This is a Global Player Original Podcast. Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time than I would ever get on the radio with interesting people. Although this week, Rook at Bregman, that might be something of a of an understatement. Um there is so much to get through. It it strikes me as we
as we sit down together, that some people listening to this will know you and your work inside out. Some people may not know you at all. And some people will actually know some of the things that you've done, although they may not immediately know your name. So author and historian or public in intellectual s seem Slightly inadequate descriptions. How how how particularly latterly with the with the launch of your latest project, which we'll get to and sits
very much within and alongside your your new book well your new paperback Moral Ambition. How how how do you think of yourself? What how what is your sort of I guess internal job description? I guess as a public historian who recently quit his job, um, I think that's it. Uh okay. Well I s I spent about a decade um in
You know, the pundit industry. Yeah. Writing articles, writing books. I wrote three books today. The first one was Utopia for Realists, which was a book about how we can make utopian ideas reality and how that has happened in the past. The second one was Humankind, which was an incredibly hubristic book. Uh you know, spanning archaeology, anthropology, psychology, history, in which I made the outrageous argument that people on average are quite nice, pretty decent at least.
um basically advocating for a more hopeful view of human nature. And then I had my early midlife crisis. I was like, what the hell am I doing? I looked in the mirror, I didn't really like what I saw and I was like, okay, I'm I'm I'm gonna need to write a self help book that will make my own life more difficult. Um I've I've had experienced this before.
Y you know when I had my big veggie awakening, this was in twenty seventeen, I read Yuval Noah Harari, uh and he had this book Sapiens, some some well have read it. Um and th that book has like no moral judgments at all. And then he talks about factory farming and it's like, oh my God, this is like the worst moral atrocity that humans have ever committed.
And I was like, Okay, I need to write about this as soon as possible because I know how weak I am because but if I write about it in public then I can't go back. So that's also what I've tried to do with moral ambition is like if I just make a book about it, then I will force myself to change my own life. And so that's what I've had to live through for the past two years. uh co founding an organization, you know, moving to New York to build the US chapter and that's it.
In everything that you've done in the public space. A sort of pursuit of betterness. Yeah. And the obsession with um, small groups of thoughtful committed citizens, as Margaret Mead said in her famous quote, um, who changed the world. Um so I've always been obsessed with those people on all sides of the political spectrum. So whether we're talking about the Bolsheviks or the abolitionists or the suffragettes or uh the PayPal mafia, you know, the group around Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
I I have always had that obsession of how do utopian ideas become reality? How did we do it in the past and how can we do it again? When when when do you remember its first stirrings? Yeah, that's a good point. Not always, obviously. I was born in nineteen eighty eight, uh shortly before the fall of the Berlin War. Don't mean to imply any causality there, but that would be hubristic. I I I grew up in the nineties
uh went to high school in Zootemir in the Netherlands which is arguably one of the ugliest places in the world. It's a new town I think, isn't it? Yeah. Recently built. Yeah, it's basically one of the You could see it as one of the suburbs of The Hague. It's a very tiny country obviously. If you drive for two hours in any direction, you're either in Belgium, Germany, or the North Sea. Um but I grew up there, had a
Happy childhood. Uh my mum is a teacher for kids with special needs. She recently retired. My dad is a minister, a Protestant minister. And um I wasn't very ambitious to be honest. I um I liked school, I thought history was interesting, but most of all I liked computer games. And reading fantasy books. So it was only later when I was a student that I developed this. What's the word in English? Ins insatiable is that the words curiosity where I just I think it was my second or my third year.
when I just started reading everything I could get my hands on. But but the academic impulse would be to understand everything you could about small groups of people who changed the world and even perhaps write books about small groups of people who changed the world. Yeah. It it it's not the obvious course of action to become Committed to the idea of of forming or joining small groups of people that change the world.
spent quite some time studying the abolitionists in particular um and reading their memoirs, reading the bi biographies about them. Honestly, it made me a bit jealous. I was like, wow, this is what a great life really looks like. Thomas Clarkson, one of the greatest. British abolitionist. He was twenty five when he participated in an essay contest at the University of Cambridge.
And the students had to answer the question, is slavery okay? Like is it morally justifiable? He had never thought about the question. The guy wanted to make a career for himself in the Church of England. Then he wrote the essay, he won first prize, it was quite brilliant, and then there's this famous moment when he's near the village of Waits Mill on his horse and he keeps thinking about what he has written and he's like, But if this is true
Then someone ought to do something about it. And suddenly he could see himself as the world historical hero taking on the slave trade. And the point is that he did it. It w it wasn't just virtue signaling, it was real virtue. And um just reading about people like that made me feel like, wow We've got only one life on this planet and um Yeah, why not try and follow in their footsteps? And you pepper your work with with with these um
They're not allegories, they're real life stories, but they serve an allegorical purpose, as uh in the sense that I I d that that could be a a template which I follow. I could become similarly significant. Yeah. Um Just just address early on, if you can, the
y rôl yr ego yn ei wneud. Rwy'n meddwl am ymwneud â'r reïncarnation, ac mae pawb sydd wedi'i wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i
or Julius Caesar. They were never some anonymous foot soldier in the Roman army or some, you know, some illiterate toothless crone in the middle of in the middle of nowhere. So so there's a there's an element of ego in wanting to be at the vanguard at the forefront of of of this sort of change, rather than just one p perhaps waiting for somebody else to take up arms and then joining in enthusiastically. And you know what? I think that is okay. Yeah. When you read Clarkson's memoirs
Part of here thinks like, Okay, well this guy is quite full of himself. I mean he's he's humble bragging so much. He's like, Oh, it was like I was following God's path and it was such an honor to be able to do what God wanted me to do I'm like, come on, man, you you you you think you're pretty awesome. And you are, but um Wha what was driving him and I think a lot of, you know, the great idealists in world history was a mixture of genuine idealism and
Um vanity. And I think that's okay. If I think about myself when I was twenty-five, if I think about myself today, sure. Um, it is also vanity. I I I enjoy trying to make a name for myself. I enjoy writing a book like this, having my name on the cover.
Um, I mean any author will probably agree with me that that moment when you receive the the book from the publisher is like, you know, a big vanity moment that you enjoy a lot. But it's a means to an end for you. Or at least I mean not to sort of be too Reverential. No, no. I I'm just a motivational pluralist, if that's a word. I think that very often in history the right things happen for the wrong reasons or at least
all this this ambition, this vanity, what we gotta try and do is to channel it in the right direction. Mm. That's that's the purpose. And that's what happened in Britain in the late eighteenth century, is that suddenly For a lot of bright young people, becoming an abolitionist was the coolest move you could make.
And um similar thing happened in the early twentieth century, in the Progressive Era in the US, after the Gilded Age, that was so corrupt, so decadent, you know, with the robber barons, much like the tech barons of today. You know, you had the Vanderbilt's the Carnegies accumulating massive amounts of money. And then you had a bottom up revolution of ordinary people joining in unions that was incredibly important. But you also had a top down revolution of
elites of people like Theodore Roosevelt, who had studied at Harvard and who really disliked his peers because they were so lazy. And you know, Roosevelt was like, I'm gonna live a great life. That's what I want to do. And a great life is about making the world a better place. cause envy as well. I mean it could be uh raison detra envy. It's it's it's that driving force that some people feel within them that
other people might look at and think, God, I wish I felt that strongly about something. And part of your work is to teach people how they can feel that strongly about something. And also to make them jealous indeed. And we've had so much fun with this, James, since we started this. So um Peter Thiel, uh the venture capitalist, uh who's big news in this country at the moment because of Palantir who um
Uh many people feel are far too heavily involved in some areas of government, notably data collection. Or at least that freedom and democracy are not compatible. and that democracy needs to go. He bankrolled the rise of JD Vance. He's a big fan of people like Curtis Jarvin who also wants to turn the US into a monarchy. I mean, these people are dead serious and they're not joking. Uh but Peter Thiel has some really great insights in um how the world actually works.
Um he's a big fan of Rene Girard, the French philosopher. And Rene Girard had this this insight that a mimetic desire is so important in human relations. A lot of people don't know what they should want in life. So what they do is they look at others. This is why so many billionaires want a yacht and a bigger yacht. If you think about it, it's absolutely ridiculous. Like What's the point? What am I supposed to do with all my money? Oh I need a model to follow. They pursue the most shallow
goals in life. But that is just mimetic desire at work here. So we can use that insight and try and make other things prestigious and desirable. So we've what we've been doing, for example, we started in Amsterdam two years ago with my organization, the School for Moral Ambition. We had billboards in the business district, uh a little bit like the city of of Amsterdam that said, If you are so smart, then why do you work here?
Um we basically are coming here to liberate you from your most th boring jobs. Um and that has been so Extraordinarily effective. Uh, if you say to you know one of these investment bankers, oh, you're so greedy or a bad person, backfires. It doesn't work. if you say, Oh, wow, you're you're pretty smart, you're quite talented, and this is what you do? Like, wow okay. Well I'm gonna talk to someone over there who's, you know,
making AI safe, fighting global poverty, preventing the next pandemic. Um it's effective because well, for obvious reasons, but it strikes me immediately that it it I in Bonfire of the Vanities, T Tom Wolfe writing about financial uh titans and they describe themselves as masters of the universe. Whereas whereas you're pointing out, you're masters of very small and rather silly universe. Yeah, you're masters of bullshit. You could actually be masters of history. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's um
a seductive invitation that you make, but it's not just yachts that you get as a reward for epic wealth. You also get security, you also get Okay, so at the very end of the book in the epilogue, and maybe this is a spoiler, but here I go. Um I do have some things to say about You know, obviously you can take things too far. Thomas Clark's in the abolitionist we talked about.
uh spent seven years of his life travelling thirty five thousand miles across the United Kingdom, spreading his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. And then he had a total burnout. I don't think burnout was a phrase there, but you use it very high in the book. Nervous breakdown, I think that's what it was. Exactly. Um and he couldn't walk the stairs anymore, he could hardly finish a sentence. Um and I read that in his memoirs and I was like, Thomas
You should have remembered your breathing exercises, right? Surely you can take things too far. Now, why do I only say that at the end of the book? Because I think a lot of people honestly deserve a kick in the butt. Um just like I do. deserve that, in my view. Um but in the end I am A pluralist, life is about many things. I'm not saying morality should take over everything. I've got Two kids, I've got my hobbies. There's more to life.
But morality does play an important role in a rich, well rounded life. How how lazy is it of me now to as as we sort of turn the clock back to your earlier life, how how how lazy is it of me to raise the concept of the Protestant work ethic? Given what your father did for a living. Um it's not lazy. I I I think it's in my case just not very accurate though. Um Some people when they watch my uh Davos clip from twenty nineteen when I had the honour of saying some nasty things about
billionaires on that stage. Though this was when you when you pointed out the fifteen hundred private jets upon which people had travelled to Davos while saying not a single word about tax avoidance. So and it was an incredibly powerful Piece of rhetoric that reached parts very few contributors to Davos have ever reached before or since every year when Davos happens it goes viral again.
thing that came out of the conference. They haven't been inviting me, uh inviting me again for some reason. But um a lot of people watch that and said, Okay, it makes sense. I mean he's the son of a Protestant preacher like that. But I'm always like, Well, you gotta meet my mom. Sure. Yeah. And um I I wasn't brought up in that kind of faith. So my dad is Someone who specializes in poetry. He has a PhD uh on uh Nijhoff, which is uh an important and famous Dutch poet. Um
And I I had these struggles with him, um, where I was like when I was sixteen, seventeen and he said, Dad, come on, what do you believe? Like Give me some dogmas. Like what is true? Did Jesus die on the cross for our sins? Yes or no? Come on.
And he would be like, Get off uh bugger off. Like that's a vulgar question. That's not what religion is about. Uh so tha that's the struggle we had. Uh but yeah, th the the work ethic And uh also, you know, the Dutch directness on steroids, that's what I got for my mom. Tell me more about your mum. How significant was her work? Because there's a selflessness to working with. Children with special needs. I think well they can be. So are you conscious of that?'Cause we only have the Yeah.
We only have the childhood we have. We've got no idea what makes our childhood different from other people's. We don't even know that our childhood is different from other people's until we get a little bit older. How how how present were her charges and her pupils in your life as a young, very young child? Very present. Right. Um so I think we all have our role models. We all have people that we want to make proud. And for me, my mum is probably
The most important person is the same thing. That when people say they believe something that they don't act on that belief. So, um when it comes to her personal life choices, he was always very quick, right? She I I uh black Pete in the Netherlands, which is a pretty horrible racist tradition, but that for a very long time wasn't at least A lot of people.
weren't that aware of it. Yeah. And uh it was highly controversial when activists first started advocating against it. And I remember that my mum was like, Oh yeah, yeah, of course. Oh stupid that I didn't see it. Okay, well. Let's get rid of that. And um I've always admired that
that attitude. And um indeed, wanting to make her proud by actually practising what I preach is honestly it's a big part of what's driving me. W it's a funny one though, isn't it? Because it I I think about this a lot when people are told that the thing that they've always been doing is wrong. It's the defensiveness is understandable.
Uh e even sometimes quite a violent defensiveness because you're taking it personally. You're you're being told that you and your parents and your traditions are racist or are wrong and you know that you're not a racist person. So how can this thing that you've done? Yeah. Maybe that's the thing. I I think my mum has taught me that there's a kind of joy actually when people talk to you and say like, Hey, you should do better. Because it's also an opportunity for moral progress.
And like the way she has always responded to is like, Oh, interesting. Tell me more. Like tell me tell me how I'm failing. Tell me how I'm messing up because I wanna do better. Um and th there's also I don't know, a a lightness there, a j a joy that I've That I've always really loved. Well why do you think she's like that? What what about her life or background has created that appetite
I think it's uh it's a family thing. So I'm I'm Breckman, my mother is a Velthouse and um like my dad always says, you know, when I Whenever I, you know, have fights with people, whether it's the BBC or with Davos billionaires, she's like, Oh, that's that's your mum's genes at work again. Um that's the Velty's part of the family. So I've got quite a few people
on that side of the family who, you know, um have spoken truth to power, um and enjoying the thing. But the s but the self improvement element of it more than the truth to power element of it. I like to think so, yeah. I have to think about it for a bit longer. I think that's true. Um But I I have absolutely no clue about whether that's an idea or whether that is something genetic or whatever. But it is also uh it it is also the productivity drive, that's definitely it. So
Both my mom and I we just cannot stand still. Like if there's like five minutes Like for me, w waiting for a train without access to information or thinking productive thoughts or whatever, like I find that really difficult. Which is obviously also a danger to thing. But you do your breathing exercises as well. Um that partly explains that that learning that about your mother partly explains what can sometimes seem like uh
a d an excess of idealism or optimism. If if that is one of your earliest influences, then your belief in the fundamental decency of everybody, or at least of most people, becomes a lot easier to understand. If you've been raised in Very different. And that was really w only when I was twenty five, twenty six. I remember talking to a therapist that was going through some difficult things for the first time in my life and he said
Welcome to life, Rutger. This is what most people, you know, have had to go through from a much earlier age. And indeed that is true. Like uh what is it called? Attachment theory in parenting. Yeah. Yeah. I had the pure luck of being really well attached. And one of the side effects of that is that you have A lot of faith in humans, in human nature, and it also in your ability to make change.
Um so yes, that has been one of the great privileges of my life. And and there's a there's a sort of a d a a small misunderstanding about s some of d what you worked on, particularly in the first book. It's not essentially saying Everybody is decent. It's saying societies or governments should treat everybody as if they are. Yeah. Or the classic anarchist view of human nature, which If we would sum uh sum it up in one sentence, it would be most people are pretty decent, but power corrupt.
And that's basically also my read of history. Mm-hmm. So if we go back all the way to the age of the nomadic hunter gatherers, there's so much evidence now, both from anthropology and from archaeology. that warfare is a recent invention, that it didn't exist for most of human history, or barely existed at least.
that these societies were way more egalitarian, uh egalitarian economically, but also between the sexes, and that the great mistake, as Jean Jacques Rousseau famously argued in in what is it, the eighteenth century. Um was that Some day. People settled down and said, You know, this piece of land, that's mine. And Rousseau famously wrote, Like, that's the moment when we should all have said, like, Don't believe this idiot, right?
Uh, that was the agricultural re revolution, the Neolithic Revolution. And uh again, h there's consensus now that that made life much worse for the vast majority of people, up until only a very short time ago, with uh the Industrial Rev Revolution, obviously, and the extraordinary growth of wealth that
slowly started to trickle down since the late nineteenth century. Uh also gave us horrific wars, obviously. Um so uh the jury is still out on whether the Industrial Revolution was a good thing. Uh but that is basically how I look at the whole shape of human history. Deep down, humans are fundamentally cooperative. They're not saints, not at all. They they definitely have a dark side as well. But You know, on balance they're
they're cooperative, relatively friendly cre creatures. This is what evolutionary psychologists call the survival of the friendliest. Like for for millennia it was the friendliest among us who had the most kids, who had the biggest chance of passing on their genes. to the next generation. It's just that power corrupts. Power is an incredibly dangerous drug.
And we can see that on steroids in our world today. And yet you you you have no problem holding on to your what I'm gonna call faith really in in the thing that you've just described.'Cause this is a dark age that we're in at the moment. It is, yeah. It really is. Um and it's a challenge to your world view. Absolutely, yeah. It is also
Almost refreshing that m my ideology and I consider myself an old fashioned European social democrat, that that is becoming the new resistance. Because that is also making it much clearer what it actually is. Um, people often use the language of freedom of speech, freedom of association, human rights. Whatever.
hearing what they're actually saying, what that actually means. A lot of people think that liberalism is a rather shallow ideology that is j just about letting people do whatever the hell they want, consume whatever the hell they want. You have a government that maybe gives a little bit of subsidies here. and a few taxes there, but that's about it. No.
Liberalism is an extremely demanding ideology. It was one of the greatest triumphs of human civilization that after the abolitionists and the women's rights campaigners and the civil rights campaigners
we finally achieved something that could be called an actual democracy with human rights. It was still a promise. It was still a promise. But we created institutions like the criminal uh court, you know, in in in The Hague, the In International Criminal Court, with an incredible promise that if there would be Criminals, autocrats, perpetrators of the worst atrocities that anywhere in the world, if that would happen, we would bring them to justice. Now, how utopian is that?
But look at where we are right now. I mean the chief prosecutor of the ICC is under American sanctions right now. He cannot even book a holiday on Expedia, you know, he cannot even access his bank account. That's That's where we've ended up now. And As I said, it is becoming so much clearer right now that this ideology that we took for granted is is something worth fighting for. So you're disc yeah, that so it's not just
that people didn't realize that it was worth fighting for, it was that they didn't realise that they would perhaps have to fight for it. Yeah. Currently there are people fighting for it. They're dying in the trenches in Ukraine. For that exact ideology. Um when you currently ask Europeans, um, would you be willing to die for your country, I think the numbers are very, very low. Like the vast majority of people say, No. Uh well, um
Could be an increasingly relevant question. And what what are you willing to die for? Is is is is probably a better question. Or at least to to fight for, to make sacrifices for, to to really, you know, g give it everything you have. And um Yeah, that I think that is an increasingly relevant question because of two reasons, because of the global rise of what I've
really think is neo fascism, fascism in in a twenty first century form. Um but also the extraordinary technological revolution that we're going through with AI. Uh yeah, and you can't separate the two. In fact this week they've probably seem closer together than than than than ever before. On that question of fascism, I'm I'm comfortable with that language as well, although it's been an interesting journey to To reach that place of comfort.
When when you were growing up, or or w l let's say when you were maturing intellectually, once you decided upon the course that you wanted to follow and you were you were working in this in this sphere of of of of public thinking or punditry or whatever you prefer to call it. Did you always understand'cause the the Netherlands was different from the United Kingdom during the crucial period here. Um did you always understand that fascism was something that could happen?
To us. Yeah. Both both geographically and historically. Yeah. So as a young boy, I was obsessed with the Second World War. I read everything I could find about it, and mainly the question of resistance was the one that I couldn't get out of my head. Why did so few Dutch people resist the Nazis? There was the resistance myth in the fifties, in the sixties, you know, that has now been thoroughly demolished by historians. Um no, most people didn't do anything. Most people were scared.
They didn't like the Nazis. The Nazis were unpopular, but yeah, to really risk your life to hide persecuted Jews, most people didn't do that. But there were exceptions. So for this book I looked at what made these people different? I I wanted to find that out. Um It turns out there's a whole literature about that question. What makes a resistance hero? I used to think that there must be something like the psychology of resistance. Surely
S these people were different in some ways. Maybe they were somewhere on the spectrum or not. Maybe they were rich, poor, young, old, men, women, left wing, right wing. Orthodox Christians, secular atheists, may there must be some variable that explains why they did what they did. Researchers did hundreds of interviews, um, you know, put all the information in databases and could find couldn't find anything. There's one big book about this called the U Altruistic Personality Project.
Done by two professors, Samuel and Paul Oliner in the States. And if you if you read that book you can go to the appendix and you see all the numbers and again and again you see the same letters. It's it's N S, N S, N S, N S, meaning statistically non significant. Uh it's a very disappointing literature because they can't find much. Yeah, yeah. But but you know, James, y what was so interesting is that
Um years later, another group of researchers looked at the same data again and and they saw, hey, wait a minute, we've overlooked something. There is actually one variable that seems to explain this really well. In ninety six percent of all cases when This variable was in play, people joined the resistance. And this was the mere matter of being asked. If people were asked to do the right thing, they almost always said yes.
Now obviously there was some selection bias here. You're not gonna ask uh you know um an an an NSB, someone who b betrayed the country um um person to join the resistance. But still it is striking that almost everyone said yes. And very often resistance started in a small way. perhaps you are you're asked to distribute an illegal newspaper.
But before you know it, you know, you're hiding persecuted people. And um that also explains why this resistance wasn't evenly spread out over the country, but it was more like a virus. You know, you had pockets of resistance and it was very often local super spreaders, very often um ministers in the church or teachers, people who have some kind of community.
um who played a leading role, who basically played the role of the super spedders who were just asking a lot of people. And and in the book I I profile one of those super spratters who just would not take no for an answer. Um and um that has really Uh it's it's such a simple insight but it made a massive impact on me because I was like okay, so this is what it takes.
And and and that I mean that tr ties back to my earlier question about the difference between waiting for somebody else to step up and falling into line behind them and actually taking it upon yourself to to to be the person that that that that raises the standard. Raises the flag or sounds the you know, so sounds the bugle. But so so you so you were conscious,'cause that work that you did there
And possibly I don't know if work's been done on identifying unifying characteristics of actual super spreaders. It sounds like that might be e it might be easier to find something that they have in common than it would be for everybody who joined the I love that question. I have my theory I have my theories on it, but I haven't seen Rigorous academic scientific work on it.
My theory would be that many of them are somewhere on the spectrum. So like a Greta Thunberg type tunnel commitment to doing better. Like I have no choice. Of course I have to do this. It's not a coincidence that many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are also uh, you know, able to ignore the rules of You know? I don't know. If if moral ambition is about anything, it is about recognizing that you are an agent, that society has a lot of ideas about what you should do with your life.
uh about the kind of journalists you're supposed to be, about the kind of consultant you're supposed to be. Um and that You can wake up to the fact and you can actually shred the script and go on your own journey. Aaron Ross Powell Well b uh we probably should mention at this point that the subtext of of of the latest book, Moral Ambition, which is out in paperback this week, is is how to find your purpose.
And and that's why you described it earlier as a self help book. Where do you derive your confidence that people want this kind of help? Oh, I don't think everyone wants it. No, I know, but enough to sell books, enough to build your school, enough to Yeah, yeah. But w where where does that come from? I think there are quite a few people walking around with a hole in their sole.
Yeah. Um, with this realization that indeed they have one life on this planet and they drag themselves to the office every day, they're sitting in their cubicle wondering, is this it? Uh yeah No, there is more. The other path I I would be the last one to say that it is an easy path. But we found it incredible to bring these people together. So we now have twenty two thousand members from more than a hundred and forty countries.
coming together in our so called moral ambition circles, groups of six to eight people, it's all for free. People can just come together and and ask these questions. Um and Yeah, that's been incredible to see. We've we also have so called more ambition fellowships and we get thousands of applications of of of people who are ready to quit their job and and want to jump ship. So it's the antidote to what's the point.
Isn't it? I mean it's the antidote to I've got this feeling, but what's the point? Like what difference can I make? I suppose most obviously in in in environmental matters. What's the point of me doing anything when there's a bloody great oil rig over there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm a guy who comes from the political left, so I've attended so many debates in Amsterdam or elsewhere.
where we would talk about the systemic issues, you know, whether it's big oil or big tobacco or capitalism or whatever. And so often the evening would end and it was like, okay, we d we have no solution but it's good that we talked about it. And I was at some point I was like, no, it's like it's not good that we like nothing has changed. Awareness is completely overrated. And at some point
You know, this this all this talk about systemic change can also become a an excuse, an excuse to to to do something yourself, right? I call that um the left-wing excuse. Um there's also a right-wing excuse, you know, all those people who say like You know, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and you can do anything just if you put your mind to it. People born on born on third base who think they've scored a triple. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But
Uh yeah, I became really fed up with that with that attitude. If I look at how systemic change happens in history. Again and again, it does start with small groups of people who recognize their age agency. In the seventeen eighties, you could put, you know, the all the abolitionists in Britain probably in this room. I mean it would be Maybe a little bit crowded. It was a very small room.
And they launched the greatest movement for human rights that this world has ever seen. It was the first time in all of human history that hundreds of thousands of people started caring about the rights of others. And and what what greater purpose is there than the advancement of the species? Yeah. Ultimately. Yeah. Um I I I mean we're jumping around a lot as I knew we would, but I think I think people uh uh will be able to follow various threads and there's a couple of things that we should
talk about b b b before um the end of this interview. But I I I wanna rewind again to your childhood if I can, just as a as an attempt to understand what made you the person that people are now learning more about or learning about for the first time. And Uh uh you mentioned computer games and and fantasy books. When when when when did you feel and I'm gonna use pompous language, for which I'll apologize, but but when did you feel the the the the call of destiny, let's say?
I think that was actually only a few years ago after I had published humankind that book had done really well. So so this is the midlife crisis when you got cross with people who were reading your book on beaches in Barley. Right. Um who said like look Um this is great what you've achieved.
But you've you've climbed let's call it the first ladder of success, but up until now it was standing against the wrong wall. Now you can use your platform to do something way more impactful. And that just had a big impact on me. I think before that, you know, when I was Twenty three, twenty four. I just wanted to become an author. That was my dream. I wanted to live in the world of ideas. And to be able to write words and make money, that seemed like
pure magic to me. And it still does. I I still considered it consider it an extraordinary privilege. I mean, I'm not a plumber. I'm I'm I don't make anything useful with my my hands. So that that is possible uh is is extraordinary and um that was basically my mission. Um
And um And you were quite precocious. You moved very quickly through the sort of journalistic world. Yeah, yeah. Well I didn't abide by the rules. So initially the plan was to do a PhD It's just that I was at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and I I looked at a list of twenty PhDs that have been published, dissertations that have been published. in the last few years or in the few years before that. And I found all of them so boring games. Uh I mean, they were about such specialist
seemingly insignificant things. And I was like, I don't want to spend four years doing any of that. So so just boring or pointless as well. Was there w were there stirrings there of this being W to all talk and no action.
Well I'm hopefully a little bit less arrogant than I was back then. Now I I recognize that l you know, a lot of my books they rely on the works of incredible specialists. You know, what could be a sentence in my book is like four years of work for someone else. Yeah. So I should recognize that.
But at the same time I was so impatient. I wanted to talk about and write about the big questions of history. Why are we here? Why have we conquered the globe? I've always tried to use history as my form of theology. Well, just let me stop you there, because when I talked about Destiny, that was also what I meant. Because when did the... video game playing fantasy fiction writ reading teenager start thinking those thoughts. When when did your when did your private
Uh universe start expanding to the point where you wanted to become a writer. So we've missed those stages. Yeah. So my very first essay was when I was sixteen. Right. I was um I remembered very well. I had like a Pentium four computer and I'd never written anything before. I still have it on my computer. It's very funny to read. Um and I had come to a conclusion that I thought was a massive
Massive philosophical breakthrough. Um, I had come to the conclusion that free will cannot possibly exist. Um, I just thought about it logically. Um, we humans we are atoms, we are molecules, we are the products of causes like our genes, we didn't choose our parents, we didn't choose our passport, our environment. The whole notion of me choosing this or that makes no sense whatsoever. And it seemed so obvious to me, and the implications seemed enormous.
The religious implications, like heaven and hell, uh God punishing us for what he has made, it it made no sense to me at all. But also the way our economy worked. Like why do we reward some people for being really brilliant? They didn't choose to be brilliant.
that we say, Oh, they had such willpower. They didn't choose to have such willpower, right? The whole thing And then I realized that actually, um, this has been argued many times before, you know, by both philosophers and neurologists and brain scientists. And I was like, Why are all these people such bloody cowards that they don't, you know?
take the conclusions to a to its logical m endpoint, right? You have people like, I don't know, at the time Sam Harris writing about free will, and people like um What's his name? Uh Robert Sapolsky, who does take it a bit further. But I was like th come on, the the societal implications of this are massive. So for weeks and months I walked around in a days and I was like Everything should change. And that was the that was I I think the beginning of of that journey. Um where uh I thought
If if what happens if we actually take our ideas seriously? Right. What if we act upon them? But that didn't come completely. out of the blue. There must have been Oh yeah, that that was all part of a religious struggle, obviously. I mean Oh you say all gr yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, yeah. So sorry, for me it's so obvious in the sense that uh you grow up in a li religious family. I was always really proud to be the son of the of the preacher, you know, sitting, you know, in one of the
uh front rows, uh looking at my friends whose dads, you know, worked in offices. And I was like, my dad is a preacher, you know, he speaks truth. uh every Sunday and y your dads have to listen to him. Um so I I alwa I was always proud. Uh and I I really tried to become a Christian. It's just that when I was sixteen and seventeen I had this desire to convince others.
of the truth of Christianity. So I was like, I I g I gotta prepare myself for these debates. So I started reading everything I could about atheism, about intelligent design, about agnosticism. I I read Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, I read everything I could find about the e theory of evolution. And I also made a promise to myself that I wanted to be intellectually honest, because I was surrounded by by kids in church who
To me, uh uh to be blunt about it, many of them seemed cowards. Many of them seemed to shy away from the difficult questions because they were worried, uh uh it seemed to me at least, that the answer might be Yeah, God does not exist and you do not have a soul and there is no purpose to the universe. It's just us here on a lonely planet. Uh a beautiful planet, but a lonely planet in a black cosmos. Um
And um yeah, I think i I was around eighteen years old when I took a shower one day. That those are the moments when you can think, right? Uh and I realized I didn't believe anymore. Right. And for me that was not some happy moment. It was not like, oh, finally got rid of that. Sure. But it w it was really a sense of
falling out of a story and and a reluctant. If I would be my own therapist then the rest of my career is basically about uh struggling with that fact and and trying to replace God. Yeah. If I were to be a therapist. Not necessarily God, but at least faith. Uh spirituality. Um because life has to be m about more than, you know I don't know. Just the standard stuff. Why? Why does it have to be?
I um I could give you the scientific answer, right? I I I would argue that it's probably part of human nature that we want to be part of something bigger. I think there's a God shaped hole in pretty much each and every one of us. Yes. Um But my ultimate ans answer right now would be agnostic. Like I think reality is bewildering.
Like I've really lost the faith of my my the my the the youthful certainty of my my my atheism I've also lost that. You know, when I was twenty one, twenty two I was super certain like it all doesn't exist. It's all Now I'm I'm just I'm absolutely bewildered by by reality. And I think what what we um what we what we can do is is is to make the best of it and and and to build upon the traditions that have been given
you know, been handed to us by our by our ancestors. Like traditional Christianity doesn't work for me anymore. I can't go back to church. Sure. Uh but I am I I in in many ways, you know, you can take the the the boy out of the church. But Yes, of course. Can you take the church out of the church? And and it provides comfort and succour and and you know, um I I know you Oh yeah. But back to um Clarkson and the need to have that in a life. But it doesn't have to be God shaped.
Harris James, the the form of immortality that I've come to believe in. Um whatever we know about the world, we know that consciousness is real and we know that time is real. We know that this conversation in whatever way or or form Um it happened. So no one can undo that after this conversation is done and gone. Um and I think when I when I read Thomas Clarkson, I know he was a collection of molecules and atoms.
And that, you know, he he's gone. It's it's two centuries ago. But he's been one of the most influential people in my life for the you know, in the past five years. So he still speaks to me and his life is a monument in time. They can never take that away from him. Um now he was obviously a devout Christian, so he thinks he's probably chilling out in heaven somewhere. But like this is my form of immortality to
to try and turn our own lives into eternal pieces of art that maybe will not be admired because we will be forgotten. I mean probably our, you know Uh our great great great grandchildren won't even know our names. Sure. But the footprint will be there. Yeah. Even if they don't know whose foot it was that made it. And and that the the impressions that are made will will sustain. And that's why as as I mentioned earlier, the the the the the role that
stories about people in in in the book are so absolutely crucial because they're simultaneously inspirational and illustrative. This also goes back to the question about ego by the way. So Clarkson initially was driven by vanity. in the end he was buried in an unmarked grave, uh and had become a very humble man. Um so maybe that is also The arc of life that I that I like and that we should aspire to. You know, at the end of the of our life, we the metaphor that I always liked is
Dying is a little bit like a small stream of water flowing into the bigger river, right? Uh the bigger river of consciousness. Um yeah, tha that's a metaphor that I always liked. So tha th at at those moments we can Well it th it's like the double the double thought. Like on the one hand at some points in your life you really have to believe that you are significant, that you can make a difference. But there are also points when it's okay to think, you know what?
I I am, you know, I am much less important than I like to think I am. Let's have a little look then at some of the moments of importance that were thrust upon you rather than necessarily thought and and which will e you know, explain why you enjoy Mae'n ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r
I I mean uh i i for many people it would have been the first time they they became aware of what you looked like. They may have read some of your stuff before but but not not not not many. um, compared to how many would have seen that clip of you railing against the the the billionaires who'd arrived in the private jets. But you'd done that before. This wasn't a new
territory for you, it was just a new platform. Yeah. It was just a new audience. How shocked were you b when you saw that sort of the graph of reaction going almost vertical. Yeah, yeah. Well, I I I thought it would get some response, but the size of it I I had not anticipated that. But it just showed how Angry r and rightfully so, so many people are, uh the extraordinary hypocrisy of these
Well, I mean that's the shallow form of liberalism that we talked about. It's like bono liberalism. It's Richard Branson liberalism. These people who talk about their values, about their feminism, about their idealism. And then at the same time they avoid their taxes on a massive scale. Last week I was in Sweden, um, you know, in a talk show uh and um on that table there that there was also a uh a Swedish billionaire named Petr Stordalen.
who's now in a big fight with uh with the tax authorities because, you know, he's he's doing some massive tax avoidance, you know, trying to get untaxed dividends out of his company. Um and um you know, I ask him like what do you do? Like what what like how do you actually use your wealth, your privilege?
And then th their answer is like, Yeah, yeah, I invest in culture and then w w wha what does that mean? Yeah, he organized a party for his own employees so he could even use it as a write off and then that's culture philanthropic or something like that. I mean the shallowness of these people is astounding, especially if you realize what they could do. Like some of the challenges that we face, whether it's the suffering of animals or the terrible diseases like malaria.
Um, it's not that much that we need uh in order to make a big, big difference against it. You know, Gift Directly, one of my favorite NGOs that gives money directly to the poorest in the world. I if some billionaire would, you know, wake up today and give them, let's say, ten billion dollars, they could lift a whole country, they could l live Malawi out of extreme poverty. Uh we've got the evidence that that would work.
So I don't know, these people drive me nuts and they make me really angry. So that that famous line, It feels like I'm at a fi firefighters conference and no one is allowed to speak about water. Yeah. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit. And and your anger was so obviously authentic that it became infectious. There will be people who have said similar things but with less authenticity. And what I've tried to do during this conversation is work out the root.
of that authenticity and I hope people are seeing and even feeling them but to step into the sort of the modern world, as it were, rather than the world of ideas. Uh uh were you unnerved by the scale of the reaction or did you bloody love it? I really loved it. It gave me hope. anger and outrage perhaps can be channelled in the right direction. And that's exactly what one of our missions is right now. This year we will start
our first tax fairness fellowship. So we're recruiting some of the most radical nerds we can find. People who maybe right now work in finance. You know, maybe they work at a hedge fund. Uh maybe they work as a consultant or a banker or as a brilliant marketeer. But Yeah, we like to see ourselves as the Roman hoots of talent and we're gonna take them out of their BS jobs and they're gonna join a team of Avengers, if you will,
to um to make that global billionaire tax a reality. We're working with people like Gabriel Zuckman, the French economist, whom I admire immensely. Uh you should have him in your show sometime. Um and um Yeah, they they've made a lot of progress. Uh and and we we need they need reinforcements. They need more people to work on that. Because not least because the opposition is enormous, incredibly well organized and better funded than anything on this planet since the Borgers.
And and that must be unnerving sometimes. Frightening sometimes. I mean you make incredibly powerful enemies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we we talked about immortality and turning your life into a monument. that also believes that you need to look past, you know, your own death uh and the boundaries of your own life.
um of the twelve founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one was still alive when it finally happened in eighteen thirty eight, when British slavery uh w slavery was finally abolished across the British Empire. Um Seneca Falls, you know, the famous women's right convention in the United States, eighteen forty eight. It's still, you know, a pilgrimage to the world.
place for many young feminists they go there uh to learn about the sixty eight women who came together there. Well, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote in nineteen twenty. And on that day, on the day of elections She didn't cost her vote because she was too frail and too sick. Um now
that is that is moral ambition, you know? Really um fighting for a cause that's much bigger than you are. And the causes that I talk about in this book, whether it's the fight against factory farming, big tobacco, for global billionaires tax, um I think it's quite likely that at least some of them I won't see them happening during my lifetime. Um, because they're just too big. But if if you can achieve everything during your lifetime you're probably not thinking big enough.
how he felt about the prospect of Putin being toppled and he was always very, very clear that he wasn't by any stretch of the imagination confident that he would be there to see it. Not not just bec or or or Putin's successes, not just because of the peril. the mortal peril his work put him in, but also because of the
But the the the the the nature of time, the slow passage of time. And how awe inspiring is that? Yeah, yeah. When you talk to people like that, you feel so small in a way. You're like wow. That that that I mean the old people used to say things about young people needing a war.
And I used to laugh at them, but they had half a point. Something that was worth fighting for. And and our generation or or or the sort of post boomer generations across the West have have had things so easy that they are both failing properly to process the peril that they're currently in, the f the fascist threat that is now rising up in our countries, in all of our countries. And and also um rising to the challenge of properly fighting it. Which brings us to another of your adventures
in um in the headlines as we could call them. Which which which was when you were invited to give the wreath lecture at the BBC at the end of last year. And I think the day before it was due to be broadcast, someone gave you a heads up. that they'd removed um a a a rather crucial line from that um from that lecture. Would you have a have a go uh slotting that moment into everything else that we have been talking about. Because it was much more than an intellectual insult. It it was almost a
um a a vindication of a lot of the things you argued for. Aaron Ross Powell So being asked to deliver the wreath lectures was really one of the great honors of my life, right? An extraordinary opportunity to you know, to find the connections between all my books, Utopia of Realists, Humankind, Moral Ambition, and to basically try and explain in Uh what is it, two hours, uh twelve thousand words. What I've been trying to do for a decade, how this is all connected.
And the first lecture was really about the misery of today. It was about um you know, the decadence, the corruption of our modern day leaders. Um, I joke at the beginning of that lecture that I learned uh in church as a young boy that every good sermon consists of three parts. You start with misery and then you move on towards salvation and thankfulness. But you start with the bad news. And the bad news was indeed that these big powerful institutions um had succumbed to cowardice.
Uh and the irony was The irony was so immense. Um I I I've I have a literal line in there that about You know, media networks, corporations, universities bending the knee to the new administration, you know, uh being threatened with lawsuits and then, you know Capitulating. Capitulating indeed. And then to have the BBC do exactly that.
Exactly that, you know? To take out a line, in my view, uh a pretty factual line. I I I thought carefully about that line. I don't call Trump the most corrupt president in American history. You could argue that that was Nixon or some of the nineteenth century presidents. But n I call him the most openly corrupt president and I think that I mean that that that is pretty much a fact. Like it's very hard to argue against it at least.
Um there's so much evidence now now that the Trump family is making billions of money openly uh on the presidency. If you just look at their ventures into crypto, you know, the launch of the Trump coin, which is a illegal way to to bribe him basically. Um it's it's very, very clear. But then to have that institution take out that line. And they clearly said to me, and we talked about this on your live show, they clearly said to me that they would not have done it.
if I had given the lectures a month earlier. If if the whole panorama thing wasn't in the news, if the Trump n lawsuit was not there, they would not have done it. So they were completely honest that this was not about journalism, this was not about truth. This it was about them being scared of the lawsuit and of tr of the Trump regime. And it wouldn't have had any impact on the lawsuit. I suppose they were just desperately hoping that if they
didn't upset him even more, he might change his mind about suing them because there was no way it was ever gonna have any impact on the No, no. On the leg on the on that legal case. But it really makes you wonder. what else is going on inside that machine, inside that institution. There's there's The great historian Timothy Snyder, familiar for to you and and for many for many listeners probably as well, he wrote this book on tyranny and w uh he has I think twenty lessons.
for for us right now and the first lesson is do not ba obey in advance. That's that's where it s starts to go wrong. A lot of people think that authoritarianism is about the autocrat giving orders and then us obeying. It's not how it works. It's a lot of people assuming that the autocrats uh don't like this or that and then obeying in advance. And that is more pernicious. That is that is more dangerous than than the direct autocracy. And that's exactly what the BBC did here.
So you had no hesitation in blowing the whistle on that? Look, I think that's a good thing. Um when I don't know, he he lost his mind and then didn't want to air the interview and He told you to go fuck yourself. And it was partially funny, but on the other hand I also wasn't entirely proud of myself of how I conducted myself during that interview. I thought I was a bit full of myself, you know, saying like, Oh I'm speaking truth to power and and
Um also suggesting that he was saying certain things because, you know, he was pay being paid to do it because I think was too shallow of a point. I think Tucker Carlson really believes what he says. Um It's just that if he Like as Norman Chomsky famously said, you know, if you do not believe what you said, you would not be sitting there. They would not be paying you to to sit there. Um
So anyway I was a little bit in doubt, like should I put this out? Should I not? We we decided to do that in the end. I think it was the right decision. But with in this case, like n I had no doubt on my mind whatsoever. I was like, I'm on the right side here. And you idiots. Uh, you cowards. You're not. Did you find out what the chain of command looked like? Do you know did anyone ever confide in you who who had dropped because there would have been I've worked at the BBC.
And I share your concern about the broader malaise that this incident highlights. But there would have been people there who felt and you know there were people there who felt as outraged by it as you did. So two observations. The first one I uh I heard they told me that it was discussed at the top levels within the BBC. But the second observation is that I had actually expected more of a backlash.
Uh before this happened I thought maybe there will be walkouts or something like that within the BBC because if this happened to the journalism institution where I was working, like I worked for a decade at the Correspondent, uh a great investigative journalism platform in the Netherlands. I think the employees would be livid. They would be extremely angry at their their uh emp em employers and editors in chief and and
I'm just kinda wondering like why didn't that happen? Do you have any insight into that? They they invited me to do the wreath lectures and then they take out a sentence against my wishes. I mean that there's a word for that, right? That's censorship. So if you work there at one of the great institutions of journalism of of speech or whatever. W why why was there not more of a backlash?
I I suspect that some people who would have had enough profile to make an obje a public objection really matter, would feel that that the wreath lecture wasn't journalism in in in its purest form, that it served a different purpose, that it spoke to a different medium. Um and I think that there is
a massive problem with what they call balance and and what is actually false equivalence. So I've spoken to BBC people who have tied themselves in extraordinary knots to argue that you I mean we saw it first probably with with with global warming and climate change that you always have to have
the opposite position represented, even if it would involve if Galileo was on the programme. You'd have to have some bloke there insisting that heliocentrism is wrong, you know, just just for balance. So that probably
has invaded the DNA of the corporation that that and it's a terrible, terrible thing, but it but it at least begins to explain, not excuse But but um You know what really struck me in the reporting on Gaza is that when I went to uh NOS dot NL, which is basically the BBC of the Netherlands um or you know the quality newspapers in the Netherlands like NRC and the Volksgrant. Um you know, it wasn't in the beginning obviously, but as soon as like ninety five or ninety eight percent of
genocide experts said, Yes, this is it. We can use the G word. Yeah. Then Dutch mainstream journalists also started to do that. So you could you you would see the the the word genocidal violence in normal reporting. And I think that was just normal journalism. Because like just like with climate, like it's n if ninety seven percent of climate scientists agree like this is this is man made global warming.
Um, like we've got this is a scientific or academic discipline. Like we've we we we've got a lot of brilliant minds who've studied this for a long time and Um maybe there's initially like one or two, you know, dissident experts, but that was not the case anymore. This was like l really the consensus. You had the International Association of Genocide Scholars putting out statements. Like people, this is it. Um
But then with the wreath lectures, like the editors really did not want me to say that. And again, it's an offhand comment, so and I refuse to take it out. But they were like, Can you please take that out? Can you please not, you know, say Gaza and genocide in one sentence? And I was like Wha why? Where does the extreme stress around it where does it cause the thing? Well that that I can answer. And and that is that's our newspapers, which are not like anything you've got in the Netherlands.
I was asked some years ago why Fox News, the equivalent of a Fox News, has never taken hold in this country. Given particularly the shared language and and the answer is the Daily Mail. The answer is we already had it. And that was also a shocking experience. Um To be on the front page of the Daily Mail and to see them outright lying, like absolute lying. So for example, the the clearest lie that they included in that piece was we have contacted Rutgers Brackman for comment. He did not reply.
I was not contacted. I've asked everyone in my team, my publishers, no one received an email, no one received a call. They did not do it. And to just lie about that, I find the brazenness of that and and that doesn't exist in the Netherlands. That's right. Like our our journalism culture of journalism has not degenerated today. But the B but the B B C you see, to to to answer your question, the third
strand, the thirteen of this fork, would now you would have people who did not go into this profession to be well known. That they would be, if not on the front page, then on page five, the the commissioning editor, the producer, the anonymous editor. background journalists, not the front of camera, not not the not the celebrity. Even they would have to pick their children up from school knowing that everybody was pointing at them because they'd been in the Daily Mail today. So that is oddly
just to come fullish circle, that is um uh uh uh uh obeying in advance. And that's something that newspapers have done in this country, which is close to unique actually in my knowledge of of of print media. You've seen it happening increasingly with broadcast media. But um I told you that we would have a lot of ground to cover and we have so so um before we before we blow the whistle.
Um who who who do you have in mind when you're writing? Uh particularly the most recent but when you're writing Moral Ambition, is it a younger version of you? Is it is who who who who is your muse, as it were? So let me be really clear here. Everyone can be morally ambitious. History is so clear there. We've got people of all ages, all backgrounds, people wi of privilege, of very humble backgrounds, who
Can change the course of history. I've got a whole chapter about Rosa Parks in there, who is now often remembered for being that humble seamstress. who refused to give up our seat. She was actually one of the most badass political strategists of the twentieth century.
and went to, you know, a school for activists, learned all the tactics. They thought super carefully about how to make the biggest splash with the Montgomery bus boycott. They were waiting for the right moment. Many, many other women have been arrested and girls have been arrested before Rosa Parks. They were just like, Okay, with Rosa Parks, that's the one we'll work with. Like she's gonna be the icon of our movement and she played the role spectacularly well. Um
So um that is for me really, really important. If I sometimes dunk a little bit more on, let's say, those people of privilege, the people stuck in the Bermuda triangle of talent, of consultancy, finance and corporate law. It's one because I rather enjoy that. Um and it it is also because Um, these people d deserve that that kick in in in the ass and they ought to be doing way more. Um
But as we talked about earlier in this conversation, I I believe we need a double movement. We need the the bottom up movement, we need the people in the streets, we need the activists, we need powerful unions, we need all of that, but we also need a new elite. and we've been betrayed by our current leaders. They're immoral, they're in serious, they are in Europe increasingly irrelevant, I'm I'm afraid to say. Uh and we need a new elite. We need people
who have a skin in the game, who are actually practicing what they preach, who are willing to try something, fail, stand up again. I mean that's the Theodore Roosevelt ethos, uh of Of he s he said it's it's not the critic who counts, but it's the man or the woman in the arena. Moral ambition how to find your purpose is is out now in paperback. Rudger Bregman, thank you. This has been a Global Player original production.