Rutger Bregman on How to Live a Moral Life

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rutger Bregman is an historian and author. He is the co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition, a new initiative to mobilize talented professionals to work on the world’s most pressing problems. His latest book, Moral Ambition, explores how we can build lives and careers that make a real difference. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rutger Bregman discuss what it means to have moral ambition, how to know which causes deserve support—and how to make the world vegan. Email: [email protected] Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.8	Amazon offers term time working to their employees, like Anton,
0:07.4	who's home to look after his daughters during their holidays.
0:10.0	Hello!
0:10.8	To him, this is the best sound in the world.
0:17.2	Actually, maybe that's the best sound of all.
0:21.6	Now that's term time working.
0:23.6	Offered at Amazon.
0:24.6	10 weeks off guaranteed per year.
0:26.6	Mix of paid holiday and unpaid time off.
0:28.6	Conditions apply.
0:29.6	I think it starts with recognizing that we need a whole toolbox
0:33.6	and that a certain tool that may work really well at one time will not work and another time.
0:38.4	So if we go back to the abolitionist movement, what we see is that initially they needed to be
0:43.5	really pragmatic.
0:44.9	They focused on stuff like the suffering of white sailors.
0:48.7	They decided not to fight slavery as such, but instead fight the slave trade.
0:56.1	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:04.2	When I was younger than I am today, I thought it was quite easy to know how to make a difference in the world.
1:12.0	It was easy to know which job had a positive impact in the world and which job might have a negative impact on the world, what political cause was righteous, what political cause would make the world a worse place.
1:23.6	I have to admit that the order I get, the more I think about, politics, the more experience I have in the world,
1:30.2	the less clear it is to me how to actually make a positive difference in the world.
1:36.4	Things turn out to be more complex than we bargain for.
	...

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