Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ You’re Not Wasting Time, You’re Wasting Your Life | Rutger Bregman (PT. 1) About this episode You could be doing anything with your life…so why are you choosing this? Historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman https://rutgerbregman.com/ joins Ryan to question everything we tend to believe about success, work, and impact. They discuss why many “prestigious” careers might actually be pointless, how a few regular people pulled off one of the biggest moral wins in history, and why meaningful work rarely looks like what society celebrates.
Rutger Bregman https://rutgerbregman.com/ is a Dutch historian and author. His latest book Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moral-ambition-stop-wasting-your-talent-and-start-making-a-difference was released in April 2025.
In 2024, Rutger co-founded The School for Moral Ambition https://rutgerbregman.com/sma, a non-profit organization inspired by his latest book, Moral Ambition https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moral-ambition-stop-wasting-your-talent-and-start-making-a-difference. The initiative helps people to take the step toward an impactful career.
Follow Rutger on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rutgerbregman/?hl=en and X https://x.com/rcbregman?lang=en | @RutgerBregman https://www.instagram.com/rutgerbregman/?hl=en
📚 Grab signed copies of Moral Ambition https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moral-ambition-stop-wasting-your-talent-and-start-making-a-difference at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=rutger
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.
0:52 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. There's a scene early in the movie Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius is speaking to his son Commodus, hauntingly played by Joaquin Phoenix, who, if anything, probably undersells just how awful Commodus was. Marcus is fictionally informing Commodus that he will not be succeeding him as emperor. This is, by the way, a conversation Marcus Aurelius should have had with Commodus in real life. Let me play this for you because it's really haunting. Commodus begins by listing the four virtues.
1:34 Speaker 01 You wrote to me once, listing the four chief virtues:
1:42 Speaker 01 wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
1:51 Speaker 01 As I read the list, I knew I had none of them.
1:55 Speaker 01 But I have other virtues, Father.
1:58 Speaker 01 Ambition, that can be a virtue when it drives us to excel.
2:04 Ryan Holiday? I think that's an interesting part, right? Is ambition a virtue? Because in meditation, the Marxist realist does talk about ambition quite a bit. And mostly, he's negative on it. He talks about getting inside the minds of ambitious people, thinking about what they long for and they fear. He talks about trying to outgrow his ambition. He talks about the insanity of it, how it means tying our well-being to what other people say or do. So what did the Stoics think about ambition? Was it a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it more depends on what we are ambitious about, right?
2:49 Ryan Holiday? If our ambition is to be famous, is to be powerful, is to be rich, is to be remembered forever, I'm not sure that's the kind of ambition the Stoics would be for. But what about the ambition to change the world, to improve the world, to bring justice into the world, to leave the world better than you found it? That's what I want to talk about in today's episode. That's what I talked about in Right Thing Right Now, right? This virtue of justice. If there's anywhere to be ambitious, it's here, right?
3:31 Ryan Holiday? To try to make the world better, not for you, but for others. And there's this really fascinating book that just came out that I loved. It's by Rutger Bregman. He's a Dutch historian and sort of political activist. It's called Moral Ambition. And I love the subtitle. It's "Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference."
3:57 Ryan Holiday? This idea of moral ambition, something that is embodied, I think, in someone I talk a lot about in writing right now, Thomas Clarkson, who we nerd out quite a bit about in today's episode. It's going to be a two parter, but in part one, we talk a lot about Thomas Clarkson. And we're talking about how there is a kind of a sadness in what people are aspiring to try to do today and how we can aspire to do more. Again, not to have more fans, not to get more followers, not to make more money, but to make more of a difference. Rutger has written a couple of other interesting books, Utopia for Realists,
4:38 Ryan Holiday? and then Humankind, A Hopeful History. Both were Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers. They've been translated in 46 languages, but I don't think that's the kind of ambition we're talking about. I've done stuff like that. What you're trying to do with the book is change how people think, make a difference themselves. You're trying to change them, so then they change the world. That's been the most rewarding part of the success of my books, for instance, and I think Rutger would agree. Anyways, let me just get into this episode. I think you're really gonna like it. I really enjoy this conversation. We had a great chat around the bookstore after. I'll put that up on YouTube soon. You really should check out Moral Ambition. It's a great book. I am excited for you to hear this. I'll bring you part two, where we talk about a bunch of other awesome stuff. Anyways, talk soon.
5:24 Ryan Holiday? I think it's funny, like, most of the time, when we say like, someone's wasting their life, we're like punching down, right? We're saying like, you're wasting your life being a store clerk, or, you know, you're like, you're not being ambitious enough professionally. But I think it's interesting, you're basically saying, a lot of the kinds of people we know are wasting their life, even though by every other metric, they're considered very successful.
5:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
5:51 Ryan Holiday? This is what they were supposed to be doing.
5:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's the opposite, indeed, that, I mean, during the pandemic, we discovered that so many people work in essential jobs, right? I mean, we already knew that, but now we had a name for it. And when they go on strike, then we're in trouble. But, yeah, there are some people with very fancy resumes.
6:11 Ryan Holiday? Who are totally superfluous to society. Yeah, they could stop doing what they're doing, and we probably wouldn't notice.
6:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. This was actually a story in my very first book, Utopia for Realists, when I wondered. Has it ever happened that bankers went on strike? Because that's sort of my method. Whenever there's a theoretical question we have, I'm like, well, we could just look at history.
6:32 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
6:33 Speaker 02 In one of my other books, I have the Lord of the Fly story. I was just like, well, has it ever happened? Kid shipwrecking on an island? Let's see what happens. Turns out to be a very happy story.
6:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
6:41 Speaker 02 Um, with the banker's strike, I could find only one example in Ireland, 1970. Bankers were angry that their wages were not keeping up with inflation. And they're like, you know what? We'll go on strike and then you'll see how important we are. And that strike lasted for six months and nothing much happened, actually.
6:56 Ryan Holiday? It didn't apply the pressure to society that they thought.
6:59 Speaker 02 No, no, no. It was really interesting. So what people started doing is to, to write IOUs to each other, sometimes on the backs of cigar boxes or even on toilet paper throughout the funniest stories.
7:10 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
7:11 Speaker 02 And yet the economy just kept growing and society was still operating. Now, there were obviously important differences, like Ireland wasn't, you know, part of the big global economy that it is today. So yeah, that's important to keep in mind. But I did think it was quite funny that here you have this one example of bankers going on strike and nothing much happened.
7:29 Ryan Holiday? It's like, what would happen if you weren't doing what you're doing? Would you immediately be replaced by a thousand other people?
7:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:36 Ryan Holiday? That's probably a sign that it's not that important.
7:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:39 Ryan Holiday? To me, that's kind of a test is if you're spending your life well is if you stopped doing it, would you be replaced? Like, are you doing what only you could do? And if you're not doing what only you can do, that's probably not the best use of a person and a set of DNA that's never existed before in human history and will never exist again.
8:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. In the, in the book, I use the term from baseball, FORP, like your value over replacement player.
8:07 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
8:08 Speaker 02 So imagine you're a great pitcher.
8:10 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
8:11 Speaker 02 But there are like 10 replacement players who are about as good as you are. Then if you are sick that day, then, you know?
8:16 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
8:16 Speaker 02 It doesn't matter all that much.
8:18 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
8:18 Speaker 02 And I think a lot of quote unquote prestigious jobs are like that. Like if you are that McKinsey consultant or the banker at Goldman Sachs, the reality is that if you didn't show up for work, then you know, you're still quite replaceable. Even though you are super talented, you could have gone on and done great things. So in the book, I've got one story of a former consultant, graduate from Harvard Business School. His name is Rob Matter and he had this, quote unquote, conventionally successful career. Became quite wealthy, built a cool company. But then there was this one moment in his life where he was watching the BBC at the time. He wanted to turn off the television, press the wrong button on his remote.
9:00 Speaker 02 And then suddenly saw a documentary about a little girl that was a victim of a terrible fire. So her whole body had been burned and that moved him so much that he was like, okay, I wanna do something for her.
9:12 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 02 And then he applied his skill set as a consultant, as a manager, to build a machine. He organized this swimathon so people participated in this big fundraiser. They swam the distance from across the channel, from the UK to France, raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. But then the next year, he was like, okay, now my VORP was like, I've helped one person. But what is actually the biggest problem in the world that kids are suffering from? So he started asking around and spoke to a couple of experts in global health. And they said, yeah, it's malaria, 600,000 people dying from it every year, mostly kids under five. So for the next year, he was like, okay, let's do another fundraiser, but now for malaria. He's the founder of the Against Malaria Foundation right now.
9:55 Speaker 02 It's arguably the most effective charity in the world.
9:58 Ryan Holiday? And good life.
9:58 Speaker 02 And one estimate says that they've saved, what is it, 150,000 lives now? So his VORP has gone like.
10:05 Ryan Holiday? It's like 2,500 bucks or 3,000 bucks to save a life or something like that, right? It's like the best ROI you can have as far as donating a dollar to a charity.
10:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:14 Ryan Holiday? I didn't know that was him.
10:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:16 Ryan Holiday? That's fascinating.
10:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just an example of someone who indeed, in terms of his impact on world history, it was, I might view, literally zero for the rest of his career. And then it went up a little bit when he started helping that little girl and that was beautiful. But then it went through the roof when he founded the Against Malaria Foundation.
10:36 Ryan Holiday? And then you've got to calculate the model that he sort of pioneers there of tackling. He's one of the pioneers of effective altruism, right? And so it's not just what is his impact with against malaria, but then what are other similar movements and charities that were founded on that model, which have also had an.
10:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, he did this way before effective altruism.
10:58 Ryan Holiday? No, I mean, he's like proving the model of effective altruism. Yeah.
11:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. And he's been a huge inspiration and mentor to, to many people.
11:05 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
11:06 Speaker 02 In my book, I write about this school in London. It used to be called Charity Entrepreneurship. Now it's called Ambitious Impact. I describe it as the Hogwarts for do-gooders.
11:15 Ryan Holiday? Wow.
11:16 Speaker 02 So people go there to start, you know, the most high impact charity that they can think of.
11:21 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
11:22 Speaker 02 A little bit like Y Combinator in Silicon Valley, but not to make, you know, the most money, but for helping as many people as possible. And indeed, Rob Mata is one of the mentors there. And you could say he's one of the teachers. And it's just so wonderful to see. Here you have these incredibly ambitious young people who are like, let's devote my career to fighting lead poisoning, tuberculosis, helping animals in factory farms, you name it.
11:48 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
11:48 Speaker 02 But yeah, they're not about things like small is beautiful or less is more. They would never say something like that. They're like, I want to make the biggest possible impact.
12:07 Ryan Holiday? Sometimes a job is very well paid because it's extremely rare that someone can do it well. Right? Like you're being paid because you're talented, like you're irreplaceable. And then some jobs are very well paid because they fucking suck. And like, why is it that we give kids straight out of college with no experience or really expertise in the thing they're about to consult people in how to do? Why do we pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's because it's actually horrible. It's a horrible, soul crushing shitty life. It's a bad life. It's depressing work and also at some level has zero impact whatsoever. Not even in the world. Like companies are paying for advice
12:53 Ryan Holiday? that they then don't listen to and don't implement and has no impact on the bottom line either. Right? It's just, it's a total waste of almost everyone's time. And that's partly why you have to pay these people a lot of money because you are, I think another way we should think about as a society is we are purchasing the opportunity costs of that person and their talent. We are going like, hey, you could be doing literally anything. What do I have to pay you to come over here and waste your existence?
13:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:22 Ryan Holiday? That's why it's well paid. So you think it's well paid because it's important and prestigious and exciting. And it's like, actually, everyone that's doing it is trying to get out of it until they get to some point where they have too many life expenses, until they get so acclimated to it that they can't get out of it. That's, that's what you're being paid.
13:44 Speaker 02 And look, sometimes I talk about this with my friends on the right and they're like, how could these quote unquote bullshit jobs ever exist?
13:50 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
13:50 Speaker 02 Because someone's paying them to do it. So therefore it must be valuable, right?
13:55 Ryan Holiday? There's another form of value it's creating.
13:57 Speaker 02 And then I'm like, I always make the comparison to pirates in, say, the 16th or the 17th century. I'm like pirates, you know, they were highly skilled. They went probably to, I don't know, some kind of pirate school. You know, they learned how to torture and to pillage and to rape and to all kinds of bad things. And then they went out, you know, on the seven seas and they, yeah, ripped a lot of people off. That is hard work, right? That is, yeah, you can make a lot of money doing that, but you're not really contributing in that way.
14:23 Ryan Holiday? No, you're okay.
14:24 Speaker 02 And if you look at a lot of modern finance, and again, I'm not saying all of it, but you know, yeah, a big chunk of it is a little bit like the pirates back then. Not as violent, but the business model in a way is similar. Like you're making money by, you know, taking that wealth from others.
14:40 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:40 Speaker 02 So in some respects, I sometimes think that we live in this kind of inverse welfare society. Right? Very often the story we're being told is that the people who create the most value, they're at the top, right? They earn a lot of money. They pay more in taxes and then that trickles down. I think actually very often it's the other way around.
14:59 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:59 Speaker 02 So at the quote unquote bottom of society or in the middle classes, you have people with the essential jobs. You know, the teachers, the care workers, the nurses, if they go on strike, we're in trouble. So we're all relying on them. They're the strongest shoulders that carry us all.
15:11 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
15:12 Speaker 02 But then at the top of society, we have a lot of people, consultants, marketeers, bankers, who say that their own jobs, and it's not just me saying it, people could say like, this guy's a historian. That's like the definition of socially used, I beg to differ, but no, it's people saying it about their own. Own jobs, right? I could go on strike, wouldn't matter all that much. And they obviously rely on those people in the essential jobs. So that's what I mean by like an inverse welfare society. And it really forces you to ask this question. How is wealth actually created and how do we define that? I'm a big believer in the power of markets. Don't get me wrong. I believe in markets, I believe in society, I believe in governments. I think we need a healthy mix of all these three things. But if you start to believe that, you know, markets are the ultimate determinant of what wealth is,
15:57 Speaker 02 what value is, then you're lost.
16:00 Ryan Holiday? There's something I think about an honest exchange where like you go, okay, a historian. Look, if you're a historian, you just work at some university. You collect an increasingly high salary that's taxpayer subsidized or on the backs of donors or, you know, from the obscene rising costs of tuition. Maybe that's not, I don't think is an honest, as an honest exchange as you wrote a book, you publish that book, people who want to purchase that book, pay money for it, and you capture a small amount of that value. Do you know what I mean? There's something, I think the honest exchange in capitalism in which you create value and people voluntarily compensate you for that value. That, that to me, like, I feel like you can make as much as you want to make that way. That, that, that strikes me as a relatively honest exchange.
16:45 Speaker 02 You could still have a discussion, though, about.
16:48 Ryan Holiday? Is that person as essential as, as a teacher? No, but.
16:51 Speaker 02 And, and also like how much of the value actually comes from you, right?
16:55 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
16:56 Speaker 02 Because, you know, people who are more on the left side of political spectrum would say like, you didn't pay for that road, you know, you got the education. You didn't decide to, you know, be born in the United States. You didn't decide to have these parents. And, you know, I'm personally quite radical. I would like go all the way and say like, everything is something that's been given to you.
17:15 Ryan Holiday? Nobody's self-made.
17:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:17 Ryan Holiday? And this is, this is ultimately obviously where a fair and progressive tax system comes in.
17:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
17:23 Ryan Holiday? Yeah. So I was in London, I did a speaking tour in London in the fall, and I wanted to see the print shop. Where Thomas Clarkson.
17:32 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
17:33 Ryan Holiday? Twelve people had met.
17:34 Speaker 02 I was there just a couple of weeks ago.
17:36 Ryan Holiday? What I think we need to talk about is why there's no fucking plaque there.
17:39 Speaker 02 It's a private equity firm right now.
17:40 Ryan Holiday? What does that say about this? One of the most consequential locations in the Western world. The site of one of humanity's great achievements. The whole idea that humans can't change things, that you can't, what, a master's tools can't be used to destroy the master's house. It is an anomaly of anomaly, like the exception that proves the rule in so many ways, that a small group of committed individuals can utterly change the course of history. And not only does nobody know that it exists, but even the people who know that it exists haven't memorialized it in any consequential way. It is a travesty.
18:23 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
18:23 Ryan Holiday? So tell everyone what happened in this print shop.
18:26 Speaker 02 Okay, so we're writing May 1787. Twelve men with black hats walk into this print shop at George Yard, number two. Nine out of 12 are Quakers. They're part of this radical Protestant sect that believes in the deep equality of everyone. They even have, you know, women in their meetings who are allowed to speak, which is really radical at the time. 10 out of 12 are entrepreneurs. So people who have built their own companies, scaled their own companies, in quite a few cases are pretty wealthy. One of them is, yeah, a mixture of a civil servant and a lawyer. So lawyers can be pretty useful sometimes. And one of them is, I would argue, a writer, Thomas Clarkson. And he's my very favorite abolitionist, maybe yours as well. We've both written about him.
19:12 Speaker 02 And together, they founded the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Now, this is something that is perhaps, you know, comfortable for Americans to hear and acknowledge. But the US in the history of abolitionism is not the most important.
19:28 Ryan Holiday? And we come late to it.
19:29 Speaker 02 It's late to the show, and it's also not globally super influential. If you want to understand why the international slave trade was eventually abolished, it's all about Britain. It's about what happens in 1787. When those men come together because they founded, you could say the mother of all movements, like the greatest movement for human rights that the world has ever seen. Now, Adam Hochschild, the historian, has written the book about this.
19:53 Ryan Holiday? Bear the Chains.
19:54 Speaker 02 One of my favorite books I've ever read.
19:57 Ryan Holiday? Every student should read it in high school.
19:59 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
19:59 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
19:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, can't agree more. It's indeed one of those stories that shows that small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens, as Margaret Mead told us, can massively change the world.
20:10 Ryan Holiday? It was to say, indeed, that's the only people that ever have.
20:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And for me, it's also a beautiful example of what I've come to describe as moral ambition. You know, the combination of the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur. When those two things come together, I think something really magical happens. So, um, yeah, this was a movement that lasted for half a century. When slavery was finally abolished across the British Empire in 1834, only Thomas Clarkson, the youngest, was still alive. So, most, most of them didn't get to see the actual end of it. But, yeah, it was an incredibly successful and maybe most importantly, highly pragmatic movement.
20:47 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
20:48 Speaker 02 So when we think about abolitionists today, I think very often we think like these people just, I don't know, raised their banner and said, no more, abolish slavery.
20:57 Ryan Holiday? It's wrong, let's do something about it.
20:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, that's a part of it. But it's like, I don't know, I would say like 5% of it. This was a super pragmatic, incredibly entrepreneurial movement that came up with so many tactics and new tricks and ideas.
21:10 Ryan Holiday? They invent the playbook that we're still using today to create social change, like consumer boycott, banners, logos, pamphlets, like basically every petitions, all the things that we now like, I think it is, it's really important. Things become so commonplace that we forget that they were once inventions. And so much of what Thomas Clarkson comes up with, so much of what Gandhi comes up with, so much of what Martin Luther King Jr. comes up with, these were, it's not just that it was morally correct and courageous that they did it, but it was also innovative and groundbreaking in how they did it. They invented a whole new way of thinking. It's not just that they were morally correct, but as you said, they were morally ambitious and then morally.
21:56 Ryan Holiday? What's the word competent?
21:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:58 Ryan Holiday? You know, they were competent in how they brought it into being strategic and cunning in some ways like I think it's important like they didn't set out to abolish slavery as a whole. There's even pragmatism in there. Let's just get rid of the trade.
22:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:14 Ryan Holiday? So they had a much more reasonable goal that they could get people on board with. You don't believe that the slave trade is wrong, but slavery is okay.
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:25 Ryan Holiday? But you understand that some people too much changes like Lincoln does the same thing. I mean, Lincoln gets people go, oh, Lincoln wasn't actually opposed to slavery. No, Lincoln was pragmatic and he understood that that the wedge issue for bringing about the abolition of slavery was first the legal argument that the expansion of slavery was illegal and forbidden in the constitution. And, and so he's, he finds out where he can get like a toehold and then he builds from there. And Clarkson was great at that.
22:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of years ago, I started working on this book about the, the great moral pioneers. And I just wanted to learn who were the most successful ones. Initially, I looked at my own country. I'm from the Netherlands. And that was quite a disappointment because in the Netherlands, it was very small abolitionism. It was mostly a bunch of Calvinists. I would, you could call them social justice warriors.
23:17 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
23:17 Speaker 02 Who mainly cared about their own moral purity and didn't get much done. In France, you had writers and intellectuals who wrote this beautiful essays.
23:25 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
23:25 Speaker 02 And manifestos about this is wrong, but again, didn't get much done. In Spain, there was pretty much nothing. In Portugal, there was pretty much nothing in the US. It took a civil war. And in the US, very often it was also, I would say too purist and not pragmatic enough. So for example, you had the free produce movement in the US that said like, we're not going to consume anything that has anything to do with slavery.
23:47 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
23:48 Speaker 02 Turns out, you know, you can consume almost anything. It's a little bit like vegans today who are looking at every product like, is there a little bit of milk powder in here? And yeah, it's not really the way to build a movement around something.
24:00 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
24:00 Speaker 02 But indeed, as you rightly pointed out, in the UK, it did become a really big movement. Indeed, in, in June of that year, seventeen eighty seven, they had that meeting about their ultimate goal. I go, what do we focus on? And there was one of the twelve, Granville Sharp. He was the most religious. He was actually one of the early abolitionists, very courageously. Was pretty much on his own in the seventeen sixties and the seventeen seventies. And he was the only one who's like slavery is totally immoral. You know, that's going to be the goal. We're going to be the British Society for the abolition of slavery. And then the entrepreneurs listened to him and they were like, yeah, it's not going to work.
24:34 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
24:35 Speaker 02 And they won the debate and Granville Sharp was quite angry about that. But it turns out the entrepreneurs were right.
24:41 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
24:41 Speaker 02 Because they had some really interesting reasoning here. So one thing they said is if you first abolish the slave trade, then the supply of enslaved people towards the colonies will dry up. And slavery was so, so horrific that, you know, without the continuous inflow of new enslaved people, like enslaved population would go down because very often people would die in just a few years. So the reasoning here was that if you first abolish the slave trade, then that will basically lay the ground for abolishing slavery as a whole. Because then, yeah, these slaveholders will be forced to start treating their enslaved people better.
25:20 Ryan Holiday? You know, they tried to do that in the US. Like the US constitution forbids at a later date. It says like in eighteen twenty or something like that will stop the, the, the importation of slaves. And they make it a capital crime. This is like Lincoln's point is like, you think the slave, you think the, the founders weren't opposed to slavery? You don't, you don't take something and make it a capital crime. If you don't at some level know it's morally repugnant. But the problem in the US was slavery was less brutal here than it was in the Caribbean. Right? That your point is in the Caribbean, they're basically like, it's like in other countries where they've used slaves, like in mines and stuff. It's so exploitative and inhuman that like the lifespan is like two years or three.
26:05 Ryan Holiday? I mean, it's just unimaginable. But when the founders in America eradicate the slave trade, it has the unintended benefit of making certain American slave. States, slave breeding states. So Virginia, who basically starts, Virginia and South Carolina, who are the two big states in the originating the Civil War. Virginia basically uses up its soil and then becomes a slave breeding state. So the whole idea of selling slaves down the river, that's where that comes from. What you're pointing out is that the entrepreneurs had a couple of things going for them. One, a real sense of how the world works. Like they knew slavery not as an abstraction, but as an institution. Cause a lot, some of the people involved in that abolition movement that, that they talk about in
26:50 Ryan Holiday? Bury the Chains, like had worked on slave ships. Like they even knew how it worked, right? So they, they understood the institution, not as an abstraction, but as a reality. And then I think, who was, who was one of them? Wedgwood. He had a keen understanding of markets and people. I think he probably understood that, hey, the softer sell of we're just eradicating the slave trade, which is the worst, most egregious part is a more compelling argument than we're going to get rid of this whole thing that you can't imagine your life without.
27:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. It's so fun nerding out about this.
27:25 Ryan Holiday? Totally.
27:25 Speaker 02 So the people around Wedgwood and, and some others in the movement, they created one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda that we've ever seen. And it was just a drawing, the illustration of a slave ship.
27:37 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
27:37 Speaker 02 What was so brilliant about it, it wasn't even an exaggeration.
27:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
27:41 Speaker 02 In a way, it was an understatement. So there was a small law implemented in the late 1780s to regulate the slave trade a little bit. It said that, you know, there's a maximum amount of people that you can put on a British slave ship. And now most people didn't even follow that law. They just, you know, sealed under a different flag, but whatever. They made an illustration that said, okay, so this is, this is legal. This is the max. And it's just this horrific image. So most people listening to this podcast now will probably have seen it because it's still like in so many history books. And it's just taking this instant visual. Representation, like you see it and you immediately know this is pure evil. Yes. And this is something to keep in mind that for many British people at the time, you know, they've never been on a slave ship. Right. They've never been to the colonies.
28:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, there were a few thousand black people in London at the time and slavery was pretty much illegal in London itself. There were some legal discussions around it, but it was very, very different than what was happening in the colonies. One other thing that they discovered was one of their most effective arguments in Westminster was actually not about enslaved people, but it was about how white sailors were treated on these ships. Right. So Thomas Clarkson and a colleague did a lot of investigative journalism into the question, what actually happens to these sailors? Because someone's making a lot of money here. Yeah. But that's the shareholders, you know? But these sailors, they go on a ship. Very often, you know, they're misled, they're made all kinds of promises, doesn't happen.
29:07 Speaker 02 And what's most worrying of all, many of them die. Yeah. Twenty percent of them died during one of these voyages, which is a very big benefit to the slave captain because that people, you don't have to pay them, right? So the journalism did a lot of, you know, statistical research, then went to Westminster, talked to the prime minister, William Pitt, and they were like, the slave trade is so evil. And they didn't talk about because, you know? Yes. What it does to black enslaved people. No, it's what it's doing to our boys. And suddenly, you know, all the politicians in Westminster were listening, like, what it's doing to our boys, right? And that was a super effective political argument that they used. Yeah. Very deliberately.
29:57 Speaker 02 When the forty eight laws of power, Robert Greene, one of the more controversial laws is never appeal to mercy or gratitude, always appeal to self-interest.
30:07 Ryan Holiday? And this is one of the problems of, I think, moral movements and causes is that they often argue that this should be implemented, or this should be stopped, because it's right and that's wrong. And if it were only that simple, it probably wouldn't be the status quo, right? Like, the injustice, or the cruelty, or the problem is tolerated because it's good for someone, somewhere, right? And so what effective people do is, is not say, "Oh, but it's bad for these people over here, so you should stop," is that they find a way to make it in the self-interest, or connect it to the identity of the person who is currently
30:52 Ryan Holiday? benefiting from the status quo. There has to be a savviness to it, and a persuasive element, that's almost always not going to be as simple as, "Let me show you what's right, and let me show you what's wrong." And I think that's, that's such an important leverage point, is they did, like, clearly, most people in the 18th century just did not care about black people at all. They saw them as less than human. So, part of the effectiveness of the abolition movement was, first off, let's humanize black people, and this is their other very famous form of propaganda and marketing, is the, the image of the black man holding a banner that says, "Am I not a man and a brother?" But then the other part, you're right, is they go, "Well, who do you care about? And let
31:36 Ryan Holiday? me show you why, what the status quo is bad for them too." So it's in your self-interest to care about this thing that you don't currently care about. And that, that's unsavory, though. I think in today's world, a lot of activists, and people on Twitter, and, you know, we struggle with taking the time and effort to do that. We just go, "This is wrong, it should end."
32:02 Speaker 02 In history, very often, the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And you see it again and again. I was studying the women's rights movement in the US the other day. And was quite surprised to learn that, you know, they became much more effective once they convinced conservative women to join the movement as well.
32:18 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
32:18 Speaker 02 And why did they manage to do this? Because it was all about temperance.
32:22 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
32:22 Speaker 02 The fight against alcohol. And conservative women were like, yeah, that's what we need to get rid of.
32:26 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
32:27 Speaker 02 And that's why we need the vote to basically pass prohibition. It's really interesting from a progressive perspective, right?
32:33 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
32:33 Speaker 02 That was one of the the main ingredients here. I do have a question for you, though, here. So, yes, you need moral reframing. That's what psychologists call it, using different kind of arguments that appeal to different people than the people who are already in your bubble. But still, the moral argument was very important, right? And the one other book that I really loved about the British abolitionist movement was Moral Capital by Christopher Leslie Brown. And he argues that it had everything to do with the American Revolution. So after the American Revolution, British elites are lost. They're like, what is our place in the world?
33:07 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:07 Speaker 02 We don't have our great colonies anymore. Why are we superior to the rest? Like, why are we still the most awesome nation on earth? And he argues that abolitionism basically became that thing, that it was almost a British vanity, that now they found something, you know, a stick to beat others with, to say like, we are going to be the great nation that will go out and first abolish the slave trade, and then also will force other countries to stop slave trading. And that is exactly what happened. So my country, the Netherlands, we didn't suffer on our own. It was basically the British said, like, you stop now, or you'll be in trouble.
33:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:41 Speaker 02 And that's what happened to dozens of nations. There are two researchers who estimate that about 80% of the global slave trade was abolished under British pressure.
33:50 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
33:50 Speaker 02 And I know that you consider ego the enemy. But here, I'm like, well, sometimes like this kind of vanity can also be channeled in a positive direction, right?
34:00 Ryan Holiday? Well, ego in yourself is a problem. But ego in other people is often a point of leverage, right? Like, in politics, it's how do I? You think about what great diplomats do. They often get someone to give up ground by appealing to how they'll be remembered in history. Right. It's like, nobody wants to be the bigger person if it comes at a cost. But if I can show you how being the bigger person is going to make you celebrated all over the world. The people are gonna, right. So, so that appealing, I think that's what Robert Greene is saying is that if you just go, hey, you gotta do this for me. I really need it. It'll make me feel good. I'm desperate. You go, you're the greatest statesman in the world, right?
34:44 Ryan Holiday? And you need to help my small nation to prove you have to appeal to vanity, self-interest, et cetera. You're someone's identity, not, let me tell you all the reasons why you are morally obligated to do this thing. If people were clear about their moral obligations or are often primarily motivated by their moral obligations, we probably wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. So it's about that reframing.
35:09 Speaker 02 What do you think about Thomas Clarkson's story then? Because I mean, I know a lot of young people listen to you as well. And what I really love about his biography and his memoirs, probably my favorite political memoirs I've ever read, is that initially he was driven by quite a bit of vanity. So when he was 24, 25, this is the year 1785, he saw a big career for himself in the Church of England. He participated in all these essay contests. You know, that was the way to make a name for yourself. You know, you couldn't become an influencer. So you, you did a Latin essay contest at Cambridge University. And just by chance, that year, 1785, he had to answer this question, is slavery okay? Yes or no? Is it, is it morally defensible? Yes or no?
35:53 Speaker 02 He'd never thought about the question, but he just wanted to win first prize. Okay, he, he did the research. He wrote a beautiful essay. He won first prize. And then there's this famous moment when he goes back from Cambridge to London where he lived. He's near the city, the village of Wade's Mill. He keeps thinking about the essay. It really bothers him. He steps off of his horse. And then he's like, but soon someone do something about this. And you read his memoirs and part of you think this is a pretty vain man, right? Really see that, yeah, a wall of possibilities opens up for him. He's like, the coolest thing is probably to take on the slave trade. Like, I could be a historical hero, riding on my horse, you know, across the United Kingdom, spreading this abolitionist propaganda everywhere. The point for me is that he did it.
36:37 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
36:38 Speaker 02 Right? There's this absolutely beautiful moment when he had a dinner in Tasten, and back then the abolitionist movement was very small. Tasten was this other little village that was like the capital of the, or the headquarters of that movement. And they have dinner together, and here he is, a young man, who at some point during the dinner stands up and says, "I am ready to pledge myself to fight the slave trade and fight slavery." And again, part of you thinks like, oh, quiet.
37:02 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, yeah.
37:02 Speaker 02 Don't it down a little bit, Thomas? But he did it. And then he, he goes to Bristol, you know, the, the great slave haven. And when he's there, he suddenly starts to dawn him and is like, oh, fuck, this is scary, man.
37:14 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
37:14 Speaker 02 This, this could be quite dangerous.
37:16 Ryan Holiday? Way more than I.
37:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. And at some point, you know, he really has to fear for his life. In Liverpool, people almost kill him. And he managed to get away just, just in time. But initially, it is that vanity, that ambition that drives him. But it's redirected in a more productive way. And then, most importantly, the work itself utterly changes him as a person.
37:36 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
37:36 Speaker 02 So when he starts learning more and doing more, he, he realizes that it's actually not about him.
37:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
37:41 Speaker 02 That he's part of a much bigger movement. And in the end, you know, he is offered, you know, a very posh funeral in a, you know, one of those great British churches. But he says, no, no, no, I don't need that. And he's buried in an unmarked grave. Like, we know the graveyard, but we don't even know where he lies.
37:56 Ryan Holiday? His legacy is, is what he did.
37:58 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly.
37:59 Ryan Holiday? That's the monument.
38:00 Speaker 02 So that's, that's, I guess, something I've started to believe in, maybe especially for younger people. Like, it's fine to want to make a name for yourself.
38:08 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
38:08 Speaker 02 Maybe it's also, it resonated so much because I, you know, saw a bit of myself in that. You know, when I was 25, I was like, you know, I wanna become a bestselling author. I wanna write about big ideas, et cetera. And, you know, now that I've been doing the work for a decade, you can feel that the work is transforming you.
38:25 Ryan Holiday? Yes, I think if it's just the ego and the ego is not directed at something profoundly humbling, it probably turns malignant very quickly. But if it's about something bigger than you, and if it's something extremely hard, I think those two can work well in concert with each other. But yeah, like, the great man of history theory is not so popular academically or culturally, right? But, but if you don't believe you can change the world, certainly you will not be the one changing the world. I just think it's interesting that culturally, we certainly accept that individuals can make the world a worse place. Like, any one person has the power to negatively harm large groups of people. And, and, you know,
39:08 Ryan Holiday? we say like, if, you know, if, if you're not part of the solution, you're a part of the problem, or whatever. And, and then, at the same time, we're really cynical and negative about any one individual's ability to make a positive difference. And we don't have a culture that encourages and celebrates people to really reimagine, or imagine what a future could look like, and that they themselves could be that person. Like, I even, I've even come to, to really dislike that quote, which becomes popular in the civil rights movement, it was a favorite of Martin Luther King, that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. There's an inherent fatalism. It's a positive fatalism,
39:51 Ryan Holiday? but there is a passivity. It implies that it inevitably gets better. And that is, if you have studied history, not true. The arc of, the moral arc of the universe has progressed positively over a long timeline, but not on its own.
40:09 Speaker 02 In some respects, I would say.
40:11 Ryan Holiday? But, but I'm saying, in, in all the areas that we would say it's gotten better. It was because individuals or groups of individuals reached up and, and through sheer weight and force, pulled.
40:21 Speaker 02 We bend the arc of history. If we stop doing that, it might very well snap back. And in some respects, like, we've, we've gone. Pretty much in the wrong direction. In the book, I talk a lot about the atrocity of factory farming. So I think that is one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time. We can ask this question, like, how will the historians of the future look back on us? Because we can look back on the 18th century and say, okay, slavery was abhorrent, you know? How could these people do this? Even though, you know, back then, it was just an utterly normal part of how the economy worked. I think something like factory farming today is quite similar. Like, most people just don't realize how utterly evil this system is, how billions and billions of animals are tortured on a scale that is
41:03 Speaker 02 just hard to wrap your head around. Now, I think that it is very well possible that there may have been a few people, maybe in the 50s and the 60s, when this system was started, that could have been the Thomas Clarksons, who would have prevented this all from happening. You know, maybe they fallen off their horse. That's, that's the that's the thing I realized. And I totally changed my mind about when I, when I studied the British abolitionist movement. I used to be the kind of historian, because that's how I was educated, you know, as most historians are educated. I studied history by focusing more on the structural forces, right? Marxist history, right? You look at the underlayers, and the rest is just all noise. And indeed, individuals possibly can't make a big difference. But you study the British abolitionist movement, the greatest movement that we've ever seen
41:46 Speaker 02 for human rights, and you realize it's bollocks, it's totally wrong. A few people could have, you know, passed away, or something could have happened to them, and history could have looked totally, totally different. It is very well imaginable that slavery would have continued to go on for many, many decades, maybe well into the 20th century.
42:05 Ryan Holiday? Or would we have had to have some kind of global civil war about slavery? Like, like, imagine if a few people in the US had been more effective as abolitionists, or so, okay, this is nerding out about American history a little bit, but Stephen Douglas basically unleashes forces which not only prolong slavery, expand it temporarily, and lead to the Civil War. One nefarious, self-interested politician, like, the status quo in America was that slavery was not growing. And one politician who Who thinks that he's trying to control the direction of the transcontinental railroad. So he needs political power.
42:45 Ryan Holiday? And he basically says, well, I think that the Missouri compromise and the Mason Dix, all these compromises that we've worked out, let's toss it all up. Let's, he puts forth this thing called popular sovereignty, which he says, let the territories decide whether they'll have slavery or not. And Lincoln is aghast at this because he's saying you're acting like the expansion of slavery is any other dollar and cents issue. Like, should we do this or should we do that? He's saying, should we own and rape and kill other human beings in an exploitative labor system or not? You're saying, let the people decide. He's like, that's unconscionable. This is not how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. It's more complicated than that.
43:30 Ryan Holiday? We have a constitution for a reason, a declaration of independence for a reason. But basically, this one politician unleashes those forces, right? And so you go, hey, what if a handful of other politicians had unleashed positive forces earlier? Does slavery get eradicated peacefully in America? Do you save a half a million to a million lives in the civil war? Like, one of the problems with the study of history, historians make it seem like it could have only been the way that it was. And in fact, every single thing could have gone very differently. And understanding that what's happening right now can go differently too, based on the choices we make, is an incredibly terrifying and empowering thing. And your point that, yeah, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,
44:15 Ryan Holiday? certain individuals could have made decisions that could have changed the trajectory of climate change, infectious diseases. Factory farming is a moral nightmare. It's slightly better than it could be because of the work of someone like Temple Grandin. Like, one individual by going like, hey, why are animals behaving the way that they are in these slaughterhouses, you know, makes certain decisions? You could argue she's, you know, just moving deck chairs around. I don't, I think she had a profound impact on alleviating suffering and then has opened our I think opened the mind of activists who are now opposed to factory farming as a whole. But the point is, individuals can not just, abolition is one, eradicating or eliminating
44:59 Ryan Holiday? one thing is very impressive, but you can also moderate, change, you can put things on a trajectory that might lead to the eradication or the elimination of some, the fatalism is the problem, that it can only be the way that it is, and it will always be the way that it is forever.
45:15 Ryan Holiday? Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.
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