Show Notes
More and more people want to make a real-world difference with their career. Very few of them do. Why are careers in consultancy or finance still so much more mainstream than careers tackling the world's biggest problems?
In this episode, we talk with Jan-Willem van Putten, co-founder of the School for Moral Ambition, an organization that is building clear pathways for people who want to do work that actually changes the world. We discuss: The three main bottlenecks stopping talented people from doing high-impact work How to find important yet neglected causes to work on, and the School for Moral Ambition top picks Why movements that want to change the world often fail, and what effective advocates do differently How to figure out which problems your specific background and skills are best placed to solve The real struggles of leaving a prestigious career behind, from lifestyle creep to peer support, and what makes people say it was worth it
Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 2:12 From thesis on talent waste to joining consultancy: Jan-Willem's journey 4:29 Why did you step away from management consulting? 6:35 Focusing on impact vs. status: can you persuade people? 8:40 What is the School for Moral Ambition? 11:58 Is there now a real field for impact-driven careers? 12:58 Cause areas: food transition and tobacco control 17:10 How to prioritize problems to work on: the Triple-S framework 21:11 Next cause areas: tax fairness and democracy 23:00 What does the fellowship journey look like? 25:06 The profile of an ambitious idealist: startup drive meets activist values 27:43 Noble losers: why social movements fail 30:56 Is moral ambition only for the privileged? 36:04 How to cultivate a higher level of ambition in society 40:31 Feeling hopeless about big problems? New tools change the game 42:19 What holds people back from making the leap to meaningful work 46:12 What do fellows find most rewarding? 47:32 What does success look like in 10 years? 51:25 Where to start if you want to shift to a career that makes a difference 55:28 Best advice ever received: the case for taking action
On the Existential Hope Podcast hosts Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers from the Foresight Institute invite scientists, founders, and philosophers for in-depth conversations on positive, high-tech futures.
Full transcript, listed resources, and more: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts
Follow on X. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Existential Hope Podcast
We see elections as the foundation of our democracy, but Aristotle thought they create an oligarchy. In ancient Athens, democracy worked by choosing leaders among ordinary citizens by lottery. How could we revive this idea to improve today’s democratic systems?
For 50,000 of generations, humans have passed civilization down to their children. We could be the first generation to hand its future to AIs instead. Should we? Or could the best AI be the kind that chooses to step back and leave some things to us?
Google DeepMind has a 7-hour-long roleplaying game that helps real scientists and policy makers understand how AI will transform science by 2030. And those who played it have found it more informative than any policy brief.
In 2024, Taiwan was flooded with deepfake scam ads. Instead of a crackdown, the government texted 200,000 random citizens: what should we do? People’s proposals became law within months, and by 2025 deepfake ads were down 94%.
There are AIs running labs with little human intervention right now. And they’re doing experiments that human experts would never try. Is this changing what and how science gets done?