Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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In other words, maybe your efforts or the efforts of people that seem to have a ceaseless amount of energy, as you do, should be spent not trying to shore up something or, frankly, even be a fig leaf for something that has so much bad in it. but throw your energy into building something new. What do you say to those people? Why is Yale worth saving in and of itself?
But in the grand debate. between sort of institutionalism and building new things, in the debate between sort of the reformists who are like, let's fix it, we can fix it, and I guess you'd call them the radicals who are saying, it's not worth it, we can build something new and better.
So let's talk about one of the early talents you spotted. And that's, of course, JD Vance. You've mentioned a few times in this conversation. What was your first impression of him? What was his comparative advantage?
Vance once told you that you reminded him of his own grandmother. Why is that?
So you saw it immediately when you read the pages. Do you remember? Immediately. The other person that you have mentored that has come to power in the new D.C., is Vivek. What was he like? What was your initial impression of him?
OK, speaking of debate champions and Vivek, he recently got in trouble, as everyone here knows. But just to rehash it for a second, he had this long Twitter thread. He tweets a lot, as everyone seems to now. And he's sort of gone silent since then. But this Twitter thread was tied to the issue of H-1B visas for high-skilled immigrants. But it was a more broad critique of American culture.
He was sort of commenting on our gestalt. And here's what he said. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer. That doesn't start in college. It starts young. Here's where we could psychoanalyze him.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell, I promise I'm almost done, will not produce the best engineers. Now, this got a ton of backlash.
Your reputation has been built in part on knowing excellence, on raising excellent children, on helping advise other people to do the same. So I guess first question there is, do you agree with him that American culture venerates mediocrity over excellence?
I just want to maybe deepen it a little bit more. Maybe he didn't phrase it properly, but the numbers are clear. Immigrants and their children are statistically more likely to get college degrees than other Americans. They're more than twice as likely to start a new business. They are, like person for person, some of the most successful people in American life.
It may have been reductive, but one thing that definitely happened was a unbelievable tidal wave of just racism and bigotry, especially against Indians and against a particular man who's going to be in the new administration, Sriram, but also against Vivek. And that was sort of woven in with a general anti-immigrant vibe shift. Like, is that part of the vibe shift that's bad?
Like, how do you contend with that? How are you thinking about that?
Well, maybe to say it back to you, and I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, the danger of the sort of identity politics that we have been living in for the past decade, especially in elite and pedigreed spaces, the danger of it wasn't just what you saw on the surface.
The danger was the fact that telling people, maybe especially young children in some of these schools, that their whiteness was somehow the most important thing about them was inevitably going to lead to a kind of white identitarian backlash. And maybe the reason you feel like you haven't been vindicated or aren't winning is you don't know where that's going to wind up.
OK, let's talk more broadly sort of about the vibe shift. And maybe let's start with Asian-Americans, many of whom voted for Trump and shifted to the Republicans for the first time. How do you understand that? We were talking about that in the green room. You said to me, you were confident that Trump was going to win.
And one of the groups you were looking toward and one of the data points you had is just the way that Asian-Americans were going right. Explain why they did.
And not only do you sense them and ride the waves, you often create them.
How do you think the vibe shift is going to affect not just your life on campus, but campus generally? Because there's a disconnect. Everyone saw the Elise Stefanik unforgettable hearing that ended with two of the most storied college presidents getting kicked out of their jobs, which was quite unbelievable to come out of a hearing.
But it didn't really seem to change anything in the actual culture on campus. You had just as many students sort of marching if not in favor of Hamas, at least adjacent to that. It didn't actually seem to have an impact on campus.
Do you think that the vibe shift that so many people are talking about culturally and politically, and definitely that you feel in this town where people are walking around proudly wearing the red hats, Do you think that that is going to trickle down to campus or that it's going to sort of be able to be a protected bubble?
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