Living in Solved World with Nick Bostrom

I think we need to first make a distinction between sort of subjective purpose and objective purpose. So right now, if there is nothing to strive for in your life, one of the consequences of that for many people is they get depressed and they feel down or unmotivated and the world is boring. Now, that is something that at technological maturity you could fix. You could pop a pill that would give you motivation and fascination and interest. I mean, we already have sort of primitive versions of that today, right? But they come with side effects and addiction potential. But you could imagine like the super drug that would give you like the exact effect you wanted minus all the side effects. So if what you seek is the subjective feeling of purpose, like really being strongly motivated, finding your activity super interesting, that is something certainly these utopians Nick, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast.

I'm going to dive right into my first question. Can you please explain what a post-scarcity utopia is for our audience?

Well, it's a utopia set in a condition where Material scarcity is a thing of the past. So where there is plenty of all the regular stuff that people might want to consume— housing, food, clothing, etc.

And how would a society get to a post-scarcity utopia where things like our housing and our food, we don't need to worry about them anymore? Because I'm pretty sure the average American is stressed out About just about everything and has a scarcity mindset in just about every area of life right now.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to try to gauge how far along we currently are. If we say, take the zero point level at what was typical throughout our species history. So for like 100,000 years, we were hunter-gatherers and then maybe for 10,000 years, agriculturalists. But now those of us, probably most people listening to this podcast, probably have a relatively high level of material wealth. And we don't have everything we want, but compared to barely having enough even to survive and maybe not being able to feed your children properly, we might be more than halfway there to the maximum. If you imagine you had a personal chef who made the best possible food every day, that might be better than what you have now, but it's sort of seems less better than what you have now, then what you have now is better than barely having enough to eat at all. But yeah, how we might get there, I think the transition to the machine intelligence era will unlock a whole host of very radical capabilities. If things go well, which they are by no means assured to do, but if things go well with this machine intelligence transition, then I think we might enter a condition of abundance, a kind of post-scarcity society. And that would be one of the parameters defining this idea of a solved world, which I tried to analyze in my recent book.

So if the scale from 0 to 100, scarcity to post-scarcity, maybe we're about halfway there and it took 110,000 years. How fast do you think we close the rest of the 50% there?

Yeah, I mean, so it did take like 150,000 years, but really most of the progress in our material condition happened just in the last couple of hundred years. For almost all of these like 100,000 years plus, average income didn't increase because as we figured out how to be a little bit more economically productive, there were more of us, so the population grew. grew and the average income was still subsistence throughout this entire period, really up until the Industrial Revolution. And since then, economic growth has been so fast that even though population has also grown, it hasn't quite managed to keep up. And that's the only way you can have raising per capita income. But yeah, so I mean, well, yeah, so where we are now is to think of a gamble. If somebody presented you with the option, You have a 50% chance, if you choose to take this gamble, of getting the best possible material condition, like total abundance, but a 50% chance of falling straight back to subsistence level. So you eat gruel for breakfast and cabbages for dinner maybe, and you sleep on a bed, but it's flea-infested and it's really cold in the winter. Maybe you don't freeze to death, but— So would you take that gamble? I think many people would say, no, I think that's not really— you need better than 50% odds perhaps to take such a gamble. But this is if we are talking only about material improvements, like just having more stuff. I think that really gives us a very limited view of the potential upside you could imagine much more profound improvements to the human condition, particularly maybe the easiest thing is improved medical technologies that would allow us to live much longer lives, longer and healthier lives. And kind of the attractiveness of that, I guess, maybe increases as you sort of get closer to aging and death yourself. Like some people who are like, on their final breaths would give anything just for an extra month of life. And then on top of that, you could imagine various unlocks, so different ways of enhancing basic human biological capacities. So not just staying alive and healthy, but maybe upgrades to your cognitive capacities or emotional well-being levels and so forth.

So I'm really curious about, we have In the United States even, there's still starving children and we have starving children in Africa. Growing up, that was always something that my parents said, eat your food because there's starving kids in Africa, even though that didn't really compute for me. But I'm curious, how do you think, going from where we are today to this utopian state, what are the first steps? How do we solve things like hunger in this world? those other problems that we seem to not have yet solved?

Yeah, I don't have a kind of panacea for all the world's ills, and it might be a little tone deaf to like spend a lot of time writing a whole book, you know, 6 years in the making on this hypothetical condition when we are so far away from it right now. There are so many pressing problems, so much suffering in the world right here and now. And even if we do look ahead, there are these major risks and challenges over the coming years, including with this development of machine superintelligence, et cetera, that maybe you could argue we should focus both on the present ills and on the kind of risks we can see ahead. rather than dreaming about if things go well. I mean, if things go well, we'll have plenty of time to figure that out later. And I think that used to be my attitude as well, and a lot of my previous work has kind of focused more on these challenges. But at some point, I figured somebody needed to actually consider where we will end up if we continue along this path and don't slide off it. And I think there are some interesting questions related to what will give humans meaning and purpose in life if you actually could end up in a condition where all our practical problems are solved. So imagine the best possible case of scenario. We don't just have post-scarcity, but we have something I called, well, first post-work and then ultimately a post-instrumental condition. So it's not just that we have plenty, but whatever tasks need doing in this condition could be better done by machines, by superintelligent AIs and robots. So first of all, all economic labor that currently occupies a good portion of our lives would become unnecessary because machines could do everything better, with a little asterisk. There are some exceptions that we can return to. But more than that, right now, if somebody doesn't work for a living, maybe they are retired or they are independently wealthy or something, there's a whole bunch of other things that You need to do. Um, so like, you know, like Bill Gates has to brush his teeth every day, like otherwise he gets, you know, gum decay just, and, uh, you know, if you want to be, uh, like healthy, you might have to spend a certain effort, uh, exercising, uh, going to the gym. And you might think, well, even in this kind of maximally technologically mature condition, we have superintelligence, they invent all kinds of technologies. run the whole economy, you couldn't sort of hire a robot to go to the gym on your behalf. There's a bunch of stuff you have to do yourself. So maybe in this kind of post-work condition, we would all be doing those things. But if you think about it more carefully, I think that's not correct. Amongst the technological affordances at technological maturity would be the ability to pop a pill that would induce the same physiological effects in your body. as spending an hour lifting weights would currently. And so it seems to kind of put a little question mark on top of a lot of the activities that currently fill our lives. You could still do them maybe, but they would seem kind of pointless.

Yeah, I think that's so interesting because even today, we're kind of struggling with this purposelessness. I think that a lot of the people, it's this way in the US even, It's like people are struggling to almost like create this thing called meaning or purpose in their own lives. So it's like thinking about a world that's completely solved. It's like, man, how would— why wouldn't— why would we keep going? Why would we continue on? So like, what are your thoughts around that? I'd love to know.

Yeah, I think we need to first make a distinction between sort of subjective purpose and objective purpose. So right now, if if there is nothing to strive for in your life, one of the consequences of that for many people is they get depressed and they feel down or unmotivated and the world is boring. Now, that is something that at technological maturity you could fix. You could pop a pill that would give you motivation and fascination and interest. I mean, we already have sort of primitive versions of that today, right? But they come with side effects and addiction potential. But you could imagine the super drug That would give you the exact effect you wanted minus all the side effects. So if what you seek is the subjective feeling of purpose, like really being strongly motivated, finding your activity super interesting, that is something certainly these utopians could easily have. However, you might want something more than that, not just a subjective experience, but some actually worthwhile thing to strive for. that really matters, not just subjectively, but objectively. And there is a potential challenge, right? Because in this utopian condition, you wouldn't be needed for most of the things that you currently— like, right now, people, you know, maybe base a sense of self-worth on being a breadwinner, right? You make some contribution to the world at large, or at least maybe to your family or to somebody, like make some positive— But that's a lot harder if, like, the robots could do all of what you could do and do it more efficiently. Um, so there might be this kind of, um, purpose problem. Um, yeah. And, yeah, and I think there are, like, ways to at least partially overcome that, but, um, uh, it is one of the considerations if one tries to reflect on just how good could one of these utopian lives be at technological maturity. They would have a whole bunch of other stuff like pleasure, longevity, health, wealth, all kinds of things. Those boxes you could easily tick. Where it gets more iffy are certain values that are sort of more subtle and that revolves around interestingness, significance, purpose, meaning. Yeah.

One of the reasons I was really looking forward to this conversation, Nick, is because This subject that we're talking about right now and that your book is all about has become one of the predominant discussions taking place with friends and family at the dinner table and on car rides. And when you bump into somebody, it's just happening. And over here in the West, you know, hey, what do you do is the first question that people ask. And oftentimes, what do you do is associated with your profession and labor is going to become unnecessary at some point in the future. And even if you go back to some of the great philosophers and you look at Aristotle with his idea of eudaimonia, which is like the great life, you know, it was health, wealth, love and relationships, happiness. It's like, well, health, check that box. Like you said, wealth, check that box. Like you said, relationships, you know, we don't need to get meaning from them anymore. We're not striving to provide for our families anymore. I am curious what your thoughts are on how artificial intelligence overlaps with spirituality and religion moving forward. What do you think happens in this utopian society as it relates to God and things of that nature?

Well, spiritual practices is like one of the things that actually would seem to survive this transition to technologically mature condition because, um, it's not something that people are doing for instrumental reasons primarily, or if it is, I mean, you might think of it as instrumental to garner favor, uh, with God or something, but that, that's like one of the things that plausibly you couldn't outsource to machines because it's kind of in the nature of the task that you have to engage in it yourself for it to have the value and to provide the benefit. So it might be that in this condition, there would be more time and more attention to focus on these ultimate pursuits and spiritual practices than we have time for today. I mean, even pious people, for the most part, spend most of their hours cooking food, cleaning the house, getting a paycheck, driving the kids to school, doing all the kind of things that need to be to be done. And unless you're like a monk or something, that is the big majority of your waking hours.

What else other than spiritual practices do you think will survive and still be required or needed to be done by a human or by oneself?

Yeah, so I think there is, first of all, the possibility of artificial purpose. This is maybe best illustrated if we think of what it is to play games where you set yourself some arbitrary goal. Like, let's suppose you're doing golf, right? There is no particular external reason why the ball needs to travel through the holes. You just make up that that's now going to be my goal, to get the ball into a sequence of holes. Moreover, I'm going to limit myself to this very inefficient means. I can't just pick it up and put it there. It would be easier, right? You have to hit it with a club. Um, so this is like a made-up goal, but once you adopt that goal, then you now have a reason to, like, you know, exercise your golf skills because that's the only way to accomplish the goal once you have set it. Um, and so that is something the utopians could do. They could set themselves various goals, you know, because it enables different types of activities that they might find intrinsically valuable. So the activity of golf playing or the activity of— you could imagine much more complicated and sophisticated and beautiful games. than ones we have invented so far. So to the extent that you think that these artificial purposes are good enough, then there would seem to be plenty of opportunity to make those. Now, you might think there is like an extra value to having natural purposes, like ones that are not just existing because you arbitrarily made them up, but that exist independently of you. And I think there might be some scope for those, although they are a little bit harder to find. But For example, if you value various traditions, like the honoring of traditions, they might require the participation of people to perform the ceremonies or to live a certain way to carry out the traditions. And it wouldn't count as continuing the tradition if you sort of build some robot species to sort of enact the same things. We mentioned the spiritual values before. If there are particular people and you happen to care about them getting what they want, and what they want is that you yourself, with your own efforts, should be doing various things, then it might be that you can achieve this goal you have of giving them what you want only by yourself exerting yourself. And there could be more sort of indirect and subtle ways at which that could operate at the cultural level.

So do you think there will be maybe problems that we can't anticipate coming up? Like, I feel like so far in humanity, there's been a lot of these times that we're like, okay, yeah, this problem is solved. But then there's a whole host of new problems that, that emerge. So do you think that we could find purpose in new problems to solve as well?

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Um, no, other than these artificial, uh, purposes and artificial problems that we create for the sake of having problems and purposes. Um, because AGI is a general, uh, method for solving problems, including new problems, right? That's like, that's, that's how we solve new problems that come up. We discover the problem using our brains, And then we figure out some way to solve them using our brains, and we execute that plan using our brains. But if you had AIs that could do everything that our brains can do, then whatever new problems crop up, they could notice them and figure out a solution and implement it. So in that sense, this technology is, is, is kind of quite fundamentally different from, from all the other ways of automating specific tasks or having like tools that make us more efficient.

Yeah, I mean, that makes total sense. It's interesting because like, it's hard for me to almost like even conceptualize that world, right? The world of all problems solved. The AGI-1 is just like taken over and it can solve all the problems. But I think you've used this example before, which is like math. Like, why would you waste time learning math, put the effort in learning math if something else can do that for you completely? So I love this idea that there's this world where even those, like the problems that you think you can't anticipate, those are solved too. And it's really fascinating to me that that could be a thing. So what is your take on people that are sitting here saying, okay, I don't think problems can all be solved. That doesn't make any sense. What do you tell those people? it's really hard for me, I guess, to conceptualize even that, that world coming about, because today we're just so far removed from that. Because like I said earlier, there's all these problems that we have that we haven't solved yet. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we are far removed in terms of the fraction of problems solved, which is far from 100%, right? We might not be that far away from it in terms of the number of years that remain between where we are now and when this happen. I mean, it depends on your AI timelines, but a lot of people, including me, I think, have significant probability mass on rather short AI timelines. I should clarify, it's not that all problems in this condition could be solved, but rather that all problems that could be solved could be solved better by machine. So even though there might be, I mean, you might say desire is infinite. I mean, certainly some people would always want more, And so that no matter how much you have, no matter how good your technology or how much wealth or resources, you would never be able to solve all the problems if the problem is you don't have everything you want. But there would be this point at which there would be no way for us to contribute to solving them more than they could already be solved by these AIs, right? With the exception of the areas I mentioned where the task to be solved sort of intrinsically requires our effort. So spiritual practices or honoring traditions or Various forms of interpersonal entanglements. If somebody wants to be the exclusive love interest of a particular person, if there are more than 2 people who want that, they can't both have what they want. But if what they each want is not just some replica of the love interest, then there could be ways in which there is still scarcity where we humans can supply whatever limited quantity of it there is. But, that's still a kind of carve-out within this much wider space where full automation would become possible.

Yeah. I read your book about a month ago, so it's been a little while. But, I think in the book, you give an example of somebody in a 400-foot yacht is jealous of somebody in a 405-foot yacht or something like that.

Very possible, I think. Yeah.

And, that becomes the measuring stick. Nick, we have a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs and kind of young business leaders that listen to this podcast. And so I'm curious, what advice do you have for business leaders around adopting super intelligent AI and maybe ways to prepare for— I mean, it's coming really fast.

Well, I mean, it's— I mean, you might want to diversify your assets, or at least have some portion of, of your, uh, portfolio in, in, invested in instruments that would do well in this scenario where AI succeeds. I mean, human capital might be a depreciating asset in, in, in, in these scenarios where you get continued fast improvement in artificial intelligence. Um, and so, yeah, like hedging against that. Now, I mean, this, this is all kind of in the scenarios where things go reasonably well, where we manage to solve the alignment problem. and sufficiently solve the governance problems, et cetera, et cetera, avoiding waging war with these that might destroy us. So it's kind of zooming in on the particular set of branches where things actually, this whole transition goes well. I have written earlier about the other side of that coin. But yeah, if things go well, which I'm hoping that we will, then at some point have to wrestle with these more existential questions with me. I mean, it's like a kind of a high-end problem to have, like the ability to wrestle with the challenge of which activities are actually most worth doing aside from all the necessities that currently restrict restrict our choice set. And I do think, like, yes, there are these kind of somewhat disconcerting, like, once you actually start to think through what it would mean and how much it would undermine a lot of our current values and assumptions, there's like an intermediate stage where I feel probably many people would think that this actually doesn't feel at all attractive and it's kind of repulsive. Like, imagine the machines, like, Would your friends even need you? Like, there would be like virtual friends who could do better. Like, it just feels kind of— but I think that if you push through that, I think there is a there on the other side that could be extremely wonderful, which would be a slightly— a very like a transformed form of human existence where a lot of the assumptions we currently have would have to be jettisoned, but where there are sort of new ways, I think, of basing a a wonderful existence with experiences that could be literally beyond our current ability to imagine.

Yeah, it's so interesting that you bring up that, even that friend paradox too, because it's like right now with AI, I mean, you can go and there's— it's crazy. Like, you can get almost like a therapy session through AI. Like, oh, I'm struggling with this. And then it'll ask you questions and help you dive deeper. And It's like, even though those things that took people years and years to learn, it's like now you can just go online really quickly, almost for nothing, for free, and just get free therapy. And I'm curious, like, what do you think about people, like people's jobs just in general right now? Like, I feel like, you know, a lot of these, even the stuff that we do is getting taken over by or could be taken over by AI. So what's Almost like the intrinsic value of a human? What's the worth of a human even today, let alone in a deep utopia society?

Well, there's still a lot of stuff that needs doing currently. So that's plenty of reason, I think, for exerting and making some effort to— I mean, in fact, you could argue plausibly that we are right now in the most impactful time ever. That is that what people are currently doing, and maybe what they will do over the next few years, might do more to shape the long-term trajectory of human civilization than what people did during any other short period in the past. Because especially if these scenarios are correct, we are kind of on the verge of developing AGI and other transformative technologies. The choices, how well we manage this transition, might plausibly shape outcomes millions of years into the future. And so we are living at this very special moment in history. And this is one of the things we have over the utopians. If you want to have a positive impact on the world, it might be really hard for utopians Because there are no, hopefully no horrors and miseries and big needs, and whatever there is could anyway be done, taken better care of by the machines. So they might not be able to really improve the world. But we seem to be in this position where we have unique opportunities to do that. So if purpose is what you want, then like go for it now, because now is like the— like the golden time for purpose.

I'll ask one final question because we're getting towards the end here. Nick, having followed your work for a little while, it seems like you might be a little bit more positive or optimistic or maybe just objective about the future of AI. Would you agree with that statement? How have your thoughts changed over the last handful of years?

You know, the optimism-pessimism, it's always been there. I think we don't know how this transition will play out. pan out. And so when I wrote my previous book, Superitalitas, it focused more pages on the risks and downsides. But it was always there that if we avoid those, things could become extremely wonderful. And that's still my view, is that yes, things could become extremely wonderful if things go well, but it's by no means assured. So I'd say I'm maybe a fretful optimist, or you could say I'm maybe a moderate fatalist in the sense that fatalist. I think how well things will go is mostly baked in, like how hard are the problems we will be called upon to solve. We are not sure yet how hard it is to align superintelligent AIs. If they are easy, we'll probably make it through. If they are hard, we probably won't. So that's the fatalism part, but moderate in the sense that to some degree, the odds can also be improved if we get our act together and work work cooperatively and put our best foot forward, we can maybe nudge the odds a little bit in the favorable direction.

Do you have anything, any advice to people that are operating in this world of AI as far as maybe ethics they should follow or rules they should follow to get us there in a maybe more cooperative way?

Well, there is one area. The alignment problem has now become much more broadly recognized than it was back when, you know, I was starting to work on this. Um, at that point, people were dismissing it as like, oh, science fiction, futurism. Now all the frontier AI labs have research groups trying to develop scalable methods for AI alignment. And, and the governance problem, uh, is starting as of the last couple of years to attract the attention of world leaders with statements coming out from the White House and 10 Downing Street and Europe, etc. And there is a third challenge, though, that has as yet not received as much attention, but I think may become equally important. And that is the problem of the ethics of digital minds. We will create these sophisticated, complex digital minds, some of which might have moral status, meaning it matters not just what they do to us or what we do to each other using these AI tools, but also what we do to them. And so figuring out how to recognize and respect the moral patiency of some of these sophisticated digital minds that we are creating, I think, is a huge challenge. Initially, a philosophical challenge to figure out what it even means to be nice to AIs, and then ultimately a practical and policy challenge, how to sort of— get some reasonable framework implemented globally. It's really difficult and perplexing, but I think will be needed to actually get a utopian future, as opposed to a future where there's like a kind of a little human masterclass and then like a vast slave empire of suffering digital minds. Most minds in the future might well be digital, so it matters a great deal that the future goes well for them also.

It's really interesting you bring up being nice because I feel like people have a hard time being nice to other people. And then it's like, oh, but be nice to this digital mind too. That is like, it's a computer, so why does it matter? Does it have feelings? Like those questions come up too, you know?

Yeah. And, and the, the claim is that it's plausible that as we develop increasingly sophisticated machines, that some of them might have conscious experiences, the ability to suffer. They might have goals, preferences, life ambitions, the ability to enter into reciprocal relationships with other humans. A lot of the properties that, say, moral philosophers think might undergird moral status possibly could be instantiated in digital minds as well as biological minds. But undoubtedly it will be a big challenge for us to— for our empathy to extend in— I mean, it's hard enough We have pigs in gestation crates and treating a lot of animals horribly, but they at least have faces and they can squeak and they sort of resemble us in many obvious ways. Where if it's like an invisible process running inside a data center, it will be so much harder for human empathy to kind of reach in there and recognize what actually morally matters. So hence, I'm flagging it as a big challenge. I don't have—

Yeah.

a great plan for solving it, but I'm hoping we can eventually figure something out.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Right now I'm just like, I'll be nice to the AI. So anytime I just— I'm always like talking to it, I'm like saying, thank you, thanks for your help, you've— I appreciate you, all those things.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good start at least.

Yeah, especially like I think of it in the way of, man, like if these, these intelligences have the ability to govern us and to control us, like It's probably good to be nice to them, even starting out.

Yeah, I think like approaching the future with a sort of mindset of expansive generosity, even if initially maybe it means like we sometimes give moral consideration or generosity to things that don't actually matter. There is no there there. It's better to err on the side of inclusivity than to err on the other side. And I think it does make the future more likely to go well if we approach it with that sense of sort of benevolence and kindness. And maybe we are too kind on some occasions, but we can figure that out later. But it's like a better direction to go in, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I love that. Nick, do you have any other questions before I get my wrap-up questions here?

No. I mean, the book is here. Big fat book. But you can feel virtuous if you read it because it's like a philosophy book that's difficult.

So if you make it through, you'll Yeah, I tell you what, I've been through about— I'm about halfway through and I have felt a lot smarter. I'm like, oh yeah, this is great. There is some— Nick said at the beginning of our chat, but he was like, it's one of those books that you want to stop and you want to think about every page that you go through. It's like, whoa, this is really interesting. Whoa. And then I've even journaled about some of it. It's a very insightful book and I think it's really cool to even just conceptualize this possible future of not only just like utopia, but like even better than utopia. And I forget exactly the term that you use for that, but I love this idea and it's a fun book to go through for sure. Where can people go to find out a little bit more about you and follow along on your journey?

nickbostrom.com is my website. My papers and stuff there. That's the best. I'm not really active on social media, so my homepage, good old-fashioned homepage, is where I would look first.

Perfect. Yeah, we'll make sure we link that in the show notes. All right, I like to ask every single one of our guests this question, and it's this: you pass away, but you can leave the world— so all the books and everything that you've put out, all your blogs, your posts, everything disappears, all your work disappears, but you can leave the world with a single piece of advice, what would it be?

I'd want to— I mean, assuming the world actually was going to listen to it, I'd want to give that some thought. But yeah, it is tricky. It's also weird to advise the world because often good advice is context-specific. Like, um, like I often get like asked like, so what advice do you have for young people? Or like, I mean, you ask entrepreneurs and I feel it's a little bit like asking like, what's the best shoe size? Um, you know, or because it depends right on the person. Like, so, so some people may be well advised to, uh, you know, um, be more disciplined and focus and really set themselves goals and crack down on themselves. And other people, maybe they need to go easier on themselves and loosen up and take it a little bit easier, right? It depends on which direction you're initially off in. And so there's maybe no one piece of advice that would be good for everybody, just as there's no shoe size that is good for everybody.

Exactly.

And it might be similarly, like, the world is not really a unified actor. There's just a bunch of different people and countries and groups. So maybe depending on like which of these entities I was actually addressing, I might have some, something to say.

I love that.

I love that question because, uh, or I love that answer because I, I struggle when people ask for book recommendations on podcasts when I'm being interviewed. They'll just go, what's a good book recommendation that everybody should check out? And I'm like, I don't wanna provide my answer. Wow.

There is an answer. There's like a clear answer.

There's a very clear answer. There it is. Yes.

What a great response.

Great to talk to you guys.

Yeah, thank you so much. This has been such a blast. You are so incredibly intelligent. It's been fun doing kind of a deep dive into you. I mean, outside of this podcast, but also just chatting with you today. You're amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We appreciate it.

You're very kind. Thanks.