October 3, 2024 • 33 mins
How do we define Good & Evil? Can we? We all have a subjective stance on it, so then how do we collectively find agreement? Non-sectarian or religiously dogmatic? We end the episode by discussing the psychology of Good & Evil.
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TGI, the global island.
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Today, Dave and I are going to be discussing good and evil.
The good of it, the evil of it, the complexity of it, and just how difficult it really can
be to define terms that we often deem as simple within our societies, within our own minds,
and within our religions.
We end this episode by discussing the psychology of good and evil.
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Enjoy.
I think it's important to start off by just defining our terms, like last episode.
So you go first, Matt, putting you in the hot seat.
What is your definition of good and evil?
I'm going to confuse you with this definition.
Beautiful.
That's what we're here for.
It's usually what I do.
So good and evil is something that would be difficult to define.
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It is dogmatic as it is, and that doesn't always describe the whole picture.
But the way that we perceive good and evil, I guess in the classical, sort of Western
religious sense, really gives us the idea that there are good forces and that there
are evil forces.
And I feel that we often in everyday life simplify this because life is complicated
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and it's easier to simplify.
And understanding good and evil, going deeper into it, would be a better way to really understand
it because what a standard person may see as good, I necessarily do not see as good.
And whereas someone else may see it as evil, again, it could be contrary depending on the
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person.
So there are degrees to how people can define good and evil?
In everyday life, yes.
I believe so.
Outside of those people that truly believe, that are true Christians or true Muslims or
true Zoroastrians where the good, heaven, and the evil, hell.
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Are very clearly defined.
Yeah, very clearly defined.
Two separate buckets.
I don't ascribe to that.
I feel it's more in the gray.
A spectrum?
Sort of in the spectrum, but more a gray area.
So using the gray, try to define.
What are we maximizing?
What are we adding to or subtracting in good and what's going on in bad?
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Is there a way that you can simplify your definition?
No.
Sure.
No, I can't really think of it at the moment.
I can think of stories that make me think of the complexities of good and evil, but
to fully define it in a simpler term, I just simply cannot.
Sure.
I'm a good person, so why don't I put it in a box?
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You go from this here, you're a definition.
You're usually more structured than I am.
The most boring premise A from this B definition.
We need that.
We need that.
Yeah, hey, this is why we have scientists, right?
They just structure everything.
So here's my definition of good.
Good is that which comparts with reality and minimizes unnecessary suffering to sentient
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creatures.
And then bad or evil is just the antithesis of that, which is that which distracts from
reality and causes unnecessary suffering to sentient creatures.
So I wasn't going to add that first part, that which comparts with reality, but I thought
that that's really important for me because we have so many cognitive biases that shade
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our perception of reality that causes us to be fallacious in our thinking and a lot of
our moral decision making from moral psychology we know is incredibly emotionally aroused
in our limbic system.
And it doesn't have a lot of cognitive properties to it.
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It's very impulse based.
And even we know from psychology that a lot of our desire for revenge or justice actually
can blind us from whether the person even deserves justice or whether the situation
is as logical or fair that we're perceiving it to be.
So I really want to ground it in fact and reality as in my worldview episode with epistemology.
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And also the thing that we're trying to maximize is the mitigation of unnecessary suffering.
So there's my boring philosophical definition of that.
So I guess we're going to kind of question that because you go about this idea of unnecessary
suffering and to sort of end it.
Now I think we both on some levels agree with that, but on another level coming from like
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my own lived experience and from more Eastern traditions like Buddhism, this idea of education
through suffering that this almost like Typhoid Mary syndrome that if somebody you take the
suffering away from that person, are you actually helping them?
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And then are you actually doing good?
Or are you unknowingly doing bad just as Typhoid Mary did?
She was doing her job and she was unknowingly infecting people.
So that's really where the complexities of addressing this suffering goes on.
I guess can you define unnecessary suffering a little bit?
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Bingo.
Yeah, so I actually wrote this down in my notes and I named it something.
It's called broken leg paradox because you said to me one time, well, if we try to prevent
people from breaking their leg, let's say the person actually needed to break their
leg in order to realize that they had a deep passion for painting and their artistic paintings
that would only occur because they were wheelchair ridden for a few months then allows for other
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people to then actually have a way more meaningful life interpreting their artwork and feeling
so accepted by their artwork or whatever that the artwork actually created more good and
that was a result of the broken leg.
So I nicknamed this from your thing as a broken leg paradox.
So the answer to that question and I thought a lot about this is that when I say that which
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comparts with reality, what I mean by that is with all of the knowledge that we have
right now and that we individually have, right?
There's something called availability bias that we make our assumptions about the world
based off of the information that we have available to us.
But I am not God.
I am not a know-it-all.
So there's so much about the world and there's so much about actually how we mitigate unnecessary
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suffering that I'm ignorant to, right?
But with the knowledge that I do have at this moment and with the desire to keep gaining
more understanding of the world, I ought to then make with that knowledge the best decisions
I can in that knowledge to mitigate unnecessary suffering.
So then let me ask you because this is where good doers kind of come in and like an issue
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that a lot of classical philosophers have with good doers.
You forget to caught in good doing with the knowledge you may unknowingly be committing
atrocities to a certain extent.
But at the same time, right, with the knowledge you have, okay, so like let's actually ground
this in like a very specific example.
A person who has power, let's say a politician over Long Island, New York, right?
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Let's say that some senator who is making decision about Long Island, New York, right,
with the knowledge that this senator has, let's say about like water pollution, right,
that we actually need to flush out all the water and we actually need to put this new
molecule called molecule X, right?
And we know from every single scientific study that we have that molecule X actually does
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an amazing job of purifying all the water and that we can actually decrease all the
incidences of water-related infections on Long Island.
And so this senator is being presented all this new data, right, and it looks really,
really sound.
It's published in Science and Nature, the best, the best, you know, journals.
And if you're the senator with the information that you have provided to you, the most ethical
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decision is for you to actually use this molecule X and decrease the incidence of water-related
illnesses, right?
Because if you choose not to do that, then you are then indirectly doing business as
usual and you know that people are going to die or people are going to get, you know,
suffering, right?
However, there is always a possibility that this molecule X could have some, you know,
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secondary effects that actually cause more suffering, right?
But it's your responsibility to say what are those negative possibilities and do they outweigh
the benefit that we know to be true with the data we have available to us.
So I see the argument that you're making there with a politician.
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I think perhaps a politician may have not been the best option because, you know, there's
so many things that go into it.
Sure, because there's other incentives that make a politician.
This molecule X is looking amazing and my stocks are going up.
Yeah, I'm going to, I guess, try to address.
I thought, you know what, like the political science background in me is like screaming
to…
Okay, so you ready?
Let's say you work for the EPA.
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Let's say you're an amazingly moral, good human being.
For the bureaucracy, a moral, good human being.
What are you talking about?
You're an amazing scientist.
You're a young PhD, right?
And you are saying, holy crap, we have to introduce molecule X into our local waterway
because it's actually going to do a lot of good, right?
And you are more knowledgeable on this than, like you are literally the top 1% of people
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who have any understanding of how this actually works.
So you're so, so knowledgeable.
You're an expert.
Exactly.
And you have the responsibility to then lobby your local politicians to actually do good
and to actually accept this, to take the data and to actually mitigate unnecessary suffering
with the knowledge you have, right?
So I agree with you that in the world, it's not always perfect.
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There's always going to be decisions that we make out of a place of good hearted intent
that will have secondary negative effects.
Well, I say let's kind of turn this sort of…
But to not make those decisions to do good, then we are also doing bad by not choosing
that.
Where inaction becomes evil to a certain extent.
So if we look at the Holocaust, for example, you can say, like I was taught in school,
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the good people did nothing, which to an extent is…
It's hard to believe when you really see what occurred, but we're not fully discussing
that.
Wait, the Holocaust might actually be a good example, right?
Because let's say other countries go, holy crap, Germany is doing incredibly evil things,
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but if we intervene, this might cause a nuclear fallout that kills everyone, right?
So there's always a threat that our intervention might cause some sort of secondary, even worse
suffering.
But choosing to not act in and of itself allows…
What if tens of millions of more Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust because the Western
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world didn't decide to act?
It's actually the trolley problem.
You kill one or you kill five.
Yeah, but the unique thing with this trolley problem is that we don't know what the unnecessary
or secondary consequences are going to be because we are not omnipresent.
We don't know what the other…
That's why we're making the best decisions with the knowledge we have, right?
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You know, World War II is a total classic example of what now in history is shown as
what's good versus evil, you know, to a certain extent.
And thinking about it as a sense of nation states stepping in to attack other nation
states based on sovereignty and on human rights, because this is really…
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The UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is one of the governing principles of the
United Nations, was drafted in response partly because of the events that unfolded during
World War II, because of what the Nazis did is what we as Western society as a whole perceived
to be one of the most evil things to occur.
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The Nuremberg Trials.
Absolutely.
And when you see the Nuremberg Trials and you see those people on the stands…
I don't know if Joseph Goebbels was on the stand, but using Joseph Goebbels as an example,
there is no human being out there that you could possibly think of as being evil, as
evil as Joseph Goebbels, because he was…
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He oversaw…
He was complicit in all these incredibly…
Complicit.
He was leading, you know, so many of these acts, because on the personal soldier level…
So actually, I think Paul Firebands, the scientist, is a more gray area on good and evil, because
Firebands was an Austrian that was not in support of Hitler, but was brought into the
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military.
He was drafted into the military, and had he not gone into the military, him and his
family would have been killed.
And he was…
You know, he was…
Now this can get a bit more complex depending on the soldiers that you're talking about,
because if you're, say, sent to Auschwitz and now you're a soldier directly carrying
out genocide is one thing, but he was sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the
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Russians, which, you know, in that case there is war.
Now is Firebands a good person for doing this because he was protecting his family himself
and his own life being, or is he an evil person because he didn't stand up against the Nazis,
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he didn't decline, and he did go away to fight?
So this is definitely a more gray area.
And I think Jordan Peterson, I love when he brings this up and asks a classroom of people,
like, how many of you would stand up against the Nazis?
And people raise their hands and they think they would.
They really think they would.
But you know what?
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I can sit here and I can give you an honest answer.
Who would actually hide Anne Frank in their attic?
Yeah, who would hide Anne Frank?
We all think that we would be the one making the moral right to think to do.
Absolutely.
But the majority of us would be prey to conformity.
We really would be.
And I'll say there's certain things, like, I'm the kind of person that always stands
up to a certain degree.
You can't shut me up in a classroom.
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Like if you've had class with me, I'm sorry.
Highly disagreeable.
I love to fight.
Sure.
You know, and even because of my religious beliefs, it's like, so be it if I die.
But if I have a wife and children, what motivation?
Exactly.
Sure.
If it's an over thing overall, maybe then had the Nazis gone into power, I wouldn't
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have been so quick to challenge them.
Okay, can I bring up this?
Go for it.
Because I think this is an area of agreement that we both have.
Okay.
This feeling of the voice of conscience inside of us, right?
Yes.
Where like Jordan Peterson says, sit on your bed and say a prayer and be like, what is
wrong with me?
And things will pop in your head.
You will be like, wow, I haven't called my grandma in three months.
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Or as Joe Rogan says, take 200 milligrams of edibles and go to the airport and you'll
find out what's wrong with you.
That would be a very fast catalyst to get there.
But certainly, and I think me and you both believe, however we got here, whether this
voice of consciousness has evolved or whether it's actually the voice of our Creator speaking
to us, it enables us to really see what's most relevant, right?
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And so they're like, when we're looking in hindsight, when we're looking at would we
be the one to hide Anne Frank, right?
We're very quick to be like, yeah, we're going to be good moral people because in this situation,
I want to conform.
I want other people to think that I'm a good moral person.
So yeah, yeah.
But in the real gray of life, as you put it, right?
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Irfan is in this very interesting situation where with the knowledge that he has and with
he's trying to build his life, he's trying to build the protection of his family.
There's so many other sufferings that he has to weigh in this cost benefit analysis.
And he's listening to the voice of consciousness inside of him that's worried about his family,
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that's also worried about his country.
But he's trying to say, with the resources I have available, what actually good can I
do?
And for some people, the good is actually just to defend your family.
So now let me ask you this kind of going on that voice of reason, the consciousness voice,
you know, what the Quakers call the still small voice within, whether that is God or,
you know, whether that is sort of define, I wouldn't define it as the Tao, but like
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that the idea of the Tao.
It's like the sacred voice.
Yeah, the sacred voice.
Now you've sent me the charts on the levels of awareness, you know, kind of bringing this
into that now.
Emotions, do you feel that you have this voice and emotions, the sort of the reality of our
like reactive human nature?
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Do they get in the way of this?
To put it in like a very boring neuroscience, does the limbic system have all the power
over our higher cortical?
If that's the way you want to describe it.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of psychologists who literally say that, that our limbic system
is so, it's like 10 times faster of processing speed than our higher cortical, more rational
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ways of thinking.
Okay.
And a lot of our higher rational ways of thinking are actually kind of hijacked to be used to
get all the things that the limbic system wants, right?
So looking to procreate and find an attractive and good long-term mate, right?
All of my rational parts of my brain are really being hijacked by the limbic system to persuade
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other people towards that end goal or to get me food or to, you know, all the basic drives,
right?
But I think that this voice of conscious, I feel like it's more oriented in these higher
rational ways of thinking and that it's almost like the opposite is occurring.
It's where it's actually putting a brake on the limbic system and saying, yeah, there's
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short-term gratification that you want.
You want to stay in that hamster on the wheel, but hold up now, there's something more important
going on.
You need to get off the wheel for a second and you need to look whether you should even
be on this wheel.
And I think that's the voice of conscious to me where it puts things into proper orientation
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or what my guy, Jonathan Vivecki says is relevance realization.
There's a billion things that we could be attending to right now.
There's a billion, you know, memories and thoughts on my long-term memory that I can,
you know, bring up, but my frontal lobe is actually inhibiting all of that stimuli and
my higher cortical processes are actually orienting things in our conversation based
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off of what's most relevant and what's most precise to talk about.
And I think that's what the conscious voice does.
So, I guess, kind of building on what you brought in with Jonathan Vivecki's idea, in
Buddhism, like when you first learn to meditate, like I really, the ones that I center, the
Buddhist centers that I've gone to have been more the Zen or Theravadan.
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And speaking with the monks there, you know, I get this idea of like while I'm meditating,
I'm like, there's so much better I could be doing at the moment.
And, you know, the monks have told me like, there's not because you're doing this to
a certain extent.
And it's when kind of acceptance versus kind of trying to maximize potential, like you're
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literally like, I've decided to come here to, you know, give thanks to the Buddha to,
it's almost like ambition's not necessarily a good thing.
And not that that's, not that you shouldn't.
So this is this, this is going to get complicated, I guess, if I go into ambition.
But what it is, is really stealing your mind to not react to what is at hand, but to work
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with what is at hand.
Are you kind of following what I'm saying?
In the situation of fire ban, right?
Fire ban can say, the world is a horrible place.
Like I am so screwed.
I hate how my fate has put me in the situation of having to, you know, to work as a soldier.
My life sucks.
I just want to escape this.
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Instead of being in that place of resentment, there is a place of acceptance.
And out of that place of acceptance, things can kind of fall into proper place that actually
allows you to move forward in the way that you ought to move.
So it's an indescribable and sometimes irrational path that you may follow, that you work with,
kind of knowing you're in tune with this voice then.
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And I think the real question is, is along following that path.
Now can you commit atrocities?
Yeah.
And still be good to yourself?
So maybe perhaps to society you have done, or to outside societies as well, because things
are relative to the cultures that they're in.
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Can you do evil and follow your own good without maximizing like, you know, like, oh, it's
good for me.
Like having more money is good for me.
Following that voice.
This is the reason why I think we evolved with this higher cortical, more rational processing
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power.
This is like Adam Smith talked about, like the invisible hand of the market, that if
you actually leave people to their own selfish ambition, that everyone actually ends up doing
better.
And the way that you do that is to create a system where you harness people's limbic
system and their selfish ambition to create value that has an end result which makes everyone
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lives better.
And this is where I think our higher cortical processes have allowed us to then create institutions
and systems that actually harness maybe the darker sides of our nature to actually produce
good in the world.
So like for example, we have systems of government that have separations of power.
We have the United Nations for all its flaws.
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At least we have some sort of collective body.
We have, you know, international legal courts that can set guidelines for what our actual
values are.
And these are not things that are produced by one single human being, right?
These are things of our collective consciousness.
But so then do you think that the collective consciousness can turn evil to a certain extent?
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So I'm going to take this for example, and not to kind of create class warfare sort of
perspective, but like I work with a lot of very, very, very wealthy individuals and I
see they're not exactly what you would describe as good and their actions.
I know people personally that commit tax fraud, like I could literally call the IRS on some
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on a client and I know they're going to be in trouble.
So okay, so you ready?
So this comes back to just human nature, right?
I think it's important to define what do we know about human nature, right?
And then measuring what we know about human nature, how are we doing?
Right?
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And so like you were bringing up how different classes or different groups of people in groups
and out groups, we in different groups can have different moral ways of behaving, but
ultimately they can be reduced to different natural motivations, right?
Like rational self-interest, that it's in the self-interest of the person committing
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tax fraud, thinking that they have the possibility to get away with it.
But in the long run, they are actually increasing the probability of a catastrophe occurring
and them being in more financial damage.
Okay, so now looking at, there's this consulting firm, McKinsey.
They're one of the largest, I think they are the largest consulting firm in the world.
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Now in their self-interest, so like going back to Adam Smith's ideas, everybody essentially
wants to better themselves.
And from that standpoint, I mean, we could kind of go in down because Adam Smith wasn't
as simple economic of a person as people believe him to be.
He was very philosophical and now applying to the stage of capitalism that we're in,
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things are very complex.
But so McKinsey is essentially, they need to get more contracts, they need to get more
money, right?
So it's in their self-interest or their own company's good for their employees' survival
to take on more contracts.
Now I believe McKinsey is actually consulting with the Chinese government on World War III
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scenarios.
McKinsey is a US-based corporation.
Now is this where we can turn to these people, where we can turn to these sort of, do you
see this then as greed and as bad or is it essentially good because while they're creating
US jobs, even though those US jobs are to consult a foreign country on war against the
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US.
And then, but I mean, you can go to an even further level, is the existence of nation
states, is that self-serving?
Is it good?
Is it evil?
Is the defense of a nation state good?
Is the defense of it evil?
Yeah, these are questions that I would feel incredibly narcissistic to answer because
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I think just how big they are.
I think about that question, like, do we need nation states because this whole problem of
like in-group and out-group, but I think it's so deep because we see it in chimps.
So to think that they're just a result of nation states or they're just a result of
religion is incredibly ignorant and looking at it at the wrong level, that these are human
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properties.
We have a human tendency to be in-group and to have out-group hostility.
But you ready?
If we look at the arc of history, as our ability to commit acts of violence has increased,
our ability to commit a beautiful acts of peace have also co-evolved with one another.
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That our deterrence, which are actually powers of violence like nuclear weapons, right, have
also allowed for nation states to have, to define war differently and play war differently.
But those deterrence have also failed and they will fail in the future.
I mean, when Israel, I forget the exact war because there's been so many wars in the past
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with Israel.
Israel was holding the Golan Heights, which was in the north, and then below them was,
I believe, the Sinai Peninsula.
And this was during the Cold War because Israel essentially had this plan in mind that if
the forces from either the north or the south, from Egypt, would get too close to Israel,
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like where, about the land where we are today, that they would nuke Cairo and Moscow.
Simply Moscow just for being involved with the Egyptians.
And they still attacked.
They still attacked.
They called the bluff of nuclear war.
People think that the Bay of Pigs, not the Bay of Pigs, that the Cuban Missile Crisis
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was one of the closest things to nuclear war.
It was actually this incident with Israel because Israel was ready to use them.
But Israel chose not to.
Israel chose not to.
But the US chose to use them.
So I think, I still think that other countries still so possibly look at the United States
as being a little bit different.
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Because we'll use a nuke on you and then we'll actually rebuild your whole country and we'll
actually make you one of the greatest allies to the US.
And we'll say that you can have your own navy too.
Well you know what, I don't know the era of Japan, but the Imperial era of Japan, I guess
when they had their empire following the end of the Meiji era was definitely interesting
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because during the Meiji era, which was like late 1800s to, I believe, I think it was 1868
to 1911, there was this influx of Western ideas into Japan.
And if you actually read a lot of their literature from that era, you start to actually see some
of those complex Eastern ideologies being interpreted in Western ways.
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And it is this sort of mix of both, some of those being the reality of a person.
I mean there's this famous book called The Soil, and the main character in it, his name
is Kanji.
He has this daughter Otsugi, I believe, and this son, I'm blanking on the son's name,
his wife Okina, I might be blanking off these names, but I know the main character's name
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is Kanji, he's in poverty in rural Japan during the Meiji era.
So around him is modernization occurring, but not for him.
And he's living in poverty, he's indebted because of his ancestors and so on, and he
gets frustrated and he gets lashed out.
He treats his daughter, after his wife dies, he treats his daughter Otsu terribly.
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He has this, there's this idea of respecting your elders in Japan, and he disrespects his
father-in-law a lot.
And the question is really, is he good or is he evil?
And the reality of the story shows that he's not necessarily a victim, but he's a product
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of his circumstances.
Bingo, okay, so this is what I want to end on about the more psychological perspective.
And maybe I'm completely wrong with this, but I'm convinced that there are no good and
bad people, there's only good and bad behaviors, because I believe that the concept of self
is actually an illusion produced by the organ, the brain.
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Fundamentally, at the level of biology, David Cavallino doesn't exist.
David Cavallino is produced by the nervous system and by the organ of the brain, and
the brain produces behavior, and behavior can be defined as being prosocial or antisocial.
And so I think in a lot of ways, it actually is more helpful to go down to the incentives
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and go down to the gray and look at people's life and be like, one, why is this behavior
even being produced?
What's incentivizing this behavior?
And is there better behaviors that can be incentivized to lead to a better result?
And I think kind of viewing it as that input and output way, I think it does serve useful,
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and I think this is how we need to run governments too, and how governments need to run populations.
To an extent, I agree with you because-
Like, for example, crime, right?
Well, yeah, when you look at the legal system, it can be so black and white.
You've done this wrong legally, this is illegal.
And you chose to do this wrong because you're a bad person.
Instead of, well, actually, there was lead in my water, and we were eating McDonald's
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for seven years because we live in a food desert.
It gets complicated.
But the legal system, people that rely on the legal system is a more morality thing.
And I mean, I've-
Punitive justice.
I've met people that are, the law is the law and do not do anything around it.
That even, it goes against the US as it had.
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When Thomas Jefferson was drafting up our documents, he knew if there's a law, you should
disobey it.
You have an obligation to disobey an unjust law.
But I feel-
In certain situations.
Yes, in certain situations.
You're right, because this can be applied once we get into the legal system.
There's a million things.
And that's why it's important to not be dogmatic to things and to always have a clause in whatever
(32:07):
document you're writing up.
Dogmatism is the death of everything.
The proper, what's the clause?
The proper and necessary clause.
Because they didn't know about smartphones, they didn't know about automobiles, right?
Yeah, they didn't know about social media.
So I think fundamentally, what we're saying is David seems to convince himself that he
has a clear philosophical definition of good and evil, but actually this shit is so much
(32:29):
more gray.
There's a lot more conversation to be had.
Absolutely, I definitely believe that.
I still am left with having a difficulty defining either of them.
And I know I've kind of used examples throughout this, but they're almost cultural examples,
accepted examples.
Cultural, historical examples I'll show you.
Actually those definitions you have and you hold so close to your heart, there might be
(32:51):
a little bit more to those definitions.
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to call Hitler evil, but let's start discussing, say Barack Obama,
for example.
It's going to be very complex because do I think Barack Obama's evil?
No.
Do I think he committed stuff that was- Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps?
Mark Zuckerberg.
Honestly, anybody in these systems of power.
And I think it's interesting in the positions of power too because as these giant bureaucracies
(33:15):
have sort of evolved, it takes away that individual sort of participation.
Because now you are in a position that is non-personalized.
I mean, that's the whole point of these giant corporate and bureaucratic systems.
It's non-personal and you're just doing the role that is ascribed to you.
(33:35):
Well, we got a lot more to talk about.
So that's our first episode on Good and Evil.
We will definitely have to return.
Absolutely.
A little bit of morality next time too.
Sure.
All right.
Thanks.
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
Today, Dave and I are going to be discussing good and evil.
The good of it, the evil of it, the complexity of it, and just how difficult it really can
be to define terms that we often deem as simple within our societies, within our own minds,
and within our religions.
We end this episode by discussing the psychology of good and evil.
(00:27):
Enjoy.
I think it's important to start off by just defining our terms, like last episode.
So you go first, Matt, putting you in the hot seat.
What is your definition of good and evil?
I'm going to confuse you with this definition.
Beautiful.
That's what we're here for.
It's usually what I do.
So good and evil is something that would be difficult to define.
(00:51):
It is dogmatic as it is, and that doesn't always describe the whole picture.
But the way that we perceive good and evil, I guess in the classical, sort of Western
religious sense, really gives us the idea that there are good forces and that there
are evil forces.
And I feel that we often in everyday life simplify this because life is complicated
(01:16):
and it's easier to simplify.
And understanding good and evil, going deeper into it, would be a better way to really understand
it because what a standard person may see as good, I necessarily do not see as good.
And whereas someone else may see it as evil, again, it could be contrary depending on the
(01:36):
person.
So there are degrees to how people can define good and evil?
In everyday life, yes.
I believe so.
Outside of those people that truly believe, that are true Christians or true Muslims or
true Zoroastrians where the good, heaven, and the evil, hell.
(02:00):
Are very clearly defined.
Yeah, very clearly defined.
Two separate buckets.
I don't ascribe to that.
I feel it's more in the gray.
A spectrum?
Sort of in the spectrum, but more a gray area.
So using the gray, try to define.
What are we maximizing?
What are we adding to or subtracting in good and what's going on in bad?
(02:24):
Is there a way that you can simplify your definition?
No.
Sure.
No, I can't really think of it at the moment.
I can think of stories that make me think of the complexities of good and evil, but
to fully define it in a simpler term, I just simply cannot.
Sure.
I'm a good person, so why don't I put it in a box?
(02:46):
You go from this here, you're a definition.
You're usually more structured than I am.
The most boring premise A from this B definition.
We need that.
We need that.
Yeah, hey, this is why we have scientists, right?
They just structure everything.
So here's my definition of good.
Good is that which comparts with reality and minimizes unnecessary suffering to sentient
(03:07):
creatures.
And then bad or evil is just the antithesis of that, which is that which distracts from
reality and causes unnecessary suffering to sentient creatures.
So I wasn't going to add that first part, that which comparts with reality, but I thought
that that's really important for me because we have so many cognitive biases that shade
(03:32):
our perception of reality that causes us to be fallacious in our thinking and a lot of
our moral decision making from moral psychology we know is incredibly emotionally aroused
in our limbic system.
And it doesn't have a lot of cognitive properties to it.
(03:52):
It's very impulse based.
And even we know from psychology that a lot of our desire for revenge or justice actually
can blind us from whether the person even deserves justice or whether the situation
is as logical or fair that we're perceiving it to be.
So I really want to ground it in fact and reality as in my worldview episode with epistemology.
(04:20):
And also the thing that we're trying to maximize is the mitigation of unnecessary suffering.
So there's my boring philosophical definition of that.
So I guess we're going to kind of question that because you go about this idea of unnecessary
suffering and to sort of end it.
Now I think we both on some levels agree with that, but on another level coming from like
(04:48):
my own lived experience and from more Eastern traditions like Buddhism, this idea of education
through suffering that this almost like Typhoid Mary syndrome that if somebody you take the
suffering away from that person, are you actually helping them?
(05:08):
And then are you actually doing good?
Or are you unknowingly doing bad just as Typhoid Mary did?
She was doing her job and she was unknowingly infecting people.
So that's really where the complexities of addressing this suffering goes on.
I guess can you define unnecessary suffering a little bit?
(05:29):
Bingo.
Yeah, so I actually wrote this down in my notes and I named it something.
It's called broken leg paradox because you said to me one time, well, if we try to prevent
people from breaking their leg, let's say the person actually needed to break their
leg in order to realize that they had a deep passion for painting and their artistic paintings
that would only occur because they were wheelchair ridden for a few months then allows for other
(05:57):
people to then actually have a way more meaningful life interpreting their artwork and feeling
so accepted by their artwork or whatever that the artwork actually created more good and
that was a result of the broken leg.
So I nicknamed this from your thing as a broken leg paradox.
So the answer to that question and I thought a lot about this is that when I say that which
(06:22):
comparts with reality, what I mean by that is with all of the knowledge that we have
right now and that we individually have, right?
There's something called availability bias that we make our assumptions about the world
based off of the information that we have available to us.
But I am not God.
I am not a know-it-all.
So there's so much about the world and there's so much about actually how we mitigate unnecessary
(06:43):
suffering that I'm ignorant to, right?
But with the knowledge that I do have at this moment and with the desire to keep gaining
more understanding of the world, I ought to then make with that knowledge the best decisions
I can in that knowledge to mitigate unnecessary suffering.
So then let me ask you because this is where good doers kind of come in and like an issue
(07:06):
that a lot of classical philosophers have with good doers.
You forget to caught in good doing with the knowledge you may unknowingly be committing
atrocities to a certain extent.
But at the same time, right, with the knowledge you have, okay, so like let's actually ground
this in like a very specific example.
A person who has power, let's say a politician over Long Island, New York, right?
(07:32):
Let's say that some senator who is making decision about Long Island, New York, right,
with the knowledge that this senator has, let's say about like water pollution, right,
that we actually need to flush out all the water and we actually need to put this new
molecule called molecule X, right?
And we know from every single scientific study that we have that molecule X actually does
(07:55):
an amazing job of purifying all the water and that we can actually decrease all the
incidences of water-related infections on Long Island.
And so this senator is being presented all this new data, right, and it looks really,
really sound.
It's published in Science and Nature, the best, the best, you know, journals.
And if you're the senator with the information that you have provided to you, the most ethical
(08:18):
decision is for you to actually use this molecule X and decrease the incidence of water-related
illnesses, right?
Because if you choose not to do that, then you are then indirectly doing business as
usual and you know that people are going to die or people are going to get, you know,
suffering, right?
However, there is always a possibility that this molecule X could have some, you know,
(08:40):
secondary effects that actually cause more suffering, right?
But it's your responsibility to say what are those negative possibilities and do they outweigh
the benefit that we know to be true with the data we have available to us.
So I see the argument that you're making there with a politician.
(09:01):
I think perhaps a politician may have not been the best option because, you know, there's
so many things that go into it.
Sure, because there's other incentives that make a politician.
This molecule X is looking amazing and my stocks are going up.
Yeah, I'm going to, I guess, try to address.
I thought, you know what, like the political science background in me is like screaming
to…
Okay, so you ready?
Let's say you work for the EPA.
(09:22):
Let's say you're an amazingly moral, good human being.
For the bureaucracy, a moral, good human being.
What are you talking about?
You're an amazing scientist.
You're a young PhD, right?
And you are saying, holy crap, we have to introduce molecule X into our local waterway
because it's actually going to do a lot of good, right?
And you are more knowledgeable on this than, like you are literally the top 1% of people
(09:47):
who have any understanding of how this actually works.
So you're so, so knowledgeable.
You're an expert.
Exactly.
And you have the responsibility to then lobby your local politicians to actually do good
and to actually accept this, to take the data and to actually mitigate unnecessary suffering
with the knowledge you have, right?
So I agree with you that in the world, it's not always perfect.
(10:11):
There's always going to be decisions that we make out of a place of good hearted intent
that will have secondary negative effects.
Well, I say let's kind of turn this sort of…
But to not make those decisions to do good, then we are also doing bad by not choosing
that.
Where inaction becomes evil to a certain extent.
So if we look at the Holocaust, for example, you can say, like I was taught in school,
(10:35):
the good people did nothing, which to an extent is…
It's hard to believe when you really see what occurred, but we're not fully discussing
that.
Wait, the Holocaust might actually be a good example, right?
Because let's say other countries go, holy crap, Germany is doing incredibly evil things,
(10:56):
but if we intervene, this might cause a nuclear fallout that kills everyone, right?
So there's always a threat that our intervention might cause some sort of secondary, even worse
suffering.
But choosing to not act in and of itself allows…
What if tens of millions of more Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust because the Western
(11:19):
world didn't decide to act?
It's actually the trolley problem.
You kill one or you kill five.
Yeah, but the unique thing with this trolley problem is that we don't know what the unnecessary
or secondary consequences are going to be because we are not omnipresent.
We don't know what the other…
That's why we're making the best decisions with the knowledge we have, right?
(11:42):
You know, World War II is a total classic example of what now in history is shown as
what's good versus evil, you know, to a certain extent.
And thinking about it as a sense of nation states stepping in to attack other nation
states based on sovereignty and on human rights, because this is really…
(12:04):
The UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is one of the governing principles of the
United Nations, was drafted in response partly because of the events that unfolded during
World War II, because of what the Nazis did is what we as Western society as a whole perceived
to be one of the most evil things to occur.
(12:25):
The Nuremberg Trials.
Absolutely.
And when you see the Nuremberg Trials and you see those people on the stands…
I don't know if Joseph Goebbels was on the stand, but using Joseph Goebbels as an example,
there is no human being out there that you could possibly think of as being evil, as
evil as Joseph Goebbels, because he was…
(12:47):
He oversaw…
He was complicit in all these incredibly…
Complicit.
He was leading, you know, so many of these acts, because on the personal soldier level…
So actually, I think Paul Firebands, the scientist, is a more gray area on good and evil, because
Firebands was an Austrian that was not in support of Hitler, but was brought into the
(13:13):
military.
He was drafted into the military, and had he not gone into the military, him and his
family would have been killed.
And he was…
You know, he was…
Now this can get a bit more complex depending on the soldiers that you're talking about,
because if you're, say, sent to Auschwitz and now you're a soldier directly carrying
out genocide is one thing, but he was sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the
(13:40):
Russians, which, you know, in that case there is war.
Now is Firebands a good person for doing this because he was protecting his family himself
and his own life being, or is he an evil person because he didn't stand up against the Nazis,
(14:01):
he didn't decline, and he did go away to fight?
So this is definitely a more gray area.
And I think Jordan Peterson, I love when he brings this up and asks a classroom of people,
like, how many of you would stand up against the Nazis?
And people raise their hands and they think they would.
They really think they would.
But you know what?
(14:21):
I can sit here and I can give you an honest answer.
Who would actually hide Anne Frank in their attic?
Yeah, who would hide Anne Frank?
We all think that we would be the one making the moral right to think to do.
Absolutely.
But the majority of us would be prey to conformity.
We really would be.
And I'll say there's certain things, like, I'm the kind of person that always stands
up to a certain degree.
You can't shut me up in a classroom.
(14:42):
Like if you've had class with me, I'm sorry.
Highly disagreeable.
I love to fight.
Sure.
You know, and even because of my religious beliefs, it's like, so be it if I die.
But if I have a wife and children, what motivation?
Exactly.
Sure.
If it's an over thing overall, maybe then had the Nazis gone into power, I wouldn't
(15:05):
have been so quick to challenge them.
Okay, can I bring up this?
Go for it.
Because I think this is an area of agreement that we both have.
Okay.
This feeling of the voice of conscience inside of us, right?
Yes.
Where like Jordan Peterson says, sit on your bed and say a prayer and be like, what is
wrong with me?
And things will pop in your head.
You will be like, wow, I haven't called my grandma in three months.
(15:27):
Or as Joe Rogan says, take 200 milligrams of edibles and go to the airport and you'll
find out what's wrong with you.
That would be a very fast catalyst to get there.
But certainly, and I think me and you both believe, however we got here, whether this
voice of consciousness has evolved or whether it's actually the voice of our Creator speaking
to us, it enables us to really see what's most relevant, right?
(15:53):
And so they're like, when we're looking in hindsight, when we're looking at would we
be the one to hide Anne Frank, right?
We're very quick to be like, yeah, we're going to be good moral people because in this situation,
I want to conform.
I want other people to think that I'm a good moral person.
So yeah, yeah.
But in the real gray of life, as you put it, right?
(16:13):
Irfan is in this very interesting situation where with the knowledge that he has and with
he's trying to build his life, he's trying to build the protection of his family.
There's so many other sufferings that he has to weigh in this cost benefit analysis.
And he's listening to the voice of consciousness inside of him that's worried about his family,
(16:34):
that's also worried about his country.
But he's trying to say, with the resources I have available, what actually good can I
do?
And for some people, the good is actually just to defend your family.
So now let me ask you this kind of going on that voice of reason, the consciousness voice,
you know, what the Quakers call the still small voice within, whether that is God or,
you know, whether that is sort of define, I wouldn't define it as the Tao, but like
(16:57):
that the idea of the Tao.
It's like the sacred voice.
Yeah, the sacred voice.
Now you've sent me the charts on the levels of awareness, you know, kind of bringing this
into that now.
Emotions, do you feel that you have this voice and emotions, the sort of the reality of our
like reactive human nature?
(17:18):
Do they get in the way of this?
To put it in like a very boring neuroscience, does the limbic system have all the power
over our higher cortical?
If that's the way you want to describe it.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of psychologists who literally say that, that our limbic system
is so, it's like 10 times faster of processing speed than our higher cortical, more rational
(17:39):
ways of thinking.
Okay.
And a lot of our higher rational ways of thinking are actually kind of hijacked to be used to
get all the things that the limbic system wants, right?
So looking to procreate and find an attractive and good long-term mate, right?
All of my rational parts of my brain are really being hijacked by the limbic system to persuade
(18:00):
other people towards that end goal or to get me food or to, you know, all the basic drives,
right?
But I think that this voice of conscious, I feel like it's more oriented in these higher
rational ways of thinking and that it's almost like the opposite is occurring.
It's where it's actually putting a brake on the limbic system and saying, yeah, there's
(18:21):
short-term gratification that you want.
You want to stay in that hamster on the wheel, but hold up now, there's something more important
going on.
You need to get off the wheel for a second and you need to look whether you should even
be on this wheel.
And I think that's the voice of conscious to me where it puts things into proper orientation
(18:42):
or what my guy, Jonathan Vivecki says is relevance realization.
There's a billion things that we could be attending to right now.
There's a billion, you know, memories and thoughts on my long-term memory that I can,
you know, bring up, but my frontal lobe is actually inhibiting all of that stimuli and
my higher cortical processes are actually orienting things in our conversation based
(19:03):
off of what's most relevant and what's most precise to talk about.
And I think that's what the conscious voice does.
So, I guess, kind of building on what you brought in with Jonathan Vivecki's idea, in
Buddhism, like when you first learn to meditate, like I really, the ones that I center, the
Buddhist centers that I've gone to have been more the Zen or Theravadan.
(19:23):
And speaking with the monks there, you know, I get this idea of like while I'm meditating,
I'm like, there's so much better I could be doing at the moment.
And, you know, the monks have told me like, there's not because you're doing this to
a certain extent.
And it's when kind of acceptance versus kind of trying to maximize potential, like you're
(19:46):
literally like, I've decided to come here to, you know, give thanks to the Buddha to,
it's almost like ambition's not necessarily a good thing.
And not that that's, not that you shouldn't.
So this is this, this is going to get complicated, I guess, if I go into ambition.
But what it is, is really stealing your mind to not react to what is at hand, but to work
(20:16):
with what is at hand.
Are you kind of following what I'm saying?
In the situation of fire ban, right?
Fire ban can say, the world is a horrible place.
Like I am so screwed.
I hate how my fate has put me in the situation of having to, you know, to work as a soldier.
My life sucks.
I just want to escape this.
(20:37):
Instead of being in that place of resentment, there is a place of acceptance.
And out of that place of acceptance, things can kind of fall into proper place that actually
allows you to move forward in the way that you ought to move.
So it's an indescribable and sometimes irrational path that you may follow, that you work with,
kind of knowing you're in tune with this voice then.
(21:00):
And I think the real question is, is along following that path.
Now can you commit atrocities?
Yeah.
And still be good to yourself?
So maybe perhaps to society you have done, or to outside societies as well, because things
are relative to the cultures that they're in.
(21:22):
Can you do evil and follow your own good without maximizing like, you know, like, oh, it's
good for me.
Like having more money is good for me.
Following that voice.
This is the reason why I think we evolved with this higher cortical, more rational processing
(21:44):
power.
This is like Adam Smith talked about, like the invisible hand of the market, that if
you actually leave people to their own selfish ambition, that everyone actually ends up doing
better.
And the way that you do that is to create a system where you harness people's limbic
system and their selfish ambition to create value that has an end result which makes everyone
(22:08):
lives better.
And this is where I think our higher cortical processes have allowed us to then create institutions
and systems that actually harness maybe the darker sides of our nature to actually produce
good in the world.
So like for example, we have systems of government that have separations of power.
We have the United Nations for all its flaws.
(22:30):
At least we have some sort of collective body.
We have, you know, international legal courts that can set guidelines for what our actual
values are.
And these are not things that are produced by one single human being, right?
These are things of our collective consciousness.
But so then do you think that the collective consciousness can turn evil to a certain extent?
(22:53):
So I'm going to take this for example, and not to kind of create class warfare sort of
perspective, but like I work with a lot of very, very, very wealthy individuals and I
see they're not exactly what you would describe as good and their actions.
I know people personally that commit tax fraud, like I could literally call the IRS on some
(23:16):
on a client and I know they're going to be in trouble.
So okay, so you ready?
So this comes back to just human nature, right?
I think it's important to define what do we know about human nature, right?
And then measuring what we know about human nature, how are we doing?
Right?
(23:37):
And so like you were bringing up how different classes or different groups of people in groups
and out groups, we in different groups can have different moral ways of behaving, but
ultimately they can be reduced to different natural motivations, right?
Like rational self-interest, that it's in the self-interest of the person committing
(23:57):
tax fraud, thinking that they have the possibility to get away with it.
But in the long run, they are actually increasing the probability of a catastrophe occurring
and them being in more financial damage.
Okay, so now looking at, there's this consulting firm, McKinsey.
They're one of the largest, I think they are the largest consulting firm in the world.
(24:19):
Now in their self-interest, so like going back to Adam Smith's ideas, everybody essentially
wants to better themselves.
And from that standpoint, I mean, we could kind of go in down because Adam Smith wasn't
as simple economic of a person as people believe him to be.
He was very philosophical and now applying to the stage of capitalism that we're in,
(24:41):
things are very complex.
But so McKinsey is essentially, they need to get more contracts, they need to get more
money, right?
So it's in their self-interest or their own company's good for their employees' survival
to take on more contracts.
Now I believe McKinsey is actually consulting with the Chinese government on World War III
(25:06):
scenarios.
McKinsey is a US-based corporation.
Now is this where we can turn to these people, where we can turn to these sort of, do you
see this then as greed and as bad or is it essentially good because while they're creating
US jobs, even though those US jobs are to consult a foreign country on war against the
(25:35):
US.
And then, but I mean, you can go to an even further level, is the existence of nation
states, is that self-serving?
Is it good?
Is it evil?
Is the defense of a nation state good?
Is the defense of it evil?
Yeah, these are questions that I would feel incredibly narcissistic to answer because
(25:56):
I think just how big they are.
I think about that question, like, do we need nation states because this whole problem of
like in-group and out-group, but I think it's so deep because we see it in chimps.
So to think that they're just a result of nation states or they're just a result of
religion is incredibly ignorant and looking at it at the wrong level, that these are human
(26:17):
properties.
We have a human tendency to be in-group and to have out-group hostility.
But you ready?
If we look at the arc of history, as our ability to commit acts of violence has increased,
our ability to commit a beautiful acts of peace have also co-evolved with one another.
(26:39):
That our deterrence, which are actually powers of violence like nuclear weapons, right, have
also allowed for nation states to have, to define war differently and play war differently.
But those deterrence have also failed and they will fail in the future.
I mean, when Israel, I forget the exact war because there's been so many wars in the past
(27:01):
with Israel.
Israel was holding the Golan Heights, which was in the north, and then below them was,
I believe, the Sinai Peninsula.
And this was during the Cold War because Israel essentially had this plan in mind that if
the forces from either the north or the south, from Egypt, would get too close to Israel,
(27:23):
like where, about the land where we are today, that they would nuke Cairo and Moscow.
Simply Moscow just for being involved with the Egyptians.
And they still attacked.
They still attacked.
They called the bluff of nuclear war.
People think that the Bay of Pigs, not the Bay of Pigs, that the Cuban Missile Crisis
(27:47):
was one of the closest things to nuclear war.
It was actually this incident with Israel because Israel was ready to use them.
But Israel chose not to.
Israel chose not to.
But the US chose to use them.
So I think, I still think that other countries still so possibly look at the United States
as being a little bit different.
(28:08):
Because we'll use a nuke on you and then we'll actually rebuild your whole country and we'll
actually make you one of the greatest allies to the US.
And we'll say that you can have your own navy too.
Well you know what, I don't know the era of Japan, but the Imperial era of Japan, I guess
when they had their empire following the end of the Meiji era was definitely interesting
(28:29):
because during the Meiji era, which was like late 1800s to, I believe, I think it was 1868
to 1911, there was this influx of Western ideas into Japan.
And if you actually read a lot of their literature from that era, you start to actually see some
of those complex Eastern ideologies being interpreted in Western ways.
(28:53):
And it is this sort of mix of both, some of those being the reality of a person.
I mean there's this famous book called The Soil, and the main character in it, his name
is Kanji.
He has this daughter Otsugi, I believe, and this son, I'm blanking on the son's name,
his wife Okina, I might be blanking off these names, but I know the main character's name
(29:17):
is Kanji, he's in poverty in rural Japan during the Meiji era.
So around him is modernization occurring, but not for him.
And he's living in poverty, he's indebted because of his ancestors and so on, and he
gets frustrated and he gets lashed out.
He treats his daughter, after his wife dies, he treats his daughter Otsu terribly.
(29:38):
He has this, there's this idea of respecting your elders in Japan, and he disrespects his
father-in-law a lot.
And the question is really, is he good or is he evil?
And the reality of the story shows that he's not necessarily a victim, but he's a product
(29:59):
of his circumstances.
Bingo, okay, so this is what I want to end on about the more psychological perspective.
And maybe I'm completely wrong with this, but I'm convinced that there are no good and
bad people, there's only good and bad behaviors, because I believe that the concept of self
is actually an illusion produced by the organ, the brain.
(30:20):
Fundamentally, at the level of biology, David Cavallino doesn't exist.
David Cavallino is produced by the nervous system and by the organ of the brain, and
the brain produces behavior, and behavior can be defined as being prosocial or antisocial.
And so I think in a lot of ways, it actually is more helpful to go down to the incentives
(30:42):
and go down to the gray and look at people's life and be like, one, why is this behavior
even being produced?
What's incentivizing this behavior?
And is there better behaviors that can be incentivized to lead to a better result?
And I think kind of viewing it as that input and output way, I think it does serve useful,
(31:03):
and I think this is how we need to run governments too, and how governments need to run populations.
To an extent, I agree with you because-
Like, for example, crime, right?
Well, yeah, when you look at the legal system, it can be so black and white.
You've done this wrong legally, this is illegal.
And you chose to do this wrong because you're a bad person.
Instead of, well, actually, there was lead in my water, and we were eating McDonald's
(31:23):
for seven years because we live in a food desert.
It gets complicated.
But the legal system, people that rely on the legal system is a more morality thing.
And I mean, I've-
Punitive justice.
I've met people that are, the law is the law and do not do anything around it.
That even, it goes against the US as it had.
(31:44):
When Thomas Jefferson was drafting up our documents, he knew if there's a law, you should
disobey it.
You have an obligation to disobey an unjust law.
But I feel-
In certain situations.
Yes, in certain situations.
You're right, because this can be applied once we get into the legal system.
There's a million things.
And that's why it's important to not be dogmatic to things and to always have a clause in whatever
(32:07):
document you're writing up.
Dogmatism is the death of everything.
The proper, what's the clause?
The proper and necessary clause.
Because they didn't know about smartphones, they didn't know about automobiles, right?
Yeah, they didn't know about social media.
So I think fundamentally, what we're saying is David seems to convince himself that he
has a clear philosophical definition of good and evil, but actually this shit is so much
(32:29):
more gray.
There's a lot more conversation to be had.
Absolutely, I definitely believe that.
I still am left with having a difficulty defining either of them.
And I know I've kind of used examples throughout this, but they're almost cultural examples,
accepted examples.
Cultural, historical examples I'll show you.
Actually those definitions you have and you hold so close to your heart, there might be
(32:51):
a little bit more to those definitions.
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to call Hitler evil, but let's start discussing, say Barack Obama,
for example.
It's going to be very complex because do I think Barack Obama's evil?
No.
Do I think he committed stuff that was- Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps?
Mark Zuckerberg.
Honestly, anybody in these systems of power.
And I think it's interesting in the positions of power too because as these giant bureaucracies
(33:15):
have sort of evolved, it takes away that individual sort of participation.
Because now you are in a position that is non-personalized.
I mean, that's the whole point of these giant corporate and bureaucratic systems.
It's non-personal and you're just doing the role that is ascribed to you.
(33:35):
Well, we got a lot more to talk about.
So that's our first episode on Good and Evil.
We will definitely have to return.
Absolutely.
A little bit of morality next time too.
Sure.
All right.
Thanks.
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