Greed Redux

the big question can money buy any happiness? This episode, however, is going to be a little something from the way Back Machine, one of one from our seven Deadly Sin series about greed and the science of creed and well, so we decided to replay this episode because there are obvious connections between between greed and what we take for greed and human behavior and that, uh, and the idea that money is going to give us happiness and that the things that we that we want are going to

make us happy. Yeah, that's right. So we thought this would compliment the next episode. In the meantime, as you listen to this, you are going to hear us talk a bit about the jerky behavior of luxury car drivers, and we wanted to mention that there's a newer study out two thousand and thirteen that actually pinpoints seat design is the possible culprit for behaviors from luxury drivers like running stop signs and so on. And so forth. Turns

out that the seats are more expansive. And if you think back to one of our episodes on expansive postures and how they can make a person feel more powerful like a king on a laid back on a throne. Right, Yes, as some luxury cars have that kind of seating, that throne like seating, then you can kind of see how

that might actually change someone's behavior in the car. Interesting. So, the individual who is in a fancy car is in a fancy seat, and that fancy seat allows them to to lounge about and feel superior to everyone else else around them. That's right, I'm so fancy. I don't need this stop sign that I think that's the thought bubble. Now. You were telling me when you encounter jerky rider, you you have a reaction that lignes up with this research.

If I'm driving on the highway and I generally speed anyway and there's someone behind me who's super close, I tend to reach out and put my my arm reach it across the other seat. As if you know, I'm on a date and I'm the alpha male, and I've noticed my behavior in doing this, and I think that I'm just trying to signal like I'm not intimidated. So maybe there's something here to that. It brings to mind

two things. First, there there might I wonder if there's an added level of them having poor posture in these in these reclined positions, and maybe if they're you know, they're all lounged back, they're also less happy and less uh you know, less less secure in themselves as they're driving, whereas somebody that's in a less comfortable seat is maybe setting up a little more straight with their with their chest puffed out, and maybe they're they're gonna have a

little more a little more confidence and only just less lucky to the lash out of those around them. Maybe unless greedy. Perhaps maybe let's find out the third circle of Dante's Inferno is where the glutton of hang out, and the fourth circle is where the greedy hang out. To be more specific, this is the circle of avarice and prodigality. It's it's interesting Dante is really down on greed. It's not like one of these sins like lust, which

he has a lot of sympathy for. Well, because he's human, yeah right, yeah, he has like he has a lot of sympathy for some of the individuals. Yeah, that's what I'm getting too. He hasn't he has needs. But when he encounters the greedy, he's it's it's a lot harsher. He divides it up. You have the prodigal and the more typically miserly greedy. So the prodigal, they're reckless spenders. It's coming in and it's it's going out twice as fast.

I think that's something we can all, if not relate to personally, we can, we can we definitely witness in the world around us. And then you have the the truly greedy, the hoarders and the misers, the ones that take the money, hold the money, that are just in

it for the money itself. Okay. And so when Dante and his guy Virgil show up an inferno, first of all, they're greeted by Plutus, which is the god of riches, with a little a little pluto, god of the underworld thrown in because you know, the underworld, underground, that's where gold and silver come from. And he's beast, he always full of rage, and he's babbling and he's saying poppy Satan, poppy Satan, Nalipi which is kind of just nobody. There's

a lot of discussion about what in the heck that means. Yeah, I'm gonna say, like poppy Satan sounds a little poppy Satan pop Satan. Yeah, I mean there's a sense like maybe it's something papal, because certainly there's a lot of discussion of sinful popes in the Inferno and then Satan of course. But but this is actually one of the few instances where Satan is actually mentioned, because when you actually encounter the big demon himself the bottom of Inferno,

he's referred to as Lucifer. So anyway, back to these centers, so you have the spin Thrifts and the Misers, and they're all first of all, they're all so abby you can't even recognize them, Like Dante is all like, I'm probably gonna look around here, I'm gonna know some people that I met know from life, and that your Italian

accent very mildly. Your Italian is much better. And the Virgils like, now you're not gonna You're not gonna recognize anybody, because everyone's so twisted here from their lives, from their their earthly lives full of greed and and overspending that you're just not gonna be able to reckon? Is that part of the punishment? Um, it's not as much a part of the punishment. It's just kind of like the reality of the like the like spiritually there deformed from

this life of the task. The punishment itself is that they have there. It's kind of a joust between the spinthrifts and the greedy, except instead of having like you know, swords or spears or any kind of typical jousting equipment, they are rolling large objects against each other using only like their chests. And if you look at the illustrations provided by good staff Dora, the large objects that they're

jousting with their giant money bags. So if you imagine these these hideous looking like naked people and they're all sort of like pushing big money bags, rolling them around with their chest into each other and arguing with each other and calling each other's other names, and so there there there are no demons um staffed here to punish

these guys. They provide their own punishment to each other. Okay, so it's like a scene from Eyes Wide Shut Well no, no, well, you know what, Okay, maybe more accessible is the illustration that you sent me, and it showed a lucky cat a mountain, and the mountain was there was a little trail going to the very top with a lucky cat is perched, and there's mice with big hunks of cheese

weighing them down as they bring it to the lucky cat. Yes, I will, I will link to this in the blog post that goes with this podcast, and cause you're interested in saying that. But there there are many artistic interpretations. And now if one goes into Dante's purgatory and this again is the mountain that connects Earth to the to the heaven, and well, you're you're you're complicating the matter with lucky cat. At this point, there's no lucky cat

in this thing. It's just a mountain. It connects Earth and hell beneath it to the heavens above. And if you travel up the mountain, each terrace purges you of a sin so that you'll be clean enough to enter heaven. So the fifth terrace is where you would purge yourself of all this greed, and you do it by lying lying face down on a hard rock floor, weeping and praying until the greed has washed away from you. That's your punishment. Yeah, it's kind of It's not a punishment, remember,

it's a it's a cleansing. Okay, seems kind of weak sauce. It is. It is kind of weak sauce. I don't know. Maybe Dante just wasn't bringing his a game when thinking about greed. He's really down on it. But it's it's it's not like they're like, you know, boiling rivers of blood and feces. They're just dudes in hell pushing bags of money against each other. And and here a lot of people pray. So the eyes being soon shut as in with v right, and there's some gas ler ones ahead.

But um, let's look to Buddhism real quick again before we get into the real science of all this. In Buddhism, greed, along with delusion, slash, ignorance, and hate, is one of

the three poisons at the heart of all suffering. So if you look at the center of the Tibetan wheel of life, the wheel of sam Sorrow, which we have an excellent interactive illustration of in the How Stuff Works article how sky Burial Works, if you look at the center of this wheel, you'll find three animals, a pig, a cock, and a snake, and they are all biting each other's tails, forming a ring. And each of these

three animals represents one of the three poisons. The snake is hate, the pig is delusion or ignorance, you see it referred to as is either, and then the cock represents greed. It's interesting how Buddhism greed is very central to everything that is wrong with life here on earth. And just as a side note, some people are really

into like crazy burgers. I think it would be it would be fascinating if someone were too concoct a burger that contains three meats snake meat, pig meat, and rooster meat. And then you could have it be the the three poison burger or the the burger that is the root of all suffering. Well, isn't there already the true ducan? It's kind of like that your're duncan, except um, it's responsible for all of man's woes. Okay, so it's more of a some and it'd probably be a pretty heavy

launch too. Yeah, And just throwing that out there, if anyone wants to create such a blasphemy or if if you know, next Thanksgiving when that rolls are in. You can't take your tree duc in, which is a turkey, chicken, and duck all roll together, right, and you can offer it up as a way to consume the sins of the past year. Yeah, because I think that would go over really well at Thanksgiving table. You know, people don't

think about that. So that's kind of the there's the religious introduction, and both of these examples are very down on the idea of greed. But it is this poisonous thing. It is this this awful thing that that distorts the soul and renders us unrecognizable in the afterlife, that is responsible for all of this pain around us. But then there's another way of looking at it, right, Well, yeah, you write a more materialistic view. Are you talking about Gordon Gecko? Yes, read from us from the book of

of Gecko. Alright, Gordon Gecko, the character in Wall Street. We're talking to high eighties here, and I don't know if I can do a Michael Douglas voice. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, greed is good, Greed works, Greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge has marked the upward surge in mankind and greed.

Mark my words. We'll say you've not only telled our paper that the other malfunctioning corporation called the U s a W. Yeah, well, okay also fights stains. That's right, that's right. I've got a greed stick at home. Um. But yeah, I mean, this is an idea that isn't too far away from reality and certain eras of our existence.

Certainly in nineteen eighties, you know, accumulation of wealth is something that a lot of people are concentrating on, and there is this idea that greed is this sort of evolutionary birthright that we can't evolve without continuing to amass more and more and sort of step over each other in order to get to it. Yeah, I mean, and you can go with the I mean, the classic argument that stuff like Indian greed, these are the motivating forces

of ambition, and we need ambition in life. Like on some level, greed maybe is good because I need things to live, right, I need a little money and a little more is maybe even a little better, So I should want those things, right, yeah, but it's the excess part, right, Yeah. Okay. So there's this guy named Andrew Low, and he's the Harris and Harris Group professor m I T and the

director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering. And in a two thousand and nine interview with Freakonomics, he commented on the unprecedented air of wealth just recently that we have, right, um, and he said that quote extended periods of prosperity act as an anesthetic and human brain. Okay, so that's here's

one reason why greed isn't so grand. Right. Essentially, he's saying that all of us who were trading in on the real estate based financial bubble, we're in a quote drug induced stupor that causes us to take risks that we know we should avoid. He's saying basically that monetary gain and we've we've seen this before, certainly in the laboratory is uh. It stimulates the same reward securitary as cocaine.

And in both cases, again we've talked about this, you know, over and over in terms of this, and since dopamine is released into the nucleus incumbents um and then the opposite of this, this is really interesting. Financial loss activates the same fight or flight circuitry as physical attacks, releasing adrenaline in the cortisol in the bloodstream. So I mean, here you have different sides of the coin, but certainly you've got dopamine and you've got madrinaline on the other side,

and all of this is tied to finance. Okay, so it's kind of like the Again, he's in the drug example, a young man takes cocaine and then writes a really horrible song or it gets a really or is really into an idea that is just dreadful. Likewise, a young man who has a financial success for a short amount of time. During that success, everything is so great he decides, I'm going to buy a sailboat, right right, I mean anything, I'm gonna I'm gonna blow my money on this, I'm

gonna spend it on this. I'm gonna do this because things are great. This couldn't possibly wear off. And of course both individuals quickly find that, uh, the sensation does wear off, right, I mean, basically, this is deadening that part of your brain that meaning not literally deadening, but certainly the part of your brain that is thinking about the long term is now offline, and you know your short term brain is like, hey, do whatever, Like let's

go buy a boat. It sounds like a great idea. Um, So it would make sense that in terms of economics, there's something happening in the brain that really feeds into greed. Okay, so this question comes up, greed. Everybody is greedy to to some extent or another. Right, Um, but who could be the greediest jerks out there? Is there is there natural answer to that question? Who could be? Or who who might be? Who might be? Who might be? Like who out there in the world is the greediest jerk? Yeah,

well one would. I mean, if you go on with the stereotype, you're looking at people like your Gordon geckos, like your Scrooge McDuck's a lot, you know, the individuals that have so much. It's an addiction, you know, like the money and the money unto itself, is an addiction. Okay, So bingo wealth corrupting? Right, And you're right, this is

you know, somewhat of a cliche. But there are some scientists who decided to put this to the test or whether psychologists Paul piff of the University of California at Berkeley. He conducted seven different studies that the seven different scenarios really testing out socio economic levels and ethics, wondering if

indeed wealth corrupts. And I'm just gonna highlight a couple of them because I think that they're interesting, but I should point out and that all seven scenarios, the overwhelming evidence is that people with higher socio economic levels tend to have uh dodgy ethics, or that that was the conclusion that was drawn from this um There was a study in which uh PIF and his team monitored traffic at a four waist stop in San Francisco, and they noted all the makes and the models of automobiles because

that's a really good indicator of your socio economic level usually right, Um, so guests who more often than not cut the other drivers off the fancy cars fancy cars, I mean overwhelmingly. Okay. So then there's another study that they did, and this was they had test takers asked to imagine themselves being very rich or very poor and then given an opportunity to take candy from a jar that would next be delivered to children in another lab.

Like really like taking candy from from a baby. Right, see, all I can think it is a Simpsons episode where though of course that Mr Burns is another I mean, if not a few examples of the stereotypically rich, misurely awful person who's been totally corrupted by wealth. But there's an episode, of course where he he actually steals or attempts to steal candy from a baby. Well, right, there you go. He in this study certainly would have borne

out the results. But so again here here you see the people who are imagining themselves is very rich somehow distancing themselves from their action and saying and taking asually more candy than the other people who imagine themselves is very poor. H And again seven of these different scenarios. Uh. And you'd have to have many more studies in order

to have more conclusive data on this, I think. But I think at least it gives us an idea of the direction of what happens when you are exposed to extreme wealth and the sort of distancing that you experience. You know, I'm not sure that the lab full of babies or children actually need that candy, though, I mean, well, I have to say I thought that too, because I thought well I might be. Okay, you know what those two roles, that kid doesn't need it, nobody has to

go to the dentist. And what kind of candy is it? Because there's there's candy, and there's candy. Like if it's if it's like um, you know, the office bank suckers or candy corn, then by all means like other children have it. But if it's upscale candy that's clearly designed for a more sophisticated adult palette, then then I'm not sure taking it is really the best. I agree, I agree, Um.

But there there's this evolutionary psychologist and he's a consumer researcher in his name is Vladists of the University of Minnesota, and he says this work is important because it suggests that people often act unethically, not because they are desperate and in the dumps, but because they feel entitled and they want to get ahead. Okay, so that exactly what

I just did. I laid out my entitlement for the fancy candy, that the that this candy would be lost on these children, and therefore I'm i a am doing them a favor because they don't need it, and be I am the intended audience for this candy. So I've already I've already rationalized stealing candy from a baby. It's a it's a great day in my life. You know what, all your gold rings with your diamonds were kind of shining pretty rightly. Can you kind of just take a

couple off their Mr Money bags? Um? Okay? So what is the opposite of greed, Well, not necessarily opposite, but a reaction that you might have to greed, revulsion, a

sense of injustice. Right, Because we were discussing this the other day, like, like, there's something particularly foul about greed, especially when we I mean well pretty much only when we glimpsed it in others, because when we glimpse it in ourselves, we tend to, like everything else, we tend to find more enlightened ways of of understanding it or lying to ourselves about it. You know. But when you see greed in another person, it's like, I mean it all bows send the money right and money on on

a on a very crucial level, it's not real. Like even when you're dealing with like gold coins, it's just it's all it's all ultimately kind of arbitrary. I mean, yes, there's there's a great deal of numbers and mathematics backing it up, but it's all and none of it is real,

you know. And then when when we when we when we raise that this abstract thing, this unreal thing, above everything else that is real in life, when we place this in this this made up money, above the heads of very real people, it's terrifying and awful and absurd. Right well, when the fantasy of this, right, it becomes grotesque and you can't really see the reality around you, right, I mean, it clouds your vision of your ability to

actually accurately since what's going on around you. That's when I when I think, you know, you make decisions that perhaps and other people creates this of disgust, because all of a sudden you become this person who is a caricature yourself to a certain degree. There's something called the ultimatum game, and it's interesting the premises. Okay, I have ten dollars that I can share with you, Robert Land, anyway I choose. Okay, if you accept my offer, then

we both keep my proposed shares. If you reject my offer, neither of us sees any of the money. Wait now, what's the offer? Okay, um, okay, have ten dollars, I will give you a quarter a quarter of the money or just what do I have to do? Do you mean you just can you can take or you can leave it. Well, in that case, I would take it because is better than no money. Right, you are so rational,

But most people would actually reject it. Huh yeah, because you would think like the rational thing to do is to say, like, um, you know, sure, now we're both richer for this, right, But there's a sense of injustice going on, like someone might think, that's not really why are you keeping and I'm getting but I didn't do anything to earn it. You just you have ten dollars, you're giving me twenty cents and I'm and and if you give me that cents, I'm halfway to getting something

out of the office snack machine. All I have to do is find one more quarter and I'm gonna be rolling in granola bar. Okay, Well, if you were a normal, flawed person, you would say, no, I'm going to penalize you for your stinginess. No, I'm not gonna like neither of us are going to get anything, right. That's weird. Yeah, So even Ian, it's understandable, like I can totally I

can totally get it. Yeah, like I have. And it is in a way, if you think about it, um, it's sort of a power structure, right, because if that person has the money and they're offering it to you, how do you get your power back if you have nothing, if you don't have really, uh any choice in the matter. Right, So I guess I could I could considerably make the argument, well, why don't you you know you're keeping nine five, why

don't you just give me one quarter more? And then I can go ahead and at that granola bar instead. I'm I'm tempted. I'm with half. I'm here with half a granola bar, basically that I can't eat. Well, I mean, yeah, I don't know what you're gonna get, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. You start to think about that, and what happens in your brain, Uh, the anterior insula starts to get activated.

And this is the area associated with negative emotions. And this has been seen by Jonathan Cohen, He's a Princeton neuroscientist. The interesting thing is that when you up the amount of money, like, for instance, if if I said I have twenty three dollars and I'm going to give you

eight dollars. Then you start to see people go okay, well that's that's a little bit fairer, and the part of the brain, the the anterior insula, actually starts to die down a little bit in terms of activity as a way to tamp down this and say, okay, let's start to be rational about this, because now the stakes are getting a little bit higher. There's a little bit more money here, and it really I think it's very

telling on how we make some portant decisions. Huh. So this is definitely the part of the brain is lighting up.

When you've just had a dinner with those some friends at a restaurant and you have to figure out how the bill works, or or even when like far before the bill comes, say when the guacamole comes out, or the pizza's placed on the table and food has to be divvied up, I can see that kicking in, you know, because you're wondering about how things are going to be distributed and parsed out, and then how are they going

to be paid for? Like even if you're not like a stingy kind of person who's counting the slices of pizza as they leave the table, like your brain can't help but sort of think in those terms, right. Well, and they've seen this in babies, they've seen this in primates too, that there's a sense of injustice. Study after study that people are mentally taking notes on what is being parsed out at that time. Well, because I mean, we have to live in a community. We have to

live in some sort of a group. Be at a primitive group that is just you know, crawling through the grasses and prehistoric times, or a community of people who are trying to figure out how in the heck they're gonna do the tip with a group on discount at a restaurant. Right, Yeah, that's just the recipe for disaster right there. Yeah, Yeah, the whole group on thing. Uh, not to say that I haven't taken advantage of it's great, but yes, um, you have to come to some sort

of point of cooperation. And like you said, that's that's what really makes a society. That's that's the glue of it. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, more of the science of greed. All right, we're back. Why do donuts distract Summer Simpson. Why is Hommer Sipson obsessed with with donuts? We had to boil this down to a single Oh, I don't know, brain hormone,

what would it be? Delicious dopamine exactly. Just the mere thought of the donut can can result in dopamine release. Just the the the anticipation of rewarding yourself with those delicious cowards. I have to say, I think I might be salivating a little bit right now. Yeah, I've been picturing that. I don't even really eat donuts, but I'm picturing that that Simpsons doughnut with the pink I sang in the sprinkles. Yeah. Dopamine keeps popping up in these

podcasts we're doing. I mean, dopamine pops up a lot because it's anytime we're trying to figure out neurologically why we do the things we do, because dopamine is the reward juice, and uh, most of it were not most, but a lot of the things we do are about releasing that chemical, about achieving the reward. Our life is kind of this game, and when we, uh, we actually hit the points where we get the achievements, we get

the dopamine it's not surprisingly would show up here. It show it seems to have shown up in all the other sense. And it's one of these things that we learned a game a long time ago. Primitive man kind of figured out what was going on with the dopamine and figured out, hey, I can actually cheat and get

all the dopamine I want. Right, so we end up with this whole legacy of bad habits and addictions and and sins if you will, And greed seems to play especially well with dopamine because it's tied up in three of the big needs that we have in life, the needs for safety, the need for approval, and the need for esteem. Right, we need safety because we want to survive. We need approval because we want to live in a community d uh. And we need a steam because we

want to rise up in that community. And money, as it happens, and pretty much buy any of those things. You have money, you can buy safety for yourself. You want to be approved of, You can buy the right clothing, you can buy the right lifestyle to do that, and if you want to steam as pretty much any stay presidential election or or you know, or a political kind of gate illustrates you can buy that if you have enough money and enough will to invest in it. So

money is the ultimate dopamine inducer. If money in and of itself doesn't create fuel the dopamine, then it can buy something that will, which makes sense again why people would be chasing that high with with wealth or greed, right um. And it actually plays into something that has been called the scrabble strategy before, and again we're talking about the short term versus the long term, and the

scrabble strategy is actually called the greedy algorithm. And this is a computational mathematics term, and basically it say is that you can do well by making whichever move seems best at that moment and not worrying too much about future consequences. And in mathematics, the greedy algorithm builds up a solution piece by piece, always using the next piece that offers the most obvious and immediate benefits. So for us, right,

that would translate to dopamine ding ding ding. Okay. So in the scrabble scenario, the the idea here is that I get a high number value kyle like an X or a Z or something I'm better off holding onto it, but instead I play it immediately, right, Yeah, because I mean that is not playing game, right. It's not like chess where you have to really consider, you know, three

moves ahead, you just have to. In scrabble, it really is like whatever you have right in front of you at that very moment, you have to play and you'll you'll benefit from that strategy. So you know, that's that's what greed sort of falls into, is this greedy algorithm. Although the greedy algorithm obviously isn't sustainable because at some point you have to uh, you know, inhabit your future

rain and start thinking about consequences. Yeah, and I guess with human lives, the problem is that by the time you start realizing you need to play the long game, there's not In many cases there's not been much game left.

I don't know, you didn't see that a lot. I mean it's like we said earlier, it's like people end up not caring during the rich years, during the bountiful years, which are there the grasshopper, right, the grassopper in the ant That sounds right because the grasshopper, Yeah, the aunt in the fable, right, is is piling away for the becoming winter, and the grasshopper is like, whoa, I'm having a great time and then it gets cold and the ants like I'm set in the Grasshopper dies. It's kind

of a right from your Rosebud we walked. I don't know. I can't leap to that logic. I don't know if that actually plays in all that well, but I don't know. He was chasing after greed, Yeah, well he was, he was. He is another iconic greedy character. But but yeah, when we're in the midst of the of the Plenty, we're not thinking about the long game, and it's easier to think about the long game when there's not that much game left. I don't know if I'm making sense on that. No, No,

I'm getting it. I'm getting if you are obsessed your whole life with chasing after the Precious and uh and trying to battle do battle with the sneaky little hobbits is for the Precious. Well, the Precious was pretty awesome. It was one of the rings of power. So I mean, I you could you kind of have to side with Gollum on that one, I know, But the point is that that you could you could waste your entire life, you know, obsessing over the precious and then you no

longer have a life. You just have a shiny did get to travel pretty well, and he lived a long life. I don't know what's going on here, Robert Lamb. I'm just saying, you know, greedy got just coming out, don't you know, hate on Sneakle too much because you know, you got to see the world of mental Earth, and you know, and he and he his spoiler, he dies by falling into a volcano, which is something I kind

of want for myself. So okay, So there we are revealing something about you right now, into your affinity for snag. Like imagine if your if your obituary said something like Robert Land has away today when he fell into the mountain Doon, Like that's pretty after chasing absolute power. Well, now that makes it not kind of sad. I guess all right, you've got You've got a point we were discussing earlier, like the research into degreed doesn't go quite as deep to some of the other ones we've we've

talked about. Yeah, I was thinking about Dante. I was like, yeah, of course, he's like this is awful. This is bad. It's awful, it's bad. But I'm not really going to devote a lot of time. Same thing with researchers so far. I mean, I guess a lot of its kind of surface level comes down to you. We want money because money makes a lot of things possible. It allows us to have safety, it allows us to to eat, to to have shelter, it allows us to move through life.

So of course we want it. And like with all the sins we've looked at, there's like a tipping point between like a normal level of wanting money and an unbalanced level. You know, what I think would be interesting is some research on the super wealthy and wondering there or not if you reach a certain point of wealth that you become more altruistic and you actually become more ethical.

That isn't because a number of billionaires have taken that pledge to donate a large portion of their their wealth charities.

And there are for every you know, miserly Scrooge McDuck type individual in the world, you can you can generally think of someone else who is using their fortune, or at least a large portion of their fortune to try and do good things and not just as a tax, right right, right, So yeah, I would like to see more more numbers on that, for sure, because there are there are certainly some individuals that really make a case for the old adage money corrupts and money is the

root of all evil. But then there are some individuals who seem to stand apart from that and and really give us a little hope. Yeah, and and some people who I'm sure at four waste uff and they're driving a luxury car that that actually, uh, they're not jerks, I don't know. Let me get that. Let Dante have the last word on this though, because there's a lovely little line and this is of course translated from the

Italian and then this is Virgil talking to Dante. He says, now you can see, my son, the brief mockery of the goods that are committed to fortune, for which the human race of squabbles, for all the gold that is under the moon and that ever was, could not give rest to even one of these weary souls. So that's that, as they're looking at the tortures and help. So there you go, all right, So there you have it, one of our favorite episodes from one of our favorite series.

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