What Good Is Happiness? | Jennifer Frey & Jonathan Masur

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What Good Is Happiness? | Jennifer Frey & Jonathan Masur

March 12, 2020

What Good is Happiness? A Dialogue Between Economics & Philosophy. University of South Carolina Philosopher Jennifer Frey and University of Chicago Professor of Law Jonathan Masur Discuss. • Please like, share, subscribe to, and review this podcast. Thank you!

Transcript

Welcome to the Veritas Forum. This is the Veritas Forum Podcast, a place where ideas and beliefs converge. What I'm really going to be watching is which one has the resources in their worldview to be tolerant, respectful and humble towards the people they disagree with.

How do we know whether the lives that were living are meaningful? If energy, light, gravity and consciousness are a mystery, don't be surprised if you're going to get an element of this involved. Today we're here from University of South Carolina philosopher, Jennifer Frey, as well as Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Jonathan Masser, in a topic titled "What Good is Happiness?" A dialogue between economics and philosophy, from the stage at the University of Chicago. [applause] So to begin, what is happiness? [laughter] Okay, so I'm a philosopher, but it's not like my view about what happiness is, represents my discipline.

Philosophers don't agree about anything about happiness in least of all, but I'll just tell you how I have come to think about what happiness is in a very general way. I think that one thing that Jonathan and I do agree about is that everybody wants to be happy, everybody wants to be fulfilled or satisfied with their lives. So we just take that for granted, it takes to be a good thing.

But the hard, existential philosophical question is, what's actually going to make you happy? What is happiness actually consistent? How should we think about happiness given that we're human beings? What is happiness for a human being like? And the tradition that I sort of think with and do work in is the Aristotelian Thomas tradition, so Aristotle and Aquinas. So when we think about happiness, they don't take themselves to be doing theory construction or to really be doing anything theoretical. It's part of their practical philosophy.

And the goal of practical philosophy isn't simply to know or to explain, but to make people become good and live well. That's the goal of practical philosophy. And so happiness is, insofar as it's theorized, is theorized with that very practical goal in mind.

And that is my concern. I think that ethics isn't mainly a theoretical enterprise, but a practical enterprise. But what we're interested in is the question, how should I live? What kind of person do I actually want to be? And so I think that when we're thinking and reflecting about happiness or living a good human life, we're really asking ourselves how we show this fire to live and what sort of human being do you most want to be? And so I think of happiness like Aristotle in terms of the highest good.

So what would it look like to embody human excellence, to realize that in my own life, in my own particular unique circumstances, in communities with other people who also want to be happy? Now Aristotle and Aquinas take it to be obvious that whatever an excellent sort of human life is, it's going to be really demanding. This is a feature of their view and above, in my opinion. So they have an notion of happiness that allows for heroism and self-sacrifice for the sake of higher common goods.

It allows that sacrifice and suffering can be beautiful and awe-inspiring. That you would give up something really valuable to you for the sake of a higher common good. It is something that they take to be worthwhile and meaningful.

And they also think that exercising virtue and acquiring virtue will involve a certain amount of suffering. And that our suffering isn't meaningless, that it can have meaning and value and in fact it can almost be a kind of purifying thing. It sort of burns off the obstacles in your character that are holding you back from achieving your true excellence.

So this traditional conception of happiness is really concerned with self-transcendence. It's concerned with transcending this kind of cramped space of the protective self. But you're really only concerned about your individual well-being.

Because the idea is that look, if what's guiding your life is just self-interest, then you're not actually going to be able to live a life that's worthy of imitation. Because you're never going to know the deeper, more fulfilling joys of the highest sorts of human goods. So the goods that pertain to loving human relationships and friendships and of course, conversation.

And another thing that I want to say about happiness is that aerosol and pine is both think that reflection on human excellence has to be grounded in a shared self-understanding of the kind of thing that we are. Like what kind of thing is the human being? What sort of potential does the human person have inherent to it to realize its own excellence? And one thing that seems really clear to Aristotle and of Pinus is that we're social, political, creatures. So we don't actually come to be fully human outside of the community, but we certainly also don't flourish outside of human communities.

And this means that it was sort of obvious to them that our happiness isn't a private good. So you can just think about private good as the kind of good whose benefit just redounds to you as an individual. And Aristotle and Aquinas think of happiness as a common good.

In fact, they say it's the highest common good. And there's a blog you could say about common goods, but there are three basic features of common goods that I think are important to highlight when thinking about happiness as a common good. The first is that it's just common to you in virtue of being a human being.

The second is that it's not a competitive good. So my pursuit of happiness shouldn't in no way detract from your pursuit of happiness. It's not like the milk in the store.

There's just so much milk in the store. If I get some milk in the store, there's less milk in the store for you. It's not like that.

And the third thing, and this is really I think the most important thing is that common goods are both brought about. And enjoyed together. So the best way that I can think of to illustrate this is to think about a symphony playing like Beethoven's Ninth.

So no single member of the symphony can bring it into being. Maybe it can only play their part. But in order for the symphony to come to be, every person has to play their part.

So every member of the symphony is a participant in creating this good. But they also enjoy it together. You can really only enjoy the symphony when you're all bringing it about together.

And Aristotle and the finest think of happiness like that. It's a common good. They also connect happiness to virtue, to the cultivation of virtue.

And they connect the cultivation and exercise of virtue to friendship. So they have a really capacious understanding of friendship. It's not just like your best friends or your friends on campus.

The parent-child relationship is a kind of friendship. Spousal relationships are a kind of friendship. It's basically any kind of relationship in which you have shared activities together, where you enjoy goods together.

You have a kind of mutual affection or love for one another. And you will live with it of your friend. And the idea is that when I grow in the virtues and I deepen my friendships with other people, I come to see my own happiness as inextricably bound up with the happiness of my friends.

So if I think about if my friends are happy, I'm happy. If my kids are suffering, I'm suffering. Why? Because I love them.

Because I see that my happiness depends on theirs. I'm not happy on my own. I'm happy with them.

And they have a broader conception of philia or civic friendship. This is the basis of justice and common life together. And Aquinas has an notion of caritas, which is the root of life with God.

But in each of these cases, whether it's philia or caritas, I've seen myself as a part of our participant and something that's much greater than myself, as a member of a political community, or in the case of Aquinas, maybe a member of the medical body of Christ. But it's this participatory relationship. This ability to see my life in relation to something that is self-transcendent, that gives my life a kind of really deep joy and lasting fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.

So again, this is a vision of happiness that's sort of wide and deep. It's also very demanding. But the main part that I want to stress is it's a vision of happiness in which we flourish together.

We don't flourish alone. I'm not going to argue for the vision of happiness. But I do want you to try to think about whether or not you sort of have intuitions, that this is a vision of happiness that you want to accept.

And in order to get your intuitions going, I'm going to rely on a thought experiment that I think you're pretty familiar with from the literature. And that is the idea of a kind of pleasure machine. So you can imagine like a virtual reality machine in which the line between reality and simulation has just become completely blurred.

So if you get into this machine, then you're going to experience all and only pleasures. You're only going to have a subjectively positive affect. And you're going to think that everything that you experience is good and real.

Now the reality is you're sort of lying alone and dirt and your brain is being manipulated. You're not actually having... You're not actually in communion with real human good, but you think that you are. It seems to you to be totally real.

And so the question is, would you want to get in that machine? Does that seem like a life that is worthy of imitation? Would you want to tell small children to aspire to such a life? Does that seem beautiful or worthy of admiration? Or does it seem like a cop-out? Now if you are a subjectivist about happiness, I think that you have a hard time explaining what would be wrong with getting into a such a machine. Like, why should you really care about human excellence at all? Why not just get into the machine or take a happiness pill and call it a day? Because look, according to subjectivism, if happiness really is just a positive, affective state, then you could be manipulated into that state, right? And if all that really matters is being in that state, then it doesn't really matter if you are having some sort of real experience of a human good. And there's really no way to make a principal distinction between false happiness or a simulation of happiness and true and deep happiness.

And I think one of the clear benefits of the Aristotelian position is that we do have an external measure because you cannot separate happiness being truly and deeply fulfilled and satisfied with actual communion with real human goods. It has to be grounded in that. So my problem with subjectivism about happiness is it's based on the dualism, right? There's a dualism between happiness and the reality of the good.

But there's also a dualism between individual benefit and objective good. And I think that one of the values of, I mean, one of the principal insights of the Aristotelian view of happiness is that, look, insofar as you feel subjectively satisfied or deeply fulfilled in your life, it will be because you actually are attaining your good. And the only way that you can get that is through the cultivation of virtue, right? How does virtue operate in you? Right? Well, the cultivation of virtue is a kind of deep transformation of a human person.

And what does it do? It makes you fit to enjoy what is truly excellent in human life. So on this view, there is no dualism between morality and happiness. Rather, the idea is that, look, the point or the purpose of the moral life of a human life is to be happy, right? It's to live an excellent human life together with others, and there's no other goal that would be worthy of our devotion and aspiration.

That's my view. [applause] Okay, we've done it for that. That was wonderful.

Thank you. There's so much there in those rich comments. I'm not going to be able to cover even a fraction of it, but this is a great place to get us started.

And let me just say I'm thrilled to be here and thrilled to be talking with you and talking to all of you. So I begin with a sort of psychological conception of happiness. So think about all the emotions that you might feel in the course of your life, and what are all the thoughts you might have, anger, anxiety, pleasure, contentment, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.

They're all very different in a lot of different ways, but they're all sort of... They can be arrayed along a one dimension at least, where there's one dimension that they at least have in common, which is they're all either bad or good to some degree. Some of these emotions are things that make you feel good, that you would want to seek out, that you would want to make part of your life. Some of these emotions and thoughts are things that will make you feel unhappy, that you want to try to avoid and minimize to the greatest degree possible.

So being angry is obviously very different than feeling the great anxiety about a test you have to take or something like that, but they're both negative in a way that you're not giving you any satisfaction or joy while you're having them. You want to avoid them. You wouldn't say while you're feeling great anxiety that everything is going wonderfully for you.

And at the same time, the immediate pleasure that you might feel from watching a great TV show is different than the kind of deep sense of content that you might have by being surrounded by a lot of your friends or sort of the kind of general warmth you might feel when you talk to your parents on the phone after not having spoken to them in a while or something like that. But in all of those cases, we would say that's a positive feeling of a sort. You're getting a lot out of it, you're enjoying it, you want it to be part of your life, and while you're having that feeling, you would say, "Yes, this is good for me.

My life is going better because of that feeling I'm having." So those positive feelings, that's what we would call happiness and the negative feelings, whatever form they take, that's what we would call unhappiness. And so the first myth I wanted to spell is that happiness is synonymous with sort of pleasure of the most kind of basic or simple form. Happiness is the feeling that you get when you hand in that paper you've been working on for three weeks.

It's not just the feeling that you get when you eat something sweet or when you win the video game you're playing. And happiness also, the best kinds of happiness, they don't just last for a fleeting moment. The happiness that you feel when you have great friends around you, you see a lot.

That's a long term ongoing sort of happiness that fills up many, many moments in your life. It's very different than the happiness you might get when you, you know, watch a quick three minute video on YouTube that you kind of enjoy. So I was actually at an academic conference many years ago, and another legal academic put up his hand in the audience and said, "Doesn't your theory imply that we would all be better off if we ate a bucket of fried chicken and snorted a lot of cocaine and died?" [laughter] And the answer to that is no.

Because even though all of that might make you really happy in that moment, I might, I don't really know, not having tried that combination of things, even though it might make you very happy in that moment, then that moment is over and you don't get to experience any other greater long lasting happiness down the line. So that's the sort of psychological conception of happiness that we have. Positive feelings of all different sorts, of all different textures, short-lived, long-lived, etc.

All of those are constitutive of happiness. The more philosophical claim that I want to make is that happiness, being happy in that way, having positive feelings, is what it means to live a life that is sort of good for you. It's what it means to have a lot of welfare for yourself or a lot of well-being.

So think about, I'm going to pick someone at random, think about Bill Gates. Bill Gates has a lot of money, Bill Gates has a loving family, Bill Gates doesn't have to work very hard. Bill Gates is also doing all sorts of charitable works and things that probably give him a lot of satisfaction and pleasure.

Bill Gates is living a life that is good for Bill Gates. He has a lot of welfare. He has a lot of well-being.

But the important distinction I want to draw is that living a life that is good for you in the sense of having a lot of happiness and thus having a lot of welfare is not the same as living a life that is good in a moral or virtuous sense. If all you did was spend your entire life focusing on yourself and trying to garner as much happiness as you could for yourself, you might attain a lot of welfare, but you wouldn't be what we would call a good or moral person. You'd be a narcissist who cared only about yourself.

A good life in a sort of more moral sense surely involves caring greatly not just about your own welfare, but about the welfare of the people surrounding you. So what I want to say, what I want to make very clear is that when I talk about happiness as constitutive of the good life for that person, I don't mean good in a moral sense. I just mean what it means to say that someone's life is going well for that, which is very different than saying that they are living a good life and being a valuable and productive member of a society.

The other thing I want to be careful to say is that the way to achieve the greatest happiness in your life is probably not just to spend your whole life pursuing the greatest happiness for your own life. Probably many of you have had the experience of sitting down and playing 12 hours straight of video games, or maybe that's just me, but I would imagine I'm not the only person in this room. And that's a thing that we would do to try to generate the greatest amount of happiness for ourselves.

I'm going to talk about 12 hours of video games again in just a second. But I'm sure we've all had the experience that after our number or something or other, it ceases to be quite so much fun. It runs out.

Same thing with your favorite food. You might have a favorite food. You're not going to want to eat it every single day or three meals every single day.

After a while, that food is going to cease being so delicious to you. It's going to cease bringing you the positive feelings and emotions that might come with eating it normally. So the way to be happiest in life is not just to sort of go from moment to moment seeking out the greatest and most pleasurable thing that you can attain.

It's to do something else with your life. It's to do something that's often in many cases, but not necessarily deeper and richer and allows you to build more long lasting connections and things that will bring you greater happiness over the longer term. So happiness is not about just the fleeting moment.

It's not about only doing what is good for yourself all the time. It's just a way of thinking about whether someone's life is going well by their own lights for them. And then we can start to talk about what we can all do to sort of increase the happiness of the people around us and the happiness of our community as a whole.

Okay, so I want to sort of say this in a way that's kind of posing the question to Jennifer, but I obviously sort of mean it as a statement as well. So a lot of what Jennifer said about sort of the way that we could think of happiness as a communal good or a social good or something like that, I think there are two ways of understanding those types of things. One way of understanding them is as sort of empirical or psychological claims.

The idea that it is hard to be happy, or we are most typically happy when the people around us, especially the people we care about, are happy as well. So I have two children. I will say that if my two children, as I am constantly telling them, if they're not happy, then I'm not happy.

And if they're happy, then I'm happy. Their happiness and my happiness are 100% intertwined. So in many cases, the thing that I can do to make myself happiest is to try to make them happiest, a factor which they have learned to exploit.

That's a case where the nature of the closest of our social ties means as a psychological fact that their happiness is very much a determinative mind. Contrast that slightly with, let's say, my criminal law students, some of whom were in this room. In a few weeks, when I am preparing to write and then give them my criminal law exam, they will probably be unhappy because they will be anxious, if they'll be studying the law, and they'll realize that all that stuff I taught them last quarter doesn't make any sense anymore, it will be bad.

They will be unanxious, they will be resentful of me, maybe, who knows, all these sorts of feelings. All of that will affect me somewhat. I am sad when my students are sad.

But will it really diminish my happiness as much as my children's unhappiness does? Probably not. It will cut into it a little bit, but not that much. And then, a week later, when they're done taking the exam and I'm grading the exams, I will be deeply miserable.

Deeply miserable grading all their exams. And will they care that I am deeply miserable? Will my misery affect them while they are on spring break? It will not. So, as a sort of psychological matter, then our happiness is our less intertwined.

Another way of understanding these claims about happiness as a social phenomenon is as a philosophical claim, a sort of like a deeper truth that no one can be happy without the community being happier, is a happiness compounds itself. And there I think I would probably take issue. I don't understand the idea that one person can't be happy without someone else in their community being happy as well.

And I think that my one "L" is on spring break would sympathize or agree with that view as well. Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about, and then I'll stop, is I wanted to get to Jennifer's example of the experience machine, which she brought up at the end, the machine that we plug ourselves into, and that makes us happy and gives us positive feelings. So the experience machine is probably the most famous thought experiment in all of philosophy.

It is the number one argument that gets trotted out against people like me who think that happiness is the way to understand what it means to have a good life. But I have some problems with the experience machine. So, number one, I don't think that when we think about the experience machine, when you're imagining that thought experiment that Jennifer described to you, you're probably imagining that you're not going to be happy with your own experience.

You're probably imagining a lot of things. You're imagining it yourself hooked up to a bunch of wires unmoving as opposed to yourself actually sort of experiencing what was going on. You're imagining yourself being cut off from all the actual people in your life right now that you might care about cut off from your parents, your siblings, your friends, your partners, etc.

And all of those things sound deeply unpleasant. And so to the extent that people reject the experience machine, and by the way, not everyone does, to the extent that people reject the experience machine, I think that in many cases they're rejecting it for reasons that are outside of what we're really talking about. They're rejecting it for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it's good or bad to have this kind of feeling or that sort of pleasure.

They're rejecting it because it would mean sacrificing something in their actual life right now that they think that they would not want to give up. But I would submit to you that all of those problems aside, we spend lots of time plugging ourselves into many experience machines all the time. We go to movies and immerse ourselves in another world where we're just sitting there and observer for a couple of hours.

We watch television, we play video games, and so on and so forth. We're doing all sorts of things where we are not actively running around doing stuff, but we're just sort of engaged in having an experience that brings us some amount of pleasure. And those aren't bad things.

Now I don't know if anyone would want to do that for their entire lives because again it would mean sacrificing so many other things that are important to us and bring us joy. But nonetheless it's hard to say no one would ever want to play a video game for an hour because that would be a false sense of happiness. I don't think that that's right.

I think that is proven false by our common experience in life. But of course that's not to say that the way to be happy is to do that and nothing but that. As a psychological matter the way to be happy is probably to go and have lots and lots of great experiences of all different types.

Many of which involve doing things for other people. And when we do things for other people that is the sort of thing that often brings us really great happiness as well. So happiness as a concept is a way of talking about how someone's life is going for themselves.

But it's not a way of saying what it is to lead a good life and it isn't necessarily even what it is to say. It isn't necessarily even a way to say what it is to lead a life that encourages happiness in yourself. Often the things that bring us the greatest happiness are things we do for others and things we do with others.

But I think of that as a psychological concept. A truth about human psychology and the way we interact with each other is people. Not a necessary sort of philosophical preset like other people are happy as loners.

Other people are happy by themselves doing things by themselves. So that's how I think of happiness. So I will just close now by posing my own thought experiment.

So imagine a person named Sarah who decides that it's her life goal to run a marathon. She wants to complete a marathon. So she just knows if she can fulfill this life goal she will achieve such great satisfaction.

She will have a wonderful life. For the rest of her life she will look back upon the completion of her marathon as a great and wonderful achievement and she will smile and be happy about it. So Sarah begins training and the training is arduous.

She hates running. She's not in the best shape. She has shin splints.

It's just miserable. It's terrible. She runs all the time and she really hates every moment of it but she drives herself forward with admirable tenacity because she imagines what it will be like to finish that marathon and have the satisfaction having done so.

The marathon day arrives. She begins running her marathon 26.2 miles. It is terrible.

She is miserable. Every step of the way she loves running. She can't feel like she's enjoying herself but she just knows it.

She can only reach the end of it. She will achieve such incredible great satisfaction. So here she is.

She's striving. She's struggling. She's trying to achieve something that is sort of canonically human.

She runs her marathon and as her foot hits the finish line she drops dead of a heart attack. So you can ask yourself, has Sarah lived a good life or not? She definitely struggled and suffered a lot. It was a very human experience.

It wasn't being plugged into the experience machine but she never got to have those positive feelings of satisfaction. She was denied the experience of living a life knowing that she had achieved this great goal. All she got was the suffering and none of the positive feelings afterwards.

For a hedonist like me, that's a tragedy. Poor Sarah. Sarah didn't get the thing that she was striving for.

She never got all the positive feelings that were supposed to be the reward at the end of it. But I think that there are a lot of Aristotelians who would tell you, "Hey Sarah had it great." And the fact that she never got to have all those positive feelings at the end, that's just sort of collateral. So I think that's the other side of the experience machine.

We have to ask ourselves, "Okay, what are the sorts of things that we do think are valuable in life and how are we going to go about achieving them?" Great, thank you. [applause] Before you put things to me, did you have any questions? Sure, the first time it's easy to fill a stock with book lame, of course. I'm a philosopher.

But let me defend that. So I for three years now have been working with psychologists on questions about virtue and happiness and meaning in life. And I worked with one psychologist in particular who was developing a self-transcendant measure.

Because there's a lot of literature, especially in personality psychology, that suggests that the higher you score on these self-transcendants measures, the more basically you have better mental health than you were able to find meaning and purpose in your life and stuff like this. I tell you, to present this theory of what he's measuring, and at some point I just raised my hand, and I was like, "Well, look, what you're measuring, I could obviously experience in a Nazi rally." Right, I mean these peak experiences, why could obviously have an Nazi rally, and it's also clear that not only is that conceptually possible, it seems actual in lots of humans that actually lived. And he was like, "Yeah, yeah, that is what I'm measuring." And I'm just like, "Well, you know, look, if that's what self-transcendants is, then we can't say that it's good." I mean we can't say that you should be after just self-transcendant experiences, right, because we don't want to endorse going to Nazi rallies and things like this.

And so because my claim is normative, and psychological claims are not normative, they're descriptive, it's a philosophical claim. It's a claim about what human excellence actually is, and what a life worthy of imitation would look like. Now, in response to the marathon case, the Aristotelian would not say that they were living well, they would say you shouldn't devote your life to running a marathon.

I mean, I'd say that. I've run terra-cons, they're fine. I actually enjoyed my marathon quite a bit.

I had a great time. But I mean, look, that's just not, you know, I mean, I had all kinds of reasons for doing it, that I have a life devoted to running an marathon. Poorly, it's just not a well-lived life.

So, and again, when we're thinking about what is a well-lived life, we're thinking about what is worthy of imitating, right, what inspires us, what we aspire to be given the kind of thing that we are, and that's the space of reflection in which I'm thinking about happiness. Now, there's an obvious psychological component to that, right? No Aristotelian would deny, certainly I would not deny, that happiness involves a positive, a sense of deep fulfillment is the way that I would put it. Which is connected to your ability to make sense of your life as a whole, and to see it as something valuable and noble.

But it's not just the lump of positive experiences, right? There's a narrative of our construction to a human life. We have to make sense of our lives. And that's part of what it means to be happy, is to be able to do that.

And I think that we have to have a robust and a conception of happiness. I mean, the thing is, if you think of happiness as just like part of a good life, maybe it's over here, and then morality is over here. And you're constantly in your practical deliberation going to be asking yourself, well, should I be happier, should I be good? And I think that sort of dualism within your theory of practical reason is something of a disaster.

I want to unify the count of practical reason in which when your deliberation is going well, right? Which I think it takes virtue in order for that to happen. Every part of you is aimed at what is worthy of your life. And so there would be a deep unity, and you're not constantly asking yourself, well, should I feel good? Or, you know, should I help my mom, right? I don't know how you would constantly be settling those sorts of trade-offs.

And so I think it would be a benefit of a theory where you wouldn't have to. Great, thank you. As you're talking, I was thinking of this question.

One way of thinking about happiness, that I don't think either of you are saying, is that it's getting what you want. It's desire satisfaction. Both of you have a sense in your work, I think, that someone could be wrong about what makes you happy, and that's part of why you do your work.

It's not to clarify for people where to look to find out what will actually make you happy. So I guess that's the question. Where, if someone is saying, "college" and wants to live a happy life, doesn't know where, or someone to say, "in policy" and wants to make people happy, where do we look to discover the happiness? Or what happiness is? Well, I'll start by saying that getting what you want, desire satisfaction, is certainly not the same thing as living.

Having a good life for you, having a lot of welfare, it's not the same thing as happiness. Although there will be a lot of overlap. So there's actually quite a lot of psychological evidence that people are often pretty bad at guessing what they're going to want.

They think they want something, and it turns out that the thing that they thought they wanted, it just doesn't make them nearly as happy as they expected to. We make mistakes like that all of the time. There's a term for in the psychological literature.

They call it "effective forecasting errors." You're trying to forecast your effective meaning in your hedonic happiness states in the future. You're just bad at guessing at it, bad at predicting how you're going to feel. So I think that's not the best way to think about what's going on.

Ideally, you know, in a more advanced world, we'd all be hooked up to little machines that would be measuring our positive and negative feelings all the time. We can't do that, obviously. So what psychologists do now is they just ask people.

They just ask people how happy are you right now? And there are various versions of this. There's a yearly survey, the general social survey in the United States that asks everybody each year, you know, "Take it as a whole. How is your life going for you this past year?" You can survey a lot of people.

The problem is that you're only surveying them once a year, so you're not really getting a precise look at things you've sort of an overview. There are actually much better methods that try to survey people sort of in the moment. What are you doing right now and how happy are you doing it? There is an app created by a psychologist called Tractor Happiness, where you put the app on your smartphone and it will sort of ping you every once in a while and ask you those questions if you answer it.

And at the end of some number of weeks of this, the Quid Pro Po is that the app will spit out a record for you of the things that make you happiest and the things that make you least happy so that you can try to spend more time doing things that make you happy in your life. I did this on my phone and it's only the thing that the happiest was talking to your students about happiness, so here I am. [laughter] So I think that's sort of the way to think about what it is that actually makes people happy, what it is that makes people happy, what it is that makes people's lives go well for them.

I want to take a quick moment and say something about Jennifer's one about dualism, which I think is really interesting. Again, it's so rich. We could have a whole conversation about the Nazi rally example, which I'm very interested in.

Let me just say something quickly about dualism. So, you know, let's imagine that it's really your roommate's turn to do the dishes, but you know that your roommate is cramming for an exam and under a huge amount of stress. And so even though all the dirty dishes are his, you're going to do it anyway.

And so you sit down and you do all the dishes laboriously. So you've done a good thing for your roommate. You have performed a mincepah.

It might be that you're feeling such warm glow about having done that that you actually enjoy the whole experience and you have positive feelings from it. But it's entirely possible that actually it makes you less happy that you waste the time that you rather spend doing something else. I think that there's any problem with this idea that we could be doing a good thing for someone else, while at the same time taking an action that reduces our own welfare, makes our own lives a little bit worse off.

That is central and common to human experience. Those are the sorts of trade-offs and questions that people face all the time. And I don't think that we get anywhere by sort of trying to define ourselves out of the problem by saying, "Hey, even though that thing you're doing is making you miserable, actually, you're actually making your life better than leading a better life for having done it." So it's true that psychologists primarily make a descriptive thing.

One of the things that the normative claim that a welfareist, like me would make, is that to live a good or moral life is to do your best to increase the welfare of all the people around you as much as you can. And so this would be a morally good activity because you're doing something nice for your roommate, even though it's at the expense of your own well-being or happiness. That I think is a very intuitive and common concept to many of us, where we think about the trade-offs between being selfish about our own well-being and being altruistic about the well-being of others.

And I think that a sort of heuristic conception of what it means to have a life that's going well for you, it perfectly captures all of that. And I'm not sure we're going to get any mileage out of just trying to sort of change the problems that we don't face the trade-off. Do you show a respond to that? In my question too.

Okay, well let me just, I think I just want to highlight, like maybe where the deep divide is. But you know, so look, on the view that I have, so I'm thinking of happiness connected to virtue, right? Virtues are dispositions of character, right? So if you're a temperate person, then it's not only the case that you eat the right amount and you drink the right amount and your sexual appetites are regulated and you're self-controlled, but that you actually don't want more than that, right? So a virtuous person has well-trained dispositions. And that means, and what does it mean to do that? So Aristotle says that the cultivation of virtue is a training of pleasures and pains, right? It takes a kind of rational self-discipline to be the kind of person who enjoys helping other people.

And it can take a long time. I have a lot of kids. I've been a parent now for almost 15 years.

And it's been an ongoing training, right? In enjoying, right? Helping my kids and things that I could never imagine enjoying, right? And it changes you. Being a parent fundamentally changes you. It changed me.

I'm a completely different person now. And it was, in part, a transformation of my pleasures and pains. So when we make claims about, like, pleasure and pain isn't just descriptive, okay? If I get tickled at seeing you in humiliated, that says something about me, right? It says something about who I am that that pleases me.

And it says something about who I am if it makes me miserable to help other people, right? It suggests that I have some work to do as a person. And the reality is we all have work to do. No one in this room is perfectly virtuous.

You're not. I'm not. But, right? But I aspire to be better, right? And so I think, like, on my view, you just have to take on board this idea that as I'm growing in the moral life, right, I actually do come to enjoy.

That not a trade-off. It's not a trade-off for me, right? I come to enjoy doing things for my kids. And that's a kind of, you know, that's a kind of training of desire and a training of pleasure and pain.

And I think that sort of conditioning is possible. I mean, anybody who's raised children knows that you have to use training. They're pleasures and pains in similar ways, in part so that they can enjoy the life of the family together, right? Sorry, that was fun.

Can I say something? Yeah, please. So, I think, so now I really want to talk about this because it's the second time that Jennifer's brought us up. So the person who enjoys watching someone else be tickled, the Nazi rallies, the same sort of example, right? So, let's think about that example for a second.

I imagine that there are, in this room, there are three true sadists who just like it when people around them are suffering. And they hang out together and they just have a great time watching their fellow students be miserable, be anxious, suffer. They rejoice when their fellow students get bad grades.

They look for active ways to undermine their fellow students and make their lives. They look like true sadists in every sense of the word. Okay, Jennifer would say those are bad people.

I would say those are good people just kidding. Those are obviously bad people. And the reason is that, as I've said, the goal of moral life should be to try to increase the welfare of the people around you.

And these sadists are doing exactly the opposite. They're trying to decrease it and they're taking joy in it being decreased, among others. So, I think we're in total agreement about sort of the morality or the virtue of those actors.

We could ask a different question though, which is like, how well are those people's lives going for them? Do they think they're leading good lives or not? If we injected them with true serum and we asked the sadists, you know, how's your life going for you? Would they say to us, you've caught me, like, I'm deeply miserable about all this sadism? Or would they say, like, actually, things are great because, like, I look around, everyone's miserable. I'm having a great time enjoying that everyone's miserable. You know, I think we don't get any mileage out of pretending that their lives are going bad for them or that they have low welfare.

We can still call them bad people. We can denounce their activities. We can punish them.

We can look for ways to, you know, reform them or separate them from our society. But none of that is in any way dependent nor is it further by, in addition, pretending that somehow their enjoyment of what's going on is any less real than the enjoyment of a good person or an altruist who's taking pleasure in the achievements and satisfaction of everyone else. There isn't any sort of conflict about those ideas.

We just have to separate the notion of what it means for someone's life to go well for themselves versus what we as a society believe is more or less. What I believe is morally right and what is owed to all of us by the people who are members of our society. But I'm not pretending that they're not enjoying themselves.

Like, but here's the thing is, vicious people enjoy doing vicious things, right? So I'm absolutely not denying that. What I'm denying is that they're happening. So, do you think the disagreement here is a verbal one? Have the definition of happiness? I mean, we clearly disagree about the definition of happiness, but I don't think it's a merely verbal disagreement.

I think, you know, so I think it's a disagreement about, yeah, how to, I think it is a disagreement about happiness, about how we're supposed to think about it and reflect about it and use this concept. So it's a deep conceptual disagreement, but that's not merely verbal. Okay, I agree that it is a deep conceptual disagreement that is not merely verbal.

I would describe it as a deep conceptual disagreement about the notion of welfare or what it means for someone's life to be going well for them. But now I want to say a law thing. We said a lot of philosophy things, a few psychological things, the occasional economic thing, and we say a law thing.

I think, you know, in the world that I live in, in the world of law, I'm not sure how much it necessarily matters in the end. As I think about how I want to form policy or how I want to construct my society, I'm not sure that resolving this conceptual disagreement necessarily changes any of the results that we would come to. Both Jennifer and I think the same thing about the sadist and whether the sadist should be venerated or punished.

We both think the same thing about whether we ode these two other people in our community. And so at some level, kind of where the rubber meets the road and the world of law and policy, which is the world I inhabit most of the time, I don't think that these disagreements, maybe there were corners at the margins where we'll find places where we are views would come apart. But I suspect these disagreements would actually not lead to major disagreements about how we ought to shape our country's laws, what kind of sanctions we have to have for which kinds of behavior and so forth.

So I'm wondering then, why in your account should someone be moral? If it isn't the case that morality and happiness are somehow implying what's the motivation or what's the drive? If having is a, and say justice or different drives that we have, what's the basis of the drive for morality? So when you say the basis of the drive, I guess I have to ask, do you mean the psychological drive or do you mean a sort of normative philosophical drive? What do you think? They are. Okay, I'm going to, since David wants to ask a question, I want to. I mean, psychologically, as a species and as a society, it often makes us very happy to act morally and act well towards one another.

And we both said many, many times, one of the ways to achieve the deepest level of happiness and satisfaction, the greatest positive feelings is to do good things for others, especially people who are emotionally close to you. So psychologically, there's a very powerful impulse to try to act morally and help others, although not powerful enough to make everyone do it. You know lots of cases of people who don't.

Philosophically, where does the drive come from? I'm not sure, well, number one, I'm not even sure I know what that means, but number two, I'm not sure that there is such a driver that it exists. I mean, we can say, normatively, that something is good or something is bad without saying that people will necessarily be compelled to do the good thing. I mean, I think frankly, if you study law, the sort of animating impulse of law is that without some kind of social rule, people will in fact not be driven to do the good thing.

They will often do the bad thing. And so that's why we need legal rules to constrain people from doing bad things in many cases and to give them the impetus to do good things. So, you know, I think that I don't think that we necessarily need to believe or should pretend that there will be some kind of normative philosophical moral drive to always act well.

That either has to come to us psychologically or it has to come from some external sorts in many cases. Did you want to ask about that? Well, I mean, I think that the goal of the moral life is to be happy, and everybody wants to be happy, so I don't have this problem in a sense. I mean, I love your problems, but I don't have that problem.

Yeah. Is that a belief about the world or about the belief about the meaning of happiness? What I mean is, are you saying that you have a definition of happiness that includes morality or morality is constitutive of happiness? Or are you saying that we don't face tragic situations where we have to choose between our happiness and morality? Yeah. Okay, so I think a lot about tragedy, actually.

And, you know, it's no earlier that in Book 8 of the Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle mentions King Prime, and he says specifically, you know, Prime was a good man. He was a virtuous man, but of course his life ended in tragedy, and it wasn't his fault, and it can be that way. Right? So for Aristotle, that virtue is no guarantee.

Like, he's very upfront about that. This is a question that obviously the Stoics answered in a very different way. I think that a life can certainly be tragic in some sense, and I also agree that virtue is no guarantee of happiness.

I think humans are very vulnerable creatures. Things can fall apart, and you might be like King Prime. But I don't think that admitting that detracts from the claim that the goal, the moral life, is to be happy, and that virtue is necessary to attain it.

Because tragedy, as a genre, is all about pointing out the extent to which things aren't up to us. Right? I mean, the way things turn out are not totally in our control, and it's important to be very aware of that. I don't see it as having any significance beyond that.

I mean, that's a significant thing, but it doesn't undermine the theory. Thank you. I've been thinking about the example of someone who's... Their spouse is cheating on them.

Their children are turning on awfully. There's all sorts of problems going on. There's people who talk behind the back, all these things.

But the person is blissfully just unaware of all these things, and is quite happy. Another individual... Their life is in another way better. Their child is faithful.

Their children are turning out better. People don't talk behind their back, but they're aware of some issues here and there. They would report themselves to be less happy.

Who's happier? And which life would you want for a loved one? I don't know who's happier, because I don't know. I don't have enough information. I mean, the thing is, your happiness can't be measured by how your kids turn out, or... If your spouse is cheating on you, that stinks.

The thing that happens. It doesn't necessarily... I would have to know what kind of person they are, like, on my view. And so I can't... I would think you can say if somebody's happy by just sort of looking at the external conditions of their life.

I think they matter. But I know, like, really happy people who are dying, who have a terminal illness, who are in conditions that seem objectively bad. But they're able to make meaning of their suffering, and they're able to enjoy a kind of spiritual life that's incredibly admirable.

So first of all, I mean, I guess I would say I certainly agree and agree with and endorse what Jennifer just said about the possibility of being happy, despite adverse objective circumstances. That's absolutely true. We have lots of evidence of that.

I mean, in fact, one of the major findings of this whole area of psychology is that humans are remarkably adaptable. We're capable of finding happiness, having positive emotions, building connections with people, even if things are going badly for us in life. And that's a very important thing for us in lots of different ways.

I'm going to add answer David's question directly, though. It's in, like, chapter eight of my books. I feel like I'm obligated to or something, although the answer I'm going to give is not going to be as wholesome as the answer that's actually on the printed page.

But, okay, so my view of all of this obligates me to say that the person who's spouse is cheating on them, but who is blissfully unaware, and just thinks that everything is going hunky-dory, that person is actually happy. If their experience is, if their emotions that they're feeling are positive all the time, and they don't know that there's this sort of bad thing being done behind their backs, the person actually is having the fact that the bad thing is happening, doesn't make the person's life any worse if it doesn't interfere with their life. This sort of famous hypothetical, this is like the deceived spouse, this is called, it's like a cousin of the experienced machine.

It's like the second most famous thing that gets trotted out against the hedonic theories of well-being. You're probably thinking to yourself, well that can't be right, now I'm off the wagon. Like, I've fallen off the wagon here.

Now I don't believe anything he says anymore. But let me suggest, you might very well be thinking that for a lot of reasons that are supposed to be outside of this hypothetical. Like, you're thinking to yourself, well the person will find out eventually.

Well, if the person finds out eventually, then everything changes. Or you're thinking to yourself, you know, the person's relationship with the spouse can't be the same way it was if the spouse wasn't cheating. There must be something, some element of intimacy or some hint of love that's just missing and gone.

Well, that's outside of the hypothetical also, we're not supposed to imagine that. We're supposed to be thinking this person is completely and entirely unaware, and that this person is just, for that person, the life hasn't changed at all. Okay, but the reason why these hypotheticals keep getting trotted out is because they make us think about other things that are supposed to be outside of the hypothetical.

They pump our intuitions. So I'm going to give you my own hypothetical about this. Okay, so Sheila is an environmentalist and she cares deeply about a particular squirrel that lives in Kenya.

The squirrel lives only in Kenya. And she really, really wants the squirrel to survive. And so she gives a lot of money to an environmental organization and environmental organization tries to save the squirrel in Kenya.

And then the squirrel either doesn't survive or it does survive. We never know. And Sheila never knows.

Sheila never finds out. She never bothers to ask. She never talks to anyone.

The environmental organization never gets back to her. It's a fact out in the world that the squirrel lived or died, but Sheila is completely unaware of it. Would you say that Sheila's life is going better, that she has greater welfare if thousands of miles away the squirrel survived, even though Sheila never learned about it? My guess is that was strike all of you as a little bit ridiculous.

That the life, the living or nonliving of that squirrel is so remote from Sheila, if she never even learns about it or hears about it, that it can't possibly affect her actual well-being, her own experience of her own life. That's just the deceived spouse without all of the sort of larding up with extra intuitions. And that's what's animating the view about the notion that it's one's experience of the emotions and thought-one fields that determine whether one is happy and has a lot of well-being or not.

Great. Thank you very much. At this point I'd like to invite Samantha Henry.

They are going to have questions. Your questions prepared for our panel. Question from the audience.

Can you talk more about the experience machine? Can you comment on the scenario in the movie The Matrix, where you are instead offered the opportunity to exit the machine? I think that's good. I think this is more of a question for Jonathan than me, because of course I'm just like the machine's more about it, more about you. Because I think that you're a real human thing and you should want to live a really excellent human life.

But I do think that it's not the Matrix scenario, all the humans are like in this nutritive jelly. They're like worn that way. So it's not a question of, "Well, I have to give up the goods of my happy life." I mean, you would just be born into it.

And so then the question is, "Well, is that the sort of life that we really would that be poorer from?" I mean, because they're in the nutritive jelly, they feel good. It's awesome in there, but it's not real. Okay, so first of all, everyone should go and see The Matrix immediately if you have a party.

Give us the grey movie. Secondly, I mean, the movie is a perfect example of why these types of thought experiments are flawed. So, you know, what do we see exactly? We see the person from the outside in the nutritive jelly.

We see that they are just sort of a blob of disgustingly floating in this little pod while they're being mined for their electricity exploited by someone else. And it's shown to us in a way to make it seem as unattractive as humanly possible. And by the way, The Matrix itself started a spoiler movie.

The Matrix itself, the original version of The Matrix, as they tell us in the movie, everyone lived a blissful life. Everyone was happy all the time. And it turned out that humans were belled against that because they could possibly be real.

They realized something was going wrong. So they had to make The Matrix a sort of fiction that people were experiencing kind of like drudgery and sort of miserable. So the whole thing is built to make us think that being plugged into the experience machine is really terrible, that no one should ever want to live that way.

And of course, when we all think about the experience machine, when we hear the example, that's the kind of picture that we get in our minds. So, yeah, like there are a lot of really bad things about being in a jar and not getting to see your family anymore. But that's different from saying that no one should ever be allowed to go watch a movie and forget about their life for two hours while they're enjoying something.

Or for that matter that people shouldn't take "happiness pills" I think there was a reference earlier to happiness pills. There are a lot of substances that people consume in the world to make themselves feel a little bit happier for a short period of time, ranging from alcohol to pharmaceutical drugs to various types. And those aren't necessarily bad things.

If they'll make us feel a little bit better, they're often good things. Question from the audience. The experience machine example may have a status quo bias.

You are asked to enter the machine to assimilate it but assured a happy state. Already knowing your experience outside the machine, in this context, can you comment on the scenario in which one is born into the machine and are offered the opportunity to exit to an unknown reality? My answer to all the experience machine questions is that I've said it already. I'm not going to say it again.

I think that question, the whole premise of the experience machine is that the premise of the thought experiment is that if you posed it to the world at large, every right thinking person would say "of course I don't want to be plugged in". Number one, we have no idea whether that's true or not. And number two, what that means is that the proper audience of your question is everyone else in the room, I guess I would say.

Well, I mean, for me, the value of the experience machine is not in the details at all. It's really just to highlight that this vision of happiness, it really is just completely subjective. So it's divorced from reality.

And so it's just meant to make that feature of it very dramatic. I don't think it has really much value beyond that. And I think that just in hearing you talk about it, you don't see this as a problem with your view, that it's divorced from reality in this way.

Because you're like, "Look, if you really were just inside the experience machine, look, everything would seem really great, and that's all that matters. You just seem happy to bite the bullet." I guess I disagree with what it means for something to be divorced from reality. So if you are experiencing it, if it's part of your conscious experience of life, whether that thing is watching a television show or being plugged into a virtual reality machine, or the experience machine, or anything else, or just being drunk and kind of stumbling around.

You know, if it's part of your experience of life, then it's not divorced from reality. No, I'm sorry, I have to bite peck against the bat because, look, if I get in a virtual reality machine and I have a beautiful family and a successful job and it all seems great, those things aren't true. Sorry, I do have a successful job.

I'm sorry, they got weird. For time that these things aren't true of me, I get in a virtual reality machine and they all seem really true. The appearance of truth is not the same as truth.

If I think it's raining outside and I have the belief that it's raining, but it's not raining outside, my belief is false, even though it appears to be true. And I want to create space for saying the same thing about happiness. It's a kind of false, aerosol happiness.

If I have this beautiful experience in a virtual reality machine of my perfect life, it's not real. Yes, it seems subjectively real, but I am more than a subjectivity, right? And this is just a fact. And there is, and it's also just a fact that my subjective experience might not fully reach the objective reality.

This is true of a lot of people who are self-deceived. And I don't think we want to say people who are self-deceived that they're happy or they're living well. And I just think that's a very deep disagreement between us.

I think that's a very deep question from the audience. Professor Frey stated that a selfish life is not worth imitating, but why ought we live a life worth imitating? Ah, that's a great question. Why ought we live a life worth imitating? Yeah, I think you should just live an excellent life, and an excellent life would be worthy of imitation.

I sort of adopted the language of aspiration and imitation because I think that's typically the perspective of people who are, if you're trying to think about what happiness or what's the highest good, then you're in a frame of thinking about what's worthy of my devotion, what's worthy of imitation, the assumption is if you don't have it yet. I don't think that when you're deliberating, the thing that you're most concerned about is whether or not what you're doing is worth imitating. But I do think actually it should always be something, it should somehow be part of your practical self consciousness.

So if you're doing something shameful, then as far as you're able to see it as shameful, you realize that you don't want people to imitate it. So a lot of people will change their behavior radically around children. So for instance, people come to my house, I have a lot of young kids, and all of a sudden they stop dropping F-bombs all the time.

They sort of realize, "Well, I don't want Jen's kids to be doing this." So they're, you know, they, and I think this awareness, right, that actually the way that I've asked, you know, it does affect other people, especially if I'm in a position of power and responsibility. So you might think of the way someone who occupies the office of the presidency behaves. You might want that to be worthy of imitation given that as a person who represents our country to the world.

So I think it's a part of your practical self consciousness, but it's not like your goal, right? Again, like on my view, the goal is to live a life that is deeply fulfilling and satisfying for you as human being. But that's sort of what I think, be worth your imitation. Question from the audience.

Why should we strive to live as happy a life as possible for as long as possible? Why not simply seek to die in an extremely joyful moment? This is the fried chicken. I know this is the fried chicken cooking question again. I didn't mean to indicate that I thought that the answer to that question was "Yes, you should." I mean, I don't know, this is, it's going to feel like sort of a truth of it.

The answer is that it's better to have 40 years of happy life than to have three minutes of happy life. I mean, I would think that that should be obvious. That if your life is made up of your experience of it, all of the sum of all of the moments of what you are feeling and experiencing for that whole time, that 40 years of those moments, assuming that they're good moments, is much better than three minutes.

That we should not sacrifice that long term joy and well-being in exchange for three minutes of extreme pleasure or something like that. I mean, that seems to me totally obvious and exactly in keeping with the way that we all live all of the time, basically, where we're willing to make trade-offs, I mean, even much more extreme trade-offs between short-term pain, short-term struggle for long-term. So, you know, what's the difference between short-term pain and short-term pain? I think that's, I think it's a really interesting question.

I mean, my own view is that it sort of depends on the circumstances. So, I think some people have very short lives, but they have very heroic lives. Or lives that are incredibly noble such that the shortness of it doesn't seem to detract from it.

And then I think other people have sort of like very long, seemingly normal lives. Where maybe they're, you know, mostly happy in your sense. And I think it's difficult to compare these things exactly.

I mean, I think the basic question that people should really be asking themselves is, you know, what is the best sort of life I can live? And in your circumstances, it might end up being short, right? You might, I don't know, like your country might break out in civil war. And so you've got to live a life of self-sacrifice and you're going to die young, but it could be a very noble sort of life. It could, in fact, it could end up being more noble than, you know, whatever other kind of normal life you could have had.

So I think it depends on the circumstances and how you meet those circumstances, which are in most cases not under your control. Just also to take a quick, I mean, we've covered this ground a little bit, but I'll just say again, the short life of self-sacrifice might very well be a better life from a stance of morality, a better life from a stance of virtue and nobility than the long sort of banal life, right? If you give yourself to a greater cause and you make the lives of people around you much better, you have some of a lived, you have lived a morally better life, a more virtuous life than if you stood by, did nothing but made it to old age. That's the difference again between a conception of what it is to live a moral, a good life in the sense of a moral life and a life of a great deal of welfare.

If you struggle a lot and you accomplish something wonderful for the people around you, but it comes at great personal cost and pain to you and then you die young, I don't think we gave anything by pretending that that person had a lot of well-being, that their life went awesome for them. We should say that that was a person who sacrificed themselves and were willing to lead a short and unpleasant life for the good of people around them, a noble and virtue and a morally admirable activity, but not something that means that they had a lot of well-being themselves. Question from the audience.

How is happiness affected if one conducts an immoral or unvirtuous life? Is there a deficit and how long does it take to get out of this deficit? Is there a point of no return? Yeah, I don't think there's ever a point of no return for people. I think that people can always turn it around. I do think that I'm obviously committed to the idea that if they're a fair path or just people, they're not really happy.

They might have a lot of pleasure in their life or welfare and Jonathan's sense. They might be very wealthy. They might have a lot of power.

But I don't think that they would have the deepest, most important human goods and the characteristic joys that come from realizing those goods in your life. And I think there's plenty of evidence for that commitment of mine. But in the case of someone who is bad, I am actually pretty optimistic about the human capacity to turn things around.

But I think that the more vicious you are, the harder it is actually for you to see reality clearly. So this is a commitment that Aristotle has. He thinks that vice is actually narrowing down of your perception of the world.

And so if you're a selfish person, you don't actually see other people in need, you don't notice them. You don't see, you're just sort of not able to see and respond to the world in a way that an excellent person would. But I still don't think that you're, I don't think you're beyond the pale.

I don't think any human being is ever totally lost. If you like this and you want to hear more, like, share, review, and subscribe to this podcast. And from all of us here at the Veritas Forum, thank you.

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