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12 Rules for Life (Episode 39)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this episode, Michael and Caleb review Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life.
We each pick out 1 idea we believe is true, 1 false, and 1 provocative. There’s a lot to say about this controversial book. Both of us think it has a number of life-changing lessons, but also gets important things wrong.
(04:29) Hierarchy and Feedback Loops
(15:49) Tell the Truth
(23:55) Clean More Than Your Room
(36:03) Too Much Freud
(45:25) The Centrality of Myth
(56:49) Sacrifice
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
And that kind of confidence and sacrifice, that belief in the effectiveness of sacrifice is probably the mindset that is most beneficial to me moving forward. So this is something that I really resonate with and agree
Introduction to 'Stowe Conversations'
00:00:14
Speaker
with.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Critique of '12 Rules for Life' by Jordan Peterson
00:00:32
Speaker
And in this conversation, Michael and I discuss Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life, an anecdote to chaos. We each pick out one idea we believe is true, one false, and one provocative. We cover a lot of crown in this conversation, talking about everything from hierarchy or chaos, myth, sacrifice, feedback, loops, and the psychology of the mind. In both of our views, 12 Rules for Life is a book that's worth
00:01:01
Speaker
reading, engaging with, and it has a number of positive lessons, but also gets a number of important things wrong. Here is our conversation. Welcome to Studio Conversations. My name is Caleb Wanted-Rose. And I'm Michael Trombe. And today we are going to be talking about Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
00:01:27
Speaker
It'll be a book review discussion of sorts. We know Jordan Peterson is a controversial character, to say the least. But our purpose here is to talk about the book taken by
Stoicism and Peterson's Ideas
00:01:42
Speaker
itself. It's a book that's been read by millions of people at this point, positively helped a handful, significant handful, I imagine, and probably also done the opposite to some subset of other readers.
00:01:57
Speaker
So that's our purpose. Do you want to say anything else by way of intro? Well, I think that was a good intro. I mean, there's a lot of overlap between fans of Jordan Peterson and the stoicism community. And I think whatever you talk about Jordan Peterson, it's necessarily going to come along with a lot of baggage because he's quite a polarizing figure, both in terms of, you know, those that really love his work and those that really hate his work. And I thought this was a good opportunity to dig into his thought as contained in the book.
00:02:26
Speaker
and really engage with that thought. And then in that position, whether there's compliments or criticisms, engaging with that in terms of what was written and how it was presented. And I hopefully would give some value to those listening as well. Good for you and I, Caleb, but also good for those listening who want to kind of wrestle with or consider some of the pros or cons of Jordan Peterson's philosophy. Yeah, he's an influential figure, has a lot to say, touches on many important
00:02:56
Speaker
ideas, thinkers, and in some ways is I think a thinker for this age.
Philosophy's Role in Everyday Life
00:03:04
Speaker
So he's talking about independent of his connections to stoicism.
00:03:09
Speaker
To add to that, you know, there's philosophy as a way of life is what I'm interested in, right? Like ways of thinking about how to live and the best way to be. The reason I'm interested in stoicism and ancient philosophy is because they grapple directly with those questions. And, you know, whether or not you agree with Peterson or not, or you think he's really helpful or you don't, he's an active intellectual, contemporary intellectual who's wrestling with those questions.
00:03:32
Speaker
who's taking those questions seriously and think those questions of what are the best ways to live? What are the ways to conduct yourself? How can you be happy? What are morally wrong or worse ways to live? Resting with those questions as the important questions. And anybody who's taking the time to do that seriously, I always think it is really interesting to engage with because you don't see those tackled as much in the contemporary space anymore as they would have been in ancient philosophy.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely.
Feedback Loops and Personal Growth
00:04:02
Speaker
So we thought we'd go through and pick out one idea we thought was true and important, one that is false, mistaken, or misleading, and then maybe one interesting idea we want to chat about and explore further. So we thought we'd each do this. And how about I start with passing off the ball to you, Michael?
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah. Sounds good. Let's do it. Yeah. We'll start. We'll start with you. Great. So first thing is first thing is one thing true. The first chapter in something like stand straight with your shoulders back. This is, this is the chapter where Jordan Peterson compares people to lobsters. I know people like to make fun of that and can mean that, but.
00:04:46
Speaker
The thing that I thought was true about this, to summarize that chapter as concisely as possible, I thought was really compelling, really effective, was this idea that life is comprised of a series of strong negative or positive feedback loops around how people treat us and around how we feel about ourselves. And if you don't recognize that,
00:05:05
Speaker
When you try to make a change, you can be fighting against this momentum, either this negative momentum or this positive momentum, and the change can feel impossible. So I was taking Jordan Peterson's advice in this chapter to be three main things. First, you need to identify where these loops exist, where these positive or negative feedback loops exist. You need to identify that some of these loops are connected to our biology or human nature.
00:05:30
Speaker
And one of the examples he gives to explain one of these feedback loops, the example he gives for those that haven't read the book is, you know, there's natural conflict between lobsters.
00:05:39
Speaker
If lobsters didn't have a built-in mechanism biologically of defusing that conflict, then lobsters would just kill each other. If two males are fighting over space, territory, something like this, they would just fight until they killed each other. So naturally, if a lobster loses a fight for territory, it actually receives kind of a chemical or hormonal change.
00:06:02
Speaker
that makes it less likely to want to continue fighting to make it kind of recognize its lower status and that hierarchy between the one lobster and another and then less likely to engage in conflict. And this has a lot of benefits both for the lower status lobster that doesn't end up dying in the battle and benefits for the higher status lobster that doesn't have to continue fighting.
00:06:23
Speaker
And so then benefits for lobsters in general, because both of these lobsters stay alive and continue to have children. But the point there is that when you lose, so this is what a feedback loop is. A feedback loop is something that makes, you know, the kind of behavioral reaction more common or more likely next time.
00:06:39
Speaker
when the lobster loses that territory fight, it receives a negative or a kind of hormonal response that makes it less confident, less likely to incite conflict later. And then because of that, it's probably going to lose further battles, would be more likely to lose further kind of territorial battles. And it will continue to kind of
00:06:57
Speaker
reinforce this nature of taking up less and less space and moving down the hierarchy where the opposite happens for the lobster that's victorious. It gets more confident, gets more aggressive, and it's more and more likely to kind of be successful in these endeavors moving forward. Now obviously humans are not perfectly analogous to lobsters, but there's this idea here that
00:07:18
Speaker
If I dress a certain way or hold myself with a certain type of confidence, not only is there going to be a social feedback loop, people are going to treat me better, people are going to listen to what I have to say more, they're going to be more interested in me, they're going to be nicer to me, more polite to me, but I might actually receive, you know, that's actually connected to my
00:07:36
Speaker
animal nature or I guess my hormonal nature or my psychological nature as a living organism, and I'm going to receive a feeling or a hormonal feedback loop that's going to encourage me to then engage in more behavior, take more risks, put myself out there, and I'll then be exposed to more of these beneficial side effects and I'll go up.
00:07:56
Speaker
where likewise, if I end up going the opposite direction, I'll feel deflated, I'll feel defeated. People will respond to that by treating me poorly, by treating me negatively, and this kind of feedback loop can go the negative way. So we want to first recognize that this is a thing. Just say this is a fact of the world, a fact of kind of social engagement. Recognize that it's an essential thing, if not a central and natural thing. Maybe we could exist without it or try to limit it as much as possible, but it's a natural thing. It's tied to our biology.
00:08:24
Speaker
And the third point in this chapter was when we identify these two things, then what we want to do is we don't want to just jump outside of this. We don't want to just step
Truthfulness in Relationships
00:08:32
Speaker
outside of this, transcend this. It's not really possible. What we want to do is make a small change through a small action that begins a feedback loop that works in our favor. So his example of standing up straight or later in the book, his example of cleaning your room.
00:08:45
Speaker
These are examples of small actions we can take that can start to build momentum in a positive direction and start to engage because a feedback loop is a nature of reality. It can harm us and benefit us. So we want to use it to our advantage to benefit us, to build our confidence, to build momentum, to get ourselves moving in the right direction. And I think what he rightly points out is that
00:09:08
Speaker
I think there can be a tendency to not acknowledge that this exists both by yourself or in social dynamics. And then when you don't acknowledge it exists, there can be, why is this not working for me? Why does it feel so challenging? It's because you're trying to...
00:09:23
Speaker
You're trying to buck a trend you've been contributing to for a long time probably, or you're trying to overcome a lot of negative momentum. So this idea of small incremental steps to build that in the right direction. I think it's true. I think it's probably one of the most helpful things that I do that I think people can do for improving your lives is trying to identify where can I get this momentum going in my favor? Where can I get that feedback loop working for me? So that was a lot of me. That was a lot of me talking about what I think is true. What are your thoughts on that, Caleb?
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'd reinforce that this is the idea that there are feedback loops. You know, Epictetus has the analogy of a fire. He says, when you get angry, you've not only experienced that evil, but you've also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire. And this is the same idea that every
00:10:18
Speaker
Judgment decision reinforces one aspect of our character, and he wants to be moving in the right direction. And that is, I think, a generally true observation about human psychology, about our lives.
00:10:37
Speaker
And maybe what Peterson adds to this is this bit you were highlighting at the very end, which is that, okay, feedback loops exist, but they're present in small ways, ways we tend to overlook. You know, there's that slogan, the little things are the big things. And why is Peterson talking about things like standing up with your back straight, wanting to clean out?
00:11:04
Speaker
your room because these small actions, these sorts of things you might ignore or tell a story about why they are not important often are, and they may be ways of pouring fuel on the fire, as it were. So I think that's, for me, of course, the lesson about feedback loops
00:11:25
Speaker
quite common, picking out some of these specific social feedback loops is the contribution that Peterson makes to my mind.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. There's both making small changes and then there's this idea of the social aspect. We're looking at us as social creatures, right? As creatures that are subconsciously influenced. And by subconsciously, I just mean like non-perceptively, not noticeably influenced by the people around us in meaningful ways that change the way we feel about ourselves and change the ways that we end up acting or the kind of confidence or character we have.
00:11:58
Speaker
And Peterson has another comment about one of the most important things you can do for your child is make them the kind of child that's fun to play with.
00:12:08
Speaker
Because if they are, then they'll get a lot of feedback, they'll engage in a lot of play, they'll get a lot of feedback from other kids, and they'll kind of develop their character that way. And so I think about this, I think about the kind of social benefit that can come from, if you can just get over that hurdle where you're just kind of generally
00:12:29
Speaker
liked or kind of generally socially accepted, then you can experiment in that playground and you can build your confidence in that playground. Whereas if you're below that hurdle where you're kind of generally disliked or most of the social interactions you end up in are kind of antagonistic or awkward,
00:12:45
Speaker
then it can be difficult to kind of get the exposure to that and play around in that playground to kind of build those skills. And those skills are both social skills, but they're also, you know, just life skills because so many things are done collaboratively. So many things are done in kind of communal spaces.
00:13:00
Speaker
So that social aspect and the fact that that's kind of a hardwired fact of our psychology too, I think it's great. I think it's a really valuable, really valuable important lesson and one that I applied before reading this book in some sense, but will pay more attention to now moving forward. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. A piece that we didn't talk about so much is that another frame on this is that you can
00:13:26
Speaker
Some of the contributions to these social loops, especially, are properties just of us, of an individual, how I stand. But many of them are patterns between people. How one action I take influences another, but we often find ourselves in
00:13:46
Speaker
common patterns, especially with friends or partners, loved ones, where our fights turned out to be quite predictable. And you know, when that happens, there's a kind of pattern that's maybe not so useful. And these sorts of things also, of course, form their own kind of loop-like logic. They also sort of subsist off of each other's behaviors.
00:14:15
Speaker
So it's not just, I suppose what I'm trying to say is it's not just properties of individuals, as it were, that we can think of as playing role in these feedback loops, but also the way our patterns of behavior with others and histories with others contribute to our social life.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, totally greeted. It's not, I mean, that's one thing that we'll get to later. I think Peterson has this, I mean, I'll get to this later. I think Peterson has this really strong focus on the individual.
00:14:51
Speaker
in a way that lends himself to not think about systems. And I guess the system at its smallest level is just the relationship between you and one other person, right? Like the power dynamic between you, or I would say power dynamic, but the dynamic between you and your partner, you and your family. And I would even branch that out and say that there's kind of patterns or ways of interacting between societies or kind of identities or roles within society or things like that. But I think Peterson has this tendency, which I think is a,
00:15:22
Speaker
harmful tendency, I think he gets this wrong, to kind of focus predominantly on the individual. Which is not to say his comment about the individual is wrong, as you're pointing out, I think it just also applies to other contexts that he doesn't focus on as much. But that's something that I'll get to in the next section where I talk about one thing that I think was false or I disagree with in the book. Did you want to jump into the part that you thought was true or most beneficial?
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the most useful rule from the book, the one that stuck out to me this time I read it, the second time I've read the book, is tell the truth, be precise. I think he has a
00:16:04
Speaker
admirable focus on telling the truth. And it's related to your points because in many interactions, whether or not we tell the truth or not is a small thing, but it's something that in Epictetus's words adds fuel to one fire and we want to be adding fuel to the right fire. So just to read a small passage from Peterson.
00:16:30
Speaker
its seeming innocuousness, its trivial meanness, the feeble arrogance that gives rise to it, the apparently trivial circumventing of responsibility that it aims at. These all work effectively to camouflage its true nature, its genuine dangerousness, and its equivalence with the great acts of evil that man perpetrates and often enjoys. Lies corrupt the world.
00:16:57
Speaker
And yeah, it has his hyperbolic at times almost shrill style, but there is, I think there is something true to this observation that the apparent
00:17:12
Speaker
triviality of some lies often do contribute to evading responsibility, failing to play one's role adequately in a way that often just postpones suffering, if not invoking suffering at that very moment.
00:17:35
Speaker
So a fun concrete lesson from this in relationships between two people is the sort of principle of, you know, having the fight, not letting things that deeply bother you go unmentioned because when you do so, often you are not communicating your needs adequately and the habits just going to persist, maybe get worse and you often blow up.
00:18:05
Speaker
later on. And by having the fight, if you do it well, you are engaging in a form of productive disagreements, if there's any disagreement at all.
00:18:16
Speaker
And that is going to hopefully, you know, communicate what your needs are, get a sense of why the other person is behaving the way they are, and you can sort out what needs to be done next instead of not having the fights and evading any responsibility for standing up for your own needs and probably making things worse for others down the line.
00:18:44
Speaker
So that was my favorite, that's my favorite rule from this time. Yeah, I think it's a great one. And I guess there might be three reasons why you'd lie is one is you're kind of lying to yourself. You're trying to make reality something it's not. And the idea there, I guess the advice there is just kind of be brave, just kind of buck up, just embrace reality as it is and understand your own strength to handle it if you're not avoiding it.
00:19:07
Speaker
So then you might lie to manipulate others or to try to control the situation. And I think there's a stoic point here about how, you know, we're often not as good at controlling other things as we'd like to be or as we think we are.
00:19:21
Speaker
And often if you just focus on doing your best in the situation as you can do to be a truthful, honest, good person, that will put you in, there's a consequentialist point like that will help you succeed, like navigate the situation well. But also, you know, you don't have any guarantee that your lie is going to pay off. So you might as well not lie. And that way, you know, you don't have a guarantee either way, but at least now you did a lie. But then there was another point also about how patronizing lying can be. There's this lovely passage where he talks about
00:19:49
Speaker
You know, working in a hospital for those with mental conditions and somebody, you know, comes up to him and is asking him questions. He's, he's with a bunch of doctors in training or he is a doctor in training. And the person's asking, you know, who are you going to go with you? And everybody's kind of awkward and uncomfortable. And he just tells the person, no, you can't go with us because.
00:20:07
Speaker
You know, we're, we're doctors and you're not, and this is part of our training program. And so we're the only ones that get to be on this. And there's this moment of conflict, this moment of awkwardness, but then it passes because, you know, in the story, at least the person perceives, you know, that they're being respected, they're being treated as an equal. So the conflict of reality.
00:20:26
Speaker
doesn't hurt their relationship between each other because at least they're being treated both as people, right? So when you lie to others, you're trying to control things in a way that often doesn't pan out or you're really just patronizing people and you're not respecting people. And then to go on to this third way, there's this third thing that I think you hit on and they kind of, I want to pull it out because I think it's really valuable, is another time we lie because we just want to avoid conflict.
00:20:51
Speaker
We're not trying to manipulate people, but we're just being kind of, I don't know, cowardly. It's like scared. As you said, have the fight, you know, you're with your partner and you don't want to bring up that like, Hey, you know, this thing you do really annoys me. Or, you know, I, I, I really would prefer if we did this other thing that's going to cause a conflict or something like this. And to this idea of just having the fight. I mean, he talked about this about.
00:21:13
Speaker
in the book about, you know, you have to, you have to treat yourself, there's this Kantian point, you have to treat yourself like a person worthy of respect. And if you engage into a conflict, it's bad to patronize the other person and to lie to them.
00:21:28
Speaker
and not to treat them worthy of respect. But then when you don't bring up your problems, you're patronizing yourself and treating yourself poorly. You're treating yourself the way that you wouldn't want to be treated by somebody else who didn't care about what you care about or who didn't care about helping you find the resolution that can help both of you. So I think there's a lot of relevant benefits he brings out there. It's just this one simple thing of, I think the rule is off the top of my head is don't
00:21:57
Speaker
Tell the truth or at the very least don't lie. And there's a lot of benefits there. I think not in this act of telling the truth, but in the way telling the truth, what telling the truth says about the way you see the world, yourself and other people. You have access to a lot of benefits if you lean into that.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. I think an important addition to this is that there are different ways of telling the truth and some ways are better than others is the short way to put it. It's always useful to ask, is there a way to state what I think is true without
00:22:36
Speaker
immediately causing some form of backlash. How can I put this as best as possible? And I think, you know, some of the advice he gives here of standing up for yourself in the chapter of standing up for yourself is if you're confronting someone about their past behavior, ensure that you can describe specifically what that behavior is and give, you know, at least three examples of that.
00:23:04
Speaker
happening in the past. So you have this idea of one, can you make the expression of your idea as thoughtful as possible? And then two, can you back it up and show that it is in fact true by being precise, not vague, and giving examples or evidence for what you are communicating?
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a good rule. I mean, I guess the point there is that it becomes a pattern. It becomes look like the person you need to both confront this pattern of behavior. And the examples kind of lay that out clearly.
00:23:43
Speaker
Excellent. Well, what do you think he got wrong? You mentioned it a little bit previously, but what do you want to focus on here someplace where you think you missed the mark? Yeah.
Self-Improvement vs. Societal Change
00:23:55
Speaker
So the part stood out to me the most. There's a chapter called State Your Room in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World. Or at least that's the theme of the chapter. And the idea there is that, which is one that I agree with. I'm going to start saying it as charitably as possible. The idea there is that, look,
00:24:13
Speaker
Of all the problems in the world, the ones that involve other people, like big macro systems of like politics, war, culture, these are really, really difficult problems. You know, you have like a sliding scale, you have how complicated is the problem and then how much control do you have over the problem? And when we take things like that, that is something that's like a 10 out of 10, you know,
00:24:37
Speaker
I don't know, the current political issues in your country. That is like a nine or a 10 out of 10 in complication, and you're probably like a one or two in terms of control.
00:24:46
Speaker
The idea is like by focusing on this or criticizing this, it's going to be incredibly ineffective. First of all, not only that, but it's going to your attention towards the things that are simple and in your control, but also beneficial. An example being cleaning your room. Take an example being also, you know, improving your sleep schedule, improving your diet, improving your exercise routine. These little things that are going to expose you to those positive feedback loops I was talking about.
00:25:14
Speaker
But they're relatively simple. You know what the answer is. We know how much sleep we should be getting. We know we should be going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time every day. We actually know the answer to that question. There's no ambiguity there. And it's something you can totally control and do, right? Or at least, you know, people have, you know, maybe you have a young child or something, it's complicated, but you can, you can control it more than you can control, you know, whoever's leading your country right now, right?
00:25:38
Speaker
And so if we, if we, if we get stuck in this mindset of criticizing the world, criticizing the world, criticizing the world, then we don't end up cleaning our room as a metaphor. We don't have folks that don't think that are up to us in our control. That I think is a really, really great point. But what, what, what I don't like is I think that he downplays.
00:25:56
Speaker
the benefit. It's not like focus on that and then get into politics because politics is really important. Focus on that and then get into the things that are external to your immediate world because those things are really important. Instead, we just skip
00:26:13
Speaker
There comes almost criticism of being out in the world, a criticism of navigating the world politically, looking for structural changes, looking to change the environment around you. The reason changing our politics, changing the world around us is important is because of the feedback loops he talked about in an earlier chapter. We're sensitive to the feedback loops of our environment, so we should change them because that helps ourselves and helps others.
00:26:40
Speaker
He also talks about, as I mentioned earlier, about holding ourselves to a certain standard of obligation. We want to treat ourselves like we're someone to be taken care of, which means don't lie, you know, don't make friends with people who don't want the best for you. But part of taking care of someone is also taking care of their environment. It's also taking care of, you know, the things that they're exposed to or doing the best that you can in that world.
00:27:04
Speaker
So I agree that life is a mix of self-improvement and structural change, and that some people focus too much on structural change. But I think it's a mistake, and I think it's a classic misinterpretation of stoicism that people fall into to reduce your realm of responsibility to ultimately yourself.
00:27:19
Speaker
I think the thing that has the most net positive, you know, if, if cleaning your room is something that easy and helps yourself, well, then making large scale political change is something that helps many, many people. And that doesn't have to be in terms of, you know, an election or something like that. That can be kind of robust charities. That can be, you know, reform in education, reform in housing, reform in, in, you know, welfare or healthcare, these kinds of major structures that either.
00:27:49
Speaker
lead to negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops for people. So I just wasn't getting, I think this is like a blind spot for him or I'm a little bit confused by it. I'm not getting this view like, yeah, clearly start with yourself. You know, you got to crawl before you can.
00:28:04
Speaker
walk or run, but then the most impressive people are the ones running, right? And the end goal needs to be running. And if you just end up walking and say walking is great, I'm just going to keep walking, I'm just going to make my room is going to be the cleanest room ever, but I'm only going to worry about myself or only going to worry about my immediate family. I'm not really understanding that. I mean, A, I think that's a gap, but B, I think I find him like strangely critical of people. I think there should be almost the sympathy like, okay,
00:28:32
Speaker
Obviously you admire people that go out into the world, but you're not ready yet. You need to kind of grow. Like the Stoics are really good about this, right? Like obviously you admire Socrates, but you're not ready to be Socrates. So what you got to do is like,
00:28:45
Speaker
work on not being embarrassed if someone insults you. You gotta work on not getting angry if you're stuck in traffic. It's not actually like, yeah, you want to be a sage, you want to be this amazing person, but you just can't skip the step. But in Pearson's writing, this book at least, I'm not getting that picture of the sage at the end. I'm not getting the picture of
00:29:04
Speaker
Okay, what happens once I complete the steps? Shouldn't it be working on these larger systems and structures? And not only is that missing, I think he's like, he seems to be kind of actively against it in a way that I think is, I think he gets it wrong. I think that's that. I think he's mistaking it, mistaken there. Yeah. So the idea is his rule, set your room in order for you to criticize the world.
00:29:29
Speaker
neglects that part of setting your room in order, part of getting your life under control just involves interacting with other people. There's a sense in which
00:29:45
Speaker
at some level, maybe large political questions, those are not so much a part of the project of self-transformation. But living virtuously will involve you interacting in your local community, your workplace, and inevitably these larger questions which
00:30:07
Speaker
are at least political at the local level, at least cultural at the local level are going to arise and you can't evade them. If you do so, you're failing to set yourself in order just because you are a social being. That's not all that you said, but do you think that's the core of your disagreement with Peterson here?
00:30:30
Speaker
I think that's the core of my disagreement because I think you did a good job summarizing that and I think the idea is that we have to be involved in other people and care about how to treat with other people, not just because that's a good thing to do and that's what a good person does, but because these feedback loops, when we talk about feedback loops, what kind of feedback loop is what school somebody goes to?
00:30:55
Speaker
You know, what kind of hospitals they have access to in their community, what kind of housing or fooding do they have access to? Those are the really substantial feedback loops that will cause harm or benefit to people over time, depending on the answer to those questions.
00:31:12
Speaker
I don't think it's something to make fun of somebody for if their room is dirty and they try to solve those problems first. I think you might want to say, hey, become as good of a person as you can be to solve those problems later. I think that kind of sequential order to it makes sense, but I don't think it's something to criticize people for.
00:31:32
Speaker
if they get that order mixed up or they want to jump into the bigger questions earlier. And as you pointed out, those bigger questions are necessary in terms of personal development, not only necessary in terms of your own personal development, but I think I would question how much developing you've done if you don't really care about those other things.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. There's also the point that what's the positive vision and you don't really get much of a positive vision except for people resisting, you know, communist regimes being especially admirable. You don't get what does it look like for someone who set their room in order to interact with politics or interact with your community in an admirable way from this book.
00:32:18
Speaker
Which to some extent is fine, you know, it's only 300 pages or so, but that question does. I want it all. Yeah, it does arise. That's right. I would say that in general, I think Peterson, you know, it's roughly right here that people spend too much time on politics, including himself. You know, he will have another episode critiquing Peterson the person, but
00:32:42
Speaker
To some extent, I agree that concretely you need to enter a part of being becoming more virtuous, becoming a better person doesn't involve interacting with your community, but that doesn't look like getting involved with fighting climate change as a high schooler or something like that. A lot of the concrete cases that he takes on, I am generally pretty sympathetic to.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think we put this one last time. I think that's fair. And as I said, I'm sympathetic with that as well. I think it is. I think it's that missing the positive picture. So missing like, what do you do once the room is clean? You know, what do you do once the room is in order?
00:33:25
Speaker
What's that supposed to look like? How does that make sense? And then second, you know, getting involved in climate with climate change as a teenager is a mistake for effective reasons. It's not necessarily because it's because it's ineffective for your personal development. It's ineffective in terms of your ability to impact the world. But it would not be a mistake in terms of being a problem worth solving. And I think that distinction doesn't get doesn't get nuanced out enough. Yeah, yeah.
00:33:53
Speaker
I think it's also true that one reason he doesn't like people as in the world is that they're evading responsibility or they're tyrannizing others when they critique the world. But there are ways to approach these large problems like climate change or the way animals are treated that are purely individual and do not involve making demands.
00:34:21
Speaker
on others, at least not in the same sense that you might make a demand on others by going on a march or proposing some new policy. If you care a lot about animals, you can go vegan. If you care a lot about the environments, you can control your different forms of resource expenditure.
00:34:38
Speaker
And he went to some extent. He doesn't like this because maybe they also, at least indirectly, are focused on critiquing other people, blaming the world in some ways. And there's something to that. I think I would say when I thought about the case of a high schooler combating climate change, I'm thinking more in terms of them spending lots of time telling other people what to do rather than
00:35:01
Speaker
say, spending time figuring out what should one think about the most effective ways to combat climate change or something like that, which seems like a good use of time. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:35:29
Speaker
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00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, great. What was your main disagreement? My main disagreement is a cluster of two related things, which is that Peterson is too Freudian and too platonic in his model of the cell.
Critique of Peterson's Self-Model and Archetypes
00:36:13
Speaker
So I think this is an interesting aspect of Peterson, and it maps onto his political philosophy, but it leads to a lack of unity
00:36:25
Speaker
in his vision of what the self is, who people are. And he also spends too much time focusing on what Jungians might call the shadow or everyone's capacity to do great evil. So to be more precise, he talks
00:36:42
Speaker
a lot about, you know, everyone has these different parts of them, some of them which are capable of doing great evil and part of evolving, developing as a human being is facing down those parts of yourself.
00:37:01
Speaker
He has this line from Jung, which is sort of encapsulates the view, no tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. Which is, as I interpret it, it's an esoteric statement. But as I interpret it, he's saying that you can't be a sage unless you're deeply familiar with the nature of evil and
00:37:29
Speaker
The way in which he familiarizes himself with evil is by reading different accounts of communist or fascist evils by
00:37:45
Speaker
problematizing different kinds of human behavior. So on the chapter of domination, there's always this question now. If someone is doing an apparently good thing, are they just trying to dominate the other person in some sort of indirect way? And I think that's a kind of thought pattern that can often lead to rumination focusing on the negative and the model of the self
00:38:15
Speaker
I would prefer is something much closer to the Stoic one where the self is a unity. It's not made up of a battleground of different parts. There's not some war between reason, emotion, the unconscious.
00:38:30
Speaker
or Freudian aspects of yourself. Instead, there's a single person who is getting closer and closer to achieving the good. And you don't need to spend time ruminating on man's great capacity for doing evil in order to achieve, you know, make progress on that path. So I think that's my deepest disagreement with
00:39:00
Speaker
Peterson's approach. Yeah. I mean, I really liked the way that you put that, that really crystallized something for me because, you know, so I do a lot of martial arts, we've done a lot of Brazilian jitsu, MMA, things like this, like fighting sports. And, you know, one thing that Peterson talked about, I think on Joe Rogan, so Joe Rogan, you know, it's got this intersection of jiu-jitsu, MMA community. And then also, you know, has had on Jordan Peterson quite a bit.
00:39:27
Speaker
there's this this this saying that never really resonated with me where Jordan Peterson talks about you know you don't want to become weak or passive you want to become strong an animal a monster a beast and then learn how to control that beast nature you know you want to be this incredible strong and and now i understand like as you're talking about it it's just the platonic picture right it's just this Freudian picture which is you want this this
00:39:54
Speaker
repetitive in the Plato sense or bestial part of yourself to be fully embraced and strong, but you want to have the reason, the ration, the rational, the, the good part of yourself to be so strong that it can control. I've talked about this in other episodes of Plato use this metaphor of charioteer controlling horses. Right. And so yeah, Peterson's point here is you don't want really weak.
00:40:16
Speaker
sickly horses, you want incredibly strong horses that are being controlled, that are being used for good. But as you said, it is this view, which is this idea that there's this part of you that you'll never, you'll never
00:40:30
Speaker
don't know, get away from. It's a necessary part of yourself. It's something that can at its best only be understood and controlled. And a part, you know, he talks about this a lot is this intersection between order and chaos, right? And this is a way of maintaining order. And I guess this part of yourself would be the metaphorical representation of chaos. And I'm not sure if I'm, I think I'm just clarifying this in my own words, but
00:40:55
Speaker
It's something that never really resonated with me. I agree about being excellent. I think as any person, you know, I really like Jujitsu. I really like this ability to say, well, look, I can do physically difficult things. I can have courage. I can have moderation, these kind of stoic ideas, which means I can do things that are physically uncomfortable. I can do things that are scary, and I can apply those skills in other contexts. But I don't look at it as kind of controlling the beast inside.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think probably because of my stoic background. And as you said, so there's this idea about which is right. But as you said, you pointed out practically some downsides, which is that it leads to kind of rumination leads to a focus on the negative. It can lead to kind of a skepticism about the good of other people. And it can lead to this view that like, well, in order for me to be happy, I need to spend a lot of time, you know, reading about the, the gulags or, you know, reading about times when people have suffered in, you know, out of the Second World War or something like this.
00:41:53
Speaker
which I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure if that's necessary. I think you can, I think you can get, I think you can grow and develop without requiring that kind of rumination, but I might be wrong there.
00:42:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think Nietzsche is right that if you stare too long in the abyss, it will stare back. I think that is correct. I think part of Peterson's view of development involves facing darker parts of yourself, which sort of reifies them in an odd way. Like there is, in fact, a darker part of yourself. Totally. He talks about at one point, he talks about having violent fantasies.
00:42:31
Speaker
which at some levels normal I think for most males I don't know if he didn't really go into the details about what those fantasies were or if he did I don't remember it and I would be inclined to think look those fantasies are either normal or they're
00:42:46
Speaker
distortions of some sort, you don't need to somehow come to terms with the part of yourself that is producing these, you know, dark and deep desires. Instead, you can, you know, either notice that it's normal, or if it's not normal, fix it and stop having those, those thoughts to try to a way to put it, but I think would at least be the beginning of a better approach.
00:43:09
Speaker
Caleb's advice for self-improvement, just stop. Just stop. Come to us for the hot tips. You find yourself with murderous inclinations. Just stop. But no, good point. And like the one other point, like I'll be charitable because I don't know, this is just the way I am. I feel bad criticizing someone unless I come in with the other side. There is this point, like there's a valid point that sometimes people just ignore the bad parts of themselves or ignore the bad parts of other people.
00:43:38
Speaker
Being naive is a real thing, right? And you see this when people start practicing stoicism, saying, well, okay, guess what? This is not supposed to upset me. This is not supposed to make me angry. So I guess it doesn't make me angry. And they just kind of ignore the fact that they haven't progressed far enough or they haven't, you know, that it still makes them angry. And they're just ignoring that. So there's kind of being naive, I think is a real thing. And I think is a problem. I don't think you want to be naive.
00:44:04
Speaker
And I think the stoics would agree with that in terms of you want to embrace reality and part of embracing reality is understanding that some people have the capacity to be murderous. You might be one of those people under the right circumstances. People you love might be those people under the right circumstances.
00:44:18
Speaker
Likewise, they might also have the capacity to be incredibly cowardly or incredibly, or betray you. Like not being naive is a good thing. Not sugarcoating or trying to strength the will to, to pretend like, well, I'm not an angry person or I'm not jealous or I'm not envious, or I don't want to, you know.
00:44:36
Speaker
I don't sometimes want to just like see that person who got the promotion ahead of me get humiliated or you know sometimes I don't want things sometimes we all want things that are not good things to want right sometimes we all just kind of fail to live up to our expectations of ourselves and it's not right to ignore that or pretend like that's not happening again you're being naive
00:44:57
Speaker
But, as you said, that doesn't mean you need to reify or put on this pedestal, this bad part of yourself. It doesn't mean, as the quote you said at the start, that you cannot get to heaven without your roots coming down to hell. That's an entirely different thing. Right, right. Excellent. Well, let's touch on some of the ideas we thought were, if not true or completely mistaken. Interesting. Yeah, cool.
00:45:25
Speaker
We've done one true thing each, one thing we disagreed with, there was false each, and then now one interesting thing each. So mine, part that I think is interesting again, comes back to this Jungian picture of the self. So the idea that our minds are genetically or psychologically inclined towards certain essential myths, stories or metaphors that are shared by all people,
00:45:46
Speaker
and that these metaphors shape the way we view the world. So all of us, all humans have a tendency to think about the world in a certain way, attach ourselves to certain kinds of myths cross-culturally, and so all humans tend to see the world in a certain way through those myths. That is something that Peterson argues for. And because of that, Peterson thinks there's a major advantage to being aware of these myths. If we can understand these myths, then we can understand
00:46:11
Speaker
other people's psychology, our own psychology. We can understand interactions between people. We can understand stories and history. We understand these myths. And one of the main myths is order versus chaos. That's what the entire book is structured around. The idea that yin and yang, you know, light and dark.
00:46:29
Speaker
Black and white, whatever metaphor you want to use, these are ways of encapsulating, you know, heaven and hell, these are ways of encapsulating this consistent cross-cultural distinction metaphor or way of viewing the world as a battle between order and chaos, good and evil.
00:46:46
Speaker
Ironically, the main metaphor he uses here is masculine and feminine. Not ironic, but just kind of, I think funny because I think I naturally did some, as I said, order and chaos, good and evil, light and dark. I think those are pretty natural extensions. And then for him, it's masculine and feminine.
00:47:06
Speaker
Which not necessarily for him, I think he's commenting on a cultural story here. But I'm stealing this from Philosophy Tube, who's a philosopher and YouTuber. I think Peterson's mistake here, so I think that's really interesting. I think that's helpful. I think Peterson's mistake in his writing is that just because these are cross-cultural stories or myths does not mean that they're true.
00:47:26
Speaker
And I think that, to use the stoic term, that Peterson can kind of mistake the impression for reality in a sense here. So we might have, as humans, have a tendency to have a certain kind of impression about the way things are. But that doesn't mean it's true. So just because our minds or cultures of the past may be inclined to view the world as order versus chaos or masculine versus feminine energy, that does not mean this is true. It just means that our minds are inclined to think of the world a certain way.
00:47:53
Speaker
And I don't really ever see Peterson making that jump, which I think is a fault of saying, hey, well, just because people tend to look at things this way, this could be wrong. You know, we could have a, we could have an inclination or we could have a duty then to try to move away from it. You know, the same way the Stoics would point out, you know, people have a tendency to view money as a good. People have a tendency to view status as a good.
00:48:18
Speaker
that tendency is wrong. That's going to be a cross-cultural tendency. It's just the way that human beings end up making mistakes in the way that we see the world. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true. So that's my criticism to it, but I think this idea of thinking about the world in terms of myths and stories, and Peterson's particularly good at that in talking about Disney, talking about Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, connecting these stories that we really resonate with, at least
00:48:44
Speaker
You know, I do is these kinds of movies you watch as a kid with these, these greater cultural myths and showing how those permeate all these different stories. That's really cool. Really interesting. A lot of benefits to that doesn't necessarily mean it's the case though. And I would like to see that have been pushed a little further, you know.
00:49:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I would agree that this is one of the most interesting aspects of Peterson. It's myths make things concrete. There are other ways to learn about the world. I think fiction can play a similar role. It can make types of people or kinds of experiences concrete to us in a way that just reading through
00:49:24
Speaker
philosophy or some more abstract representation of the world cannot. And Peterson's good at that, both in telling stories of his own personal life or these larger tales of myths, whether it's from the Bible or pop culture, what have you.
00:49:45
Speaker
And I think there's also something to the idea that a lot of these myths tap into stereotypes and stereotypes are stereotypes usually because they are accurate to some extent and one shouldn't forget that but also as you
00:50:04
Speaker
say you shouldn't overrate a stereotype's accuracy. It's not always a good picture on the world, and some of them may not be accurate at all. I like his focus on individual myths and stories, but the order versus chaos thing, masculine versus feminine, is something I've
00:50:27
Speaker
does not make that much sense to me as those ideas just seem too abstract, too vague. I don't know why orders necessarily masculine and chaos is necessarily feminine. No, in some sense maybe that's true, but in others it does not seem so true to me.
00:50:42
Speaker
I think it's only true in the sense that like Western culture, which is the one I feel comfortable talking about, has tended to represent things this way, this way. So I think of like, you know, Apollo and Dionysus, that's something from Nietzsche as well, but something from ancient Greek myths. So Apollo is God and he represents kind of order and reason and this kind of masculinity. And then Dionysus is another God, he's the God of wine, but he has feminine features in ancient Greek myth, long kind of long hair such that he actually gets confused for being a woman.
00:51:12
Speaker
And Dionysus causes a lot of chaos, causes a lot of, I don't know, I won't say bad times, but certainly chaotic partying times where they've gone. And then you go to the 60s, right? And you have the hippies with their long hair, the Beatles with their long hair. It makes them look like girls versus this masculine military crew cut of the men. There's a fact to it that that's been a representation in Western society.
00:51:40
Speaker
Like there's a kind of sociological point here, but I'm not getting the jump to like the fundamental nature of reality. Like that's just that that's a point that I'm not getting. I'm getting it as like a descriptive kind of media studies claim, but I'm not getting it as like an essential as an essential claim. I guess is what I'm saying.
00:51:58
Speaker
But Peterson is very reverent for history, right? It's the same thing with the lobsters. If this is also reverent to history, lobsters love history. If you just take the time to talk to one of them, you find out. But this is this conservative picture, which is this idea that if something's been around for a long time, it's probably around because it's true or useful.
00:52:22
Speaker
And so, you know, if this is a myth we had in 300 BC of masculine versus feminine chaos versus order, and it's around today, it is probably something true or useful about it. And you know, that's fine, but I, and I think there's something compelling to that in certain cases, but I don't see kind of, I don't see basing, you know, we're trying to push past that what's, what's, what's useful as a general heuristic to what is true. And I don't see that as giving me anything as I pushed through to what is true, you know,
00:52:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would say so just terms of the general masculine versus feminine type bit, I might have a bit of an axe to grind here, but I just don't see it. So like, you know, you've got Artemis, Athena, feminine, Athena, exceptionally logical. You have Eris, the goddess of discord. Sure, that's quite chaotic. But you also have common tropes of the pranksters who are usually men.
00:53:17
Speaker
or historically you have these ideas of roaming bands of warrior men. Is that a force for order or chaos versus the woman who damages the hearth? Seems like a force for order, not chaos. At any rate, it just seems to me like that particular myth, order and chaos, sure, there's some large difference there, mapping that onto even Western ideas of
00:53:48
Speaker
uh masculinity and femininity seems too coarse to me. I wouldn't say there's nothing you know as you say there's there are kinds of effeminacy or feminine type ideas that challenge order but then again there are also roaming bands of wolves that challenge order and those are entirely masculine. That's a good point that
00:54:12
Speaker
So even to make the sociological claim or like the mythological claim, this has been a way Western societies represented things, is cherry picking. As you're pointing out with the gods, there's plenty of gods, more plenty of representations of women that have been contributed to order, plenty of representations of men that have contributed to chaos. And you're either cherry picking or you're getting a very distorted picture
00:54:36
Speaker
you're kind of putting the car before the horse, and you're kind of putting that lens on beforehand, right? Because as you said, yeah, that the, you know, the, the woman who kind of, you know,
00:54:47
Speaker
I don't know, I would say even, even again, this is a stereotype, but domesticates keep the house in order, you know, provides a safe place to come back to. That is like, uh, that is, as you said, a force for order. So you're, you're already viewing things the wrong way. You're already kind of looking, looking for proof that the feminine is chaotic. If you're going to get evidence for it, because you could obviously get evidence in either direction.
00:55:12
Speaker
Yeah, you know, like Zeus versus Hera, who is order and chaos. Yeah, totally, totally. Not so obvious. But I think one other fundamental disagreement we'd have with Peterson is just that he is a pragmatist of some sort. So he thinks these ideas being true is a matter of them working for us, for society. And then
00:55:31
Speaker
An additional question I think we would have is probably where neither of us are pragmatists, at least not in that sense, and not in that philosophical sense. And then there's the issue, okay, well, what does works mean? Is this the society we want or are there other stories that would work better under some different definition of justice, social harmony, what have you?
00:55:58
Speaker
There's also this perspective aspect of it too, which I think you're right to bring up, which is like order seems in a sense to be anything that is not what I do if I'm comfortable or in a position of power is going to seem rather chaotic. So as you said about works, there's kind of a definition of what this, this is working. And there's kind of a perspective that comes from, well, who is it working for? Who is it benefiting? Who is it supporting? And does it feel like it's working for the people that it's not benefiting or not supporting, you know?
00:56:28
Speaker
Like, does this kind of myth of women representing chaos, does that feel like it's working for women very well? It's at the most base level as a question to ask, right? Maybe it feels like it's working for men just fine or was working for men just fine. But, you know, that, that, that would be the first kind of question to ask once we start, you know, really pushing that pragmatism further. Yeah. Yeah. So the last bit I wanted to say, and I think to some extent you've already chatted about it just in terms of the idea I found interesting that I wanted some highlights.
Sacrifice and Future Outcomes
00:56:56
Speaker
is a specific story he tells about sacrifice and the meaning of religious sacrifice, essentially as a way to understand that we can delay our gratification.
00:57:14
Speaker
and connecting religious ideas' ritual with this psychological power of ours to see ourselves through time and make sacrifices in the present. He writes,
00:57:33
Speaker
Nothing other than the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation and hero worship and then millennia of study to distill that idea into a story.
00:57:54
Speaker
It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, if you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present, you can change the structure of reality. And he means this in a literal sense, I think, unlike some of perhaps his other uses of myth.
00:58:20
Speaker
where these religious rituals, these practices of giving up some amount of your harvest for the sake of the city gods were ways of reinforcing the community
00:58:37
Speaker
reinforcing the idea that it persists through time and also just this general idea that if we make sacrifices now, whether we are a person, a family, or a community as a whole, that will be better for us in the future. And I think that idea is so interesting as a way to make this narrative concrete.
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah, the first thing I thought when you read this was I was thinking about squirrels. I was like, do squirrels count? Him putting nuts away? Not exactly the thing he's talking about, but I was like, I was thinking of that example. Yeah, I think that capacity, I mean, I think there's something interesting, too, to be viewing self.
00:59:20
Speaker
There's a couple of interesting points you make. One is about this identification with our, either ourselves or the whole. Maybe this is bad for me, but it's good for the community. Maybe this is bad, you know, even if I don't persist, the community persists. That's something interesting. But then there's this other point of, I guess, about this constant kind of battle between the near term and the long term and this, this glorification of sacrifice as the ultimate myth.
00:59:47
Speaker
maybe as the ultimate glorification or the ultimate kind of inspiration for the path to self-improvement. You know, the path to self-improvement, the path to getting your things in order, the path to good life. What all of these stories have in common is sacrifice. So by mythologizing it, you kind of set that as a core value in a way that I guess all of humanity has figured out collectively is one of the most helpful kind of essential myths to have.
01:00:15
Speaker
I'm thinking of this in the Christian tradition because I think it's hard to think about that not in the Christian tradition because there's so much kind of sacrifice built into Christianity. I think that's compelling. I think that is something that you try to in any sort of sport development or any sort of person or any sort of studying or any sort of endeavor, having somebody get behind sacrifice. And I have to think about this. I think the hardest thing for me in terms of my self-improvement was the first thing I got good at.
01:00:44
Speaker
Because before the first thing I got good at, sacrifice just felt like nothing and then I got nothing and then I got nothing in return. Like, so when I first thing I got good at was probably Brazilian jitsu.
01:00:57
Speaker
And when I started training Brazilian jitsu, I just was having less fun than my friends, but I was still sucking at Brazilian jitsu. I still couldn't go out. I couldn't have fun. I couldn't hang out with my friends. And then I was also terrible at the sport. But then, you know, three, four or five years from now, that wasn't the case.
01:01:16
Speaker
Or I think about when people want to invest for the first time. Invest for the first time, when you start investing, you just have less money and no extra money. You just have less. And so the big change for me, I think in my personal development, was understanding that when I got go to jiu-jitsu after years of sacrificing, going to practice and training, that it was like, OK, if I do this, it will pay off. And that kind of confidence and sacrifice, that belief in the effectiveness of sacrifice,
01:01:44
Speaker
is probably the mindset that is most beneficial to me moving forward. So this is something that I really resonate with and agree with. Yeah, that's well put. That's well put. Thanks. Well, I suppose we could wrap up by saying Jordan Peterson, if you're out there, if you're listening to this, let us know what we got wrong. You're always welcome to chat with us. Feel free to come on. Have a debate.
01:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, debate, discussion, conversation. And if there are any other Peterson fans out there, let us know if there's some ideas you felt like we should have treated with more care or Jordan Peterson critics. And of course, we'll
01:02:32
Speaker
happy to cover other thinkers who have touched on or are related to stuck ideas. We're going to start doing that some more. If there are specific thinkers you'd like us to take a look at, let us know about that as well. Awesome. Thanks, Gil. Excellent. Chat soon. Bye.
01:02:53
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:03:08
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.