Hey everyone, it's Lulu. Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know about something

really exciting we have coming up here at the interview. It's our first ever live show. It'll be at

the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Thursday, June 12th. I'll be talking with actor Sandra O.

You might know her, of course, from Grace Anatomy or Killing Eve. I'm really looking

forward to it, and I'm really looking forward to seeing you there. Tickets are on sale now at

Tribecafestival.com slash the interview. Okay, now on to the show. Here's David.

From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Marquesie.

I bet we all know plenty of smart, accomplished, and ambitious people whose ambitions start and stop with themselves.

For Rucker Bregman, those people represent a potentially world-changing opportunity.

Bregman is a historian and writer who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better than we're typically led to believe, and also that making it even better and more

equitable is within our reach. Sounds a little off these days, doesn't it?

Even Bregman is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books, which are

2020's humankind and 2017's Utopia for Realists, land a little less convincingly today than when they

were first published. But his new book, Moral Ambitions, Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a

Difference, is his attempt to meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into a kind of social good.

He's trying to incentivize the kind of people I mentioned earlier, society's brightest and

most privileged, to turn away from what he sees as meaningless and hollow, albeit lucrative,

white-collar jobs, in favor of far more exciting and even self-aggrandizing work that has the

possibility of changing the world.

That's also the driving idea behind a school he's co-founded called the School for Moral Ambition,

which you can think of as a kind of incubator for positive social impact.

The big question for me, the source of some real skepticism,

...