I think Rutger Bregman & The School for Moral Ambition are full of shit

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Disclaimer : I'm just a random person on the internet and this article is my personal opinion. This article was written without AI.

The first time I heard from Rutger Bregman was due to his remarks at Davos about taxing the billionaires. His speech went viral and I was rooting for him. Later on he got to troll Tucker Carlson about Carlson being a millionaire working for billionaires. Absolutely fantastic.

A few books in, Bregman started the School for Moral ambition in 2024. Although he is a co-founder, he seems to be face of this non-profit organisation, doing a lot of high-visibility interviews and he's the author of the book "Moral Ambition".

The idea behind the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) is quite simple: use your talent to address the world's biggest problems. To paraphrase: "don't become a consultant at McKinsey but do something more valuable and worthwhile with your talent". The argument is similar to what Steve Jobs said to John Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or come with me and change the world?"

It sounds all very noble, but I've become a skeptic for multiple reasons.

Bregman rubbed me the wrong way in the last podcast episode of the "De Rudi & Freddie Show" in 2024. He confronted co-host and award-winning investigative journalist Jesse Frederik and openly questioned if his work really made a difference. Bregman implicated that Frederik could do other things that would be much more effective and be more impactful than his investigative journalism (I'm paraphrasing here).

I'm absolutely comfortable with questions like these, although it can feel confrontational. Yet I really felt it came from a somewhat righteous and smug moral superiority. I felt this way because I haven't seen any evidence1 that SMA has done anything of substance that warrants all the money involved.

Bregman drank the AI cool-aid

Now I already learned that Bregman was really enamoured with AI, and I'm absolutely not, for the usual reasons. That said, fast forwarding to today, I truly believe he has lost the plot, and this recent video (June 2026) is evidence of it.

He is comparing skepticism of artificial intelligence with climate change denial or climate skepticism. He sees AI as a tool that is beneficiary, just not in the hands of billionaires but in the hands of governments (as I understand it). He believes that AI will create an utopia where people can actually work less hours as Keynes 'wrongfully' predicted

Unfortunately for Bregman, as far as I can tell, there is no (scientific) evidence that AI is actually capable of having such a huge impact. Meanwhile compare this to the mountains of evidence for human-caused climate change, it would be a different story. I would expect a different argument from a former journalist. To reiterate: the case for climate change is rooted in a vast body of scientific research. The case for AI creating a 15-hour work week seems mostly backed by wishfull thinking.

I feel that Bregman isn't really aware of his own biases, fuelled by his own personal experience using AI. He paints all the AI critics as 'luddites'2 and that AI-skeptics are on the wrong side of history, just as the climate deniers are. Comparing AI skeptics to climate change skeptics feels like a cheap rhetoric trick that doesn't do justice to the criticism and skepsis surrounding AI.

Bregman also believes that stopping AI or 'shutting it down' doesn't make sense. Because if we shut AI down in our countries, other countries or regimes will build AI and get an advantage over us (he shows China as an example). The age old "if we don't, somebody else will", that has excused bad behaviour for all of eternity.

The reality is that voters and the larger public never had any say how this AI technology is deployed. That we take into account the impact on communities, people, the use of energy and other resources. We never had any say in this. The entire AI-push seems anti-social, anti-democracy.

Yes, the companies now pushing AI upon us are so huge and valued so high they are dwarfing the GDP of entire nations within Europe as Bregman suggests. Yet, I think there is strong evidence these numbers are not real. I sense such a lack of critical thinking and healthy skepticism about his own claims. He is dismissing the work of people like Ed Zitron who has unearthed a ton of evidence that AI doesn't deliver (or not nearly as much as is widely claimed) and there's a bubble that may collapse at some point. As I see it, Bregman only has a well-produced narative, but nothing more: it seems pure rhetoric.

And then I learned something about SMA that made me really disappointed.

The School for Moral Ambition took money from Bill Gates

Bregman has been quite positive about Bill Gates contributions to society, mainly pointing at his work on fighting malaria. Unfortunately, it seems...