Name: How to use your ambition for good | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T17:01:35.000Z
Duration: 50 min 52 s
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what do you want to look back on when you lie on your deathbed? All the powerpoints you know you hated to make or all the reports you wrote that no one ever wanted to read, all the products that you didn't believe in that you still spend a lifetime selling?

Seems pretty sad to me. We're told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job, be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high status position. Some of us love this endless climb but lots of us at least once in our lives find ourselves asking what's the point of all this ambition?

The fat salary or the fancy title aren't those pretty meaningless measures of success?

One proposed solution is to stop being ambitious and start being idealistic instead. You hear this from a lot of influencers. Follow your passion. Small is beautiful. The idea is that you should drop out of the capitalist rat race and do what you love. Yoga maybe or watercolor painting even if it makes very little positive impact on the world. But what if instead of trying to be less ambitious we try to be more ambitious about the things that really matter? Like helping others.

In an era when there's so much chaos, injustice and frankly a feeling of widespread despair it's worth asking what would the world look like if we start measuring our success not in terms of fame or fortune but in terms of how much good we do?

I'm Sigal Samuel and this is The Gray Area.

Today's guest is historian and author Rutger Bregman. He's probably best known for what he yelled at policymakers at Davos a few years ago. Taxes, taxes, taxes. He's tried to get billionaires to pay their fair share in taxes and he's also argued for other policies that could make life better for everyone like a universal basic income. Now he's written a new book called

Now he's written a new book called Moral Ambition which urges us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start trying to do more good for the world. He wants us to be both ambitious and idealistic. To devote ourselves to solving the world's biggest problems like malaria and pandemics and climate change. I invited Rutger on the show because I find his message inspiring and to be honest I also have some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful but I'm not sure that work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. So in this conversation we'll explore all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful and ask are some objectively better than others? Hey Rutger welcome to the show. Thanks for having me good to see you. Your book is called Moral Ambition.

Why should people be morally ambitious? My whole career I've been fascinated with the waste of talent that is going on in modern economists. There's this one study from two Dutch economists done a couple of years ago and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless or at least doubt the value of their job. That is just insane to me.

I mean this is five times the unemployment rate and we're talking about people who have often excellent resumes you know who went to very nice universities. I'm going to Harvard tomorrow to speak to students there and well it's an interesting case in point 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. Not saying all that is totally socially useless but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. I mean these people could go on and do great things and as you know we face some pretty big obvious problems out there. Whether it's you know the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner. Terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people. The problem with democracy breaking down. I mean the list goes on and on and on and so I've always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. Now I'm not saying that morality should suck up everything. I'm personally a pluralist. I think that there are many things that are important in life. You know family, friends, music, art and you don't want to let morality dominate everything but I think in a rich well-rounded life it does play an important role and if we're going to have a career anyway we might as well do a lot of good with it. What about that question specifically about you know someone comes to you and says

I'm a third grade teacher. I'm a social worker. Am I not being morally ambitious enough? So half of the country already works in these so-called essential jobs. We discovered that during the pandemic that you know when some people go on strike we're in real trouble. So my point here is that half of the country doesn't need a lecture from me about being morally ambitious. They're already working in essential jobs. I'm indeed more interested in preaching to my own people to honestly quite a few of my friends. We used to have big ideals and dreams when we were still in university. You know we wrote these beautiful application essays about how we were going to fix tax avoidance and tax evasion. How we're going to tackle global hunger and work at the United Nations and look at us. What has happened? It's pretty sad isn't it? Now we're old and wrinkled and complacent. Yeah. Something has gone wrong I would say. So that doesn't mean that I don't think anyone can be morally ambitious. Rosa Parks was a seamstress. Lech Walesa you know the great social revolutionary in Poland. He was an electrician. So I mean history is littered with examples of people who weren't very privileged and still did a lot of good. But they don't need a lecture from me I think. I'm mainly talking to people who shouldn't just check their privilege but also use that privilege to make a massive difference. What role does personal passion play in that? You write in the book don't start out by asking what's my passion. Ask instead how can I contribute most and then choose the role that suits you best. Don't forget your talents are but a means to an end. Yeah I think follow your passion is probably the worst career advice out there. We at the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. So I always like to say that Frodo, you know, he didn't follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, oh what's your passion Frodo? He said look this really needs to be done. This needs to be fixed. You got to throw the ring into the mountain.

If Frodo would have followed his passion he would have probably, you know, been a gardener, having a life, you know, full of second breakfasts, pretty comfortable in the shire and then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved. So I think the point here is pretty simple.

Find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what are some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species and ask yourself how can I make a difference.

And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it. It's just don't start with looking at your navel and thinking oh what is it for me? Just ask smart people out there and become passionate about what they say. So you're saying do the work first, trust that the passion will come later? Absolutely, yeah. And I've got a couple of examples of that in the book.

One school I've got a whole chapter on is called Charity Entrepreneurship. They've since rebranded as Ambitious Impact but it's a school that I like to describe as the Hogwarts for do-gooders. So they recruit really driven entrepreneurial people who want to start a highly effective non-profit and they continuously research this question. It's called prioritization research, thinking about what are some of the most pressing issues we face.

And then they find these founders of these non-profits and they basically match the founders not only with each other so that you have a co-founder but also with these tasks, right? You basically get a mission. And one of the most successful charities they've launched is called the Lead Exposure Elimination Project. I believe you guys have also written about them. That's right. One of the co-founders is Lucia Coulter. She used to be a doctor at the

NHS. Loved their work but at the same time she was like, can't I do more good, right? I'm currently working as a doctor in a very rich country, mostly treating patients who are already relatively old.

It's beautiful work but I want to do more good. And you should talk to her now. I mean she's incredibly passionate about the work she does. Okay, but so that's a good example. So it's not that she completely ditched what she was already doing and her existing passions, right? She found a way to take her passion for healthcare or for global health and sort of put it on a different scale but still using her existing core passion and skill set. That's a good point. Maybe we got to be passionate on a meta level, you know, about our higher level goals. You can be really passionate about making the world a better place, helping a lot of people, improving global health, something like that. But it's quite risky if you get too attached to a certain intervention or something like that. I think that's a very sure way of massively limiting your impact. And you see it a lot, sadly. I've been walking around in the world of philanthropy for the past two years and it just drives me nuts how many of these rich people are all the time, you know, they're gazing at their navel. And like you don't have to come up with the answer yourself. The research has already been done, right? Why do you have to be the one, you know, who needs to have this epiphany about, oh, it's the pandas in this specific region that really need our help.

There are already Gandalfs and Dumbledores working on it for you, figuring it out.

Exactly, exactly. And it takes a team to make a big difference. I think it can be quite liberating as well to not have to fight your passion anymore. I speak to quite a few, you know, teenagers and people in their 20s about what they should do with their career.

And a lot of them find a lot of relief in this message that they don't have to find their passion, that there are other people out there who have a job for them to do, right?

That they can just sign up for it. Interesting. In your book, there is one Venn diagram that caught my eye. It's, you know, these three circles. The first is labeled sizable. The second is solvable. And the third is sorely overlooked. And in the middle where they all overlap, it says moral ambition. Explain that to me. What does that mean?

Yeah. So this is the triple S framework of making the world a wildly better place.

And it's connected to this simple point that choosing the cause you work on is probably the most important question you got to answer. And so at the School for Moral Ambition, we work with this framework in selecting these causes. Take something like climate change, for example.

Climate change is obviously a very sizable problem. It's very big, threatens a lot of people.

It's also very solvable, right? We know what we can do. We've got a huge toolbox, a lot of solutions out there that are waiting to be implemented. And then the question is, is it also sorely neglected? And the good news here is less and less so. You could ask yourself, what was the best time to be a climate activist? And the answer is not now.

Exactly. That was the moment. So if you, again, want to maximize your impact, if you want to ask the morally ambitious question, then the question is, okay, what would the climate activists of the 70s have done today, right? Or what is the problem that's currently where climate change was in the 1970s? You see what I mean? That is an entrepreneurial way of looking at doing good.

You are really looking for the gap in the market. You could also do that within a cause area, by the way. So if you look at climate change, then you can think, okay, what is the part of the problem that is currently most neglected?

Okay. So looking at the neglected or sorely overlooked, looking at the solvable and looking at the sizable, I do wonder about the sizable part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. It's about making the biggest possible impact. And if you can achieve your goals during your lifetime, then you're probably not thinking big enough. Look,

I'm not saying that everyone has to be morally ambitious or something like that. I'm not like preaching with my finger and saying, oh, if you don't live this kind of life, you're a bad person.

I am saying, if you are ambitious anyway, why not redirect that energy to do a lot of good?

I think it will make your life much more meaningful. If you're going to have a burnout anyway, you might as well get that burnout while you help a lot of people, right?

And the same is true for some people who are very idealistic, but not very ambitious.

Like, wouldn't it be nice to actually achieve a lot? I mean, I personally come from the political left. And yeah, there's this weird leftist obsession with being pure and irrelevant, right? Calling out a lot of people, winning the debate in the group chat, but not actually making a difference for the people you say you care so much about.

I think that's what you call in the book, the noble loser, right?

But I guess what I'm wondering is, do you believe that there is sort of a moral imperative to do the most good you possibly can do to have the most impact, the most scale?

Well, obviously at some point you've done enough. I talk about Thomas Clarkson, my favorite abolitionist. He was a British writer and activist. And when he was 25, he had this epiphany that slavery was probably the greatest moral atrocity of his time.

And he was like, you know what? Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can spend my life fighting this horrible institution. And that's basically what he did. The first seven years he traveled across the United Kingdom, 35,000 miles, spreading his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. And then he had a total nervous breakdown. That's a burnout. He couldn't walk the stairs anymore. He couldn't speak. He started sweating profusely whenever he wanted to say something. And I read that in his memoirs. And I was like, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, remember your breathing exercises. You can take things too far. Now, the reason I say that only at the end of the book, because most of us first deserve a kick in the butt. So yeah, there are some do-gooders out there. I think they take morality a little bit too seriously. As I said,

I'm personally a pluralist. I'm a father of two young children. I think they're way more important than my career. I am pretty ambitious, right? I do want to make a mark on this world. And I think there are a lot of people out there. We are all, or most of us are scared to death. And what do you want to look back on when you lie on your deathbed? All the PowerPoints you hated to make, or all the reports you wrote that no one ever wanted to read, all the products that you didn't believe in that you still spend a lifetime selling? It seems pretty sad to me. I think this is touching on something really honest, which is that I think a lot of the desire for this sort of big impact may actually come from our fear of our own mortality and this desire to leave a legacy that will outlast us so that we feel like in some sense, it actually mattered that we lived at all.

And I remember dealing with this myself. I'm a journalist now, but before that, I was a novelist.

And I didn't care how many people my work impacted, right? It was for me really not about scale. My feeling was, look, if my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone in the world, helps them feel more understood, I will be happy. So I guess my question for you as someone who has personally struggled with this issue of scale is, are you telling me I shouldn't be happy with that? The title of chapter one in your book is literally, no, you're not fine just the way you are. So I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l'art, right? It's just music or art for the sake of art itself. I don't want to let everything succumb to a kind of utilitarian calculus. I think it's better to help a lot of people than just a few people. And as I said, in any rich life, morality does play a big role. I wouldn't want to live in a society where everyone is like Thomas Clarkson, running around on his horseback doing morally ambitious work. But on the margins, I think in the world today, we need a lot of moral ambition. We need much more moral ambition than we currently have.

Yeah. I mean, I personally would not want to end up in a world where everyone is so focused on moral ambition and scale that no one ever writes a novel because they worry it won't impact enough people. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan

Woolf, who has this great essay called Moral Saints. And she says, if the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren. Quite an elitist idea of how to spend your life, by the way, reading a novel and improving your backhand. Or maybe just watching Netflix all day. Fair, fair. But you could swap that out with reading your favorite book or any hobby, playing soccer, whatever it might be. But basically what she's saying is, if you try to make all of your actions as morally good as possible, you kind of end up living a life that's bereft of hobbies or relationships or all the other experiences that make life meaningful. Just talk a little more about how you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious. There is some tension there, right?

Talk a little bit about that. There is some tension, but I think that tension is mainly felt by philosophers for some reason and not really by me or, I don't know, a lot of normies. It's just, as I said, for me, it's super obvious that life is about many things, including improving your backhand. I'm not saying that people aren't allowed to play tennis anymore, but we spend, what is it, 2,000 work weeks in our career, 10,000 working days, 80,000 hours. That's a lot of time still left at the job. And as I said, 25% of people currently consider their own job socially meaningless. And a lot of our so-called best and brightest are stuck in those jobs.

So we are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless, and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That's the reality, right?

I really don't think that there's a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction. And that's a problem I would honestly like to have.

So you're saying we're currently very far away from this problem of everyone going full tilt on moral ambition and ignoring everything else in life.

There's only one community I know of where this has become a problem.

It's the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies.

Okay. I definitely want to get to that, but I'm going to put a pin in that for a moment because I just want to take the flip side of what you were just saying. You're saying like, okay, I'm not really concerned, Sigal, that we're edging into this world where everyone is so focused on moral ambition. But how do you then actually know when it's enough? I think you used the phrase earlier like, at some point it's enough. And I think you write in the epilogue of the book, morality plays a big role in a rich and full life, but it's not everything. And if your inner fire burns bright, no need to stoke it hotter. But to me, that is pretty fuzzy sounding.

How can I know what's enough and avoid pushing so far that moral ambition does take over my life?

That does happen to some people. So how can I concretely know like, Sigal, you've done enough.

Chill. Well, it depends on how far you want to push yourself. Look, there are no easy answers here.

I think that at some point when you really start to suffer from your moral ambition, that's not where I would want you to end up. I think you should be fueled for 80% by enthusiasm and for maybe 20% by feelings of guilt and shame. So a little bit of guilt and shame in the mix, that's fine. It's actually how this journey started for me. I published this previous book,

Humankind, made quite a lot of money on it, honestly, which I never would have expected.

I always thought that I would be a broke history teacher or something like that.

And yeah, that gave me a feeling of responsibility like, huh, what does this mean? I actually need to do something with it. And I also felt a little bit ashamed for spending a decade in what I'd like to describe as the awareness industry. I'd been saying a lot about all the things that need to happen in the world. A lot of people will know me for shouting Texas, Texas, Texas at Davos, right?

And I was a bit fed up with myself, honestly, for standing on the sidelines.

To me, what this is indicating is like, there's some element of subjectivity here, right? Like the question of what percentage of my life should be focused on moral ambition and what should be like playing the oboe or like you're deciding who to compare yourself to and how much you want to push yourself, how much you're okay with having some suffering in your life to achieve a greater goal, how much you're like, I push back a little bit. I think the question itself sort of presumes that doing a lot of good or making a lot of impact is not going to be a nice experience or something like that, that pushing harder will always involve more sacrifices.

But if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, they find a lot of joy in thinking big.

They find a lot of joy in climbing the ladder. It's what I always experienced in my career.

I love becoming a member of a student society in Utrecht in the Netherlands where I grew up because I felt so dumb compared to all these older students. And I was like, this is awesome.

I want to learn about philosophy and anthropology and history. And again, when I started my career as a journalist at the Volkskrant, which is sort of the Guardian or well, I guess the New York

Times at the Netherlands, I just love being the youngest journalist there and learning from my older colleagues. And when I started as a writer, I had these big dreams about, I want to write a book that will speak to millions of people about the big questions of history, like why have we conquered the globe? What makes humans special? And then as I did that, I was in my early 30s,

I was, yeah, a bit bored and looking for the next ladder to climb. So for me, climbing a new ladder has mostly been about excitement and enthusiasm. Let's talk about the effective altruism piece of this. Some of our listeners may have heard of it, but for those who haven't, it's a movement that's all about using reason and evidence and data to do as much good as possible.

I will say I'm not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA because I work for Vox's Future Perfect section, which was sort of loosely inspired by EA in its early days. So I'm curious where you stand on this. You talk about effective altruism in the book, and you do echo a lot of its core ideas, like this idea that you shouldn't just be trying to do good. You should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist? Yeah, so I wouldn't say the most good.

I was like, you should do a lot of good, which is different, right? That's not about being perfect, but just about being ambitious. So in the book, I study a lot of movements that I admire. As you know, I write extensively about the abolitionists, about the Sovrushets, about the civil rights campaigners, about extraordinary people like Rosa Parks, who was such a strategic visionary. A lot of people remember her as this quiet seamstress, but she was actually a highly experienced activist.

And they really planned this whole Montgomery bus boycott. It didn't just happen. I talk about the animal rights movement. I talk about Ralph Nader and the extraordinary Nader's Raider movement in the 60s and the 70s, when Ralph Nader was able to recruit a lot of really talented young

Ivy League graduates and convince them to not work for boring law firms, but instead go to

Washington and influence legislation. There's one historian who estimates that they've influenced, what is it, 25 pieces of federal legislation. So anyway, the book is a whole collection of studies of movements that I admire. And indeed, effective altruism is also one of those movements that I admire quite a bit. I think there's a lot we can learn from them.

And there are also quite a few things that I don't really like about them.

So the main thing I think, indeed, what I really like about them is their moral seriousness. As I said, I come from the political left. And if there's one thing that's often quite annoying about lefties is that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, this simple thing about donating to charity, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that that is one of the most effective things you can do. But then very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like that moral seriousness of EAs. You go to conferences, and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive. I'm sorry to say that I still have both of my kidneys.

To them. But yeah, I admire the people who really practice what they preach.

I guess the main thing I dislike is probably what we already talked about, like where does the motivation come from? One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, obviously, also one of the founding fathers of the modern animal rights movement. And everyone knows him for that thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond. I'm pretty sure that he must be really fed up with talking about that thought experiment, because I am already fed up talking about it, and it's not even my thought experiment.

Right. So that's the thought experiment where Peter Singer says, look, if you are walking to work and you see a little kid drowning in a shallow pond, you know you could save this kid. Your life will be in no danger. It's shallow, but you will ruin your expensive suit or you will muddy your shoes should you do it. And it's supposed to be like, yes, obviously you should do it. And well, by analogy, we have money. It could easily save the lives of people in developing countries. So you should donate it.

Yeah. Thank you so much for helping me out with that one. Anyway, I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me.

And now I'm suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere and like, oh, this microphone, it was too expensive. Could have donated that to, I don't know, charity in Malawi or, you know, I just had a sandwich and, you know, the peanut butter on it was also too expensive. It's like a totally inhuman way of, I don't know, looking at life. It just doesn't resonate with me at all. But there are quite a few of people who, um, yeah, um, instantly thought, yes, that that is true. And they discovered, hey, wait a minute, I'm not alone. Uh, let's build a movement together. Um, and I really like that. Um, for me, the historical comparison, um, is, is, uh, the Quakers, um, the early abolitionists who were very weird as well. It was like this small Protestant sect of people who deeply believed in equality. They were some of the first who allowed women to also preach in their meeting houses. They, um, would never bow to anyone, even if it was the, uh, if it was the king of England, they would never, um, take an oath because they were like, yeah, we, we always speak the truth. So why would we take an oath? Anyway, they were seen as very weird. Um, and, um, quite amazing as well. Right. The abolitionism sort of started as a, as a Quaker startup. So that's also how I see EA as very weird, but pretty impressive. And, and, and, um, I think a lot of people in there have done a lot of good work, even though I'd never, you know, joined the church.

It's not for me. And there, yeah, there are some, some obvious downsides to, to the ideology as well. Let's pick up on that weirdness bit, right? So in your book, you, you straight up tell readers join a cult or start your own. Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird. If you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture. I'm curious how you think about the downsides of being in a cult. Yeah.

Cults don't have a great reputation. No. Um, so I got to give some credit to Peter Thiel here. Um, maybe not, um, someone that people naturally associated with me, um, uh, is a venture capitalist very much on the right wing side of the political spectrum. Um, he's written this fantastic book, uh, called zero to one about how to build a successful startup. And, um, indeed, one of his advices is to start a cult. Um, a cult is a group, a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world. Um, and they have, uh, some shared beliefs that make them very weird, uh, for the rest of society. Now, as I said, I spent the first decade of my career as a journalist and, um, most journalists think that they should break out of their bubble, uh, that they should, you know, meet people on the other side of the political spectrum.

This is the debate that I used to have with my colleagues. They would say, yeah, we got to make sure that the plumbers read our essays as well. And my response was always like,

I, you know, I would love for plumbers to read my essays, but currently my friends aren't reading them. So maybe, maybe we can start there. Right. Um, and this is, um, um, why I think it sometimes makes sense to actually double down on a cult because, um, in a cult you can be radicalized and sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. Um, to give you one simple example, you know, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But then when, once you don't join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling like, Hey, I'm not the only one, right? There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And you know what? Uh, I can do much more than I'm currently doing. So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now I totally acknowledge that there are all signs of dangers here. Um, like, uh, you can become too dogmatic. You can be, you know, quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. So I do see all of that. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, yeah, they have cultish aspects. They were, they were in a way.

Yeah. A little bit like a cult. I want to push a little bit on this question about, you know, cults and dogmatism, but obviously a big downside, as you mentioned, is that you can become dogmatic. You can become kind of deft to criticism from the outside. Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside? Yeah. Don't let it suck up your whole life.

There's this quote from Flaubert, the novelist who once said something like, if you want to be violent and original in your work, you need to be boring in your private life.

I'm paraphrasing here. But I've always liked that quote. I don't know. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability. So maybe surround yourself with other types of people and other types of pursuits, right? Basically be a pluralist. I don't know. I don't know. Honestly,

I don't have like the perfect recipe here. In general, it's super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, you know, who don't take you too seriously, who can also laugh at you, you know, who have a good sense of humor or, you know, who can just see your foolishness and call it out and still be a good friend. But this is like general life advice for everyone. Right, right. Having a strong dose of pluralism can help counteract a lot of the potential pitfalls with these sorts of ideological movements.

Yeah, absolutely. At the same time, you know, I come from such a different place, you know.

I was mainly frustrated with all these people on the left side of the political spectrum saying, oh, we need systemic change. We need to abolish capitalism, overthrow the patriarchy, and write, you know, a hundred more monographs about it in utterly inaccessible academic jargon. And I was like, come on, can we actually do something, right? Can we actually find some effective way of actually making a difference? Well, I think one important question is the question of who should we be trying to make a difference for? There is a very interesting concept that you mention in the book, which is humanity's expanding moral circle. What is that?

It's, again, a term from Peter Singer, the philosopher, who makes the simple case that throughout history, our moral circle has expanded. So back in the old days, we mainly cared about our own tribe and members of our tribe. And then, you know, we got the big religions and we started caring about people who believe the same things. And then we got the nation states and so on and so on. And he basically says that moral progress is all about expanding the moral circle and to keep pushing that expansion. A couple of years ago, I was actually working on a different book. I wanted to write the history of moral circle expansion. That's what I wanted to do, because it's really interesting that a lot of the first abolitionists, they already cared deeply about animal rights, which makes a lot of sense. Because once you start expanding your moral circle, once you start opening your heart to people who first weren't included in your moral circle, then the question is like, why stop at some point? And I was writing about that, learning about that. And I was like, huh, maybe I should finish this book when I'm 60 or 70 or something. Maybe I should be doing this stuff, you know, not just be writing about it. So that for me, that was incredibly inspirational. That's funny. Okay, if the moral circle is like, okay, who's worthy of our moral consideration? Who's not? Who's in? Who's out? You kind of acknowledge in the book, like, maybe it's not obvious how to tell, are we including everyone in the moral circle that should be included? And you have a few pointers that you offer people on how to check that they're including everyone that should be included. Do you want to give us like a little summary, a few pointers? I think that there are some classic signs that can tell us whether we're on the right side of history. This is one of those fascinating questions that we can ask, right? We can look back on, say, the Romans who threw naked women before the lions, but still thought they were super civilized because unlike the barbarians, they didn't sacrifice kids to the gods, right?

And every civilization throughout history has always thought we are the most civilized. And obviously we think that today as well, like any modern day liberal in the US or the West in the 21st century will be like, yeah, there's still bad stuff happening, but basically like we've figured things out. And the uncomfortable truth is that probably we are still committed, engaged in some really terrible moral atrocities. I mean, that's highly likely if you just look at the historical track record. So the question is, what will the historians of the future say about us? And then

I'm not just talking about, oh yeah, the bad Maga people or something like that. No, no, no. I'm talking to you directly who's listening to this podcast right now and probably thinks of his or himself as a pretty decent person. Then the question is, okay, what is that? A couple of signs. Well, one is we've been talking about it for a long time. So the alarm bells have been ringing for a long time. That's one clear sign. In the book, I give the example of the way we treat animals. And it's not as if these arguments are new or anything. A lot of smart people have said this for a long time. Jeremy Bentham already in the late 18th century wrote that it's not about whether these animals can speak or reason or do mathematics. No, it's about the simple question, can they suffer? And we've got an enormous mountain of evidence that tells us, yeah, they can probably suffer really badly. So yeah, if you eat meat and dairy today, then it's quite likely that you're involved in one of those moral atrocities. I've got a few other signs that I talk about. For example, we rationalize these kinds of things by saying that they're natural or normal or necessary. This is what Melanie Joy, the psychologist, calls the three Ns. And you look at something like slavery, and that's also what we did back then, right? We said it was natural.

Like throughout history, every civilization has always practiced the institution of slavery.

Like it's just what people do, right? What are you going to do about it? Or necessary, people would say. Yeah, it was just essential for the economy. If we would abolish slavery today, the economy will collapse, and there will be all kinds of perverse consequences.

So anyway, it's interesting to look at those signs and then think, okay, what are some of the worst things that may be happening today? There's sort of a pet peeve I have about the way people sometimes talk about the expanding moral circle. People, I find, typically talk about it as if moral progress or the expansion of the moral circle is some sort of linear process.

Mm-hmm. I think that's a really good point you're making. So historians call this the Whig view of history, named after the Whigs, the political party in the UK a few centuries ago, which indeed had this Western triumphalism baked into it. Like we know what's right for the world, and we will show the rest of the world how to be good, how to be moral.