New Podcast Release: Rutger Bregman

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to historian and author Rutger Bregman.

Rutger is known for Utopia for Realists and Humankind, books that challenge cynicism and argue for the feasibility of large-scale moral progress. In this episode, he reflects on a personal turning point, an early midlife crisis, and how it led him to move from writing about big ideas to trying to act on them.

We discuss the launch of his new project, the School for Moral Ambition, which aims to support people who want to use their careers to do good more effectively. Along the way, we explore the role of status, strategy, and “moral envy” in driving ethical action and why Rutger thinks Effective Altruism needs a broader tent.

He shares how studying the British abolitionists sparked a new kind of moral energy in him, why we should worry less about purity and more about results, and how past justice movements can inspire our responses to today’s most pressing moral crises, including factory farming, pandemic risks, and democratic decline.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

Rutger’s Midlife Shift: From Awareness to Action

KASIA: Tell us what you think it means to live well.

RUTGER: Wow, that's a big question to begin with. I always feel I'm too young to answer that question. I just turned 37, and there's still much to learn about life. I only recently had my first, I would call it, my early midlife crisis where I realised that I'd been spending perhaps too much time in the “awareness business,” writing articles and books, trying to convince people about what's wrong with the world and what we can do to fix those problems. And increasingly, I realised that awareness is quite overrated and that I must try to bridge the gap to action and do something myself. There's this famous quote from Theodore Roosevelt, the president of the United States, who said that it's not the critic that counts, but it's the man or the woman in the arena, right? The people with sweat on their foreheads and their hands are dirty, and those who fall and then stand up again and keep going will have that perseverance. So, you encounter me in that stage of my life where I'm very much, “let's go, let's build something!”

Moral Envy and the Power of Example

PETER: I think you are building something, right? The book is doing a lot, and we will talk about the School for Moral Ambition you founded. So, we'll get to what you are doing. And creating awareness is also doing something. So, I wouldn't feel too bad about your years in the awareness business.

RUTGER: It would be nice to tell you about what happened to me a few years ago. So, I wrote a book called Humankind, about human nature and history. It was a very ambitious book. I tried to make the case that humans are not as bad as we often think. I talked a lot about the veneer theory. This notion is that civilisation is only a thin veneer, that below that lies raw human nature, and that people are just, fundamentally selfish. I don't believe that. We collected a lot of good evidence to show that it is untrue.

But I’ve got to admit that at some point, I saw these photos of people reading the book on a beautiful white beach in Bali or a tropical island or something, saying, “Oh, this is such a wonderful book. It has restored my faith in humanity. And people should stop following the news and be happy and be kind to one another, and everything will turn out to be all right.”

And I was like, "Oh no, I've created a monster.” So, I started to study the great moral pioneers of the past. I envisioned a book that could have become a historical version of The Expanding Circle.

Peter, I've always been interested in your concept that our moral circle has expanded throughout history. But as a trained historian, wouldn't it be awesome to write a big book about first the abolitionists, and then show how the women's rights movement grew out of that? Then we got the workers' rights movement, the unions, the children's rights movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the LGBT movement, and so on.

We want to show how we are on this march and that we can join this great movement that started in the 18th century. But what happened is that I started studying the British abolitionist movement, and I quickly discovered that they were the only ones who were successful and personally, I’m from the Netherlands, and in the Netherlands, there was hardly any abolitionist movement. There was only a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who mainly cared about their moral purity instead of achieving results.

I was studying these British abolitionists. I was learning so many lessons that I started to experience an emotion that I would describe as moral envy. You look at other people, again, the people in the arena doing the good work.

I was 34 or 35 and writing a book about this, but I wished that I were doing this stuff. Right? I wished I were part of a movement. I can finish this book. I don't know, when I'm 60 or 70, there's time later. But now it's time to do something else.

So that's why I decided to write Moral Ambition. If you have a book, that's a great excuse to go on a publicity tour and launch an organisation. So, I knew that I still needed a book. But yeah, that emotion, that moral energy, has been quite important for me in changing my own life.

Effective Altruism and Its Limits

PETER: It's an interesting emotion because I think we talked about this with someone else recently, with Arthur C. Brooks, who's politically conservative and used to head the American Enterprise Institute. We were talking about whether envy is always a bad thing. He denied that it's always a bad thing because he says it spurs ambition or competition. But isn’t envy always a negative feeling? Wouldn’t you rather do the things you did without feeling envious of others? Just do them for their own sake.

RUTGER: I see myself as a pluralist. It's fine to rely on the full spectrum of human emotions and motivations. Humans are a mixed bag, right? So, we are partially motivated sometimes by things such as compassion, empathy, and altruism, which is wonderful. But we can't solely rely on that to make this world a wildly better place.

Peter, you're obviously the founder of the Effective Altruism movement, a movement that I admire. At the same time, though, I feel it's a bit limited in its reach because many of the effective altruists I've spoken to are a bit strange and weird. They're mainly motivated by this yearning to do good and help others. They are born altruists. A lot of them became vegan when they were very young. Many of them reacted instantly when they read your essay, Famine, Affluence and Morality, and I think what happened in the years around 2010 is that these people discovered one another on social media, and they realised, “Hey, I'm not alone.” But they've always been quite weird, which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'm happy for them to do their work, but at the same time, I thought, perhaps there's also a place for a broader movement for more “neurotypical people” that relies on other sources of motivation.

Most people want to belong to a group. Most people yearn for status. Most people want to be liked. Just two days ago, I spoke at Harvard, and again, you meet many well-meaning and sometimes quite compassionate and altruistic young students. One of their main motivations is the yearning for prestige and ambition and the wish to make a name for themselves, which is, I think, fine, all energy that can be channelled in a good direction. Sadly, it's often going to waste because 45% of Harvard graduates end up working for a big consultancy firm, a big corporate law firm, or a big bank, which is not always the most socially useful work. But I've become interested in how we can use that energy, the drive to make a name for yourself, and refocus it.

That's why my book Moral Ambition is an attempt to redefine what it means to be successful and to live an awesome life.

Factory Farming and the Expanding Circle

KASIA: Okay, so what are the good things that people can work on?

RUTGER: So, I like the framework Effective Altruism has given us. They encourage us to look at some of the world's biggest problems, the world's most solvable problems, and the most neglected problems. They call it a framework. It is important, tractable, and neglected.

I've come up with my framework, which is the same, but it's the Triple S framework. We call it the sizable, solvable and sorely neglected framework. What are the obvious examples?

The world's terrible diseases, malaria, tuberculosis, are neglected moral catastrophes that are going on daily. The threat of the next pandemic is also so bizarrely neglected. The whole world spends only a billion dollars a year researching emerging infectious diseases, which is as much as Americans spend on bleaching their teeth.

And then, the dearest cause to me is the fight against factory farming. It's a question that I've always found fascinating: How would future historians look back on us? For us, it's easy to look back on the Romans and say, “Oh, these were such bad people because they threw people before hungry lions.” But then the Romans would say, no, we're civilised. We don't sacrifice children anymore; the barbarians do. So, throughout history, all these big civilisations have seen themselves as the most civilised, and we seem to be doing that today as well.

It would be a nice coincidence if we were the first civilisation to figure it all out. However, that’s a very intellectually lazy position because there are straightforward ways of figuring out some things we're doing wrong today.

And for me, the way we treat animals is the most obvious example. Philosophers and great thinkers have warned us about this for a long time. Utilitarianism has a great track record here. You both know the famous footnote from Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century, where he said, it's not about whether animals can talk or reason. That doesn't matter. It's about whether they can suffer. And we've got a Mount Everest of evidence now that shows, yes, they can suffer terribly.

And most people, what's interesting -- you must have experienced this as well – is that sometimes I get these invites from journalists who say, “Hey Rutger, do you want to debate factory farming, the ethics of it, on television?” And I say, “yeah, sure. But you won't find anyone willing to defend the other side.” And usually that happens — they come back a couple of days later and say, “We can't do the debate because no one wants to come out in defence of this moral atrocity.”

PETER: I've had the same experience. You're right, it's very hard to find people who defend it. But it's there and continues to be there. It even increases in size because China develops and has far more factory-farmed animals than it used to. So, I agree with you. It is something that future generations will look back on with horror and say, “How could they do this?” And it also connects with what you said about pandemics, right? We neglect the risk of pandemics. I forgot the exact figure, but it's something like 70 or 80% of new viruses that affect humans come from animals. And factory farms are the ideal places to breed them. Tens of thousands of animals crowded together. So, yeah, that's an obvious one that people should work on. And I hope some people will say they want to be the equivalent of the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, but for factory farming. We certainly need more of that.

RUTGER: Exactly. And it's so interesting to me that so many of these early abolitionists, such as William Wilberforce, were great parliamentarians and politicians who proposed the bill in the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade year after year, and he was also the founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first animal rights organisation in the Western world. Then, Benjamin Lay was the first white abolitionist in the United States. He was a very radical Quaker. He was even kicked out of four Quaker meetings. You have to be truly radical to be kicked out of that radical sect! And, yeah, he was pretty much the world’s first vegan. He refused to consume anything in which animals were harmed. He wouldn't even sit on a horse. So, he would have to walk everywhere, which meant it would take him a long time to get around. But for me, that's interesting.

Elizabeth Rike, another important British abolitionist in the 1820s, also deeply cared about animal exploitation. She once liberated a bull from a bullfight. Then she was chased by an angry mob for a long time. Luckily, she got away. But for me, it is no surprise that once you start expanding the moral circle, you also start wondering, why not take the next step? It’s no surprise that a lot of the first suffragettes were initially active in the abolitionist movement. I think there's a certain moral dynamic. I don't believe in laws of history, so, I am not sure that the future will be better. The arc of history doesn't necessarily bend towards justice. It might just as well snap back if we don't pay attention. But I think there is a certain logic and dynamic once you start expanding the moral circle.

Historical Pragmatism over Moral Purity

PETER: I want to recommend Moral Ambition to our listeners. We've talked about some of its aspects, but I agree with many more things. For example, it is important not to be too purist about what you aim for. You give the example of the anti-slavers who debated whether they should try to abolish slavery or focus on abolishing the slave trade. Only abolishing the slave trade was a politically feasible objective. But some said, “How can you not want to abolish all slavery? We all agree it's such an abomination.” But clearly with historical hindsight, that was the right path to take. They ended something quite horrible, and that led eventually to the abolition of slavery. I think that's important in politics, and we've been forgetting it lately, thinking we need to support all progressive causes instead of focusing on the ones that give us the best chance of achieving change.

RUTGER: Absolutely. Winning is a moral duty in the fight against injustice. The animals who are currently suffering in factory farms don't care that you are this purist vegan who checks every little product. They want you to achieve policy victories, have power, and change the system.

I've sometimes had these debates with my vegan friends. They would say, but Rutger, the abolitionists did it right. They just said, "Abolish slavery,” and convinced one person at a time. That's how it happened, right? I'm like, no, that's not how it happened. This was an incredibly pragmatic movement.

As I said earlier, abolitionism was mostly a failure in other countries like the Netherlands or France, where it was a bunch of writers and intellectuals who got nothing done. In the US, it was super unpopular, and in the end, it took a civil war.

The vegans who say, “Oh, we should boycott all animal products and convince one person at a time” — the analogy is the free produce movement. In the US in the 1830s, some abolitionists said, “We'll stop consuming any product related to slavery.” This was a total failure because almost the whole economy had something to do with slavery, and the shops only had very expensive, low-quality items.

The British abolitionists were smarter. In the 1790s, they had a boycott movement against sugar and tea. It wasn’t a big sacrifice but a highly visible one. It gathered political momentum, and hundreds of thousands refused to put sugar in their tea.

Again, the point here is it’s not about your moral purity. It’s about actually getting things done. And the most successful abolitionist movement, the British one, was far more pragmatic than people realise.