a big kick in the butt, honestly. Um because very often they're, you know, wasting their talent. They're wasting their time in jobs that don't really add all that much of value. But again, what we need, it's always a double movement. Um, we need basically people with all skill sets and all talents to unite and um to take on the most pressing issues that we face as a species.

[00:17:46]>> Thank you Roskar for your great answer and Adam also for your question. Um, we're going to the next live question that's from Ollie Ranken. Um, Marine or Ailia will invite you to be a co-host right now. So Ollie please prepare and again please keep it short and concise.

[00:18:08]You should be able to ask your question right now.

[00:18:19]>> Yes, there you are.

[00:18:22]>> Hi Ra. Um yeah, in um Utopia for realists, you advocated for open borders. Um, and that's obviously a a pretty unpopular and possibly increasingly unpopular idea at the moment. Um, but do you think it's even possible for um for a moral ambition revolution to happen while the system of nation states is still enforcing what's basically the last socially acceptable form of discrimination.

[00:18:52]>> Love that question. So if there's one simple lesson that I want to get across in my book moral ambition is it is that it is possible to be both utopian in your end goals and very pragmatic in your methods. So again if we study the great abolitionists um they had an incredibly utopian goal.

[00:19:11]They wanted to abolish slavery and not just in the British Empire but everywhere. They wanted to completely ban uh this institution, make it illegal in every single country on earth. Now, for us, that sounds kind of obvious, right? Because like what could be more horrible than slavery? But in in the 1770s, you know, um it had always been pretty much the norm. Obviously, there were worse um instantiations of slavery such as, you know, the slavery in the European colonies, but you you had slavery everywhere. You had it in Africa. You had it in Asia, you had it among Native Americans. It had pretty much always been normal. And many people believe that it would never change because it was just like the way society had always worked. Um but what I admire so deeply about these people is that on the one hand they had these utopian goals but they were super pragmatic about how to actually get there. So for example there was this very impressive debate they had in uh the 1780s where they discussed should we first attack the slave trade or slavery the whole institution. And they made the very pragmatic decision to first focus on the slave trade alone because that was politically much more feasible. And they also thought, you know, if we first get that done, then it will make it much easier to move on to fighting slavery as a whole. And that's exactly how it worked. Um, and I think that's also how we can think about some of these ideals today. Um, I think we have to recognize that simply a lot of people do not share my cosmopolitan views on on immigration and that therefore it is it is really important to be pragmatic. Um, if you if you now say, you know, only shout things like, "No human being is illegal, you know, you can't be illegal on stolen land. Let's just open the borders." I think that would be a catastrophic um um plan for Democrats in the US right now. I mean, it's very clear that that would be a pretty great way to lose the elections, and it is an absolute moral imperative right now to not lose the elections because we're on the road to fascism. Um, so that that is for me one of the important lessons of history.

[00:21:28]You're not a sellout or anything if you're pragmatic. In fact, if you really care about the people and animals who are currently suffering, then you are always laser focused on actually achieving results and you're not obsessed with your own moral purity.

[00:21:45]>> Thank you, Reser. Amazing answer. Hey, we're going to the question that I think is also really, really important and dear to me. It's uh raised by Sonia in the Q&A and I'll spotlight it for you and she asks you what is the role of women in the moral revolution. Um Sonia I'm nine five weeks before I'm due and [laughter] when I read your question it really resonates. Um but Ratkar yeah can you speak a little bit more about this um which role we have to play as women in the in the moral revolution that you talk about?

[00:22:20]>> It's a it's a long question. and I'm trying to scan it as as quickly as I can. Um, >> it >> so um I talk a lot about this in my book about basically feminism as one of the greatest moral revolutions that happened in all of history. And by the way, it was also the greatest peaceful revolution. Like women didn't fight wars. They didn't, you know, throw bombs or anything like that. It was an incredible revolution that happened almost completely peacefully and radically changed everything. Again, um for people in the early 19th century, um it would be very hard, you know, to wrap your head around the the the wall we have today. Um maybe uh people will know about Mary Woolstonecraft, one of the first British feminists who wrote a vindication on the rights of women. And shortly after she had published that, a um you know um uh a British philosopher published a counter pamphlet that said, "Yeah, what's next? Like a vindication on the rights of brutes? Like should we give horses the right to vote as well?"

[00:23:26]I mean, that's how silly people thought it was. And uh most of us luckily uh think that that is absolutely bizarre to think. Um so um maybe I'll say one thing about this in particular. It's also something I said um during um the reef lectures. What I think is really sad about some parts of the left these days or you know some parts of the progressive movement these days is that um yeah we now have this new commandment to have no kids. Um, so what we see in the in the birth data is that there's obviously a collapse of of the birth rate everywhere, but that's mainly driven by people on the left opting out of parenthood because a lot of them have convinced themselves that, I don't know, it's a bad thing to have kids or something like that. That um, you know, it's bad for the planet, it's bad for the environment, it's well the the world is going to be horrible anyway, so that's why you don't want to have kids.

[00:24:28]And it breaks my heart every time when I see that, when I hear that. I think that bringing new life into the world is one of the most beautiful things you can do.

[00:24:37]It is one of, you know, the great honors in my life to be a dad. Uh to do that together with my wife, raise two two kids. We have a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And um I am determined to help them to make them very very net positive. So I don't don't see them as walking carbon bombs. Uh, I see them as, you know, um, I see the beautiful potential in both of them. Uh, and I'm determined to to give it everything I have and support them in in every possible way. And, um, um, obviously parents always do it together, but yeah, I have been in awe of of my wife. Uh, you know, uh, the the day she gave birth to our first one, still the most beautiful day in in my life. So um yeah I I I really very much hope that we can get back to that attitude that we can see the hope and the potential in all new life and uh that's why I'm also so happy for you Julia as you know.

[00:25:40]>> Thank you and thank you for your beautiful question also Sonia. Um here we're going to the next person to ask their question live. Uh Christian Drake please get ready. Um there you go.

[00:25:54]Yep.

[00:25:56]You're invited to the stage and you should be able to speak now.

[00:26:17]We'll give him few more seconds.

[00:26:19]Christian, we'd love to hear from you.

[00:26:23]And if not, I'm inviting [clears throat] someone else.

[00:26:31]Ah, there you are. Yes, Christian, please share your question with us.

[00:26:36][snorts] Sorry, I had a bit of a delay. Um, I get the feeling that climate change doesn't play a huge role for you guys, but for me, I believe it's one of the the biggest problems, one of the most urgent problems. So I wanted to ask if you share this view and do you believe that um like when when our the basics of our life our livelihood might be endangered is that not a problem for being like bor ambitious because we're basically busy trying to survive.

[00:27:14]>> Yes, absolutely. Uh I agree 100% and I think many members in our community would agree with that as well. When we got started uh two years ago, um we thought long and hard about which cause areas we would center in our so-called moral ambition fellowships. So many of you will know that we have our moral ambition circles. These are groups that anyone can start, anyone can join. We have hundreds well thousands of members now from more than 100 countries across the globe. But we also have these fellowships where we basically well we pay people to quit their job to take to take on some of the most important causes of our time. Now we thought long and hard about what those causes should be. And one of the causes we chose was actually the food transition. And the reason we chose it was well a couple of reasons. Um obviously it's about one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time which is the way we treat animals.

[00:28:09]Um but it's also the most neglected aspect of the fight against climate change. 20% of emissions come from meat and dairy. And um in contrast to other uh parts of the climate movement, this is really really neglected. So like EVs, electric vehicles um are doing better and better. Uh renewable energy that's going through the roof, but uh the food transition is extremely neglected and that's exactly why we're so interested in it at the school for moral ambition.

[00:28:42]Um this is an essential part. This is really important to understand about how we define moral ambition is we think that carefully choosing your cause area is the most important determinant of the eventual impact you're going to make.

[00:28:56]It's it's it's not even how hard you work or how talent you are. It's really about what do you decide to work on. Um because if you work on something that is way neglected then your then the additionality if you will is going to be way bigger. Um, so yes, we think that climate change, global warming is one of the great existential threats that we face as a species and we recommend people in our community to do the work that is most neglected right now that is sometimes you know the most the least sexy or or the most controversial uh because it's it's exactly that work that needs to be done.

[00:29:34]>> Thank you Rascar and thank you uh Christian for asking your question. Um, Ollie and Christian, please lower your hands so I can see who else has a question. Um, and then in the meantime, we're moving to the live Q&A. And I think this is a really interesting followup also when talking about climate change. It's Philip's question spotlighted now that you're criticizing the degrowth movement and um, he wonders, isn't this morally ambitious?

[00:30:03]>> So, I think there are a couple of aspects that the degrowth movement really gets right. So the basic point that they make that we cannot go on like this that we are you know burning through our forests that we're pumping the atmosphere full of CO2 that you know growth as we often define it today as in like mere GDP growth that that is fundamentally unsustainable. What I just don't like is the alternative that the degrowth movement seems to have come up with. Um I like to begin with the word itself. I really don't like the word um like I I don't think you should define your whole movement around something that you're against. This is so often the problem with people on the left.

[00:30:44]They only know what they're against, right? They're against austerity, against the establishment, against homophobia, against racism, against all these things. And I agree, I'm against all those things as well. But we got to think about what we're actually for, right? We got to have a positive progressive agenda of the kind of world that we want to build together. The other thing that I don't really like about the degrowth movement that it seems to be very skeptical of the power of technology and I think that's very misguided. What I try to show in my book is that actually technology can play an enormously important part in um the journey of moral ambition and that in fact it already has. um say um take something like the women's right movement, right? That wasn't just activists um advocating for their rights. It was also brilliant inventors like Josephine Cochrane who came up with the dishwashing machine uh and later the washing machine. Uh it was people like Kathern McCormick, the very brave philanthropist who said,"I want women to have the control over their own fertility and I will fund the scientist who will create that technology." Now this was so radical in the 50s that no one wanted to finance that. Uh even Planned Parenthood thought it was too radical. So she found a renegade scientist at who had just been kicked out of Harvard, George Pinkis. And Pinkis said, "I can do it." He worked on it for a couple of years. He received millions of dollars from Kathy McCormick and then they created uh something called Innovid. Now Innovate was so radical, so world historical that today we call Innovid, we call it the pill. Um and that really started with one very brave and determined uh philanthropist.

[00:32:27]So that's those are just some examples of things that I don't really like about the Degrowth Movement. Although I do think that they also get the um some of the diagnosis of what's wrong with our world today. they get that right.

[00:32:44]>> Thanks RKAR for sharing this. I think it's something a lot of people found an interesting question to have answered by you. Hey, we're moving to uh the next person, Umapati. I hope I pronounced your name well. Um I'm going to invite you to be a co-host and ask your question to Rker. [snorts] Yes, welcome.

[00:33:18]You're still on mute. Uh, >> thank you so much for allowing my question. Um, um, Raa, I I am a doctor who work in underresourced parts of the world where governance is a major problem. So could I ask you to answer this question as a both as a historian as well as a futurist? Is there a system of governance uh institutionalized governance, political governance that would make uh a lot of our initiatives and moral ambitions uh uh uh will make it unnecessary. In other words, uh if I go back to one of your examples you gave, the abolitionist movements may be redundant if the monarch at that time had the moral ambition at the moral outlook to realize that he was sanctioning a crime against humanity. So he could have done it with just a single legislation that uh that uh that could have so but but over the last 2,000 years of human history we have not found I at least I think that we have not found a political system that seems to be morally driven. Even people like Mahatma Gandhi you know who once a system of moral uh uh base governance doesn't seem to uh to work. So what do you think about uh either in the past or in the future? Thank you.

[00:34:34]>> Thank you.

[00:34:36]So a lot of people ask me that that question indeed like you talk about moral ambition but what is what is moral actually right what is what is the moral way of looking at the world and how will you yeah built your whole system around this so so let me say two things in answer to your question um I see myself as part of the universalist tradition this is a tradition that indeed started with the abolitionists then you know the baton was passed on to the suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote And then came the civil rights movement and the LGBT movements. And what what all these people did is they expanded the moral circle. They basically said that everyone has inherent human dignity.

[00:35:17]Some did that with secular reasons. You know, some were like influenced by the enlightenment and said everyone has human rights. Um others had more religious reasonings like for example the Quakers which was like a a Christian cult basically. and they said um like there's the inner light of God in each and every one of us. So that's the universalist tradition that the school for moral ambition really is a part of.

[00:35:43]Um now the the question you ask is more about politics, right? Like what is the the the best political system? Now in that sense I am an old-fashioned European social democrat. I said that multiple times in in the Q&A after the read lectures as well. Um now what the do social democrats believe? They believe that humans are not saints. Uh they believe that humans are flawed. Uh and that we therefore need to build systems of checks and balances. We think that the market can be pretty powerful in generating wealth. But that markets that are out of control, you know, they start threatening our very democracy. So you need substantial taxation, you need rules for companies. Um that's really crucial. But apart from markets, you also need the government, right? The government is able to provide basic services like healthcare and education and often will be able to do that in a better way or at least a more just way than the market will be able to do that.

[00:36:41]But then finally, you also need something in between which you could describe as civil society, right? These are like the NOS's, people coming together, movements, grassroots movements, churches, and like the social democrat believes that this is all a balancing act. like you're continuously at risk of, you know, making the government too strong and then you need to tame it or the the the market becomes too strong and then you need to tame it.

[00:37:05]Um and civil society has to play a big role there. Um there is no utopian political system out there that will forever solve all of our problems. Um, humans are are flawed human beings like um our our life on this earth is methy messy and that's also what makes it so beautiful. That makes politics so beautiful is that we are difficult creatures to work with and that's why continuously we need to be in conversation with one another. We continuously need to try and work out our differences. I I once learned from the the late anthropologist David Greyber um that you know violence is is you know the the hardest thing to come up with with an intelligent answer because it just cuts off all conversation right um and and that's very often what happens when people try to come up with like the perfect political system that will solve all our problems forever is they realize that just doesn't exist that that is um that is not a utopia but that that would actually be quickly turn into an autocratic dystopia. So yeah, I'm an old-fashioned social democrat.

[00:38:12]>> Thank you, Rker. And thank you for your great question.

[00:38:16]Um, we're going to the next one from Joanna, which I also really love.

[00:38:20]Spotlight now. Um, and that is Rutker.

[00:38:23]How can we address collectively in your opinion the continuous blockage that lobbies make to morally ambitious legislation?

[00:38:30]Oh [clears throat] >> yeah, I love that question. Well, we got to get into the game ourselves. Maybe a little background on how the School for Moral Ambition got started. So, I spent a decade of my career writing articles, writing books, you know, doing talks, recording podcasts, standing on the sidelines, and becoming increasingly frustrated that I wasn't out there in the arena. You know, in the in uh the second wreath lecture, I quote the Roosevelt who said that it's not the man or the woman, I would add. um the you know not the the critic that counts but it is it's the man and the woman in the arena uh the people who you know actually take the hits who try things who fall down and then stand back up again and so what happened is that I met this guy called Yonut uh who had just started um a nonprofit called training for good and they were doing something really interesting so at the time AI wasn't a big thing there were few people were talking about it but Yan Villim and his co-founders had come to the conclusion that it was going to become really big and that the government was not prepared. Uh that you know the power of big tech the lobby was enormous and that it needed to be regulated but government was just not up to date like it did not have the talent it did not have the knowhow in order to regulate this properly. So what they started to do was a kind of well I I I always call him the Robin Hood of talent. So he started luring people out of Silicon Valley who were working at these big tech companies and and he convinced them to instead work on the other side um and say like hey we need people who really understand this technology to not advocate for big tech but for the people and they were amazingly successful. So some of them ended up working for the European Commission or for the European Parliament and they were pretty successful in lobbying for a better AI act that really protects European citizens. Um so when I heard that I got really excited because I was like can't we scale this up right? Can't we do more of this work? For those who have read my book, uh, they'll know that I was really inspired by what Ralph Nater did in the 1970s, right, with his group called the Nater's Raiders that also lobbied effectively for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, you know, legislation in the United States that saved millions of lives. Um, so I think that's exactly what we need right now.

[00:40:56]We can actually build our counter lobby.

[00:40:59]We can build a lobby for the people. And that's exactly what the school for more ambition wants to be or at least that's one of the big things we're trying to do.

[00:41:10]>> Thank you. And thank you Joanna for your great question. Um, before we move on, I just want to quickly celebrate that we have 741 people joining us on this.

[00:41:20]>> Incredible. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much everyone for coming.

[00:41:24]>> It's incredible. And I feel so bad that we only have so little time and many people still wanting to ask their questions. So, please put them in the Q&A so you get upvoted um if we really shouldn't miss your question. But I'm now going to give the honor to Juliet McDow. So, um adding you to be a co co-host.

[00:41:44]Um yes, there you go. You're invited to take the stage.

[00:41:55]And in the meantime, people can still lobby for their question in the chat.

[00:41:59]So, [laughter] I would definitely try that out.

[00:42:07]I see Juliet's question is also in the chat, but now you can ask it yourself.

[00:42:10]There you go. Very concise. That's great.

[00:42:18]Thank you so much. Uh yeah, my question is in the chat, but I've worked in the development sector for almost 30 years now. And what we've seen over the past year or two years is a real divestment from uh philanthropy both from the American government but also European governments. And when I did read your book, uh while it's very exciting, I kept asking myself, who's paying for this? Uh so yeah just very concisely what is your vision about this? I you know similar to the tech talk that you just gave. Yeah I've opened up a tech company but when I go in front of investors with my AI for good story you know I have to give numbers of how this is even profitable. So I'd like to hear from you.

[00:43:09]>> Yep. I can't agree more. Uh this situation is pretty depressing. Uh, we've obviously all seen what Elon Musk and his cronies did to us aid, which is one of the most callous evil things I've seen in a long time. Um, like many thousands of people have already died because of that and many more will in the future. Uh, but it's not just been happening in the US. Also, the UK has massively cut its development aid budget. Uh, the Netherlands has been doing it. Um, and that's honestly pretty depressing to witness. I I also find it depressing to see how few people seem to care about it, including many of my friends on the political left um who are often, you know, who can be outraged when they talk about, I don't know, for example, the way asylum seekers are treated in, you know, once people are are already, you know, within our borders. But very often, you know, our compassion or empathy seems to stop at the border or we don't think all that much about things like malaria that kills 600,000 people every year or tuberculosis 1.2 uh million people every year. Um I was reading this incredible book by John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis. Highly recommend that book. Um I I was actually reading it on a flight and I had to stop reading it all the time because uh you know whenever I got to order a drink I was I had tears in my eyes so I was like can I have a diet coke um very moving book uh following just one tuberculosis uh uh patient and um at the end of the book John Green says like okay this book times 1.2 2 million. Um, and indeed also philanthropy is really falling short. So there was recently an article on the giving pledge. You know this promise that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates made 15 years ago to uh with a group of others to donate at least 50% of their wealth before they would die. Well, of the original Siges um on average their wealth has grown by 280% in those years.

[00:45:13]Uh, eight people have died before fulfilling their pledge and only one couple, John Arnold and his wife, have actually done what they said. So, that's depressing and I think they deserve to be shamed. Some people say that shame doesn't work. Well, I I disagree. Shame is a pretty powerful thing. There's a reason why humans are one of the few animals in the animal kingdom that can blush. This is partially what we're trying to do with moral ambition, right?

[00:45:38]We're trying to make doing good more prestigious. And um this is also what we're saying to those people in our community who are wealthy. We are saying pretty directly to them like we think you should do more. I was on Swedish television recently where they put me in front of a billionaire and people can watch this on my Instagram and you know one of the question I I had for this guy is like why do you do so little right you could give away half of your wealth and you would hardly notice it. You would still have exactly the same lifestyle. You should do way more. And that's exactly what we're calling for in this movement. Um, and I am proud to say that we're making some progress. Um, but we need much more of it.

[00:46:19]>> Thanks, Rker. Well, to continue on your last words, let's look at the question from Dean. Um, which I think is something that we struggle with, which says, I love the skill of your ambition and vision. However, that can be a hurdle to momentum. So, progress over perfection. How do you reconcile the tension of scale of transformation versus making continuous momentum and change?

[00:46:41]>> So Julia, you know this uh unlike you, I was completely in inexperience when we started this. You know, I I spent my life in the archives and writing books, sometimes doing TV shows, but that was about the extent of my experience actually building something. And if I look back at the last two years, I think I've really learned two incredibly important entrepreneurial lessons. The first big lesson is whenever you are in a hurry, ask yourself, are you really in a hurry? Because you make the biggest mistakes when you think you are in a hurry. Um, remember that we are on a long, long march towards justice, towards moral progress. Of the 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one was still alive when slavery was finally abolished across the British Empire. And and one day we will die and we will not have achieved all our goals. In fact, if you can achieve your goals during your lifetime, you're probably not thinking big enough. So that that that patience is important. But the other lesson is is is almost a little bit it's seemingly contradictory to the to the first lesson. It's it is that ambition attracts ambition. uh we've really experienced that when we paint the bigger picture, when we really talk about our utopian goals and say that we want to build a global movement of the most driven, most ambitious talent of people to take on the most pressing issues. Well, that is just contagious.

[00:48:05]Uh we deliberately decided not to say, oh, we we got started in Amsterdam and we want to build a movement of people in Amsterdam and then we'll we'll see what we get. No, it started in the summer of 2023. I wrote a four-page Google doc uh that had all these hubistic visions of what we would build and here we are 22,000 people in our movement uh 744 people on this call. Um I think ambition can be contagious and that's exactly the kind of virus we want to spread.

[00:48:34]Obviously the virus of moral ambition.

[00:48:42]>> Thank you. All right. It's get becoming harder and harder to select people. Um, [laughter] >> so glad I don't have >> great responsibility. Uh, JB, uh, you're invited to ask the final question live.

[00:48:56][snorts] Um, no pressure.

[00:49:09]You are still muted.

[00:49:16]Yes. Great.

[00:49:18]>> Figuring this out.

[00:49:20]>> Hi.

[00:49:21]>> Hi. Um I see you as a kind of new atheist uh of the the four horsemen, you know, Daniel Dennett and so forth, except that you have a challenge that is a material one that might be even harder to challenge an immaterial one. That is what is the foundation of this challenge, this economic challenge perhaps, you know, is it how can we challenge capitalism as a whole and is that your overarching ambition or view of of SMA?

[00:49:53]>> So my final wreath lecture is probably my most personal wreath lecture. Uh in that lecture I talk about my belief and my own spiritual journey. So um my dad who's actually downstairs right now taking care of uh our son um he is a Protestant minister. So when I grew up the questions of religion were very important. Um in the final lecture I talk about the five big questions of religion like where do we come from?

[00:50:24]Where do we go? Who are we as a species?

[00:50:27]How should we live our life? And finally what is sacred? What what really matters in life? And um when I was 17 18 years old, I realized that indeed I I didn't share um the answers that my dad and my my mother gave like I I I couldn't become a Christian or a believer like they were. And so indeed um at some point I think I was 19 and I was you know taking a shower and at some point I realized God I don't I don't actually believe. But for some people that may be u you know a liberating moment. For me it was actually a pretty sad moment. I felt like I was you know um falling off a cliff that suddenly the foundation that was always beneath me that that was suddenly gone. So I say this in the final brief lecture as well like if my dad has always used theology to try and find the answers to those big five questions. I think my whole career is an attempt to find the answers to those questions in history. And you know what's so interesting and for me also profoundly moving is that as I got older, I realized that actually my dad and I converged on pretty much the same answers. Um and um what I also realized is that actually um some of the most important movements in history like the abolitionist movement were not just motivated by secular enlightenment ideals around human rights but there were also profoundly spiritual uh profoundly um religious. Uh I already mentioned the Quakers who believed in the light of God in each and every one of us. Um so um I I know I guess that has also made me more humble as a person and when I now think about these questions I I'm less inclined to think about okay what dogma should I believe in is this true or is that true um I am more inclined to judge people on the matter on the basis of what they actually do to make this world a much better place. Um it's like Jesus said right you judge a tree by its fruits. Um and um so yeah that that's basically been my own spiritual journey and that's also why I think people of all faith all background are very very welcome in the school for moral ambition. Um if they all subscribe to that universalist belief that in the end we are all precious. Humanity itself is sacred. We all have inherent dignity and that's why we should try and expand the moral circle beyond the boundaries of our own tribes and our own bubbles and uh really try to make this world a much better place for each and every one of us.

[00:53:12]>> Thank you Ratkar. I think there couldn't be a a better answer to to close this session with. Uh and also linking to your final read lecture number four. Um that's been really amazing. Uh I also read a lot of people in the chat who really would love to see you more often.

[00:53:30]Uh and I think it's it's really great that we have a next session planned coming up in May uh where there will be another live Q&A with you especially for the moral ambition community. And also what's really special is that it will be on this platform which will be our new home a couple of months from now. Uh so we're really really excited about that development. Um and retar before we close off is there any final thing that you want to share with the 700 or now it's 400 people in the room who um yeah something you look forward to or something you want them to well go home with. [snorts] >> So the most important thing is that we're really doing this together. So obviously I'm trying to do what I'm good at uh you know writing wreath lectures.

[00:54:18]I like to think that I'm good at that.

[00:54:19]Um but we we need everyone in this movement. Um and it's been so exciting to see it grow organically. Um, I remember the first time, you know, two years ago when I was in the office in Amsterdam and I saw some of my colleagues in a meeting and I had no idea what the meeting was actually about. And um, then I was reminded of this lesson that someone called Jeremy Heyman, you know, one of the great campaigners in the US taught me and he said, "Ger, always remember, it's not a movement if it doesn't move without you." And what I'm so proud of is that moral ambition has really taken on a life of its own. Um, so I invite everyone to join us at moralamition.org to consider starting a moral ambition circle. Uh, to join one of the circle starter trainings, to start a moral ambition chapter in your own street, neighborhood, at your own university.

[00:55:14]Um, it is happening everywhere across the globe. It's it's popping up everywhere. So there are now still 400 people left in this call. Um, let's just do it. Let's just do it together. Let's build this thing.

[00:55:26]Well, great note to end with. Brethkar, thank you so much for making the time, sharing your thoughts with us. Thank you, Marina and Oilia for making this happen behind the scenes and especially thank you all for joining, asking your questions, sharing your thoughts. We hope to see you on the 27th of May again live on this platform together with Rusker. See you then. [snorts] >> Bye everyone.