Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough?

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and best-selling author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind: A Hopeful History. In 2019, he went viral for his takedown of billionaires at the World Economic Forum and for a heated exchange with Tucker Carlson. Today, he joins the show to discuss his latest book, Moral Ambition, which he defines as the desire to use your available talents and resources to make the world a better place rather than focus solely on individual wealth. He argues the real question is whether the work you’ve chosen is ambitious enough in moral terms—whether your day-to-day life tackles the big problems facing humankind. He explains why “follow your passion” is often bad advice; why moral breakthroughs tend to come from small, disciplined groups rather than mass appeal; and why moral progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Go to or use code COLEMANDEAL at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can listen to Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough? is an episode from Conversations With Coleman by The Free Press.

This episode is 70:43 long.

This episode was published on Feb 16, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Conversations With Coleman when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.