How to Be an Effective Idealist (Rutger Bregman)
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You’ve likely seen Rutger Bregman on a late show or on Instagram, or watched his amazing viral clip from Davos, which we talk about today and which I’ll share in the show notes in case you missed it.
Rutger is a Dutch historian and bestselling author of several books, including his latest, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. He’s a particularly brilliant problem-solver, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a fun sense of humor.
Today, Rutger shares more of his model for living a more meaningful life. It’s not about being an idealist, or even following, quote unquote, “your passions.” It is, in many ways, about effectively solving the problems in our lives using the talents we already have.
Rutger illustrates this with some pretty fascinating real-life stories that floored me.
MORE FROM RUTGER BREGMAN:
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
Rutger Bregman at Davos
Rutger’s Website
Follow Rutger on Instagram
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Well, I first saw you before this press tour started, and then of course I saw you on talking to John Stewart, but I saw you at Davos. Did that video go viral where you were essentially explaining to everyone present that we know exactly what we need to do, there's just a failure to take action, which is equitable taxes?
RUTGER:
That was pretty much it. I was invited to go there in 2019 to talk about my very first book, Utopia for Realists, and that was a book about how we can eradicate poverty, move to a radically shorter working week, maybe even abolish old borders around the globe. It was all kinds of crazy ideas that perhaps may one day become reality, and I think they were mainly interested in having me talk about basic income because that was very fashionable in Silicon Valley at the time. The first signs that the robots were coming, as we still call them back then today, we call it AI. But yeah, there were a lot of fears around automation and what will people do? Well, they still have a job in the future. So yeah, they were like, okay, who are the experts on basic income? A bunch of wise old men in their fifties and sixties, and then there's this one Dutch young historian.
Yeah, let's have that guy. And I guess they didn't really look into me because I have some other opinions as well. And indeed being a part of that conference was I found it super annoying. All these rich people talking about how they want to make the board a better place, but then being utterly blind to the role they play in making this world pretty messed up, for example, not paying their fair share in taxes. So I thought, you know what? Let's not talk about basic income when I'm on stage, but let's talk about something else instead.
ELISE:
No, it's amazing, and I will find it for everyone listening, but essentially you roasted everyone for flying there on their private jets or their corporate jets, and then wasting everyone's time and not really having any intention to take the action that could be possible considering who was in that room. Yeah,
RUTGER:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I'm not some kind of moral purist or anything like that. I'm not saying like, oh, don't ever step on a plane. But yeah, there is a certain hypocrisy when you have 1500 people flying in on a private yet, and then they go into a big auditorium to see David Attenborough's new film, and you see multiple people crying and they're like, oh, what are we doing to the planet? It's like, yeah, what are you doing to the planet? So yeah, it's
ELISE:
Pretty much, but it's so much more convenient to not include yourself and any calculus about what needs to happen out there for everything to be resolved, which is sort of the premise of this book, which did you obviously, the timing, you wrote it somewhat for graduates, right?
RUTGER:
Initially that was the plan. So I had one passage in the book at one point where I said, look, if you're past the H of 30, if you have a set of cheese knives, if you have a robot mower, if you have a Labradoodle, then you are probably lost. It's too late and don't bother even reading this book. Now, my publisher had me remove that passage because apparently that's not good for book sales, and I got to be honest here, it's also not true. Obviously, the book actually has quite a few examples of people who are well past the age of 30 and made a pretty massive shift in their lives and in their careers and are now doing a huge amount of good. But there is a social truth here. There is quite some evidence that your teen nature and your twenties, there are special years. It's when you're writing the Constitution for the rest of your life. So I'm always excited when I get to speak to young people. They've got everything ahead of them, and it's such a flexible special period, isn't it?
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and you can speak for myself, you're full of idealism and you're convinced that if someone gives you the keys to the castle, you can retool the whole thing, certainly, which let's keep that thinking, but throughout the book, I mean, Rob Mather obviously is a significant part of this story, and he's not in his twenties or thirties too. I think that there's something that I loved about the book is that it's rooted in let's not just go be ineffective idealists who think awareness is enough. Let's go and actually solve and resolve some of these problems that we are protesting about. And to do that, sometimes you need skills, right? And sometimes you need to be tooled by the world in order to have networks and capacities that maybe you don't have when you're 22.
RUTGER:
Exactly, yeah,
ELISE:
We're all part of it.
RUTGER:
Yeah. Look, I spent a lot of my career dunking on others, dunking on lazy politicians, dunking on greedy billionaires, and I stand by all of that. But in this book, dunking a lot of myself and on the people around me, because honestly, I'm quite angry. I see so many people around me with nice resumes who went to good universities, but who've ended up in jobs that are just not very socially meaningful. In the book, I quote one study from two Dutch economists, they looked at more than afford countries, and they found out that around 25% of people in the modern workforce think that their own job is socially meaningless. So it's not me saying it, it's people themselves saying it. And these are not teachers, these are not plumbers. These are not care workers. These are people, well marketeers, influencers, managers, consultants, corporate lawyers, people who are actually quite talented and have an amazing skillset, but are not really using those skills to make this world a much better place.
And that's also what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Honestly, it was nice to go to a place like Davos and shout taxes, taxes, taxes, and then go viral, be the Internet's most famous person for three minutes or something like that. It's nice, but does it accomplish anything? Have tax rates gone up for the very rich since 2019? Have we solved the problem of tax evasion and tax avoidance? How much progress have we actually been making and what have I actually been contributing to that? Apart from retweeting myself, I was like, it's a bit pathetic, Rutger, what you're doing here, you got to up your game and start building something that actually matters and start doing something that actually works,
ELISE:
And I want to get to that. But essentially you're taking all the proceeds from, you're essentially creating, is it a school? What is it? The moral ambition?
RUTGER:
I would say it's a launch bet.
ELISE:
Okay,
RUTGER:
So one of the stories in the book is about that has a familiar name to many people, I would say Ralph Nader. He became infamous, especially in the year 2000 when he ran against El Gore as a third party candidate and probably made El Gore lose the elections, which wasn't great.
ELISE:
Yes, he did.
RUTGER:
But in the sixties and the seventies, he did amazing work. He had a group called Nader's Raiders, and this was a beacon for some of the most entrepreneurial driven and talented people in America. At some point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work with Ralph Nader instead of one of those boring corporate law firms, because Nader said, look, you are not going to work to make those rich shareholders even richer know you're going to work with me in Washington to make America a much fairer society. And they had their fingerprints at some point on 25 pieces of federal legislation, the Clean Air Act, clean Water Act, he saved millions of lives. Ralph Nader himself lobbied various effectively for the seatbelt in the us. Ralph Nader's name basically should be on all the seat belts in the us. That has always been a huge source of inspiration for me.
And when me and my co-founder started thinking about this school for more ambition, we were like, can we replicate that? Right? Can we start another movement like that doing good, more prestigious and help stop this waste of talent? Because currently so many talented young people end up in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, which is consultancy, corporate law and finance, and it's just super sad. So yeah, sometimes I like to say that we're the Robin Hoods of talent. We take away the talent from the big boring corporations and we give it to the most important causes of our time.
ELISE:
The resurgence, I'm sure you've read abundance too, and I was like, oh, Ralph Nader is in the collective unconscious, but partly because people, the far right has taken his playbook and use that to try and pick apart legislation.
RUTGER:
Yeah, that's a really interesting, so we need a
ELISE:
New playbook.
RUTGER:
So in the sixties and seventies, what was needed in America was a movement of people that were just very effective at stopping all kinds of big projects and basically stopping the government as well and big misses. So rivers were being polluted on a massive scale. Highways were being plowed through historic neighborhoods. You have people like Robert Moses, famously profiled by Robert Caro, the great biographer, and yes, we really needed the environmental movement. And historically they've been really good at saying no. They're like blowing up pipelines, occupying squares, you name it, stop polluting, stop messing up our planet. But now we're at a point in history where we need something pretty different. We need to build, really, we need to totally transform our whole economy, clean energy. That is mainly a building challenge. We need to scale up solar and wind energy in a way that is just astounding.
I think the only comparison that really works there is World War II mobilization. That's the scale of the challenge, which is very different obviously from public interest lawyers going to Washington to try and stop things from happening. Now we need a new group of Raiders who are like, okay, how do we actually build this thing and very often also and move quite a bit of red tape that is standing in the way. I mean, this is what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I think quite rightly pointed out in their book, it is quite embarrassing for progressives that like Texas is beating California right now easily in terms of the deployment of solar energy, and that's not because the markup people are suddenly so excited about solar energy. No, it's just because you're allowed to build in taxes, it's illegal, and you can also make quite a bit of money with it. So that's why it happens while in California, it has almost become illegal to build affordable housing, to build sustainable energy, to build high-speed rail. And this is by the way, a problem across the west. So in my own country of the Netherlands, I see the very same phenomenon that it's become so difficult to build. So yeah, the times have changed. We need different solutions, but we still need the same energy and we need very talented people to be working on these issues.
ELISE:
Well, and I think that this is such a compelling, we talked about people flying their private planes to Davos and then not having the will crying at the David Attenborough movie. You write about how for so many people reducing footprint, which is a wonderful thing that we should all try to do to consume less, but that we're not selling it to anyone. And this idea of a leave no trace existence is never going to gain traction. In fact, our energy use is just skyrocketing with ai. And until we build, until that there is a solution which is building a vast renewable energy grid to compensate for the way that we want to live. And you can almost, I see that almost like I've been consumed by this at times where I'm so down and feel so hopeless about what's happening that I'm like, oh, screw it. I'm going to go buy a new pair of shoes.
Think that collectively, we all participate in that, oh, everything's done, so I'm going to go on vacation. So people need this idea which you write about, and Derek and Ezra write about, and many people talk about, which is actually there's another way if we build,
RUTGER:
This is one of the most important things to emphasize here in the fight against injustice. Winning is a moral duty. So today in America, it seems to be an absolute moral imperative to win the next elections, right? Because it's the democracy itself. What we're talking about here, it's very real democratic back rec lighting happening right now. The very real chance of an authoritarian breakthrough in the next couple of years. Maybe this has already happened. I like many other historians are not afraid to use the F word, the fascism word anymore because the similarities are just too clear. So how do we prevent that? Well, the most important thing is to organize and win elections. How do you win elections? Well, by being popular, I really doubt that the message of we are going to make you poorer and give you less, which seems to be the message of parts of the left.
I mean, the Degrowth agenda in Europe, for example, became very popular. I don't think that's going to resonate a lot. I think the message of, look, big business and Republicans, they are making you poor with all kinds of insane economic policies such as tariffs or because of massive tax rates for the super rich. And that's why you can't afford education. That's why you can't pay your health bills, and that's why you should be really angry, and that's what we're going to fix. We're going to get you more of the stuff you need. I think that would resonate. I would say the problem with the abundance crowd, the people around Ezra Klein, is that they're too wonky. These people love reading policy papers. So now we need people who can actually turn this into an appealing message, and I think that we need quite a bit of righteous anger to be put in the mix as well.
I think that's an important ingredient or almost like a way of a good kind of populism you could say, because there's a lot to work with here. This is not just democracy that's collapsing, but it's economic suicide, what the US is currently doing, and people will really feel it in their own lives. They will feel it in their wallets. But yeah, building that popular agenda, finding good ways to tell that story and then please win the elections, that's important. And I'm not saying that just because they cared about America, but for the rest of the world, we would very much like that to happen. Thank you.
ELISE:
To get it together over here.
RUTGER:
Yeah.
ELISE:
A huge part of this book, which is so important for anyone who identifies as progressive or more on the left, I think the people on the right or center see this more clearly about us and ourselves is we're very ineffective at building coalitions and in the last five, 10 years, and you write about this in a way that I feel like it's hard to do and pull it off, and you do it, so kudos to you. You do it with a wink and a nod. But the way that identity politics or how essential this idea of intersectionality is in terms of understanding the Venn diagrams of oppression in our society, but how we've essentially created a reverse hierarchy of suffering where if you're not in complete coherence or if you don't understand every single then circle, you have no place, right? We are morally excluding each other all over the place. I thought that you called out that tweet from NARAL, which is the perfect example of three days before Dobbs is overturned NARAL, which is our largest pro-choice organization, essentially saying, if you don't care about the rights of trans girls and women, you are clap back, not a feminist. And then it went further than that, but we sort of painted ourselves into these corners and all of our, they're not even coalitions, right? They're just causes that are dissolving.
RUTGER:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a huge, huge problem on the left, this kind of purity politics that stands in the way of effective coalition building. What we know from history is that every great movement, including the abolitionist movement or the Women's Rights Movement, was a coalition of people who very often didn't agree with one another in some pretty important aspects. And he would say that the idea of intersectionality actually recognizes that there are different ways in which people get discriminated against, and that should be a simple insight that we can use to say, Hey, this is how they're abusing you. This is how they're abusing me. Let's work together. Let's build a big coalition. But what's happening in practice is that indeed there has originated this kind of hierarchy of suffering almost, and that the people who are lower in that hierarchy, the best thing they can become. People like me, for example, white guys who are relatively privileged, the best thing I can become is like an ally. And I think what we can now see happening is that, or what we saw happening a couple of years ago is that a lot of people are actually not super interested in just being an ally.
I believe in solidarity. I want to be in the same fight as you, right? I want to fight for justice. I not just want to stand on the sidelines cheering you on, even though that's part of what I want to do, but I also want to be morally ambitious myself. So yeah, when I started hearing a lot of people saying, Hey, you got to check your privilege. I was like, yeah, happy to check my privilege, and then can I use it right? Can I use it to make this world a much better place? And can we build a coalition together what the lesson of history is to me? But instead was what happened indeed was the kind of purity politics that was politically incredibly ineffective. You saw it so clearly during the pandemic, indeed, when Black Lives Matters became huge, which was on the one hand, the largest protest movement in the history of the United States.
And on the other hand, one of the most ineffective protest movements in the history of the United States. And I don't say this to try and score a political point here or something like this, it deeply saddens me, but I would say it's true. If you look at the track record here, how much legislation has been paused after BLM? Well, locally, a little bit here and there. Some police forces changed their procedures here and there, but the main slogan itself, Defund the Police, was incredibly unworkable and also incredibly unpopular, actually maybe even mostly so with communities of color, of people who actually appreciate good policing and very much need it because they often live in neighborhoods with higher crime rates. So yeah, that was, I think, quite frustrating to see is that activism became all about performance. There was this small online group, very vocal online bullies today you can mostly find them on blue sky where they're bullying each other, but back then they were on Twitter and they wielded a lot of power.
And at some point, the whole progressive activism ecosystem grinded down to a halt. And the most ironic moment was indeed the moment you already mentioned when Roe v Wade was taken down by the Supreme Court. And at that very moment, all the pro-choice groups were not fighting the enemy. They were fighting each other. And many managers and leaders of those kinds of organizations said, I'm more scared of my own employees than of MAGA Republicans. So yeah, that was very sad. But luckily that's in the past. Now, I do see hopeful signs that things are improving, but I think in a way, this is what got us Donald Trump. And again, it saddens me, and I'm not happy to make that point, but we saw that in the effectiveness of the slogans like Donald Trump is for you, Kamala Harris is for they them. It became this way to divide us.
ELISE:
And I think that what we see within the MAGA tribe is a group of people who we've condemned and made bad. And so the polarization grows from there. And then within the left, you have the same apparatus of, sorry, Rutger, you're a white privileged man. You're back, you're an oppressor and you're not part of the oppressed class. And then it keeps spiraling. And as you said, we need this baton toss or long relay race where we each can apply pressure in our own way. I'm really good at beating up conservative white men, and I have the privilege to be able to do that. So I see that as my job. But I can also imagine a scenario in the last five years where it would've been step back somehow. This isn't your fight, so I hope, I'm glad you're hopeful that we're past this. We need to be more effective. That's for certain.
RUTGER:
Pretty sure that we're past it, because I've been saying things both on my Instagram and on other platforms that I'm pretty sure could have been very problematic for me to say four or five years ago, might have cost me my head symbolically speaking. And again, I don't say this with pride or anything like that, but it was a very unhealthy environment that we had a couple of years ago where it was just generally difficult. The whole annoying thing is cancer culture was real. It's just that the people who were complaining about it were themselves so annoying
And such idiots and such hypocrites. And you can see that right now. Where are all the people on the right saying, oh, cancel culture is such a big thing now that the government itself is using its full force to disappear people. You have got Project Esther in the US and Heritage Foundation Plan, which is all about cracking down on Palestinian descent, and it's just astonishing. It's like George Orwell, 1984, any kind of criticism of Israel gets immediately stamped as antisemitism, which is terrorists sympathy. So therefore, you are a terrorist, so therefore we can do whatever the hell we want with you. That's basically government policy right now. And where's Jordan Peterson? Where are all the Bill Mahers, all these fighters for the freedom of speech? They're nowhere. At the same time though, they often made, I would say some valid points about cancer culture on the left as well.
ELISE:
No. And then you have within what's happening with Globalize the Intifada, then you have it all spiraling, so out of control where we're making Jews incredibly unsafe, and then Jews are being used as a shield in the labeling of everything as antisemitic as a Jew, then we’re put at greater risk.
RUTGER:
And that's the interesting thing, like Project Ether has not even been pushed by Jewish organizations. It's mostly conservative Christian organizations. So it's entirely disingenuous. This is not about finding antisemitism at all. It's just about beating up your political enemies.
ELISE:
No, this is a move by Christian nationalists anyway, in Moral Ambition, you write about these five myths, the illusion of awareness, the illusion of good intentions, the illusion of right reasons, the illusion of purity and the illusion of synergy. And we touched on some of these, but the illusion of synergy, for example, is so important, which is if I feel like these are my values, you have to have the exact same values and the exact same worldview in order for us to move forward or that we all must believe the same things.
RUTGER:
Yeah. So Albert Hirschman was an economist who wrote this brilliant book called The Rhetoric of Reaction, and in the book he talked about three rhetorical tricks that conservatives and right wingers use to say, oh, all your fancy idealistic plans of you people on the left, they won't work. So for example, they say, actually what you're trying to do is going to have perverse consequences. For example, you want to help the poor by raising taxes on the rich, but that will do so much economic damage that actually GDP will shrink and therefore the total amount of tax revenue will actually go down, right? It's a classic trick or what slave holders said in the 18th century when British abolitionists said, Hey, we need to ban the slave trade. And they said, oh, what will happen if you do that is that that slave trade will be taken over by the Portuguese and the Spanish, and they have no rules whatsoever on how to entreat enslaved people.
So actually the problem is going to be worse. The thing here is not that it's not necessarily incorrect. Actually, the example I just gave about the slave trade, it's actually true. So indeed, when Britain a polished, the slave trade in 1807, the Spanish and Portuguese took over a lot of that, a big part of that market, and indeed, they treated their enslaved people even worse than the British were doing. And actually, the trade also grew in the 19th century still didn't mean obviously, that they shouldn't do it after that, Britain used its power to force 80% of countries, including Spain and Portugal to stop slave trading. But yeah, that's the rhetoric of reaction. At some point, hir was asked, is there also the opposite of that? Are there also rhetorical tricks that progressives always use to defend their ideas? And he said, yeah, that's true.
And one of them is indeed the illusion of synergy. So progressives, they love to say like, okay, we got to abolish poverty. We got to abolish homelessness by giving everyone an apartment. We got to fight climate change by giving everyone sustainable energy. We got to do this in new kind of way with the participatory democracy. And also we got to, I don't know, implement an equal rights amendment for everyone. They've got a whole laundry list of things they want to do. A good example of this was the Green New Deal that was popular a couple of years ago in progressive circles. It was a huge list of things that needed to happen. And then when you would say, oh, that's a long list, and they would say, yeah, and that's exactly the point. We need all of that because all these things work together in a magical way actually.
They strengthen each other. This is the synergy idea. Now, again, the point I'm making here is not that it's not true, synergy can genuinely exist. Sometimes plans really work together wonderfully well, but very often we're just fooling ourselves or we're denying the simple fact that in politics and in life, there are trade-offs and we can't do everything at the same time. So I would say a good example of this right now is we just talked about the need for winning elections, right? Well, if you want to win an election, you got to come up with a popular plan. So that's already a trade-off, right? You can't just talk about all the things that you personally like. For example, I said 10 years ago, I wrote a book about abolishing all borders. I don't think that's going to be politically
ELISE:
Super popular, not a winning strategy.
RUTGER:
So I think we got to have a more realistic migration agenda here. And so that is all about recognizing that sometimes there are trade-offs and you can't have everything at the same time all at
ELISE:
Once, and you have to look for these trap doors because going back to the story that you were telling about abolitionists in Britain, it wasn't that Britain was like, this is terrible. We're enslaving people. We can't do this. They found a trap door. Can you talk about what actually moved people to decide this was not a good idea? Sure,
RUTGER:
Yeah. So they used a technique that psychologists call moral reframing. This means that you try and find different arguments for the same idea that will resonate with a different kind of audience. So let me give you a simple example. I'm a guy who deeply cares about poverty, right? I think we've got to abolish it. And the main reason I care about this because I just empathize with the suffering of poor people, and therefore, I'd like to make the argument that we should raise taxes on the rich and then redistribute quite a bit of that, and therefore make progress. Now, this is going to resonate with, I don't know, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 30% of the population. People have different psychological profiles, different kind of arguments resonate with them. And this is the point that Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist also made, is that progressives tend to serve rather one-sided moral meals.
So we appeal to the same moral concepts again and again, mainly for example, the desire for equality or the need to care for one another. But there are other things that people find important as well. Take something like patriotism. You could also say, look, I want to abolish poverty because we're just the best country on earth. We're not as stupid or as uncivilized as any other countries who still have so many people living on the streets. We're the best, so we're going to fix this. Or you could appeal even to something like disgust, which is also a powerful emotion or the desire for cleanliness. You could say, this is just disgusting the way we're treating people, or it's just disgusting how we're polluting the planet. This is one of the reasons why originally, if you go back all the way to the beginning of the 20th century, you'll see that actually the environmental movement was mostly a conservative movement, and many conservatives settle.
It's just disgusting with the industrial revolution and what all these industries are doing to our pure landscapes, they're destroying our history, they're destroying our environment. Just our examples. We have tended to start thinking of certain political causes as necessarily left wing or right wing coded. But once you start moral reframing, you realize, hey, there's actually no, it's not a necessity That climate change became this big progressive thing. There are actually ways to morally reframe this. Anyway, long introductions, this is what the abolitionists did in Britain. This was the most successful abolitionist movement. And at some point, they discovered that if they started talking about the suffering of our boys on these slave ships, that would resonate immensely. In Westminster, they did some extensive investigative journalism and discovered that around 20% of white sailors, so basically the perpetrators were dying on these slave ships. And yeah, they went to William Pitt, the prime Minister at the time, and he was shocked, utterly shocked, and that was one of their Trump cards actually in Westminster during those years.
It really helped to grow the movement. And it's weird for us today because we're like, that's not the right reason. But in history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And if you don't just care about your own moral purity, but if you care about actually achieving results, then I think you want to try and find out which tools are actually effective, which arguments are actually resonating and are powerful enough to build you that coalition that will actually get you the political power that you need in order to help the people and animals that you care so much about.
ELISE:
Right? No, it's so helpful. I think that we assume that everyone is operating from the same perspective and seeing harm in the same way. And if you can shift that or reframe it, it definitely is more inclined to build coalitions.
So let's talk about Rob Mather, because I love this story. I vaguely remember the first swim, was it Terry?
Speaker 4:
Yeah, yeah,
ELISE:
Yeah. But yeah, tell us his story, because I think for the people who are listening are probably not college grads, they're more our age, and so inspire them. Come on, Rutger.
RUTGER:
Okay. Well, here's the story. It starts with a relatively boring consultant manager who was just conventionally speaking, very successful. He went to the University of Cambridge, then was a student at Harvard Business School and started making quite some money, but then in the year, I think it was 2003, he was watching the BBC and wanted to switch off his television. But what happened is that he pressed the wrong button on his remote, and that changed the course of his own life. And I would say it changed the course of human history. The channel switched to a documentary about a little girl called Terry who had suffered the most horrendous burn wounds. She was the victim of a fire. She was just two years old, and her whole body was burned, basically. Her mother had smoked a cigarette in her little room, something she would normally never do, but she was super stressed out that week.
And yeah, a fire got started, and yeah, it was only the skin under her little nappy that was untouched, but apart from that, totally burned. And the mother felt so guilty that she just couldn't hand it anymore. And now the father was raising this little girl, and he needed money, obviously, because it's super expensive, all the treatments and all the support. And Rob Mata at the time, he had two kids. He was moved immensely, and he was like, what am I doing with my current job? I'm going to start a fundraiser for Terry for this little girl. And as you can imagine, a guy like that, he's pretty effective. He's good at making a lot of money. So when he starts a fundraiser, it's going to be pretty effective at it. Hundreds of people participated in dozens of countries. He raised hundreds of thousands of money in this swimathon.
Indeed. People swam for Terry. And then the next year they were like, okay, this was great. Terry has quite a bit of money now, but what's the cause we're going to swim for this year? And that's really when the most important thing happened is Rob started applying his research mindset to that question. He basically started with the question, what is the worst thing that is happening to kids in the world today? He asked around, he spoke to multiple global health experts, and at some point he realized, you know what? It's probably malaria. The single biggest killer of children at the time. Today, still more than 600,000 people die from malaria, and that's mostly under five. And to its astonishment, there actually already exists a super effective, super cheap solution back then. It cost around $10, and it's an insecticide treated malaria bat net. If you sleep on that, then you're pretty much safe.
And why do people not have these bat nets? The answer is pretty simple is because they're too expensive. If you live on a dollar a day, then $10 is a lot, obviously. So he was like, wow, maybe we can do something around this. Well, let's start a fundraiser for that. Now, that one became even bigger, turned into the against Malaria Day. The Against Malaria Foundation and against Malaria Foundation has turned into one of the most effective charities in the whole world today, and they've ever since raised, what is it, more than $700 million, keep needing to recheck the website because it's growing so quickly. And there's one conservative estimate actually from quite a few years ago already that says that they saved around 150,000 lives, which is just utterly mind blowing. And for me, this is a beautiful example of what I call moral ambition, using your skillset to make this world a wildly better place.
The most important moment in this story, I think, is when Rob Mater decides not to follow his passion, not to just do whatever feels good to him, but to really look at the research, to really think, Hey, how can I use my skillset to make the biggest possible difference? I've come to call this the Gandalf Frodo model of doing good. So Gandalf never asked Frodo, Hey, Frodo, what's your passion? Right? It's not that Frodo watch a documentary about something that happened in Mordor and was like, Hey, let me throw that ring into the mountain. No, he had an T wise wizard who conducted rigorous research for him and who said, look, I've got the whole what's to-do list here? This is the most important, most pressing thing. Throw the ring into the mountain, we're all going to die. And if there's one message I keep emphasizing in my book is that this is also what moral ambition is all about. It's not about following your own passion. It's not about gazing at your own navel, but it's about going out into the world and saying, here I am. These are my talents. This is what I can contribute. What should I do? Tell me. And that's the story of Rob Ma.
ELISE:
And it seems, what do you call them? I can't remember your three S's.
RUTGER:
Sure. It's the Triple S framework. It starts with problems that are solvable. They are sizable, obviously, they got to be big, and maybe most importantly, they got to be sorely neglected. So any entrepreneur will understand this. If you want to make a ton of money, you don't go and build a product that already exists, or you work in an industry that's already crowded, right? Because yeah, your profit margins are going to be much smaller. As Peter Theo, our friend, the venture capitalist would say is, you actually got to try and aim for a monopoly. If you have a monopoly on something, on a product or a service that's desired by a lot of people, then you're going to make a lot of money. So try and go where others don't go. And this is actually also the way to do a lot of good. So you can ask yourself the question, what was the best time to be a climate activist?
Well, I would say not today, because today, luckily enough, the movement is pretty big. It's tens of millions of people who are involved in it. But in the sixties and the seventies, it was super small. So back then, your impacts, your contribution would've been much bigger, relatively speaking. And so then you can ask yourself the question, what are the problems that are today at the point where climate change was in the sixties and the seventies? Because we really need people to work on those problems, right? Because they're so, so neglected. Yeah. So this is basically the framework. Instead of following your passion, select the problems that are most impactful to work on.
ELISE:
Yeah, I love this too. The four main ingredients of moral ambition. One, the idealism of an activist. Two, the ambition of a startup founder. Three, the analytical mind of a scientist. And four, the humility of a monk. Four is hard to come by. I have to say. I thought you write about this school, the Hogwarts of where it was. Rob, sort of the inspiration for this, or he's one of the mentors helping these people, both young and old, go out and solve these Triple S problems in the world, but that they also, you think about power, you think about money as these incredibly corrosive, they're theoretically neutral, but the way that they corrode people's souls. I don't know what language you would say, but I really liked that one of the factors of the school is that they have to look out for moral corruption. The founder says, people don't lose their ideals all at once, but in little steps gain one pound a year and 20 years later you'll be 20 pounds heavier. I think something similar can happen to our altruism.
ELISE:
Talk a little bit about that. Is it just that people stop caring or that they lose track of what they're trying to achieve?
RUTGER:
Well, look, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, this is, I'm paraphrasing here. He said something like, man, the scoundrel gets used to anything. And this is particularly true for the comforts in our life. I'm not sure if you've ever flown business class, but if you've never done it, then I highly recommend you never do it, because yeah,
ELISE:
I've flown business. It's a problem.
RUTGER:
Yeah. Well, it's like you like, oh, I like economy. Class will always be like total torture. Compare it now that you know what flying can actually be like. But that's a metaphor for life. I think that a lot of wealthy and privileged people often just don't realize how wealthy and privileged they are. So you remember the Occupy Wall Street movement said, we are the 99%, but a lot of members of that movement were actually in the global top four, 3%, maybe even the 1%. If you earn a median wage in a country like the Netherlands where I'm from, you are in the richest 3.5% in America, you're probably even richer. It's the richest country on earth. And globally, half of the population lives on less than $7 a day. And then people are like, yeah, but that's not adjusted for purchasing power. You can buy so much with a little money there.
No, this is adjusted for purchasing power. And then you could say, well, how do people survive on so little money? And then the answer is, well, very often they don't survive on so little money. Their life expectancy is much shorter, and there's a simple reason for that. So that is important to keep in mind, to keep yourself grounded. The way to do that, I think, is to surround yourself with like-minded, ambitious idealists, and sometimes almost like bind yourself to the mast. I've always loved that story of Odysseus sailing past the sirens. I think most listeners will be familiar with it, these sirens who sink so beautifully that all the ships that sail past it, the sailors, you just go nuts. And then the ship crashes on the rocks, and Odysseus is like, Hey, I want to listen to this. I want to listen to reality, see reality as it really is.
But at the same time, I want to protect myself from my own impulses, from my own desires. So he asks the men bite myself on the mast. And for me, that picture of Odysseus bound to the mast is a perfect metaphor for what real freedom looks like. Not the shallow kind of freedom that has become so central in capitalist societies, the freedom to buy, to pollute, to say whatever you want, however dumb it is now. For me, it's the freedom to marry, for example, the freedom to bind your choice in a way and make a promise, the freedom to have kids, the freedom to start a company, to have skin in the game, to start another organization, the freedom to give your money away to the most effective causes of our time. I mean, in a shallow way, these are all things that would actually reduce your freedom.
I mean, any parent listening to this will be like, yeah, those days when I still was in my twenties and it could do whatever the hell I want. But still, I think the decision to have kids, which is one of the most beautiful things in life, to create new life and take responsibility for it, is the ultimate form of freedom, I would say. And that's very much at the heart of what moral ambition is. It's not about living a much more comfortable life or anything like that. There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of self-help books out there that will tell you how to be more relaxed, mindful, productive, rich, whatever. This is not one of those books, but hopefully it will help you to live a more meaningful life, A life that is worthy of actually being remembered
ELISE:
And you open the book this way. What's handed to us is this goal of being happy, but that really, people want to matter, right? They want to have something during legacy. Theoretically. I'm sure in everyone's minds it's for good, even though they might be causing a lot of harm in that process. I think a lot of people too are like, I'll go get the stability and then I'll turn to meaning. I'll go make money so then I can give money away, et cetera. But whenever I do a lot of work with women around actually getting to articulate what you want, which is very difficult for women to do, most of us have no idea what we want. We've never actually really thought about it.
And I will say that when you hear what people, some people are like, I just want to center my own happiness and go on vacation and not worry about other people, which is fine, but for the most part, what women want is actually quite beautiful. I think what people want, if you really got down to it, would be quite beautiful. I don't know. You might have more cynicism than I do, but I think that people if asked, oh, that's the other thing we didn't talk about. I loved that part of the book about the idea of resistance, the study of what actually makes people resist, and it's that they just need to be asked. I love that,
RUTGER:
Right? Yeah. It's such a simple insight. I think very often when we think about these issues, we tend to get stuck in a kind of fixed mindset. We tend to think, oh, good people, they do good things, or entrepreneurial people, they start new initiatives. I would say it's actually the other way around is you start a new organization and that makes you an entrepreneur. You built something and that makes you a builder. You help a lot of people, and that makes you a good person. And it's such a simple, but such an important distinction. And it was made very clear to me when I indeed studied the resistance movement in my own country in the Netherlands. So during the Second World War, I think most listeners will know that the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans, by the Nazis, and a huge percentage of our fellow Jewish country men and women were taken away.
It was one of the highest percentages in Europe, around 80%. And I'm sad to say that most people didn't do much about it, and most people did like the Nazis, and most people knew other Jewish people, or at least were okay with them, maybe had them as colleagues or even as friends, but they were like, what can I do? They felt like, I'm just a bystander. I don't have the power here, and we don't even know. We don't know, right? What's going to happen. So yeah, most people didn't do much. And then for this book, I thought, okay, but then what made some people different? What was the psychology of the resistance here? And I read all the books I could find about it, really dug into the research literature and was quite surprised how little these researchers found out. The one big book about this is called The Altruistic Personality Project by Samuel P. Oliner.
They did hundreds and hundreds of interviews with resistance heroes who really risked their own lives to save persecuted Jews, to give them a hiding place. And these were rich people, poor people, young, old professors, people who had hardly gotten any formal education at all. It was really a cross section of the population. And then other researchers started looking again at the dataset, and at some point they realized, Hey, wait a minute. There actually is something here. There's one factor that seems to be very predictive, because in 96% of all cases when this happened, people joined the resistance. And as you said, it was the mere matter of being asked. People were asked to join, then they did it. And this also explains why resistance was a little bit like a virus. It spread locally, it spread from person to person. It wasn't evenly spread out over the population.
There were cities and villages where there was hardly any resistance at all, where all the Jews were taken away and murdered. But then there were pockets of resistance in the country or places where no one was taken away, or very few people were taken away. And in the book I write about the little village of New Yolanda, where at some point a third of all the inhabitants had Jewish people in their cellars and in their farms and whatever. And even at this reasoning, we just got to be sure that everyone has at least one person in hiding, because then no one can betray us. That was the idea. Brilliant. So that was a big, big epiphany for me. And this is also what we had in mind when we started the School for Moral Ambition. This organization, which I co-founded, was Can we build a machine that just asked a huge amount of people to devote their lives and careers to some of the most pressing causes of our time? Because we don't need to find heroes, we need to make heroes. We need to ask people to become a hero. It's as simple as that.
ELISE:
I think it's such an incredible insight. And again, I think most of us are used to being asked for money, particularly from politicians. I'm like, please stop this spam text.
RUTGER:
Well, that's America.
ELISE:
Yeah, that's America. Very rarely are you asked to serve in a way that would feel more meaningful. And so I think that call to all of us is ask each other and go to your school. Who is this for? Is this for recent grads?
RUTGER:
No, this is for everyone. This is for everyone. So our first program is our Moral Ambition Circle program. These are groups of five to eight people who find these questions really important and who struggle with them. We're like, okay, I see what's happening in the world. I want to do something, but I just don't know what. And then our advice is first to find like-minded people, because you don't answer these questions on your own, but you do it together. It becomes so much easier if you're part of a small group of ambitious idealist who are like, yes, let's try and find our path together. So we've developed a curriculum for that, a program, and people can join the community. We now have more than 13,000 members for more than a hundred countries and many, many hundreds of moral ambition circles across the world. Then on top of that, we also have our moral ambition fellowships, and those are really for the people who are ready to quit their jobs.
So we basically pay people to quit their job, and then we're playing as their gand davs. So we've got our researchers, they've done a lot of research into the question, what are some of the most pressing issues we face right now? And then we recruit these small fellowship teams of around 12 people who quit their job and then take on this, cause this program lasts for seven months. And then after that, people really launched their careers in this new field, basically. So for example, in Europe, we've launched a fellowship that is devoted to fighting big tobacco, which is the sovereign of our time. It's the most evil legal industry and existence. And the fight against it is incredibly neglected. A lot of educated progressives think that it's already over. I live in Brooklyn currently, and I think most of my fellow, Brooklyn, is that a word? Brooklynites?
ELISE:
Brooklynites.
RUTGER:
As you can see, I'm very new to the place, not a real one. I got fake Brooklynite. But anyway, hardly anyone smokes here, right? But that's because this industry deliberately targets communities that are more marginalized, more poorer, and the problem is growing, actually globally, the number of smokers is going up, and it's the single largest preventable cause of disease, 8 million deaths every year. So that's orders of magnitude bigger than climate change, just in terms of deaths. And again, very few people are working on it. So we had so much fun recruiting, quite accomplished lobbyists, corporate lawyers, marketeers. Actually, one of our marketeers used to work for Big Tobacco for a little bit, which he's now very ashamed of. But yeah, these people are now hardcore fighters against this terrible industry. We want to keep doing that for many, many years to build out these ecosystems.
Build the right coalitions because as we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, it takes a lot of perseverance and often our friends on the right have been much better at that than we have. So taking down Roe v. Wade was a 30 year long project, maybe even longer. The Alliance for Defending Freedom started in the early nineties. I think they built out a huge network of 5,000 lawyers launched dozens of lawsuits, have many failures and lost many times as well. But they just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And I think that's what it takes. If we really want to have, for example, a billionaires tax or a more reasonable system of taxation, that's not going to be a six month project or even something we fix in one election cycle. What we need to do is to build out a huge ecosystem again, like our friends on the right, they had the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, all these institutions that were created in the seventies and the eighties that planned the corporate takeover of America.
And I think that's what it takes. That's what I see when I study the abolitionist movement or the Women's Rights Movement. It's that incredible amount of perseverance, knowing that you are just a small part of a movement that's much bigger than you. So of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls in 1848, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote across the country in 1920, and she was sick on a day of elections. So anyway, that's what the School for Moral Ambition wants to be. We want to recruit people who want to be part of those kind of decade long fights to make this world a much better place.
ELISE:
Well, you make it all sound very compelling and very inspiring, and the proceeds from the book go to the school. So everyone needs to get the book at a bare minimum. And thank you for your service.
RUTGER:
Well, thank you for having me. This was fun. And again, anyone listening to this, you're super welcoming in our Moral Ambition community.
ELISE:
I love Rutger's mind, his sense of humor and his work. And I hope for some of you who are listening who are maybe wondering about an next chapter or feeling like you have endless skills that you'd like to deploy in the world, maybe there's something to do in his domain. Just some final words from his book. He says, in any case, don't let yourself be fueled by a sense of guilt or shame, but rather by enthusiasm and a lust for life. Be ambitious, not perfect. There comes a point when you're fine just the way you are.
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