You’re Not Wasting Time, You’re Wasting Your Life | Rutger Bregman (PT. 2)

You’re not here to impress, you're here to make a difference. In this PT. 2 episode, historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman sits down with Ryan for a deep dive into what a meaningful life actually looks like and why so many people end up wasting their one shot at it. They talk about how easy it is to chase the wrong goals, why real impact often goes unnoticed, and how to realign your work with what truly matters. 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 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Now, one of my favorite sections in Courage is Calling is about this idea of moral luck. Do you know what moral luck is? Moral luck is a term sociologists and historians talk about. It's basically like, not everyone finds themselves in a position to be a whistleblower about some government secret. Not everyone is there when somebody falls in the water and can't swim. You know, not everyone's Florence Nightingale and is born when nursing is primitive, and then they can invent this whole thing. You know, some of us aren't lucky enough

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  to be in the Spartan army when the Persians invade, or, you know, we weren't screenwriters when the blacklist was there, or we weren't feminists during the suffragette movement, if that's what you want to call luck. But, but obviously, they couldn't have been courageous and just and done their important work if they weren't there at that moment in history. And so sometimes we, we sort of lament where we are now.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Churchill, writing of The Earl of Roseberry, said with sadness that the man lived in an age of great men and small events. And what I end up saying in Courage is Calling is that while there is a kind of boring tranquility to that Victorian period, Roseberry lived from 1847 to 1929. It's also just totally wrong. I mean Churchill is totally wrong. There were massive events in the middle of the 19th century and there were great injustices that cried out for help. Where were these great men? You know, the United States doesn't abolish slavery until 1865. For the entirety of Roseberry's life, working conditions in England's factories

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  were heinous and awful. Britain's colonial system and its abuses carried on for decades. The Irish question loomed over British politics. Countries were going to war for no reason. Millions of people were starving. Millions of people were being abused. Countless things went uninvented, unreformed and unchampioned. I guess what I'm saying is that there is plenty that could have been done in those years. And that was true even during the events of Churchill's time. You know, Churchill was tapped on the shoulder, but not about the Bengal famine. Why did he mishear Gandhi's moral call? Churchill had his finest hours, but he can't escape the blame for those he didn't answer.

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  And that remains true for us today, right? That's what moral luck is. And I think if there's anywhere you can say we make our own luck, it's here. We make our own luck with what we do. And Marcus really says this. He says, "True good fortune is what you make for yourself." Good fortune, good character, good intentions and good actions. In part one of my episode with Brecker Bregman, we talked a lot about this, how we actually need to be more morally ambitious. We need to strive to do more, to make more changes, to have more of an impact. We need to be more ambitious, not to make more money, not to have more followers, not to care about our legacy so much as to care about our impact on our fellow human beings. We talked a lot about Thomas

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  Clarkson in part one, that's obviously someone we both write about in our books. I write about him and right thing right now. Rucker writes about him in his amazing book Moral Ambition. Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. I loved this book. He's got two other interesting books worth checking out. Humankind, A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists. The Guardian called him a Dutch wonderkin with new ideas. He's done some great TED Talks and he just co-founded this thing called the School for Moral Ambition, which I'm really interested. I'm going to participate in. I want to be more ambitious. I feel like I've had a lot of impact in my work. That's been the rewarding thing, hearing how people. Not that people liked it, but what people were able to do with it. But I want to do more and I think we all need to do more.

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  And I think Stoicism calls for us to do more, to make our own moral luck, as Marcus Aurelius is saying. So, look, I'll just get into this. Rucker is awesome. You can grab signed copies of Moral Ambition at the Painted Porch. He was nice enough to sign them. I think you're really going to like this book. You can follow him on Instagram, at Twitter, at RuckerBregman. Go out there and do good. I really enjoyed this interview and I think you're going to like listening to it.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  This is one big problem, right? With the study of history, that we know how the story ended.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Like when we study the history of Nazi Germany, it's really hard to study it properly because we know how it ends. We know it ends with the mass murder of 6 million Jews in the gas chambers, but in a way that prevents us from properly understanding what happens in the early 1930s. And why people were seduced by Hitler and why some conservative politicians decided to work with him because they hated the left so much.

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Right? That is, I feel sometimes also the problem in this country right now. We see what's happening to democracy. We see what's happening to the rule of law. But then we have historical examples, you know, that instinctively, you know, you like to refer to because yeah, you are reminded of certain things that happened in Italy, maybe. In Germany, maybe, but it's almost difficult because we always think of the end, but that's not the thing. Like, we don't know how it's going to end.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And that's exactly why we got to talk about what's, what's happening right now.

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  We need to celebrate more examples like Thomas. Clarkson, because Thomas Clarkson on that road goes, someone should do something about this. And then a lot of people think that, right? All the major issues of our time for all time, someone has thought someone should do something about this. The second part is the essential part, which is he said, and maybe that person should be me. Right? That's what we need more people to do to say, hey, maybe that person should be me. And I think we do a bad job teaching our kids. And it's weird because, you know, now there's all these arguments over history. I think this is something we should all agree on. We do a bad job celebrating and telling the stories of those exceptions. Like, for instance, we don't talk about Thomas Clarkson.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  We don't teach the Holocaust enough. A lot of kids don't even know that it occurred. But like, a few years ago, I read this book called The Conspiracy of Decency. You read this book? It's about Denmark and how Denmark responded to the Holocaust. Oh, yeah, I know. And basically, the people of Denmark got together and there was like a thousand or so Jews in Denmark at this time. And, and goes, hey, we're not going to do this. And there's this sort of countrywide resistance. Individually, they smuggle like in the form of an underground railroad. One Denmark Jew after another out of the country into Switzerland, I think. No, into Norway and Sweden. Yeah, Norway and Sweden.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  And they did what we all tell ourselves we would do if something like this was happening. They do what we wish the rest of Europe had done. And then, so there is the positive example. And we just don't fucking talk about it. We, but that's what you would want. The study of history is not to remember a bunch of facts and figures. And it's certainly not to make you feel shitty and depressed and give up on humanity. The study of history, like the great biographies of the past, like Plutarch, was to celebrate the great men and women of history who changed the arc of things, who moved things. And to see ourselves in them, and then to hopefully do some version of that ourselves. There's so much to say about this. So.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Maybe the first story is this, one of the chapters in my book is about resistance heroes during the Second World War. As a young boy, I was already fascinated by that question, like, why did some people have that courage? Yes. As I said, I grew up in the Netherlands. The Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in 1940, and very quickly Jews were taken away. And actually, the Netherlands had one of the highest percentage, around 80% of Jews that were eventually murdered. And there was little resistance, I'm sad to say. Most people were against the Nazis. They didn't like the Nazis, but they also felt like they were They didn't want to be next. Bystanders, and that they just couldn't do anything. And they also thought, well, we don't really know what's happening to them anyway. So there were a few exceptions.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And I was really interested in the question, what makes them different? Like, what makes a resistance hero? Is there something like the psychology of a resistance hero? Is there something in their DNA, their genes, in their upbringing? What's going on here? Now, after the war, there were these big research projects. One of them was at the, what is it, the California State University, Samuel and Pearl Olner, two professors. They were like, okay, let's do hundreds of interviews with resistance heroes. And they published a big book about it. It's called The Altruistic Personality Project. I was very excited. You know, I ordered the book, I read it, and very quickly, you know, I looked at the appendix where all the statistical evidence was gathered. And I saw these same letters over and over

• 9:54Speaker 01

  again, like NS, NS, NS, NS, meaning non-significant. They were looking at many different variables, and they couldn't just find anything. It very much seemed to be a cross-section, you know, of the population, people from the left to the right, young, old, poor, rich. But then later, a new group of researchers looked at the same dataset, and they did find one very predictive thing. They found that around 96% of people said yes when they were asked to join the resistance. So this is the, this is like the crucial thing. If you're asked to do something, then very often, people say yes. So they realized that it's not really about the psychology of the resistance hero. No, it's about the sociology, right? It was a very contagious thing. Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And this also explains why resistance wasn't like evenly distributed over the country, but that you You could see pockets of resistance.

• 10:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  And you also had these, I like to call them super spreaders, like people who just asked a huge amount of people to also join the resistance.

• 10:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I profiled one of them, a man named Arnold Dauß, and he was very persistent. Like, there's this one funny story where he convinced a lot of Amsterdam Jews to go to the province in Drenthe, in the east of the Netherlands. At some point, he has two Jews that are looking for a hiding place. And he goes to a farmer and then says, hey, do you have a place for this person? And he says, no, we don't have a place. Well, they're actually here. Come in, come in and have a good day. And they survived the war. So that, for me, that was a big epiphany, that it's not really about who you are, but it's about who you can become. In your justice book, you quote Aristotle, right? You don't become a harpist because you're born that way. You become a harpist by playing the harp, right? You become a builder by building.

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  You do.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And that's, for me, such a fundamental insight. You're not born as a good person. You become a good person by doing good things. So just get started.

• 11:45Ryan Holiday?

  What I would add to that, then, because that's very groundbreaking to me, that it's about being asked. What great activists do is they don't write anyone or any segment of society off. They create inclusive movements. And like you look at Gandhi, you look at Martin Luther King, you look at Harvey Milk. What was almost frustrating about them to their followers was how uncynical they were in the sense that they were always trying to create alliances, collaboration. They didn't see anyone or anything as irredeemable, right? They were trying to bring people into the tent, which is kind of the opposite of how activism works today, right? Which is like, it's about purity, it's about exclusivity, it's about kicking people out

• 12:29Ryan Holiday?

  of the movement for not being totally on board with it. This is why the left has almost no political power, because they have, they not just kicked all the people out of the big tent, but they were so egregious in doing so that they went to the other side. No one wants to exist in political no man's land. So when you decline an alliance with someone, you are often forcing them to ally with your opponents. Right? When you cancel someone from the left, it's not a coincidence. Most of them end up on the right. You know? And so the idea of, hey, everyone is capable of being good, of being on the right side of this. And we're not going to write you off for being currently on the wrong side of this. Like, I think, to go back to abolition, I'm forgetting the guy's name.

• 13:11Ryan Holiday?

  But the guy that writes Amazing Grace, obviously a song about grace and redeemability, is a former slave trader. They don't, they don't prevent him from joining because he did horrible things to other human beings. They actually see him as a potential ally for the movement because he knows how it works. And so the idea of like, who are you asking to join? And how are you bringing people along with you? That's what they say, leaders create leaders. Right? Great activists help make people who are not currently politically engaged, decide that they should be engaged and capable of making a contribution.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Every great movement throughout history, it was a coalition of people who very often didn't agree with one another. Yes. So my rule of thumb is always like, if, if someone agrees with you for like 70 to 80% of the time, that person is an ally, not your enemy.

• 13:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  And indeed, you see it when, again, the abolitionists, the Quakers initially didn't get much done.

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Because they were this very weird Protestant radical sect who deeply believed in their own dogmas.

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It's only once they started working together with the evangelicals.

• 14:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  That they, you know, started to galvanize a movement. And for us, it's, it's difficult to fully wrap our head around how difficult that was for them. Like, these were very, very religious people. And it's like, that's, that's pretty important that, that they were able to overcome those differences to build that coalition.

• 14:43Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I mean, even in the women's rights movement, right? There's all these debates about should we let Mormon women in, who were at that point, polygamists. Right? And so utterly foreign and objectionable to, you know, sort of conservative women in New York City or whatever. And then do we let black women in? Do we let? Do we let poor women in, right? And, and the women's rights movement succeeds when it is this sort of big, broad tent that covers, you know, not just a good swath of American society, but British society as well, right? Like, the multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-viewpoint coalition is ultimately like the one that succeeds.

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Insular movements tends, not only do they tend not to get a lot of support, but they tend to implode and take, you know, sort of silly and idiosyncratic stance. Like, they get themselves in trouble because there's not enough ideological diversity inside the movement.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  So that's one thing we need the coalition building. The other thing that we can really learn here is the importance of perseverance.

• 15:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  So I already said that only one of the founders of the British Society for the abolition of the slave trade was still alive when they finally accomplished their goals. Well, take the women's rights movement. Of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls in 1848, you know, the first women's rights convention in the United States, only one was still alive in 1920, when finally, what is it, the 20th amendment was passed and, you know, the federal right to vote was there, and she was sick on the day of elections.

• 16:16Ryan Holiday?

  This is Carrie Chapman Cat, who wasn't even born until after Seneca Falls.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I know which quote. Yeah, this is a very powerful.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution, it cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign. During that time, they were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters, 480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments, 47 campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write women's suffrage into state constitutions, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include women's suffrage blanks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt women's suffrage blanks, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive congresses.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And this is, again, the thing, like, we only, we study history and we know the end of the story. Like, we know, oh, all's well that ends well, you know? Women got the right to vote.

• 17:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  But Susan B. Anthony, you know, she was dead before that amendment was passed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she didn't get to see it. Like, so many of these, these great pioneers, they never saw what we know what happened in the end. And you had that realization that... That perseverance to be part of something that's much bigger than you, that just inspired in me an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy.

• 17:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Like, I studied these great moral pioneers of the past. I'm like, this is what it means to live a great life. To be able to, how do you say that? Follow in the footsteps of those who came before you.

• 17:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  It's almost a form of transcendence. Like, I'm not a super religious guy myself. My father is a Protestant minister, but I never caught the bug in that way. I don't go to church often. But for me, this is almost a kind of religion. This is how I believe in the afterlife, right? Is just this feeling that you can follow in those footsteps. And that, like, I mentioned factory farming. I don't think I'm gonna see the end of that. Like, or I think it's gonna take a lot, a lot of time, at least. But knowing that you're a part of something that's much bigger than you are, that gives me a lot of energy to work on that stuff.

• 18:11Ryan Holiday?

  There's a line from a Longfellow poem, which I'll probably butcher, but I think about it all the time. He says, "The lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and leave footprints behind us in the sands of time." He says, "Footprints that some other person, struggling difficulty, can take solace and inspiration from." That that's the meaning of life, is that somebody did something that inspired you to do something. And you, in doing something, can leave something behind that inspires some other person. And that's, it's this idea of a procession of torches. We don't study the abolition movement enough, Thomas Clarkson. But Thomas Clarkson puts in motion this movement, which leads to the women's rights movement,

• 18:56Ryan Holiday?

  which leads to the civil rights movement, which leads to the gay rights movement, which leads to the environmental movement, which leads to everything that's happening right now. And that if you see it as this sort of one movement, learning and teaching and inspiring, and by the way, building up mailing lists and, you know, constituencies and experience and tactics and strategies that then the next group is inheriting and building on and adding on, that's really how you make a difference. It's like, how have you left? In that same Longfellow poem, he says, you know, like, "Tomorrow should find you further than today." It's weird to be talking about moral ambition,

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  but then also shrink it down to just that, which is like, how are you making progress on these things? That's the goal.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  This is for me, the form of immortality we can all believe in, no matter if you believe in God, yes or no. It's like building monuments in time. And no one can take that away from you, right? If you've done something, achieved something, created something that will inspire people who come after you. I mean, Thomas Clarkson is dead for two centuries now, and here we're fanboying about, you know, someone who's been so inspirational to us. And I read his memoirs, and it's speaking through me, you know, through the centuries. And I was like, indeed, this is what it means to live a great life. It's almost like as if he's reaching out through the pages and asking me that question, like, do you want to do this as well? I'm like, yeah. So yeah, it's been super influential to me. It's like, with this book, for example, I thought, you know, I spent a decade now in the quote unquote

• 20:33Speaker 01

  awareness industry, writing articles and books, which is powerful, which is important, sharing ideas. But learning more about these abolitionists really made me want to build something. So I became the co-founder of the School for Moral Ambition. We're helping as many people as possible to pivot their careers towards more socially meaningful jobs. And again, I never thought, if you would have asked me this a couple of years ago, I would have said, look, I'm just a writer, you know, I live in my little cave and I write books and that's what I do. I'm like, I'm not entrepreneurial at all. And reading about these people helped me to discover that, again, being entrepreneurial, this is not something you're born with. You can really get stuck in a kind of self-image, like, oh, that's not who I am. No, you become someone by just doing it. It's such a simple lesson, but very powerful.

• 21:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so the cardinal virtues is stoicism or courage. I think people know what that is. Discipline, people know what that is. Wisdom, they know what that is. And then justice is the one that we kind of skip over, or we think, we have a strange sense of, like, too many people think justice is a thing that you get, right? Like, you get justice from the legal system. You get justice from a judge or a juror. You get justice because the law says this is how things are supposed to be. What I've tried to do in my writings, and this is what I did in the Justice book, and what I tried to build this series around is the idea that, no, no, no, all the virtues, but justice, perhaps most of all, is a thing that you do. Like, justice is a thing that you give. Justice is not...

• 21:58Ryan Holiday?

  Like, hey, here's how I think society should be like in the like, I'd like people to treat other people well. No, justice is how you treat people. Justice is not, hey, what I want those politicians in Brussels or DC to be doing. Justice is like, you run a small business, right? Do you give your employees health insurance? Like, justice is not, hey, what should the minimum wage law be? It is, but justice is also like, what do you pay the person who cleans your house? Right? Like, justice is both smaller and bigger than I think we, we unfortunately.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  It's the most important one of all, right?

• 22:34Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I read this piece the other day about, I think the author called it modern monks. You know, these men who spend a lot of time going to the gym, you know, getting the right vitamins, taking care of their body. I don't know, meditating a lot. And I think all of that is powerful, but the most important question is like, what for? Like, what's the purpose? If you're so healthy, if you're so powerful, like, what are you gonna do with all those talents? And the answer is, I would say, justice, right? So I think it's important.

• 23:04Ryan Holiday?

  All the other virtues are rendered meaningless if not directed at justice, right? So, so, yeah, you're like incredibly self-disciplined, you're working incredibly hard on your body. And you're just getting really strong. That's just vanity. Have you created a strong body that can then work long hours in pursuit of something meaningful? If you are, there were a lot of brave soldiers in the Confederacy, right? There were, I'm sure, brave captains who led convoys of slave ships and challenged the elements. And, but if it's in pursuit of something morally bankrupt, it is itself morally bankrupt. None of these things exist in isolation, right?

• 23:44Ryan Holiday?

  Like, the people who decided, I'm not gonna get a vaccine during the middle of a pandemic and then like, lost their jobs over. There's a certain amount of courage in that, I guess. It's just fucking stupid, though, right? Like, you've picked a dumb cause to go all in on, right? And so, yeah, justice has to be the thing that your life is.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  It's the most important question. What do you actually work on? I sometimes call this the Gandalf Frodo model. Of of doing good. So we all know that story, right? Gandalf knocks on Frodo's door and says, look, uh, situation, evil wizard wants to kill us all. You gotta do this, right? We need you to do this. And Gandalf doesn't say, hey Frodo, what's your passion? Right? What do you feel good about? Well, Frodo would have said like gardening, you know, having a lot of second breakfasts, living here in the Shire with my friends. No, he needed to apply his unique talents and skills to the most important urgent challenge that was facing all the hobbits and humanity and all species. And I think we can ask that same question today, like, what would Gandalf say?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Find yourself an alt wise wizard. At the organization I co-founded, we work with so-called prioritization researchers. So they spend a lot of time thinking about what are the most pressing and most neglected issues we face as a species right now? So it's like three things that are important, very sizable problems, very solvable. You got, you gotta know what to do and, and, and sorely neglected. You focus on the stuff that, you know, it's maybe not that sexy. So take something like global warming, climate change, super big problem, very sizable, very solvable as well. Is it sorely neglected? I think the good news is that it's less and less so. Like millions of people are doing great work here. So if you want to be really morally ambitious, then try and focus on the most neglected aspects on it.

• 25:30Ryan Holiday?

  Which is, by the way, basic entrepreneurship. You don't go where everyone else is going. You try to go towards a blue ocean. You go where there's not competition again. Is this something only you could do? What's your replacement?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And so that's probably food. So that's 20% of emissions. And it's super neglected compared to the other aspects, like clean cars or electric cars are doing really well. Clean energy is scaling up. I mean, we're in Texas right now and Texas is beating, beating the world in that respect. So that's a lot of good news, but in terms of food, sustainable alternative proteins, there's still so much work to do. But you can even say like, well, maybe climate isn't even the best problem to work on. Right now, if you want to be super morally ambitious, because the best time to join the movement would have been in the 1970s. When it was super small, you know, that was the 1787, you know, when the abolitionist movement. We got started in the UK. That was the comparable moment for climate. So what is a problem that is at that point right now?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  In my book, I give a couple of candidates. One could be, you know, the next pandemic. That could be way, way worse. And currently, the whole world spends around a billion researching emerging infectious diseases like Zika and Ebola, which is the same as Americans spend bleaching their teeth. Right. Super neglected. It could be such a huge problem. We already talked about factory farming. It could be these terrible diseases that hundreds of thousands of people die off that everyone seems to be ignoring, like already mentioned malaria. I mean, the fact that- John Green just wrote an amazing book about tuberculosis. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. You had him on the show, right? I know. Oh, no, not yet. Okay. So that's a good example. It's 1.5 million people dying from it and super neglected.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Very often, the reason why these big problems are neglected is because there's no business model. So again, I'm a big believer in the power of markets. Yeah. If you can make money on something, then usually something will be done about it. This also means that very often your VORP is relatively low. You know, if you're one of those commercial entrepreneurs solving one of those problems. Like if, not saying that Zuckerberg solved a big problem with launching Facebook, but if he didn't do it, someone else would have, right? We can be pretty sure about that. But then with malaria, right, it's just this, the whole history of that in the book. In the early 1980s, people already realized, scientists already realized that we could make a vaccine, a very effective vaccine, you know, but that it would just take a lot more money and a lot more research.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  But that would surely be doable in a couple of years if governments or companies would say, let's get this done. Didn't happen. Why not? You can't make money on it. It's mostly very poor people in poor countries dying from it. In the end, it took 20 years until Bill Gates, of all people, had to come along and say, hey, this seems super neglected. You know, I'll spend more money on it. And then other groups came in as well. And then it took 40 years. And in those 40 years, 40 million people died from malaria, which is as much as how many people died in Europe during the Second World War. So those are the problems. If we would have had a Thomas Clarkson in 1980 saying, I'm gonna take this on, right? I'm gonna lobby a government. I'm gonna work inside a corporation.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I'm gonna find some way to make this happen. That person could have saved millions and millions of lives.

• 28:52Ryan Holiday?

  Don't you think it's kind of depressing when you think about someone like Luigi Mangione? Right? So here you have a kid, wealthy family, clearly very smart, an entrepreneur, wants to make a difference, outraged at the injustices of the world. And he sits down and says, I'm gonna, he has a Clarkson moment, right? I'm gonna do something about it. And what he decides to do about it is murder one CEO of one company, allegedly. But like, he could have said, hey, I'm gonna start a new kind of healthcare company. I'm gonna start a nonprofit. I'm gonna create a social media platform that, that, you know, I'm gonna bring to light the horrors of this system and bring it, bring public awareness to it.

• 29:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right? He could have done so many morally ambitious things. And then instead, he did an incredibly dangerous, scary, like, he put his life on the line, like, the death penalty over it. But the, the means with which he used, I think, most of your Gondis and your Martin Luther Kings, etc., would have found morally repugnant, which I do as well. But also, like, the plan, what he's hoping to accomplish, was also infused with this nihilism, like, the only impact I can have as an individual is to murder another individual. That's so pathetically self-disempowering.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  We have a total lack of role models here. On the left, we have the Luigi Mangione's. On the right, we have Andrew Tate.

• 30:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Recently, my son was born and

• 30:20Ryan Holiday?

  Congratulations.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's our second, so, almost four years ago, our daughter was born. And then I was like, okay, cool, let's, let's buy a lot of books about what women can do and what they can build in this world. And there are beautiful books about, you know, women are smart, women are powerful, women, you know, can do everything they want. And I loved reading those books.

• 30:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  But then, when our son was born, I was like, okay, now I wanna have all the books about how awesome boys are, right? What they can build. And I was like, why are these books, right? Well, who are the great role models here? They're such a A gap in the culture here.

• 30:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Who are the Thomas Clarksons of today that I can tell my son about? Like, this is what it means to live a great life.

• 31:03Ryan Holiday?

  This is a man, this is what a man does, right? This is what a great person does, but like specifically, this is what you, this person, in the same way that, that it's important that everyone sees themselves represented in TV and movies and art. So you go, hey, I can do that thing. We've lost the track on being able to do that. I think for young men also, like, who, who do I want to be like? What's my model? I don't think there's a lot of great examples.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's what we need, right, Ryan? We need a strategy to basically tell these young men, like Andrew Tate is.

• 31:34Ryan Holiday?

  He's a fucking loser.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. The point is not, like, people on the left would say, oh, he's so immoral. Like, that doesn't work. No, he's a loser.

• 31:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  He's just.

• 31:42Ryan Holiday?

  He's a fucking loser.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  He's just an idiot. He's dumb and he's wasting his life on the most stupid things.

• 31:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And.

• 31:48Ryan Holiday?

  He's a, yeah, he's a fucking loser. He's a fucking loser.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  That's also something I've, I've experienced. You know, we've been recruiting people from, you know, big banks, corporate law firms, convincing them to quit their jobs and work on some of the most pressing issues. And the last thing you should do is to tell these people that they're so selfish and immoral. And they'll say, oh, come on, you just can't keep up. You're jealous, right? You can't play the game like I do. No, what you say is like, look, you're so talented. You went to this brilliant university, you have this skill set, and this is what you do with it?

• 32:20Ryan Holiday?

  You have to make it culturally aspirational.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that is, was one of the great epiphanies when I studied, again, the British abolitionist movement. It was part of something much bigger, Ryan. So it wasn't just about abolitionism, it was about changing the whole culture. William Wilberforce, one of his biographers said this, it was his life's mission to make doing good more fashionable.

• 32:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  On his deathbed, if you would have asked him, what are you most proud of? He wouldn't have talked probably about the British Society with the abolition of the slave trade. He would have talked about this other. NGO organization he started that was all about the the fight against vice and the promotion of virtue.

• 32:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  For him, those two things were intimately connected. In the 1770s, there was this incredibly immoral period in in British history. There was a lot of alcoholism in Parliament. Politicians slurred their speeches. One in five women was a street prostitute in London. What was it? The Prince of Wills was an incredible a-hole.

• 33:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  And was behaving very immorally. And these people wanted to start a counter-revolution against that. They wanted to bring virtue back in fashion, basically. I think we've seen the same thing in the US, by the way, with the move from the Gilded Age to the progressive era. People like Theodore Roosevelt, people like Louis Brandeys, people like Elva Vanderbilt. These were elites who were redefining what it means to be successful, and we desperately need that today.

• 33:47Ryan Holiday?

  So how do you think? I feel like, look, like I had a successful marketing and business career. I could have kept writing marketing books. It's obviously a better niche as far as, you know, speeches and consulting. And I decided to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, which I, you know, popularized for millions of people. I love what I do. I feel like I've been ambitious in, I mean, look, I could have started a startup, a tech company, I could have, I could have done a bunch of things, and I instead decided to start a little bookstore in this little town. I feel like I have, at various points in my life, chosen a thing that's harder, more unusual.

• 34:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's not selfless, but it's less selfish than maybe at earlier times in my life I would have intrinsically been. But how do you think I could be more morally ambitious? But what, if I went to your school, what would you push me to start doing and thinking about?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  So the feeling I had after a decade in the awareness industry, you know, writing articles and books and Talking about the great problems we face and then hoping that some other people would actually do the work of improving this world. Yeah, I had this nagging feeling that I wasn't doing enough. I looked at the great moral pioneers of history and it's like, wouldn't it be awesome to actually be in the arena? We all know the famous Theodore Roosevelt quote, "It's not the critic who counts, it's the man or the woman in the arena," you know, with the sweat on his face, falling, standing back up again. And that's what I was yearning for. So perhaps it's something like that, right? You have created a pretty powerful,

• 35:23Speaker 01

  effective empire around a very powerful ancient idea. In my view, it is all about bringing virtue back in fashion. But maybe it's now time to try and bridge that gap from awareness and ideas and books and podcasts to actually doing something, building something, like creating these tangible initiatives that are, that really are about a specific cause, right? So maybe it's something like that. We'd love to work with you on it and figure it out.

• 35:51Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I try to use the platform for like, causes I care about. I mean, it would be much easier and more profitable to me to not talk about the justice side of things at all. Like, I knew in this series, the justice book would be the most controversial, piss off the most people. There's also a version where I didn't talk about anything that's happening contemporaneously. I could, you know, only talk about discipline and productivity and resilience, but I feel like I choose to talk about things that are happening in the world. I feel like I would try to, like, every year we do, instead of like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which I think are gross, we just raise money for food banks. And so I, we've, you know, we've had millions of people that way. I try to use this stuff, but there's something, yeah, there's something I feel that that's still coming up short.

• 36:36Ryan Holiday?

  And from an accounting perspective, there's more to do and I haven't.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Well, I read in your book about, you know, you make a decision of the, like, with the little medals, right? And you're like, "We're not going to buy them in China, we're going to buy them in the US," right? And that's nice. But for me, that is about looking for a moral minimum.

• 36:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And that's what we all should be doing. Like, don't consume meat from factory farms. Like, I don't know, compensate your CO2 emissions. Every once in a while, it's all nice, right?

• 37:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, just the basic obligations as a person who's trying to not make the world worse.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. But moral ambition is about looking for your moral maximum.

• 37:09Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  It's like, how far can you push yourself?

• 37:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And if you're ambitious as a commercial entrepreneur, you're not like, okay, now I've earned enough money, right? It's like, I don't know, it's not a million.

• 37:18Ryan Holiday?

  I can pay my bills.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And done, right? Maybe if you're in the FIRE movement, then it's all about retiring as early as possible, which I think is quite sad that that movement has taken off in that way. Like, oh, retirement is the greatest goal in life.

• 37:29Ryan Holiday?

  The goal of life is to do nothing.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's the mindset we should adopt here.

• 37:35Ryan Holiday?

  The moral maximum.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  How can we push it? And again, I think cost selection is the most important determinant of your impact.

• 37:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That's like, that is the greatest multiplier here, looking for those neglected things. The fact that John Green, you know, wrote a book about tuberculosis.

• 37:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  That is just incredibly impactful because no one gives a shit about tuberculosis.

• 37:56Ryan Holiday?

  He took his unique skill set, like in the way that Wedgwood takes his. And he took a thing and he shined a spotlight on something that people were not caring about. And it's going to move the needle in some way.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I would say that that's the question you got to ask yourself. Like, if Thomas Clarkson was alive today, what would he be working on, right? What is one of those neglected and probably also quite controversial causes today? The historians of the future will say like, that was the thing, right? Because again, for us, it's easy to celebrate the Thomas Clarks of the time. But it was a very small minority.

• 38:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And like, most people, it was like worse than being a vegan today, right? People really hated you, absolutely hated you for talking about the elephant in the room and talking about how evil it was, the way where people were making money. So I don't know, I applaud you for that, that you're willing to go there. But yeah, probably if you.

• 38:48Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, there's.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Probably gonna need to be a bit more of that.

• 38:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, there's a, there's a minimum. And then, and then it's also like, I think, once you have succeeded and done something, then you're obligated to go, are you just going to keep doing this over and over and over again? Or are you going to direct those talents to some other challenge or mountain? And what is that? And then, and then when? Because it's easy to say someday, right? Like. I'm going to do it in the future.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:16Ryan Holiday?

  When I have more money, when I'm more secure, when my kids are older. But yeah, why not do it now? So that's what I'm thinking about. So maybe I'll, I'll.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Oh, postponement is one of the great risks there. That's what you, that's what you hear when you talk about or talk to, say, young Harvard graduates who go work for McKinsey.

• 39:33Ryan Holiday?

  Give it away later.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. They say, oh, I'll just preserve my optionality. But they do not realize that the work itself will change them as a person and they will become more cynical in the process. And at some point they wake up and they realize, shit.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. What you work on works on you. And, and you are fast becoming the person who will not do anything about it. Well, if you want to go check out some books, let's go look at some books that might.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Would love to. Yeah, absolutely.

• 40:04Ryan 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.