May 6, 2025 • 40 mins
Jon Stewart sorts Trump's latest barrage of bulls**t into the "OK" and "NOT OK" piles, including telling kids to cut down on dolls and pencils, calling for Alcatraz to reopen, posting AI-generated images of himself as the Pope, and shrugging off the Constitution.
Historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman sits down to unpack his latest book, “Moral Ambition,” which is a call to action for people, especially those with education and privilege, to devote their talent and resources to careers and causes that make the world a better place. He describes how the political left has often made the mistake of placing moral purity above political relevance, and what they can learn from conservatives about building small movements into a larger, results-oriented coalition. Bregman also addresses the problem of what he calls our “inverse welfare society,” in which most high-paying, high-status jobs are inessential, and how his organization, The School for Moral Ambition, aims to reverse that structure by helping people quit their corporate jobs and transition into careers of positive impact.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
From the most trusted journalist at Comedy.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Central's America's only source for new This is The Daily Show.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
With your host John Steward, part the Daily Show.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Thank you, flame is John Stuart Man. Do we have
a show for tonight? Later on I'm gonna be joined
by our guest ruck Or Bregman.
Speaker 5 (00:52):
He is my all time and I mean this all
time favorite Dutch historian.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, that's right, you heard me.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
Suck on that Hermann Vondel Jones, who is another dutchy
story and that we.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Looked up backstage.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
But first, and I'm so glad you were with us today,
Let's talk about our beloved president. He's in as a suspect.
He's in a bit of a tough situation right now
since he ran on fixing the economy, and fixing the
(01:37):
economy is very complicated, it's very tricky.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
You need professionals.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
But Trump is one of those guys who's like, I
can do it.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I know what I'm doing.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
He watched the YouTube video and he opened up the
hood and he was like, oh, it's the wire from
the carburetor and the no let me get holds on
fire and.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Then his wife comes out.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
He's like, I told you to call somebody, and then he's.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Like, you know, boy it Mary.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And scene.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Now you see why I'm not in many movies. The
point being.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
Yesterday, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC's Meet
the Press host Kristen Welker, and the challenge was clear.
The President had to find a way to persuasively take
credit for the remaining good parts of the economy while
suddenly assigning blame to Joe Biden for the bad on
fire parts. Let's see how Trump threaded this rhetorical needle.
Speaker 6 (02:44):
I think the good parts of the Trump economy and
the bad parts of the Biden economy.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Nail did he went?
Speaker 5 (03:00):
I ad it no attempt at persuasion or allegory or
metaphor to Trump, good bye and bad.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
He's a regular Shakespeare.
Speaker 5 (03:10):
Maybe Shakespeare would have been better off with the Trump approach.
Act one, Scene one, Romeo and Juliet. Hey, Juliet, it's Romeo.
Let's and then kill ourselves.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And I want to thank my family.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Look, I'm trying very hard in this new Trump.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Flood the zone media ecosystem strategy to not get too
high or low, to not take the bait to find
things in my life that give me pleasure or peace.
For instance, a quick story, I'm a niece eleven years
old loves dolls. I was going to get her twenty
or thirty of them for her birthday, just to see
(04:04):
the joy of a child. You can't put a price
tag on that. It gives me great solace anyway. Like
I said, I'm not trying to take these interviews personal.
Speaker 6 (04:14):
I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs that's eleven
years old, needs to have thirty dollars.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
First of all, I don't think we consider eleven year
old's baby girls.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Second of all, you don't know what she needs. She'd
been through a lot this year. How many dolls would
you get her?
Speaker 5 (04:45):
What is the appropriate number of dolls to get a
beautiful baby eleven year old girl, Mister President.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
It's just not that many dolls. I mean, she gonna
have a small tea party with the dolls. But her
dream had been a quasi realistic conclave re enactment with dolls.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's what she wanted.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
Fine, Fine, it's fine, it's fine. I'll just tell her
the President of the United States said, no, you know
what doesn't matter.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Dolls are not her only happy place anyway. She also
loves taking standardized tests.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
That's true, very erudite.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
So I was thinking of getting her this wonderful baby's
first SAT kit. It has all the scantron sheets and
around two hundred and.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Fifty number two pencils. She's gonna go crazy. She is
gonna love it.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
They don't need to have two hundred and fifty pencils,
they can have five.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Motherfucker, How dare you?
Speaker 5 (06:05):
What kind of a man would deny this poor girl
her full compliment of pencils for her dream standardized testing
toy kit? Is that man a Ebenezer Scrooge, b the Grinch,
c an Evil step Monster, or d all of the above?
Speaker 4 (06:29):
Oh, that's right.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
She can't answer because she's already used her entire pencil quota.
But I have to say, like when Trump is talking
about what people should do and get, you like dolls
and pencils, Trump has such a depression era of view
(06:52):
of what kids play with in twenty twenty five. Kids
don't need twenty sets of those hoops you hit with
the stick as you go down the.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Street, just one hoop is Jim Dandy.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
But look, to be fair to Donald Trump, his austerity
pitch to the American people is in line with the
modest way in which Trump conducts his life. Trump has
a monastic view of simple living that says, hey, what
if Saddam Hussein's palace had a view of Central Park?
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Were standing in my apartment of Trump Tower.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
Some people considered to be the greatest apartment in the world.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
And some people think it's what would look like inside
Marie Antoinette's vagina.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
It was notoriously well appointed.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I do want to hand it to Trump if you
notice a very sparing use of pencils and dollars in
that he.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Does walk the walk. Well, look, here's the truth.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
If a Democrat had even hinted at toy rationing for
American children, we'd have a full week of Fox special
reports on the sobbing children of socialist America and a
boom in gun toting patriots going.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You could have Joe when you pry it from a
kung fu grip.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
But at least we're finally getting to address in a
substantive manner Trump's chaotic stewardship of what was the world's
most stable economy, and how Americans are going to have
to sacrifice financially and tamp down their consumerist impulse and
that is what has driven so much of our economy,
(08:52):
and I guess our waste. And I'm sure the President
will use this interview with Welker to cheer lead the
effort to a more finance actually responsible future for all
of us.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
We're gonna have a big, beautiful parade, military parade. We're
going to celebrate over we have the greatest military tri
people peanuts compared to the value of doing it.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
We can't afford not to do it. Why don't you
believe in me?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
If you hadn't spent so much on.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Dollars in pencils, we weren't even talking about this. And see,
but this is the brilliance of Trump. In the same
interview where he says to Americans, sorry about your Christmas,
suck it up, he talks about a ninety million dollars
parade that just so happens to fall on his birthday
and is totally worth it.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have
the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest
army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons
in the world, and we're going to celebrate it.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
I don't know, mister President, if do you know how
submarines work.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
But.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
Dragging them down Pennsylvania Avenue will.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Most likely void the warranty.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
But this is why it's so hard to pin Trump
down on everything, because to get to substantive policy questions,
you have to face down the fire hose of his
nonsense and bullshit that moves you off track, his frenetic nature.
That means we all end up suffering from a kind
of second hand ADHD, a viral cloud of his unfocused
(10:39):
weaving that gives all of us brain fog.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, no more.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
High sharks.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
When I saw the President of the United States starting
out on tariffs and ending up on dolls and parades
and pencils, I thought, there's got to be a better
way to help Americans figure out which of the things
it's okay to get upset about and which things are
just him fucking off. So I invented this chart. Let
(11:23):
me show you how it works. First, we take something
the president said.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
Donald Trump says that he is directing the Bureau of
Prisons to reopen Alcatraz?
Speaker 5 (11:39):
And then we figure out is that okay?
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Sure, it's okay.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
It's the kind of thing that's okay to just let go.
It's just a stupid thing to keep us occupied, to
lose focus on his actual policies. It's okay not to
take the bait, to not get sucked into it.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
But why would you want to reopen Alcatraz? What the
fuck is that? Why would you want to do that?
Speaker 7 (12:14):
The president says, who wants to use the island to
quote house America's most ruthless and violent offenders in this
notorious federal prison had closed in nineteen sixty three because
it was too expensive to run and repair.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's now been a museum. What did Trump think? We're
low on prisons?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
What do you although?
Speaker 5 (12:35):
I guess any opportunity for Trump to open a prison
and simultaneously close.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
A museum is too good to pass up.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
But it'll take hundreds of millions of dollars or I
don't know how many dollarsand pencils, but it's a lot.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Does does Doosee know about this? Does Alcatraz?
Speaker 7 (12:52):
Alcatraz officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Because they run a museum. They're a museum.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
They're not.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
That's what they're they're not. They're not like tough talking wardens.
They're docents with art history degrees.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
The only person working there is busy fixing those machines
that flatten pennies.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
That the only person that wolds. And here's the crazy
part about Trump.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
He throws out these crazy ideas and then those crazy
ideas have days of shelf life.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
This is a press.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Conference today announcing a partnership with the NFL draft. But
now the NFL guys have to just sit there and
nod through all this Alcatraz nonsense.
Speaker 8 (13:40):
Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say,
the ultimate right. Alcatraz sing, sing, and Alcatraz. Nobody's ever
escaped from Alcatraz and just represented some person almost got there,
but they, as you know the story, they found his clothing,
a lot of shark bites at a lot of problems.
It's a big hulk that's sitting there, rusting and rotting.
(14:03):
It sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful
and strong and miserable, weak, got a lot of qualities
that are interesting, and I think they make a point.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
What point.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
There is a point that's done.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
It's fine. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
The chart was supposed to prevent this kind of over
emotional digression. This one's on me. I am not leading
a chart based life right now. I apologize.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
I can do better. I can do better.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Let's go again and.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Judge whether or not this is an important pronouncement or
a brain fogging digression.
Speaker 9 (14:41):
President Trump shared an AI generated image of himself depicted
as the Pope on social media yesterday.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
It's not the most presidential thing.
Speaker 5 (15:03):
But Trump and the Pope do share the same taste
in interior design.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
So it was not the Worths hit and it's just
the troll. It's not hurting anybody. I mean, Trump wasn't
going to have it anyway, so it sounds like it's kinda.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I'm not gonna get distracted by it.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I'm not going But he can't really be the pope?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Can he can he be the Pope?
Speaker 10 (15:23):
The last time a non cardinal was pope was back
in thirteen seventy eight, when the Italian archbishop Bartolomeo Prignano,
who had been a monk, was controversially chosen from outside
of the College of Cardinals, and he became Pope urban
the sixth. So will Donald Trump following the six hundred
and forty seven year old footsteps of Bartolomeo Pregnano.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
No, he won't. You see what you're doing with people?
Speaker 5 (15:54):
Trump, MSNBC's gotawate valuable airtime fact checking your fucking nonsense
time they could have spent frowning, sighing, and rolling the rush.
Is there anything during this chaotic news cycle that maybe
we should keep our eyes on.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United
States as president?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
I don't know. Holy shit, that's not okay. But by
(17:00):
the way, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
That wasn't a gotcha question. Should the president of all
the Constitution am.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
On millionaire?
Speaker 5 (17:09):
That'd be the warm up question, like what color is
an orange? Or name a planet with people on it.
I mean, if you can't answer that the president's supposed
to uphold the Constitution, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even
let you become a citizen. And before you might say,
well they never told me, let me refer you back
to a cold day in January. Preserve, Protect, and defend deserve,
(17:30):
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, the
Constitution of the United States.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
Were you even awake, preserve, de prectant defend.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I e uphold it's not optional.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
It is not an opportunity for you to lawyer shop
loopholes to our nation's founding document. You took an oath
in front of God and those who are fighting against God.
But the important thing is that here's the problem. The
volatility of nonsense from consequential to truly disorienting is unfathomable.
(18:01):
While we're chasing Pope and Alcatraz stories, the Trump administration
has gutted funding for America's food banks. They've hollowed out
the FAA to the point where Newark Airport is basically
inoperable and not in its usual way.
Speaker 9 (18:17):
And then there's this Health and Human Services Secretary RFK
Junior laid off nearly all workers at the National Institute
of Occupational Safety and Health.
Speaker 10 (18:27):
The program offers monitoring and treatment for first responders and
survivors diagnosed with nine to eleven related health conditions.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I agree.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
Do you know how bad you have to be to
make the lives of sick nine to eleven responders worse.
The Trump administration is now number two on the nine
to eleven Evil Power rankings.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
O Kind is still number one.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
But you're closing the gaph, and trust me, there is
nothing that you can do to distract me from making
sure that those folks are gonna get what they've earned
from the government.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
The White House hosting this ai image of a buff
Jedi Trump to Mark Star Wars Day on May fourth,
while touting his immigration crackdown.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 5 (19:20):
I know, I'm not supposed to get distracted, but he's
not a Jedi in that picture.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
Do you understand?
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Trump is presenting himself as a Jedi, but his lightsaber
is read And the only way you can have a
red lightsaber is by infusing it's kyper crystal with the
power of your agent hate, thereby corrupting it into.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
A vessel for the dark side.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Therefore, Therefore, every one of those photos that Trump is
putting out there, he is admitting. He is admitting he's
not a Jedi, but in fact a Sith Lord.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And there are always two.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
So the question is this, who is he working with?
Why do I know all this well? I happen to
have an extensive collection of Star Wars Action figures thirty
to thirty seven of them.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
Actually, some call them dolls.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I call them friends.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
When we come back. Rucktor Bregman, don't go away. Hold
on the talent show my guests tonight, fabulous kus. He
(20:40):
is a historian, best selling author is a book. It's
called Moral Ambition.
Speaker 5 (20:44):
Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Please welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
Rucker Bregman, Sir, they go crazy for the Dutchess story.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, I know, well I have a lot of competition there,
all the other famous dutchy story.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
That's exactly vander Duncan had it coming for a long time.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Listen, a moral ambition is in this country obviously has
been somewhat outlawed. But what do you how do you
define moral ambition as something that people should be pursuing.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
So it's pretty simple. It's a combination of two things.
It's the idealism of an activist on the one hand,
and the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it's the desire
to stand on the right side of history before it
is fashionable, and to really devote your career, your precious
time on this earth, to make this world a much
better place. You're trying to step into the footsteps of
the great moral pioneers who came before you, the abolitionist
(21:53):
to suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners, but.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Not as a hobby, as a vocation, yea, yeah, and.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
You have very interesting The opening forward is so interesting.
It's a story of a monk the happiest person in
the world because brain waves tell us this. And you
tell this story, and I think you're going to a
place where.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
You say, be the monk.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
Yeah, and you basically go, this monk is wasting his life.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah. Well, look, I mean he meditated for sixty thousand
hours and then researchers put him in a brain scanner
and declared him the happiest man alive, you know, because
he had so much positive things going on there. And
I read about that story and I was really angry,
and it was like, sixty thousand hours in your own
head and the world is burning. I mean, come on,
there are problems to solve here. And look, I mean
my favorite card that's the Buddhist monk's name. He's actually
(22:40):
a fantastic guy, pretty morally ambitious. So people got to
read the epiloge as well.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
But wait, is this guy now like getting shit talked
all over there?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Anyway, The point is, I mean there are a huge
amount of self help books out there that will teach
you how to be more mindful, more relaxed, you know,
be more happy. My previous book, Humankind was an attempt
to restore people's faith in humanity, and at some point
I saw these pictures on Instagram of people reading the
book saying, you know, life is wonderful, don't worry, you know,
(23:14):
stop following the news and just relax, And I was like, oh,
I've created a monster, right, this is not so. If
my previous book was like a warm hug, then this
is a cold shower, refreshing cold shower, a plunge.
Speaker 5 (23:24):
That's apparently, that's the thing now you're supposed to do.
You go to the warm thing and then you go
to the cold thing exactly when you what is the
piece of advice that was missing from you from from
the hug? How do you restore faith in humanity? And
then get mad at them?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
So look a couple of.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
I want to restore facing humanity. Oh you people are.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Just going to life okay. So a lot of people
will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires.
You know, I went to Dolphus, you went.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
To dogs, Yeah, yeah, tell them what you said at Doubles,
which I thought was a really interesting Well it was
really short.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Basically, you know, stop talking about your BA philanthropy and
pay your taxes instead.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Right over body, you get invited back every year, now, right?
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Is that not really? Not really? But that was obviously,
you know, nice to experience. But you got to ask yourself,
like does this make a difference? In the book, I
come to the conclusion that awareness is vastly overrated. Right.
It's easy to go viral shouting text to rich or
you know, destroy capitalism, kill the patrarchy. But the point
is to actually do something about it, right, to really
(24:31):
translate your ideas into actual action and then results. And
I think too often on the left side of the
political spectrum we see this obsession with moral purity and
then also a certain kind of political irrelevance. Right, But
it really takes to change the world is to build
a coalition. Right, all these great movements, the abolitionists, the
(24:51):
civil right campaigners, they wore coalitions of people who very
often didn't agree with one another. So I guess That's
one of the pieces of advice I fair is if
if people agree with you for eighty percent of their time, right,
they're not your enemy but your ally, your ally.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
What do you say to you? Because when I view
the world of moral ambition or activism, I actually see
it as pretty vibrant. That we may not know their names,
but there are so many people that don't get the attention,
that are doing what you're suggesting, but maybe without the
(25:28):
access to the people that matter, like that don't get
invited to Davos, but are doing the grunt work, like
working in the trenches, trying to get their representatives to notice,
or trying to make a difference. What do you say
to people who are saying, like I have moral ambition,
I'm busting my ass out here. It's very hard to
(25:48):
get a foothold.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
So I believe we live in a sort of inverse
welfare society. So we've got the people in the so
called essential jobs. We discover that during the pandemic if
they go and strike, and then that's it is awesome
for all of us. The other hand, we have huge
amounts of people educated elites, you know, who went to
nice universities, who have fancy resumes. If they don't strike
very often, not all that much happens.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I've got one study in the book from two Dutch economists.
Actually they studied forty countries and found that around twenty
five percent of people in the modern workforce think that
their own job is socially meaningless. These are, by the way,
mostly people waiting.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
How many twenty five percent?
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Yeah, it's like I would actually think that'd be higher.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Well, it's quite a lot, John, It's five times the
unemployment rate.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Is it really, Yeah, yeah, one out of four jobs.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Yeah, exactly. And these people, I mean, last week I
was at Harvard.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Well look at you.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Well it's an interesting example where you meet a lot
of bright young students, right who were generally idealistic, but
then at the same time you know that about half
of them will end up in what a friend of
mine calls the Bermuda triangle of talent. So you've got consultancy,
you've got corporate law, you've got finance, this gaping black
hole that sucks up so many talents of people who
(26:56):
should actually work on these big problems. So look, I
am not here to preach people already in those essential jobs.
I am actually preaching at my own people on it,
because I'm quite angry at them.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
You're talking about Dutch historians.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
People you know who went to university, who had some education,
you know, who shot Field his responsibility to use their
skill set to make a difference.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Do you consider them no, I say about what percentage?
Do you consider our system then of education and economics
a moral failure in that regard?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And is it?
Speaker 5 (27:38):
Are there places where what you're talking about works? Is
there an analogous situation?
Speaker 3 (27:43):
There are places in history? I mean, is that the president?
This actually gives me out. This is what's so great
about job.
Speaker 8 (27:52):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
In the book, I talk a lot about the British evolutions.
They were the most successful abolitions. They built this huge
movement in the late eighteenth century and they can sited
their project to be part of a bit of a
cultural revolution. They wanted to make doing good fashionable once again.
What really fascinated me about them is that they were
mostly entrepreneurs. So nine or ten out of twelve of
(28:13):
the British the founders of the British scientific debilition of
the slave trade, they were entrepreneurs. You know, people who
have built their own companies who had skilled them. They
knew how to get things done right. I mean in
the Netherlands at the time. Yeah, it's pretty sad. There
was a bunch of Calvinists social justice warriors who were
mainly interested in their own moral purity. They didn't get
much done, right if.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
They were the ones who on their Instagram pages kept
putting up the black squares exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I remember that.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah. Yeah, and we've seen the same thing in the
US actually, the move from the guilded age that the
progressive era right and.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
Now back again.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Well, but we could then go back against perhaps another right.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
I what is going wrong because to my mind, the
sticking point, and maybe this is semantics, but the sticking
point doesn't appear to be people who are morally ambitious,
but a system that is impervious to that, that is
agnostic about moral ambition. It feels like there's enough people
(29:10):
in this country working their asses off for change and
a political system that finds a way to ignore them
in favor of insurance company lobbyists or drug company Like,
they don't have access to this st how do they
get access?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yeah? Sure, Look, I'm a guy who comes from the
political left. So I'm all about systemic analysis. You know,
I'm the guy who loves to shout like change the system.
But then writing in this book, at some point I
got this feeling that perhaps, you know, this can become
a kind of excuse as well. Right, you can keep
shouting like everything's wrong with the system, But systems they
consist of people.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Meat who once that
that we should never doubt the power of small groups
of thoughtful, committed citizens change the world. And actually, people
on the right wing side of the political spectrum they
understand that very well. You know, Trump didn't come out
of nowhere. This was a fifty year project. It started
in the early seventies, probably with the Powell Memo for example.
You know, this corporate lawyer from you know that was
(30:08):
on the board of Philip Morris and it was like,
you know, let's build this whole movement to take over America.
And then they created the Federalist Society and American like,
you need some perseverance.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
You need the moral ambition to be fused with because
on the right they fused it very well with their
billionaires and their media ecosystem. Whereas on the right. It
perhaps because it's not as homogeneous. It's been a more
it's more difficult. Is the idea for these networks of
morally ambitious activists to connect with the entrepreneurs and funders
(30:47):
and move in that direction together? Absolutely, And that's what
you're not seeing.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
How Yeah, So I co founded an organization as well,
called the School for More Ambition. Everything I earned.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
With the books going into the moral ambition.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yeah. Yeah. We like to see ourselves sort of the
robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away
the money. I know who they Well there for those
who did that, I mean, that's a worthwhile on ever, right,
but you also need to take the talent. What we've
seen in this country since the sixties into seventies is
that a lot of people who used to go and
work in those socially meaningful jobs in academia, for example,
(31:20):
or in government, they went to Wall Street creating, creating
bs financial products, or you know, Silicon Valley creating these
apps that make us all addicted. We need a talent
shift as well as a as a wealth distribution.
Speaker 5 (31:33):
So what then is the incentive other than moral satisfaction?
Is that do we need to teach kids that because
that was Look the hippies and the hippies of the
sixties and they were very idealistic, and then they all,
you know, Reagan came along and they were all like, wait,
I can work at a hedge fund, okay, And so
what is then do you have to create then an
(31:54):
incentive process for those folks?
Speaker 4 (31:58):
How do you how do you get that talent?
Speaker 3 (32:00):
So people are really cynical. We'd say, like, look, it's
all about the money, right, These people are just setting
out And I think that's probably true for some of them,
but for you know, back to those Harvard kids, for
a lot of them, it's also the status, you know,
doing something that is actually cool that is interesting, because
let's be honest, working at McKinsey is really boring, you know,
creating the same PowerPoint every day.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
Right, So I don't work there, so I don't know
what they're Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Well I've heard so, yeah, I think it's not just
about the money. People are mixed bags, right, So status
and what society values, like the kind of people we
put in the spotlight, who can invite it to shows
like this, that all that matters obviously.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
Right, right, and is it what about sort of the
everyday sort of quiet activism of living pleasantly, Like I
think we shouldn't diminish though, for whatever your status is
or station is that you can, within your own life
make the changes that create at least a better local atmosphere.
(33:05):
Because I think what you're talking about is, yeah, you
know when you point to history, you're really talking about
inflection points. Yeah, And you don't know when those will occur,
and oftentimes momentum bills to them and there's a tipping
point in it, it moves over. I don't know how
conscious it is.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Can I push back on that? So again, talk.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
To this people push back so nice?
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Well, maybe different as well. I mean there is this
tendency to say things like less is more and smallest beautiful.
I mean, in environmental circles, they have all these moment
comme motments like don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have kids,
don't use plastic straws. But then if you really focus
on that individualist aspect of improving your life, like in
the best possible scenario, well have reduced your environmental footprints
(33:51):
to zero, You've basically turned yourself into a compost. Heap,
it's not very ambitious. And if I look at some
of these great pioneers, like also like people like Parks,
like they didn't think small, they thought big. They were ambitious.
So I've looked into the research and it turns out
that more is actually more. So if you help one person,
that's great, If you help two, that's site as much mathematics.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
But are we like I wasn't even talking about like
let's use less because I do think human progress is
generally like people will do what's more convenient or more.
That's just kind of how how they operate. I'm just
I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around
what this means. Like it feels like saying to like
(34:34):
college kids at a graduation, like you bastards, like you
think you're going to go into these other jobs. No,
go soft climate change?
Speaker 4 (34:45):
Is that what this is?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
That's basically it. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
This would be the greatest, the greatest graduation speech ever.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
You just get up there and go listen. By the fuckers.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
One of the things we're doing is we're starting a
tax fairness Fellowship, So right, I mean, it was nice
to shout to the billionaires, you know, Taxas Texas, Texas.
Now we're actually trying to recruit you know, some of
the best wealth managers, the best bankers, the best fiscal
lawyers that.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
They try this with, like the ESG, the and the
investing or better. Was that just nonsense?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
I mean that is like it's not like a thin
layer of corporate responsibility right right, a corrupt, broken business model.
I mean, come on, we've got to be much more
ambitious here. We're not living in twenty fifteen anymore, where
you can say, oh, I'm doing good by doing well.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Twenty fifteen and let's do it.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
That's all the day. Yeah, No, that's not I mean,
this is twenty twenty five. We have one side of
the political spectrums, a total moral collapse. I mean democratic
black sliding happening everywhere, especially people who have some privilege,
you know, whether it's talent, whether it's you know, wealth,
whether it's your network, use it. I mean people on
the left except for so long, things like check your privilege, yes,
(36:03):
check it and then use it. You know, have some
skin in the game.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Right right?
Speaker 4 (36:07):
And how is that working out?
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah it is?
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yeah, So Howard tell me.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
About and just before we go, then so if people
want to exercise this moral ambition. What is how do
they get their foot on that ladder? Do they have
to come to your institute or is there.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yeah, so we're building a movement now.
Speaker 5 (36:27):
Of you could be running the greatest scam in the issue.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Now to do this you have to come to the now.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Tuition is no, no, no, no, no no no, there's no
two issue all right. We pay people to quit their job.
That's how it works for real.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Yes, how much does that pay?
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Well?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
I mean currently we're paying like an averts Dutch salary.
It's it's enough to live on for a couple of months.
And then obviously, I mean we help people to.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
You're really selling this, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Now it's honestly quite exciting. Right, we have now twenty
four people in Europe who quit their job to fight
big tobacco. For example, it's the most evil legal industry
out there. They've created the deadliest product in the history
of humanity. I mean, today we have this moral outrage
about smartphones, right, smartphones that make you addicted TikTok on it.
Imagine a smartphone that is so addictive and also kills you.
(37:16):
That's a cigarette. So anyway, we've recruited. Yeah, it's terrible,
isn't it.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
Yeah, note to self smartphone that kills you.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
Awesome product launch.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
So the point is like we have actually one of
our fellows in our coord is someone who used to
work for Big Tobacco, right sweet sides, and she knows
everything about effective marketing is now using that skills to
fight the industry.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right.
Speaker 5 (37:43):
Well, that's fantastic and it starts off there. And have
you done it in the United States as well? Where
this is right now purely European product?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
No, No, we're starting here.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
So we're starting here. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
I came to New York and September. We're building out here.
It's really getting started now. We're launching our first fellowships.
As I said, the fairness.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Fell and do you have some people that are that
are lined up?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Well, people can apply, So go to Moral Ambition belt
or do you want to quit your job and do
something useful work?
Speaker 4 (38:11):
The book is Moral Ambition. Get your application now.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
Look, good workmen, We're gonna take a good book, fantastic
do you take them? That is our show, ladies and gentlemen,
(38:38):
very night before we go, We're gonna take him with
your ros for the rest of the week.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Jesey lied to Jazzy. Come on, what what's.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Happening this week?
Speaker 12 (38:48):
Well, it's conclave week, John, They're electing a new pope
and I'll be in the room every day to find
out what's.
Speaker 4 (38:55):
Going on in the conclave room. That's I think the
only let cardinals in that room.
Speaker 12 (39:02):
Uh yeah, I know, dumb, dumb. That's why I spent
weeks pre pairing to go undercover as Cardinal Cappuccino Pizzeria.
I know this cardinal ship backwards and forwards. Go ahead,
ask me anything.
Speaker 5 (39:18):
Anything, okay, Cardinal Pizzeria. Who do you want to be Pope?
Speaker 12 (39:27):
No, comprendo, I only speak of the Latin.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Nailed it?
Speaker 4 (39:40):
Uh? Jesus would be proud? And who is he? All right?
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Never mind? Does he like it?
Speaker 5 (39:47):
All?
Speaker 1 (39:47):
This week?
Speaker 4 (39:48):
Here?
Speaker 1 (39:48):
It is your moment?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Actually? My wife thought it was cute, She said, isn't
that nice?
Speaker 6 (39:53):
Question about it? Actually I would not be able to
be married, though that would be a lot I'd have
to to the best.
Speaker 8 (40:00):
So my knowledge, popes aren't big going getting married, are
they not? That we know of?
Speaker 1 (40:04):
No?
Speaker 6 (40:05):
No.
Speaker 11 (40:07):
Explore more shows from The Daily Show podcast Universe by
searching The.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts. Watch The Daily
Show weeknights at eleven.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Ten Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime
on Paramount plus
Speaker 12 (40:27):
Paramount Podcasts
You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
From the most trusted journalist at Comedy.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Central's America's only source for new This is The Daily Show.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
With your host John Steward, part the Daily Show.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Thank you, flame is John Stuart Man. Do we have
a show for tonight? Later on I'm gonna be joined
by our guest ruck Or Bregman.
Speaker 5 (00:52):
He is my all time and I mean this all
time favorite Dutch historian.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, that's right, you heard me.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
Suck on that Hermann Vondel Jones, who is another dutchy
story and that we.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Looked up backstage.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
But first, and I'm so glad you were with us today,
Let's talk about our beloved president. He's in as a suspect.
He's in a bit of a tough situation right now
since he ran on fixing the economy, and fixing the
(01:37):
economy is very complicated, it's very tricky.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
You need professionals.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
But Trump is one of those guys who's like, I
can do it.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I know what I'm doing.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
He watched the YouTube video and he opened up the
hood and he was like, oh, it's the wire from
the carburetor and the no let me get holds on
fire and.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Then his wife comes out.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
He's like, I told you to call somebody, and then he's.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Like, you know, boy it Mary.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And scene.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Now you see why I'm not in many movies. The
point being.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
Yesterday, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC's Meet
the Press host Kristen Welker, and the challenge was clear.
The President had to find a way to persuasively take
credit for the remaining good parts of the economy while
suddenly assigning blame to Joe Biden for the bad on
fire parts. Let's see how Trump threaded this rhetorical needle.
Speaker 6 (02:44):
I think the good parts of the Trump economy and
the bad parts of the Biden economy.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Nail did he went?
Speaker 5 (03:00):
I ad it no attempt at persuasion or allegory or
metaphor to Trump, good bye and bad.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
He's a regular Shakespeare.
Speaker 5 (03:10):
Maybe Shakespeare would have been better off with the Trump approach.
Act one, Scene one, Romeo and Juliet. Hey, Juliet, it's Romeo.
Let's and then kill ourselves.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And I want to thank my family.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Look, I'm trying very hard in this new Trump.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Flood the zone media ecosystem strategy to not get too
high or low, to not take the bait to find
things in my life that give me pleasure or peace.
For instance, a quick story, I'm a niece eleven years
old loves dolls. I was going to get her twenty
or thirty of them for her birthday, just to see
(04:04):
the joy of a child. You can't put a price
tag on that. It gives me great solace anyway. Like
I said, I'm not trying to take these interviews personal.
Speaker 6 (04:14):
I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs that's eleven
years old, needs to have thirty dollars.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
First of all, I don't think we consider eleven year
old's baby girls.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Second of all, you don't know what she needs. She'd
been through a lot this year. How many dolls would
you get her?
Speaker 5 (04:45):
What is the appropriate number of dolls to get a
beautiful baby eleven year old girl, Mister President.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
It's just not that many dolls. I mean, she gonna
have a small tea party with the dolls. But her
dream had been a quasi realistic conclave re enactment with dolls.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's what she wanted.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
Fine, Fine, it's fine, it's fine. I'll just tell her
the President of the United States said, no, you know
what doesn't matter.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Dolls are not her only happy place anyway. She also
loves taking standardized tests.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
That's true, very erudite.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
So I was thinking of getting her this wonderful baby's
first SAT kit. It has all the scantron sheets and
around two hundred and.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Fifty number two pencils. She's gonna go crazy. She is
gonna love it.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
They don't need to have two hundred and fifty pencils,
they can have five.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Motherfucker, How dare you?
Speaker 5 (06:05):
What kind of a man would deny this poor girl
her full compliment of pencils for her dream standardized testing
toy kit? Is that man a Ebenezer Scrooge, b the Grinch,
c an Evil step Monster, or d all of the above?
Speaker 4 (06:29):
Oh, that's right.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
She can't answer because she's already used her entire pencil quota.
But I have to say, like when Trump is talking
about what people should do and get, you like dolls
and pencils, Trump has such a depression era of view
(06:52):
of what kids play with in twenty twenty five. Kids
don't need twenty sets of those hoops you hit with
the stick as you go down the.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Street, just one hoop is Jim Dandy.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
But look, to be fair to Donald Trump, his austerity
pitch to the American people is in line with the
modest way in which Trump conducts his life. Trump has
a monastic view of simple living that says, hey, what
if Saddam Hussein's palace had a view of Central Park?
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Were standing in my apartment of Trump Tower.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
Some people considered to be the greatest apartment in the world.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
And some people think it's what would look like inside
Marie Antoinette's vagina.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
It was notoriously well appointed.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I do want to hand it to Trump if you
notice a very sparing use of pencils and dollars in
that he.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Does walk the walk. Well, look, here's the truth.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
If a Democrat had even hinted at toy rationing for
American children, we'd have a full week of Fox special
reports on the sobbing children of socialist America and a
boom in gun toting patriots going.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You could have Joe when you pry it from a
kung fu grip.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
But at least we're finally getting to address in a
substantive manner Trump's chaotic stewardship of what was the world's
most stable economy, and how Americans are going to have
to sacrifice financially and tamp down their consumerist impulse and
that is what has driven so much of our economy,
(08:52):
and I guess our waste. And I'm sure the President
will use this interview with Welker to cheer lead the
effort to a more finance actually responsible future for all
of us.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
We're gonna have a big, beautiful parade, military parade. We're
going to celebrate over we have the greatest military tri
people peanuts compared to the value of doing it.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
We can't afford not to do it. Why don't you
believe in me?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
If you hadn't spent so much on.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Dollars in pencils, we weren't even talking about this. And see,
but this is the brilliance of Trump. In the same
interview where he says to Americans, sorry about your Christmas,
suck it up, he talks about a ninety million dollars
parade that just so happens to fall on his birthday
and is totally worth it.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have
the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest
army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons
in the world, and we're going to celebrate it.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
I don't know, mister President, if do you know how
submarines work.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
But.
Speaker 5 (10:09):
Dragging them down Pennsylvania Avenue will.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Most likely void the warranty.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
But this is why it's so hard to pin Trump
down on everything, because to get to substantive policy questions,
you have to face down the fire hose of his
nonsense and bullshit that moves you off track, his frenetic nature.
That means we all end up suffering from a kind
of second hand ADHD, a viral cloud of his unfocused
(10:39):
weaving that gives all of us brain fog.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, no more.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
High sharks.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
When I saw the President of the United States starting
out on tariffs and ending up on dolls and parades
and pencils, I thought, there's got to be a better
way to help Americans figure out which of the things
it's okay to get upset about and which things are
just him fucking off. So I invented this chart. Let
(11:23):
me show you how it works. First, we take something
the president said.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
Donald Trump says that he is directing the Bureau of
Prisons to reopen Alcatraz?
Speaker 5 (11:39):
And then we figure out is that okay?
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Sure, it's okay.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
It's the kind of thing that's okay to just let go.
It's just a stupid thing to keep us occupied, to
lose focus on his actual policies. It's okay not to
take the bait, to not get sucked into it.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
But why would you want to reopen Alcatraz? What the
fuck is that? Why would you want to do that?
Speaker 7 (12:14):
The president says, who wants to use the island to
quote house America's most ruthless and violent offenders in this
notorious federal prison had closed in nineteen sixty three because
it was too expensive to run and repair.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's now been a museum. What did Trump think? We're
low on prisons?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
What do you although?
Speaker 5 (12:35):
I guess any opportunity for Trump to open a prison
and simultaneously close.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
A museum is too good to pass up.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
But it'll take hundreds of millions of dollars or I
don't know how many dollarsand pencils, but it's a lot.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Does does Doosee know about this? Does Alcatraz?
Speaker 7 (12:52):
Alcatraz officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Because they run a museum. They're a museum.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
They're not.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
That's what they're they're not. They're not like tough talking wardens.
They're docents with art history degrees.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
The only person working there is busy fixing those machines
that flatten pennies.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
That the only person that wolds. And here's the crazy
part about Trump.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
He throws out these crazy ideas and then those crazy
ideas have days of shelf life.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
This is a press.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Conference today announcing a partnership with the NFL draft. But
now the NFL guys have to just sit there and
nod through all this Alcatraz nonsense.
Speaker 8 (13:40):
Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say,
the ultimate right. Alcatraz sing, sing, and Alcatraz. Nobody's ever
escaped from Alcatraz and just represented some person almost got there,
but they, as you know the story, they found his clothing,
a lot of shark bites at a lot of problems.
It's a big hulk that's sitting there, rusting and rotting.
(14:03):
It sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful
and strong and miserable, weak, got a lot of qualities
that are interesting, and I think they make a point.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
What point.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
There is a point that's done.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
It's fine. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
The chart was supposed to prevent this kind of over
emotional digression. This one's on me. I am not leading
a chart based life right now. I apologize.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
I can do better. I can do better.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Let's go again and.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Judge whether or not this is an important pronouncement or
a brain fogging digression.
Speaker 9 (14:41):
President Trump shared an AI generated image of himself depicted
as the Pope on social media yesterday.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
It's not the most presidential thing.
Speaker 5 (15:03):
But Trump and the Pope do share the same taste
in interior design.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
So it was not the Worths hit and it's just
the troll. It's not hurting anybody. I mean, Trump wasn't
going to have it anyway, so it sounds like it's kinda.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I'm not gonna get distracted by it.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I'm not going But he can't really be the pope?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Can he can he be the Pope?
Speaker 10 (15:23):
The last time a non cardinal was pope was back
in thirteen seventy eight, when the Italian archbishop Bartolomeo Prignano,
who had been a monk, was controversially chosen from outside
of the College of Cardinals, and he became Pope urban
the sixth. So will Donald Trump following the six hundred
and forty seven year old footsteps of Bartolomeo Pregnano.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
No, he won't. You see what you're doing with people?
Speaker 5 (15:54):
Trump, MSNBC's gotawate valuable airtime fact checking your fucking nonsense
time they could have spent frowning, sighing, and rolling the rush.
Is there anything during this chaotic news cycle that maybe
we should keep our eyes on.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United
States as president?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
I don't know. Holy shit, that's not okay. But by
(17:00):
the way, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
That wasn't a gotcha question. Should the president of all
the Constitution am.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
On millionaire?
Speaker 5 (17:09):
That'd be the warm up question, like what color is
an orange? Or name a planet with people on it.
I mean, if you can't answer that the president's supposed
to uphold the Constitution, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even
let you become a citizen. And before you might say,
well they never told me, let me refer you back
to a cold day in January. Preserve, Protect, and defend deserve,
(17:30):
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, the
Constitution of the United States.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
Were you even awake, preserve, de prectant defend.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I e uphold it's not optional.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
It is not an opportunity for you to lawyer shop
loopholes to our nation's founding document. You took an oath
in front of God and those who are fighting against God.
But the important thing is that here's the problem. The
volatility of nonsense from consequential to truly disorienting is unfathomable.
(18:01):
While we're chasing Pope and Alcatraz stories, the Trump administration
has gutted funding for America's food banks. They've hollowed out
the FAA to the point where Newark Airport is basically
inoperable and not in its usual way.
Speaker 9 (18:17):
And then there's this Health and Human Services Secretary RFK
Junior laid off nearly all workers at the National Institute
of Occupational Safety and Health.
Speaker 10 (18:27):
The program offers monitoring and treatment for first responders and
survivors diagnosed with nine to eleven related health conditions.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I agree.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
Do you know how bad you have to be to
make the lives of sick nine to eleven responders worse.
The Trump administration is now number two on the nine
to eleven Evil Power rankings.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
O Kind is still number one.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
But you're closing the gaph, and trust me, there is
nothing that you can do to distract me from making
sure that those folks are gonna get what they've earned
from the government.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
The White House hosting this ai image of a buff
Jedi Trump to Mark Star Wars Day on May fourth,
while touting his immigration crackdown.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 5 (19:20):
I know, I'm not supposed to get distracted, but he's
not a Jedi in that picture.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
Do you understand?
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Trump is presenting himself as a Jedi, but his lightsaber
is read And the only way you can have a
red lightsaber is by infusing it's kyper crystal with the
power of your agent hate, thereby corrupting it into.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
A vessel for the dark side.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
Therefore, Therefore, every one of those photos that Trump is
putting out there, he is admitting. He is admitting he's
not a Jedi, but in fact a Sith Lord.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And there are always two.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
So the question is this, who is he working with?
Why do I know all this well? I happen to
have an extensive collection of Star Wars Action figures thirty
to thirty seven of them.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
Actually, some call them dolls.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I call them friends.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
When we come back. Rucktor Bregman, don't go away. Hold
on the talent show my guests tonight, fabulous kus. He
(20:40):
is a historian, best selling author is a book. It's
called Moral Ambition.
Speaker 5 (20:44):
Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Please welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
Rucker Bregman, Sir, they go crazy for the Dutchess story.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, I know, well I have a lot of competition there,
all the other famous dutchy story.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
That's exactly vander Duncan had it coming for a long time.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Listen, a moral ambition is in this country obviously has
been somewhat outlawed. But what do you how do you
define moral ambition as something that people should be pursuing.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
So it's pretty simple. It's a combination of two things.
It's the idealism of an activist on the one hand,
and the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it's the desire
to stand on the right side of history before it
is fashionable, and to really devote your career, your precious
time on this earth, to make this world a much
better place. You're trying to step into the footsteps of
the great moral pioneers who came before you, the abolitionist
(21:53):
to suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners, but.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Not as a hobby, as a vocation, yea, yeah, and.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
You have very interesting The opening forward is so interesting.
It's a story of a monk the happiest person in
the world because brain waves tell us this. And you
tell this story, and I think you're going to a
place where.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
You say, be the monk.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
Yeah, and you basically go, this monk is wasting his life.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah. Well, look, I mean he meditated for sixty thousand
hours and then researchers put him in a brain scanner
and declared him the happiest man alive, you know, because
he had so much positive things going on there. And
I read about that story and I was really angry,
and it was like, sixty thousand hours in your own
head and the world is burning. I mean, come on,
there are problems to solve here. And look, I mean
my favorite card that's the Buddhist monk's name. He's actually
(22:40):
a fantastic guy, pretty morally ambitious. So people got to
read the epiloge as well.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
But wait, is this guy now like getting shit talked
all over there?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Anyway, The point is, I mean there are a huge
amount of self help books out there that will teach
you how to be more mindful, more relaxed, you know,
be more happy. My previous book, Humankind was an attempt
to restore people's faith in humanity, and at some point
I saw these pictures on Instagram of people reading the
book saying, you know, life is wonderful, don't worry, you know,
(23:14):
stop following the news and just relax, And I was like, oh,
I've created a monster, right, this is not so. If
my previous book was like a warm hug, then this
is a cold shower, refreshing cold shower, a plunge.
Speaker 5 (23:24):
That's apparently, that's the thing now you're supposed to do.
You go to the warm thing and then you go
to the cold thing exactly when you what is the
piece of advice that was missing from you from from
the hug? How do you restore faith in humanity? And
then get mad at them?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
So look a couple of.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
I want to restore facing humanity. Oh you people are.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Just going to life okay. So a lot of people
will know me for saying some nasty things about billionaires.
You know, I went to Dolphus, you went.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
To dogs, Yeah, yeah, tell them what you said at Doubles,
which I thought was a really interesting Well it was
really short.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Basically, you know, stop talking about your BA philanthropy and
pay your taxes instead.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Right over body, you get invited back every year, now, right?
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Is that not really? Not really? But that was obviously,
you know, nice to experience. But you got to ask yourself,
like does this make a difference? In the book, I
come to the conclusion that awareness is vastly overrated. Right.
It's easy to go viral shouting text to rich or
you know, destroy capitalism, kill the patrarchy. But the point
is to actually do something about it, right, to really
(24:31):
translate your ideas into actual action and then results. And
I think too often on the left side of the
political spectrum we see this obsession with moral purity and
then also a certain kind of political irrelevance. Right, But
it really takes to change the world is to build
a coalition. Right, all these great movements, the abolitionists, the
(24:51):
civil right campaigners, they wore coalitions of people who very
often didn't agree with one another. So I guess That's
one of the pieces of advice I fair is if
if people agree with you for eighty percent of their time, right,
they're not your enemy but your ally, your ally.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
What do you say to you? Because when I view
the world of moral ambition or activism, I actually see
it as pretty vibrant. That we may not know their names,
but there are so many people that don't get the attention,
that are doing what you're suggesting, but maybe without the
(25:28):
access to the people that matter, like that don't get
invited to Davos, but are doing the grunt work, like
working in the trenches, trying to get their representatives to notice,
or trying to make a difference. What do you say
to people who are saying, like I have moral ambition,
I'm busting my ass out here. It's very hard to
(25:48):
get a foothold.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
So I believe we live in a sort of inverse
welfare society. So we've got the people in the so
called essential jobs. We discover that during the pandemic if
they go and strike, and then that's it is awesome
for all of us. The other hand, we have huge
amounts of people educated elites, you know, who went to
nice universities, who have fancy resumes. If they don't strike
very often, not all that much happens.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
You know.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I've got one study in the book from two Dutch economists.
Actually they studied forty countries and found that around twenty
five percent of people in the modern workforce think that
their own job is socially meaningless. These are, by the way,
mostly people waiting.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
How many twenty five percent?
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Yeah, it's like I would actually think that'd be higher.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Well, it's quite a lot, John, It's five times the
unemployment rate.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Is it really, Yeah, yeah, one out of four jobs.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Yeah, exactly. And these people, I mean, last week I
was at Harvard.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Well look at you.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Well it's an interesting example where you meet a lot
of bright young students, right who were generally idealistic, but
then at the same time you know that about half
of them will end up in what a friend of
mine calls the Bermuda triangle of talent. So you've got consultancy,
you've got corporate law, you've got finance, this gaping black
hole that sucks up so many talents of people who
(26:56):
should actually work on these big problems. So look, I
am not here to preach people already in those essential jobs.
I am actually preaching at my own people on it,
because I'm quite angry at them.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
You're talking about Dutch historians.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
People you know who went to university, who had some education,
you know, who shot Field his responsibility to use their
skill set to make a difference.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Do you consider them no, I say about what percentage?
Do you consider our system then of education and economics
a moral failure in that regard?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And is it?
Speaker 5 (27:38):
Are there places where what you're talking about works? Is
there an analogous situation?
Speaker 3 (27:43):
There are places in history? I mean, is that the president?
This actually gives me out. This is what's so great
about job.
Speaker 8 (27:52):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
In the book, I talk a lot about the British evolutions.
They were the most successful abolitions. They built this huge
movement in the late eighteenth century and they can sited
their project to be part of a bit of a
cultural revolution. They wanted to make doing good fashionable once again.
What really fascinated me about them is that they were
mostly entrepreneurs. So nine or ten out of twelve of
(28:13):
the British the founders of the British scientific debilition of
the slave trade, they were entrepreneurs. You know, people who
have built their own companies who had skilled them. They
knew how to get things done right. I mean in
the Netherlands at the time. Yeah, it's pretty sad. There
was a bunch of Calvinists social justice warriors who were
mainly interested in their own moral purity. They didn't get
much done, right if.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
They were the ones who on their Instagram pages kept
putting up the black squares exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I remember that.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah. Yeah, and we've seen the same thing in the
US actually, the move from the guilded age that the
progressive era right and.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
Now back again.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Well, but we could then go back against perhaps another right.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
I what is going wrong because to my mind, the
sticking point, and maybe this is semantics, but the sticking
point doesn't appear to be people who are morally ambitious,
but a system that is impervious to that, that is
agnostic about moral ambition. It feels like there's enough people
(29:10):
in this country working their asses off for change and
a political system that finds a way to ignore them
in favor of insurance company lobbyists or drug company Like,
they don't have access to this st how do they
get access?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yeah? Sure, Look, I'm a guy who comes from the
political left. So I'm all about systemic analysis. You know,
I'm the guy who loves to shout like change the system.
But then writing in this book, at some point I
got this feeling that perhaps, you know, this can become
a kind of excuse as well. Right, you can keep
shouting like everything's wrong with the system, But systems they
consist of people.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
There's this beautiful quote from Margaret Meat who once that
that we should never doubt the power of small groups
of thoughtful, committed citizens change the world. And actually, people
on the right wing side of the political spectrum they
understand that very well. You know, Trump didn't come out
of nowhere. This was a fifty year project. It started
in the early seventies, probably with the Powell Memo for example.
You know, this corporate lawyer from you know that was
(30:08):
on the board of Philip Morris and it was like,
you know, let's build this whole movement to take over America.
And then they created the Federalist Society and American like,
you need some perseverance.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
You need the moral ambition to be fused with because
on the right they fused it very well with their
billionaires and their media ecosystem. Whereas on the right. It
perhaps because it's not as homogeneous. It's been a more
it's more difficult. Is the idea for these networks of
morally ambitious activists to connect with the entrepreneurs and funders
(30:47):
and move in that direction together? Absolutely, And that's what
you're not seeing.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
How Yeah, So I co founded an organization as well,
called the School for More Ambition. Everything I earned.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
With the books going into the moral ambition.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yeah. Yeah. We like to see ourselves sort of the
robin Hoods of talent. So Robin Hood famously took away
the money. I know who they Well there for those
who did that, I mean, that's a worthwhile on ever, right,
but you also need to take the talent. What we've
seen in this country since the sixties into seventies is
that a lot of people who used to go and
work in those socially meaningful jobs in academia, for example,
(31:20):
or in government, they went to Wall Street creating, creating
bs financial products, or you know, Silicon Valley creating these
apps that make us all addicted. We need a talent
shift as well as a as a wealth distribution.
Speaker 5 (31:33):
So what then is the incentive other than moral satisfaction?
Is that do we need to teach kids that because
that was Look the hippies and the hippies of the
sixties and they were very idealistic, and then they all,
you know, Reagan came along and they were all like, wait,
I can work at a hedge fund, okay, And so
what is then do you have to create then an
(31:54):
incentive process for those folks?
Speaker 4 (31:58):
How do you how do you get that talent?
Speaker 3 (32:00):
So people are really cynical. We'd say, like, look, it's
all about the money, right, These people are just setting
out And I think that's probably true for some of them,
but for you know, back to those Harvard kids, for
a lot of them, it's also the status, you know,
doing something that is actually cool that is interesting, because
let's be honest, working at McKinsey is really boring, you know,
creating the same PowerPoint every day.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
Right, So I don't work there, so I don't know
what they're Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Well I've heard so, yeah, I think it's not just
about the money. People are mixed bags, right, So status
and what society values, like the kind of people we
put in the spotlight, who can invite it to shows
like this, that all that matters obviously.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
Right, right, and is it what about sort of the
everyday sort of quiet activism of living pleasantly, Like I
think we shouldn't diminish though, for whatever your status is
or station is that you can, within your own life
make the changes that create at least a better local atmosphere.
(33:05):
Because I think what you're talking about is, yeah, you
know when you point to history, you're really talking about
inflection points. Yeah, And you don't know when those will occur,
and oftentimes momentum bills to them and there's a tipping
point in it, it moves over. I don't know how
conscious it is.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Can I push back on that? So again, talk.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
To this people push back so nice?
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Well, maybe different as well. I mean there is this
tendency to say things like less is more and smallest beautiful.
I mean, in environmental circles, they have all these moment
comme motments like don't eat meat, don't fly, don't have kids,
don't use plastic straws. But then if you really focus
on that individualist aspect of improving your life, like in
the best possible scenario, well have reduced your environmental footprints
(33:51):
to zero, You've basically turned yourself into a compost. Heap,
it's not very ambitious. And if I look at some
of these great pioneers, like also like people like Parks,
like they didn't think small, they thought big. They were ambitious.
So I've looked into the research and it turns out
that more is actually more. So if you help one person,
that's great, If you help two, that's site as much mathematics.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
But are we like I wasn't even talking about like
let's use less because I do think human progress is
generally like people will do what's more convenient or more.
That's just kind of how how they operate. I'm just
I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around
what this means. Like it feels like saying to like
(34:34):
college kids at a graduation, like you bastards, like you
think you're going to go into these other jobs. No,
go soft climate change?
Speaker 4 (34:45):
Is that what this is?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
That's basically it. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
This would be the greatest, the greatest graduation speech ever.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
You just get up there and go listen. By the fuckers.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
One of the things we're doing is we're starting a
tax fairness Fellowship, So right, I mean, it was nice
to shout to the billionaires, you know, Taxas Texas, Texas.
Now we're actually trying to recruit you know, some of
the best wealth managers, the best bankers, the best fiscal
lawyers that.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
They try this with, like the ESG, the and the
investing or better. Was that just nonsense?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
I mean that is like it's not like a thin
layer of corporate responsibility right right, a corrupt, broken business model.
I mean, come on, we've got to be much more
ambitious here. We're not living in twenty fifteen anymore, where
you can say, oh, I'm doing good by doing well.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Twenty fifteen and let's do it.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
That's all the day. Yeah, No, that's not I mean,
this is twenty twenty five. We have one side of
the political spectrums, a total moral collapse. I mean democratic
black sliding happening everywhere, especially people who have some privilege,
you know, whether it's talent, whether it's you know, wealth,
whether it's your network, use it. I mean people on
the left except for so long, things like check your privilege, yes,
(36:03):
check it and then use it. You know, have some
skin in the game.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Right right?
Speaker 4 (36:07):
And how is that working out?
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah it is?
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yeah, So Howard tell me.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
About and just before we go, then so if people
want to exercise this moral ambition. What is how do
they get their foot on that ladder? Do they have
to come to your institute or is there.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yeah, so we're building a movement now.
Speaker 5 (36:27):
Of you could be running the greatest scam in the issue.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Now to do this you have to come to the now.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Tuition is no, no, no, no, no no no, there's no
two issue all right. We pay people to quit their job.
That's how it works for real.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Yes, how much does that pay?
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Well?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
I mean currently we're paying like an averts Dutch salary.
It's it's enough to live on for a couple of months.
And then obviously, I mean we help people to.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
You're really selling this, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Now it's honestly quite exciting. Right, we have now twenty
four people in Europe who quit their job to fight
big tobacco. For example, it's the most evil legal industry
out there. They've created the deadliest product in the history
of humanity. I mean, today we have this moral outrage
about smartphones, right, smartphones that make you addicted TikTok on it.
Imagine a smartphone that is so addictive and also kills you.
(37:16):
That's a cigarette. So anyway, we've recruited. Yeah, it's terrible,
isn't it.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
Yeah, note to self smartphone that kills you.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
Awesome product launch.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
So the point is like we have actually one of
our fellows in our coord is someone who used to
work for Big Tobacco, right sweet sides, and she knows
everything about effective marketing is now using that skills to
fight the industry.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right.
Speaker 5 (37:43):
Well, that's fantastic and it starts off there. And have
you done it in the United States as well? Where
this is right now purely European product?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
No, No, we're starting here.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
So we're starting here. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
I came to New York and September. We're building out here.
It's really getting started now. We're launching our first fellowships.
As I said, the fairness.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Fell and do you have some people that are that
are lined up?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Well, people can apply, So go to Moral Ambition belt
or do you want to quit your job and do
something useful work?
Speaker 4 (38:11):
The book is Moral Ambition. Get your application now.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
Look, good workmen, We're gonna take a good book, fantastic
do you take them? That is our show, ladies and gentlemen,
(38:38):
very night before we go, We're gonna take him with
your ros for the rest of the week.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Jesey lied to Jazzy. Come on, what what's.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Happening this week?
Speaker 12 (38:48):
Well, it's conclave week, John, They're electing a new pope
and I'll be in the room every day to find
out what's.
Speaker 4 (38:55):
Going on in the conclave room. That's I think the
only let cardinals in that room.
Speaker 12 (39:02):
Uh yeah, I know, dumb, dumb. That's why I spent
weeks pre pairing to go undercover as Cardinal Cappuccino Pizzeria.
I know this cardinal ship backwards and forwards. Go ahead,
ask me anything.
Speaker 5 (39:18):
Anything, okay, Cardinal Pizzeria. Who do you want to be Pope?
Speaker 12 (39:27):
No, comprendo, I only speak of the Latin.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Nailed it?
Speaker 4 (39:40):
Uh? Jesus would be proud? And who is he? All right?
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Never mind? Does he like it?
Speaker 5 (39:47):
All?
Speaker 1 (39:47):
This week?
Speaker 4 (39:48):
Here?
Speaker 1 (39:48):
It is your moment?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Actually? My wife thought it was cute, She said, isn't
that nice?
Speaker 6 (39:53):
Question about it? Actually I would not be able to
be married, though that would be a lot I'd have
to to the best.
Speaker 8 (40:00):
So my knowledge, popes aren't big going getting married, are
they not? That we know of?
Speaker 1 (40:04):
No?
Speaker 6 (40:05):
No.
Speaker 11 (40:07):
Explore more shows from The Daily Show podcast Universe by
searching The.
Speaker 4 (40:10):
Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts. Watch The Daily
Show weeknights at eleven.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Ten Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime
on Paramount plus
Speaker 12 (40:27):
Paramount Podcasts
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