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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Appearances
Let's talk about the political implications of this, not politicizing the fires themselves, but... The implications. Trump tweeted, one of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America, and I can attest to that, it's really paradise, is burning down to the ground. It's ashes, and Gavin Newsom should resign. This is all his fault.
Two weeks from now, Karen Bass, will she be in or out? Gavin Newsom? What's his fate? He's long wanted to run for presidency. Are those dreams over because of this fire?
Here's one of the lessons I'll put my cards on the table that I draw from this. Government in L.A.
and in many blue cities across the country has lost sight of the most basic parts of their job, which is keeping people safe, safe from crime, safe from, you know, majorly drug-addicted people harassing them on the street, safe in this case from natural disasters like wildfires, or if not safe, at least prepared.
And instead, they have focused on, you know, what Rob Henderson might call luxury issues or niche boutique issues that have very little to do with the basics of governing. Is that going to be one of the kind of political takeaways from this?
24 so far, but it's definitely going to go up.
Sure, there's the wealthy donor class perspective on it, but there's also, you know, Altadena, this is not Malibu. This is not the Palisades. Like, these are middle, like, solidly middle-class people. And if I'm them, and if my home is just burned to the ground—oh, and by the way, I'm thinking about this guy who went to the French Laundry or whatever it was in the middle of COVID—
Someone can fact check me on that, but I think memory serves. That was right. Yeah. Like, why am I voting for the person that is so out of touch with my everyday concerns? Just as an example, though, of like, there's been a lot that we've published and a lot of commentary, I think, over the past, since the election in November on the vibe shift, right?
Culturally and politically and, you know, woke is fading. People are moving to the right. You guys know this conversation. Right. One piece of evidence just of how quickly things can shift is Maria Shriver, hardly a Republican conservative, is on Twitter talking about how Los Angeles and California needs radical change in the wake of this.
I have friends in L.A., progressives, texting me, I guess I'm a Republican now. In other words, they are so fed up It's not that they're Republican on any particular policy issue. It's that they are so disgusted, Brianna, with, you know, one party rule and the corruption of it that they're just like, done. I'll vote for anything else that's not this. Do you see that happening?
One last question on this, and then I want to move on to another topic that's been engulfing the conversation in a different way. I've been thinking a lot about the fact that the paradox, and it goes like this. We live in a world in which private companies and very determined individuals are able to create rocket ships that return to Earth and are caught by giant chopsticks. Okay?
There's people talking legitimately, and I didn't used to believe this, about colonizing Mars. Like, that seems within the realm of possibility in our lifetime. But at the same moment that that kind of technological progress is possible... One of the greatest states in the union, a state that is the fifth largest economy in the world, is not able to contain a fire.
This is not a political question, I guess, so much as a cultural one. But what does that mean? Is that a failure of priorities or is it that everyone that's smart and competent fails? runs as far away as possible from government? And if so, how do we change that? I've just been thinking about that a lot. It's like we live in an era of Starlink and SpaceX and choose your other thing.
And also we live in an era in which I saw this unbelievably emblematic photo in which a person in L.A. was trying to put out a fire in his backyard with cartons of oat milk because there was presumably no water in the hose. That's unbelievable. What explains that?
So is Doge the solution? I don't think so. Okay, I think it might be. Before we get to Doge, let's talk about a little thing called H1B. Okay, and if you're not a person that lives on the internet, you might not even know what that is, so let me explain. The thing that everyone has been talking about for the last week or two is immigration. particularly the H-1B controversy.
And for those who have never heard of what that is, H-1B visas go to highly skilled workers. Think doctors, lawyers, engineers, coders. It's sold as a program of visas, temporary visas, for the best and brightest, and it's been around since about 1990. Now, typically, the immigration debate in this country... centers around low-wage workers and illegal immigration.
But this controversy over H-1Bs has turned out to be one of the early and profound fissures between the two wings of the new Trumpist Republican Party. The sort of, forgive me for being crude, the free market business types, think of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the true nationalist populists think people like Steve Bannon.
The Musk types have come out in ferocious defense of the H-1B visa program. Perhaps not surprising, given that of the 85,000 H-1B visas that were granted each year, about 70% of them work in tech. On the other side, we have a very strange coalition, maybe not so strange to Batya, people like Steve Bannon, but also Bernie Sanders. So, Batya, you were big on this issue.
I saw you all over TV talking about it. Explain to us where you stand and why you stand there.
Okay, I want to get deeper into the politics. Brianna, before we move on, you're someone who actually has worked deeply in the tech industry, presumably with a lot of people on H-1B visas. Are they indentured servants, as Batya said? What's the dynamic as you've seen it?
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