Moral Ambition

Best Of: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference

The Next Big Idea, 26 October 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at 2 min 8 sec in.

The episode's featured book. Rufus Griscom interviews author Rutger Bregman about Moral Ambition, which argues that talented, privileged people waste their potential on low-stakes gestures while global crises—preventable child deaths, pandemics, AI risk, nuclear threats—go unsolved. Bregman calls for applying entrepreneurial drive to the world's greatest problems, drawing on history, case studies from abolitionism to modern philanthropy, and his own reckoning with a decade spent in the "awareness business."

Listen to this episode ↗︎