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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Do you have moral ambition?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.610.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We’re told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. Some of us love this endless climb. But lots of us, at least once in our lives, find ourselves asking, "What’s the point of all this ambition?"Historian and author Rutger Bregman doesn’t think there is a point to that kind of ambition. Instead, he wants us to be morally ambitious, to measure the value of our achievements based on how much good we do, by how much we improve the world. In this episode, Bregman speaks with guest host Sigal Samuel about how to know if you’re morally ambitious, the value of surrounding yourself with like-minded people, and how to make moral ambition fashionable. Host: Sigal Samuel, Vox senior reporter Guest: Rutger Bregman, historian, author of Moral Ambition, and co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members Show Notes Vox’s Good Robot series can be found here: Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 (discusses the "drowning child thought experiment" and effective altruism) Episode 4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for the show comes from CyberArc.

0:02.0

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0:38.0

Support for this show comes from ServiceNow, a company that helps people do more fulfilling

0:42.8

work, the work they actually want to do. You know what people don't want to do?

0:47.6

Boring, busy work. But ServiceNow says that with their AI agents built into the Service Now

0:52.7

platform, you can automate millions

0:54.8

of repetitive tasks in every corner of a business, IT, HR, customer service, and more.

1:02.1

And the company says that means your people can focus on the work that they want to do.

1:07.1

That's putting AI agents to work for people.

1:10.1

It's your turn.

1:11.0

You can get started at ServiceNow.com slash AI-agents.

1:20.2

We're told from a young age to achieve.

1:23.8

Get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job.

1:32.3

Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high status position. Some of us love this endless climb, but lots of us, at least once in our lives, find ourselves asking,

1:40.3

what's the point of all this ambition?

1:42.3

The fat salary or the fancy title, aren't those pretty meaningless measures of success?

1:50.1

One proposed solution is to stop being ambitious and start being idealistic instead.

...

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