 All right, let's get a Jordan Peterson. Anyway, Jordan Peterson announced today, I think, that he has resigned from his position as a full 10-year professor at University of Toronto. So he has left a 10-year track position at the University of Toronto. Now, a lot of times that's a big deal because it's a sweet job to have as a 10-year professor. Jordan Peterson doesn't need the money, so it's not an issue of money for Jordan Peterson. But it is, you know, it's pretty noteworthy. Jordan is, but he's not even 60, God, that makes me feel terrible. So Jordan Peterson is actually younger than I am. Go figure. Jordan Peterson is younger than I am because I'm 60 and he hasn't turned 60 yet, so he must be 59. Anyway, for somebody 59 to leave a 10-year track position at the university, why? It's an amazing job. You can be fired from it, basically. I mean, you have to rape a student to be fired. You get to teach, you get to engage with young people. We know probably from watching Jordan from the videos that he loves teaching. And it's a tragedy for somebody as able, as competent, as engaged as Jordan is in teaching and with students, to see him leave the university at a relatively young age. Usually professors hang on well into the 70s and 80s, but they have it. You know, I don't know how old Jordan Peterson is. Just in his words, he says, I am now professor emeritus and before I turned 60. So that means he hasn't turned 60 yet. So it looks like he's about a year younger than me. So the question is why did Jordan Peterson leave academia? Why Jordan Peterson quit the University of Toronto? Because it's clear he loved his job. It's clear he loved teaching. It's clear he loved the students and the interaction between them. So what is it that caused him to leave the job? It's not health-related. It's not, you know, because, again, according to Jordan Peterson, let me just be clear before I say anything else. I don't know what happened at the University of Toronto. I don't know the politics of this, if there are any politics of it. I don't know if there was pressure on him to resign. I don't know if the fact that he took a year leave to deal with his health issue was an issue. I don't know any of this stuff. I am basically assuming that everything Jordan Peterson has written in this article that he wrote is true. I have no way to verify it otherwise or to challenge it. So I'm just going to go with the article as it is. And so we'll use that. According to Jordan Peterson, he resigned. He was not forced out. And it was not a health issue. It was not any reason other than he decided to resign for the following reasons. All right. By the way, given that we're so far behind in terms of just the super chat, try and do $20 questions, just because I'm not going to do a very long show. And that's one way that we can get there quickly. Anyway, so why did he resign? He's saying, look, so this is his first reason. It basically gives two reasons. The first reason he says he's training students. Many of these students are heterosexual white men. And he says the fact is that they have a negligible chance of getting a job today in academia. Diversity, inclusion, and equity. It's usually diversity, equity, and inclusion. But he likes to call it diversity, inclusion, equity because that spells out die, which he obviously likes. Basically rules out the possibility of hiring non-minority faculty members. Now, again, I don't know how accurate this is, but it sounds from everything we're reading about woke. It sounds like it's bad. Now, to some extent, this has been true for a long time, for decades. Departments and universities and schools have tried to create diverse faculty and focused on hiring minorities. I think I've told you the story that when I was being interviewed by Santa Clara University and before they offered me the job, it's a whole ugly story of my attempt to get a job at Santa Clara, ending with the idea that the Jesuits didn't want to hire me because there were too many Jews in the finance department. But before we got to the fact that they didn't want me because I was Jewish, they made an offer to every minority that was on the market possible, particularly this one woman who was black. And they figured they'd score twice. They get a woman and black. She ended up going to Ohio State, so she kind of snubbed them. And that's what made it possible for me to get an academic job after all because all these other people got even better paying jobs at better universities or higher ranked universities, which left the opening for me to ultimately get. And once we overcame, they were lucked to hire another Jew. So universities for decades now have been trying to create these diverse environment. But it hasn't been in a sense of religion. It hasn't been we hire minorities on nobody at all. It hasn't been at the kind of pace and at the level and at the kind of attitude that exists today. So today, it is very difficult, unless you're one of these minorities, to actually get an academic job. More difficult than it was even in the past where already it was a challenge. Today it's even more difficult to do so. So he's saying, look, it doesn't seem right to train these students, to invest so much in these students when they're not going to get a job. There's just no hope for them. It's depressing. And it's not right. But there's nothing I can do within the system to change that. He goes on to say that one of the reasons his students in particular are unlikely to get jobs is because they are his students. That in a sense, he thinks that there's a certain blacklisting going on out there in the profession around him and his students. So if somebody gets their graduate degree working under Jordan Peterson, nobody's going to hire them because of Jordan Peterson, because he's so shunned by the profession. And he says, and this isn't just some inconvenience. These facts render my job morally untenable. And I understand that in a sense of training graduate students. He could quit training graduate students and just teach undergrads. He likes teaching undergrads. You can tell it again from his performance in class. But to him, this is a key point. The second issue, so this is reason number one, his graduate students can't get jobs because they're his and because some of them at least, the ones who are white and male, just can't because they're white male. The second reason he says is because he is just appalled and disgusted by the ideology that he believes is currently destroying universities. And ultimately, if they destroy the university, destroying the culture. And he just doesn't want to be part of it anymore. He's saying that this whole woke attitude, the whole idea of only hiring BIPOC, I don't know what BIPOC, BIPOC is, black indigenous and people of color, into positions is unbelievably destructive. It's unbelievably destructive when done in universities and it's unbelievably destructive outside of universities. And I think his analysis here is good. It's telling, generally, I think this essay that he wrote, he wrote this, I should give you the reference, he wrote this today for more than I can tell, yeah, January 19th. So yesterday, he wrote this yesterday for the Toronto, for the Toronto, no, for the National Post, for the Canadian National Post. And it's titled, Jordan Peterson, Why I'm No Longer, a Tenured Professor at the University of Toronto. And it's very good, I would edit it, but in terms of the content, I think it's very good. He goes off, he's explaining what the consequences of common hiring practices are going to be, not just at the university, but culture-wide. He says universities are hiring people that are unqualified. They're bringing people into graduate programs that should not be there. The hiring, you know, universities are doing away with objective testing. In other words, tests, more and more universities are announcing that they're doing away with testing in deciding who to admit to the university. This is true both on the undergraduate and at the graduate level. This means that we're not necessarily getting the most highly-quality people, students, they're being admitted into these programs more on the basis of their race, gender, sexual identification, whatever. And as a consequence, there's a real possibility that we're just, they're not qualified. It's not true. That everybody can learn everything. For example, there's a real need to know and to understand and to be able to analyze and to be able to do pretty sophisticated statistics. We've talked about this on this show many, many times. In order to analyze healthcare data, to analyze psychological data, a lot of these professions now rely on data collection. Now, whether they should rely on so much data collection or not is a different question. But the fact is that the field today is very data-reliant. And yet many of these students don't know and are not smart enough at the end of the day to get a lot of this stuff. He says other professors, his colleagues in admissions, you know, the committees that admit students, the committees that hire new professors, they all craft DIE statements to obtain research grants. They all use DIE as a standard to hire and to bring people in. They don't believe in this stuff. They don't believe in DIE. They don't believe in this diversity, insanity, this equity idea, but they do it anyway. They just, because they feel like if not, they're gonna be shunned. They're gonna be ridiculed. They're gonna get into trouble with administration. They're gonna get into trouble with students. They even allow themselves to be submitted as Jordan Peterson writes to these unbelievable anti-bias training conducted by unqualified people to try to get rid of biases that implicit, that it's not clear that exist. And it's not clear, it's pretty clear that these trainings won't get rid of them. All, the whole purpose is to induce guilt in you. Use guilt and doubt in you. These are the test for implicit biases. Put it mildly, objectivity has been challenged. Objectivity has been challenged. I mean, if you get rid of objective testing, if you get rid of all the testing for graduate school and you just let everybody in. I mean, this is gonna have a terrible effect on students and the profession, on research, on study and professors of the future. If you hire anybody, not because of their ability and not because of the skill, you're guaranteeing a lowering of standard, a lowering of quality. Now, even once you get a degree, Peterson writes, the accreditation bodies for clinical psychology. Now require, well, only a credit university clinical psychology programs if they have a social justice orientation. So schools have to do this, otherwise they're not gonna get accredited. So accredited bodies won't accredit the students. So it's useless to get a degree if you can't then work. I mean, this is the whole evil of licensing and the way it works. And on and on and on, you know, social justice, wokeism, however you wanna call it, is everywhere. And it's infiltrating not just the humanities, it's infiltrating, we've talked about it, infiltrating medicine, it's infiltrating discipline after discipline after discipline. And Jordan is basically saying, you know, he doesn't wanna be part of the system. He doesn't wanna be a part of sanctioning all of this. You know, he says, you write here, what exactly, just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor hired on DIE grounds, manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. He's right. You can't, if you meet somebody who's black, a minority, you can't assume they're incompetent, but the doubt exists because of why they were hired. So it creates this ridiculous situation in which you wanna treat individuals as individuals, but you can't ignore the fact that they've not been hired because of their individual ability. I mean, he says this, and this is great. This is a really, really good sentence. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice. I love that. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice. And that's really what's happening. You're getting a reduction competence and you're getting massive injustice. People not hired, that shouldn't be hired. People getting hired, that shouldn't be hired. I'm gonna give you, sorry, I'm gonna give you a link in the chat here and I'll include the link in the, under the video, I'll include a link. But there's, I just put the link in the chat for those of you interested in finding the article. Now, this is not just an academia. As I think you know, the Oscars now are going to be balanced, not just by ability and skill and artistry and all of that, but by the color of the skin of the person who made it. It's gonna be balanced. And it's gonna, prizes are gonna reflect the diversity of the moving going audience, but this is not just in terms of prizes. According to an article published on Barry Weiss's sub-stack, this is the author writes, quote, we spoke to more than 25 writers, directors and producers. All of whom identify as liberal and all of whom describe a pervasive fear of running a fall of new dogma. How to survive the revolution by becoming its most ardent supporters. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with, is anyone BIPOC attached to this? You wanna hit show? It's not gonna be a hit if the writing is great. It's not gonna be hit if the acting is great. It's not gonna be hit if the direction is great. It'll never be made. Nobody will ever invest in it unless it's got a diversity quota. I mean, this is sick. It's racist. CBS, for example, according to Jordan, has literally mandated that every writer's room be at least 40% BIPOC in 2011, 50% in 2022. Not 2011, 2021. I mean, this is real racism. And this only penalizes people of ability who don't happen to have the right skin color. It's a racist policy against people of ability. And of course, again, even if you have ability and you happen to have the right skin color, now people are gonna question whether you're there because you really have ability or whether you're there because of your skin color. So it encourages racism. It encourages doubt. It encourages skepticism and discrimination in every direction. I mean, skin color, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual preferences is now the most important qualification for study, research, and for employment in a variety of different fields. And then on top of that, this has been brought into the business world through the ESG movement, environment, social and governance scores. ESG scores, Jordan says, are like the social scores in China. It tells you whether a company is, to have social justice as part of it, whether it's hiring practices are okay, whether it treats the environment appropriately, whether it has the right number of minority and it's board of directors, whether it hires the right people, whether it gives people enough leave, I don't know, a pregnancy leave, birth leave, whatever is sexy and popular these days. And ESG now pervades American business. It's everywhere. We've talked about this on the show. Investors now use these ESG scores to decide who to invest with and who not. And CEOs are falling over each other to try to raise the ESG score in order to appeal to the investors who are using the score. Again, nobody believes this. Maybe a few people like the CEO of BlackRock, but nobody believes in this stuff. But they believe they have to believe. They believe they have to act as if they believe. They believe it's a requirement now of their job to play into this. So CEOs don't give one a Yoda about DIE or about ESG or about any of these socially justice issues play into this, advocate for this, change the corporate policy in order to accommodate this because they think this is what the world is demanding of them. And just as Ivan said, the sanction of the victim, they're willing to sanction all this in the name of peace and leave us alone and let us do our job. But of course, nobody is gonna let you do your job. Every aspect of your business is gonna be regulated and controlled based on these kinds of criteria. You're feeding this, you CEOs. I give Jordan a lot of credit for going after CEOs. This is what he writes. For shame, CEOs, signaling a virtue you don't possess and shouldn't want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You're evil capitalists after all and should be proud of it. At the moment, I can't tell if you're more responsibly timid, sorry, if you're more reprehensibly timid even than the professors. They are more reprehensibly timid than the professors. The professors have limited wealth, limited prospects. The professors are detached from the real world in some fundamental sense. They're beholden to their theories and their ideologies and to the abstract knowledge that they have or lack of knowledge that they have. CEOs are more worldly. They know. They know the consequence of this nonsense. They know what is going on in the world. They know how this hurts their business. They have the wealth, they have the power, they have the voice to be able to change it. But what don't they have? They don't have the courage. They don't have them all conviction. They don't have the will to stand up to the intellectuals, to stand up to the purveyors of evil ideas, to stand up to the professors and tell them, no, garbage. We're gonna run our business to make money. We're gonna run our business in a way that maximizes our profitability, our shareholder wealth. We're not gonna succumb to this nonsense as anti-reality, anti-profit, anti-human life ideology. We're just not gonna do it. The businessmen of all the people are the ones who can afford to do it most. And are ones who I know are the most skeptical about this nonsense. So it's tragic to see the sanction of the victim. It's tragic to see businessmen coming to this, but this is the power of ideas. When you have bad ideas, when altruism is your guide, when who is most in need has a moral claim against you. When you've given up on reason, when you've given up on justice, real justice, when you've given up on ability, and when the moral standard is, how much we can sacrifice the able to the not able. How much we can sacrifice to those who claim the most grievance, claim the most need. It is all lost. What we're seeing today is the left embracing this form of altruism and taking it to its nihilistic anti-life necessary conclusion. We don't care if you can actually build that. We care what color skin you have. We don't care if you can actually cure this patient. We care what color skin you have and what color skin they have. We don't care about human life. We don't care about happiness. We don't care about prosperity. We don't care about success. We care that the people we define as needy, a sacrifice too. What we want really deep down, what DIE, what ESG, what social justice has always wanted is to tear down the able. It's to tear down the successful. It's to tear down the rational. It's certainly to tear down the egoistic. It's destroy. It's nihilism. There's no value here. So kudos to Jordan Peterson for quitting. Kudos for writing an essay explaining it. It can only go so deep because Jordan can only go so deep. He can only explain these phenomena as maybe a psychological, but here as cultural phenomena, he doesn't go deep into what brings them about. He certainly doesn't understand the causal relationship between altruism and about what's going on in the world today. But what we're living today is the consequence of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Frankfurt School, postmodernism and the woke is the nihilism of young people, the nihilism of our professors and the cowardice, the moral cowardice of our business leaders is all a consequence of that. Ideas drive the world for better or for ill. All right. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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