Pod and Man at Yale

On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Christian theologian and Grove City College Professor Carl Trueman breaks down the central question and broader implications of his new book, The Desecration of Man: 

• “If you ask somebody, who are you? That question is incredibly complicated today in a way that it wouldn’t have been, say, six or seven hundred years ago.”
• “If you want to shock people, you have to smash the orthodoxy of the previous generation. And there is no more powerful orthodoxy politically than thinking that Hitler was an evil and bad person. So, the emergence of a Fuentes doesn’t surprise me. What’s fascinating about Fuentes is, of course, is that he really has nothing positive to say…It is a purely flame throwing exercise which absolutely conforms to this pattern of desecration.”
• “The best way to make somebody realize they’re a human being is to treat them as a human being.”
• “I would say one of the key applications or key uses of technology, if you like, would be, that which restores those things that as humans, we should have, but which we've lost is good. Example: if a child is born with one leg and somebody develops a way of, you know, allowing that child to grow the leg that they're missing, I would not see that as an obnoxious use of technology. It's restoring what should be there. It's getting rid of a privation.”
• “Practical advice I might give to somebody who says, ‘well I did this and my friend took real exception’... Even if you find their views obnoxious, listen to what they have to say because the mere act of listening will indicate that you’re taking them seriously as a human being.”

For the student panel, Brett Mellul ’29 and Jack Ehlert ’29 discussed their experiences navigating faith on campus:

• Ehlert: “I think conversations about religion happen in a way at Yale that honestly, maybe they didn't even happen between friends in high school and grade school…I've had a lot of really great conversations with people of the Jewish faith or like non-Catholic Christians or atheists and things—the sort of conversations that I didn’t really have as much before.”
• Ehlert: “I think I've really been forced to sort of hold myself accountable and take my faith responsibility into my own hands, which has been really a great experience, honestly.”
• Mellul: “From a mindset perspective, I don’t view it as, oh, I have to keep the Sabbath and therefore I don’t get to study or go to the football game or do whatever it is. I view it as the opposite. I get to keep the Sabbath, and I try to find all the beauty and meaning and connection that there is in the things that I already do.”
• Mellul: “I think that I’ve had a lot of opportunities on campus, to be an ambassador, so to speak, for particularly Orthodox Judaism. And, so, whether that’s just having lunch with a friend who is not an Orthodox Jew or not Jewish at all, or that’s the way that I answer a question in a class or even just the way that I comport myself while walking to a class on campus, I think is an opportunity to positively, make an impact.” 

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On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley fellows Noah Torrance ’28 and Blake Freeman ’29 talk about their experience with open discourse at Yale.  

• Noah Torrance: "Maybe not everyone goes through Yale constantly being challenged in some way, but I think I definitely have. And the spaces that I've found in Yale, like the Buckley Institute, do a really great job of that."
• Torrance: "I was actually doing a campus tour…through one of the protests, through the Beinecke encampment, I was like, what’s going on over here? Somebody sitting? Are they camping?"
• Blake Freeman: "This is kind of cool because it’s like, okay, we expect our students to be active. We expect our students to be vocal about the things they care about. But we’re…going to set up this framework where they’re able to do it in a very constructive way."
• Freeman: "When I was growing up, I knew people who thought it was a better idea to be a garbage collector than to go to university.… It’s disappointing to me because universities do useful things and great things all the time.”

Jacob Howland, past University of Austin Provost and Dean and former professor at the University of Tulsa, discusses the major issues plaguing higher education and the ways to course correct. 

• Howland: "The future, from my point of view, always grows out of the soil of the past. You know, if we look at sort of the most creative geniuses in music and literature and so forth, they’re very well acquainted with what came before. "
• Howland: "We should hold up and celebrate professors who actually create the conditions for real learning, such as I’ve described, open inquiry, civil discourse whose syllabi reflect all positions who privilege the questions."
• Howland: "I came to the University of Tulsa in 1988, and shortly after I got there, I remember meeting a young woman and she said, what do you teach? And so forth. And I said, well, Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greeks, etc. I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I sure as hell don't teach dead white males."
• Howland: "The AI thing might be the biggest crisis. Because if it is the case, which I'm convinced it is, that many students, perhaps the majority, perhaps in some cases almost all of them, and not just students, by the way, professors too are relying on AI to do their work, then what we're going to have is students graduating essentially from what are now just diploma mills." 

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In the first episode of the spring semester, Lux et Veritas Leadership Fellows Audrey Bae ’28, Joe Gicante ’28, and Constantine Semka ’28 discuss the value of liberal arts, why they think it's worth it to pay Yale tuition to study the humanities, and what liberal arts can teach us about Trump and Venezuela:

• Semka: “I think maybe that liberal education sets you back in the first couple years, but it really gives you an advantage later in life because what we learn in liberal education is how to think. How do I acquire knowledge in a faster, more efficient way.”
• Semka: “Liberal arts gives you a very strong foundation on which you can build later your career and what many people from other countries lack is that strong foundation.”
• Gicante: “…it’s difficult to teach somebody to be creative. That's not something you can learn in a classroom, right? There’s no creativity 101. That has to come from learning how to think and thinking through different systems, which is what a liberal arts education really is.”
• Bae: “I would much rather take the time now to seriously reflect on the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to lead, so that I can live my life with no regrets even if in this initial process it seems to be very slow or inefficient.”

American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Story discussed the liberal arts, the challenges facing higher education in America, and his current efforts to fix it:

• Storey: “In Iraq under Saddam Hussein there were plenty of people studying things like engineering, dentistry, medicine, so on and so forth. All that stuff that was fine, uncontroversial….When John started promoting the study of history, study of literature, study of philosophy, that had explosive potential.”
• Storey: “The overwhelming homogeneity of a discipline such as sociology makes it the case that the kinds of questions that progressives care about just get investigated again and again and again.”
• Storey: “The polite brush off has been the basic response of colleges and universities to conservative critics for a very long time. Well, you have to hand it to the Trump administration. They’ve actually gotten beyond the polite brush off.”
• Storey: “People on the right should remember that the new means that Trump has effectively legitimized by using them with respect to the universities, well, they’re probably going to be used in the other direction.”

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In the most recent episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Fellows Nico Sahi SOM ’26 and Toby Neal ’27 talk about being liberal at Yale and as members of the Buckley Institute: 

• Nico Sahi: “I really wanted to learn a little bit more about conservative ideologies, partly because maybe I’ll change my own mind about something, but also that you can’t debate something that you don’t understand yourself.”
• Toby Neal: “The recent events of the Charlie Kirk assassination were very much on my mind because that kind of—is kind of the reason that I joined Buckley in a sense, that I wanted to join in a space where conversations, even though difficult, were being had and you could have a very democratic debate about it.”
• Neal: “We are more and more facing echo chambers in our lives. Institutions, higher education are echo chambers. And I think that’s where places like Buckley are important…”
• Neal: “It is less that my mind has been changed–I tried to reflect on if there was some actual point where I’ve changed my opinion on something and I don’t think I have. But what I think it has is helped me understand where the other people are coming from.”
• Sahi: “Over the past 10 years, the consistent story has been ‘we need to talk to more people who disagree with us.’ And I think everyone hears that information and goes, ‘yes absolutely’ and then goes back and talks to everyone that already believes [what they do.]”

Daniel Flynn, author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, joined the podcast to discuss his book on the largely forgotten ex-Communist who shaped the modern conservative movement:

• Flynn: “All the way through this story there’s this kind of Forrest Gump quality to it where [Meyer] is around these people at the right time when they are happening, when they are exploding.”
• Flynn: “He establishes something called the October Club, which, when Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero Communists in the student body. When he leaves, there’s 300.”
• Flynn: “Do you want to join a movement where the guy’s looking down at his shoes and he’s got a bunch of marbles in his mouth, or do you want to join a movement of a guy who’s a winner? Frank was a winner and people wanted to be around him. That’s why he had such success in England as a Communist organizer. Also, why he had such success in America.”

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In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Mickey Lin ’26 and Justin Greenman GSAS reflect on their trip to see Hamilton on Broadway with the Buckley Institute and discuss their thoughts on the Founders:

• Lin: “When I was working on the Hill and I had to give capital tours, I was like, now, looking back, yeah, we never really talked about Hamilton…”
• Greenman: “I think there’s this perception that, oh, we’ve never been more divided. No, we have been extremely divided, right—you think of Hamilton and Burr, you think of Hamilton and Jefferson—it’s a reminder that, right, history maybe—what was the Mark Twain line, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.”
• Lin: “I think it’d be interesting to see a Founding Fathers course or an early American politics course and for first years to take. I think it’s hard to be a political science major and continue to study politics…without having a strong foundation on the Founding Fathers.”
• Greenman: “I’ve found that a lot of people are, if not dismissive of the Founding era ideals, they’re just kind of uninformed.”
• Greenman: “Those ideas, those values, those passions that Mickey talked about, they’re still the foundation of America.”

Richard Brookhiser, noted author and journalist, joined Buckley Fellows at Hamilton then stuck around for dinner to discuss the play and the Founders:

• “The principles under which slavery was finally ended in this country were principles enounced by the founders.”
• “It is a true point that we also have to realize that [the Founders are] not just talking only to each other or in some kind of rarified common room. They are presenting their ideas to the American public. And the American public is reading them, reacting to them, debating them.”
• “Good stories just beat bad ones. They beat dull ones and they beat stupid ones. And a smart story of the American Revolution and of the construction of the government that followed, is a dramatic story; it's an interesting story; it's an intelligent story. There’s a lot of intelligence involved by the actors and you have to bring some intelligence to bear to understand everything that was going on. And it's a story that's not that long ago and still affects us today. How are you gonna beat that?”
• “I remember I was on some panel in New York, at the New School, and this older man came up to me and said, ‘Are you still in touch with Bill Buckley?’ (who’d retired by then), and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Well can you thank him for me? I’m a radical but he was the only place where you got to see radicals talking at length because he’d bring them on to Firing Line and debate them.”

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In the first Pod and Man at Yale episode of the fall semester, Will Flanigan '27, Hilda Barragan-Reyes '26, and Stephen Morris '27 discuss free markets, capitalism, and Zohran Mamdani:

• Hilda Barragan-Reyes: “I think people don’t necessarily disagree with the premise that capitalism is the best system. I think they often don’t understand what capitalism is and what socialism is.”
• Stephen Morris: “I do think many people have a sense of guilt in that there’s a lot of factors beyond our control that affect how we got into Yale or what careers our parents had, and I think part of the instinct toward Socialism or toward interventionist policies in an economy is seeking either to rectify that or to rectify the guilt that people have about that.” 
• Will Flanigan: “People support socialism vocally because they want to be perceived as caring…at the same time they want to make a lot of money and be seen as very effective and hard working.”

Georgetown University's Jason Brennan looks at why the socialism appeals to the young and the misconceptions that have made socialism so popular:

• Brennan: “Groups will get some power and make decisions. Those decisions will have bad ramifications for everybody but people almost never blame the outcomes on the people who make those decisions.”
• Brennan: “Especially after the pandemic, the U.S. government spent a lot of money. Governments around the world spent a lot of money. They restricted supply because of how COVID works. And all of a sudden our money is worth less and there’s inflation. And people are like, who could have predicted that?”
• Brennan: “The profit motive actually gets people to act. People are frankly, they’re just not that altruistic. They like to claim they are…but they’re not.” 
• Brennan: “In the 20th century, we experimented with two fundamental ways of living. About 90 countries went capitalist and about 90 countries went socialist. Capitalism went 90 for 90. Socialism went 0 for 90.” 

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On the last episode of the spring semester, Pod and Man at Yale brought two military veterans, Valerie Calderon-Meyer ’27 and Galen Jones MPH/MBA '26, to talk about post-military life at Yale: 

• Calderon-Meyer: “Most of my friends are graduates or PhD students who are within my age group. I think I feel deeper connections in that way.” 
• Jones: “The school of management, I’ve had a very, I think, easy time fitting in. 10% of the student body are veterans. So, it’s a very high percentage, and I think it’s increasing.”
• Jones: “People don’t know oftentimes how to handle the military experience but they’re very open to learning about it. And it doesn’t actually pose a barrier between friendships at all.”
• Calderon-Meyer: “I think in my experience, Yale College, for the most part, has been really accommodating, with student accessibility and accommodations for one. They welcome veterans. They understand that well…I think Yale’s making some big strides for veterans.”
• Jones: “I know also Yale has brought in not only new roles but a new office over by Mory’s, and have shown pretty real dedication to increasing the veterans support and community across campus.”
• Jones: “More often than not, we’re not in situations where (military experience) does add value. But when it does, I do try and make a concerted effort to go outside, I guess, my own comfort zone of saying these things, because it is another perspective that needs to be told and shared. And there are a lot of times that there is a large value add.”

Peter Dutton, military veteran and Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow for the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, joined the podcast to talk about his own transition from military to civilian life and to look at the China challenge: 

• Dutton: “The transition from being active duty to civilian, you know, the strongest thing in it was the something I didn’t expect, was the sense of, I just wasn’t responsible for everything anymore. As a naval officer, it’s just sort of ingrained in you that you are responsible for the outcome of the mission of the organization that you are a part of. Period. End of discussion.”
• Dutton: “Probably the average student in the military is somewhat more conservative than the average student here at Yale or at NYU. But it may in part have to do with age and experiences. Because what you really see in the military is a pretty significant reflection of the diversity of American society.”
• Dutton: “A lot of people sort of stereotype Yale as leaning hard to the left and I find in the student body so far in my interactions, that’s an oversimplification.”
• Dutton: “There’s a lot of worry that China is becoming a global military power. I think it’s too soon to begin to seriously worry about that…America has a global military with global focuses. China has a very focused military, and yet China’s military is very strong.” 
• Dutton: “America should be concerned about China and there are senses in which China can be a threat to the United States.”

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On this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Beacon Editor-in-Chief Owen Tilman ’27 interviewed climate policy expert Bjorn Lomborg ahead of his talk at Yale: 

• Lomborg: “The world is actually, on pretty much all measurable variables getting better, but there are still lots of problems to fix. But let’s stop fixing them because we think this is the end of the world…let’s be smart and think about what we can do best.” 
• Lomborg: “It’s really really wrong when scientists try to pretend to also be politicians at the same time.”
• Lomborg: “The U.N. climate panel report, the IPCC is right, there is manmade global warming. The conversation that I have is how bad is it. And I argue, much less bad than what people talk about. And what are the right solutions. And it’ll often turn out that the rights solutions are not the ones that you hear about.”
• Lomborg: “That’s really the conversation we need to have and we can’t have that if everybody is just running around like chickens without their heads and saying, ‘Oh my god. The world is coming to an end.’”

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On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Anshul Guha ’25 and Kevin Baisden LAW ’25 talked about what it means to be conservative at Yale: 

• Guha: “I think the most important thing for me, as a conservative on campus at that time, was to make sure that I was continuing to speak out…and making sure that my views were heard just so that there was this opposing view on campus.”
• Baisden: “I didn’t self-censor. None of my closest friends at the law school self-censored. Even in classes—I’m just thinking back to my federal courts class, which is taught by a very famous constitutional scholar who is definitely liberal—I would have no issue espousing or endorsing a conservative viewpoint leading up to the election.”
• Guha: “A couple years ago, the whole idea that young people can plausibly be conservative in large numbers was just not a thing and so even the discussion [about conservative policies] wouldn’t happen. So, I’m just happy that the discussion is now happening.”
• Baisden: “If I’m being candid, I expected more critical thought and critical discussions from both directions before I got to Yale Law School.” 
• Baisden: “As a conservative, I’m defense counsel every time I walk into the law school.”

Lawrence Perelman, a close friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., recently published a new bio of the iconic conservative thinker, American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Elements of American Character. He joined the podcast to talk about his new book, his relationship with Buckley, and how music shaped their lives and relationship: 

• Perelman: “I knew of Bill–not only knew of, but he was a hero of mine growing up in the 1980’s as a vehement anticommunist, as a philosemite, as someone had pushed the antisemites out of the conservative movement. And for me and my parents—my parents fled the Soviet Union in 1975, so 50 years ago—he always stood as a beacon of hope and inspiration.”
• Perelman on Finding a Mentor: “Getting through the door the first time can be tough. But getting through the second time is even tougher. You have to really prove yourself.”  
• Perelman: “After my parents, he was the most important person in my life. There is no question…In terms of my formative life, to understand generosity, to understand the importance of communication, of staying in touch, of actually responding to someone’s letter, there’s no one that shines brighter for me. Those acts actually changed the course of my life.”
• Perelman: “He was just a pleasure to be around. He was nice. He was fun. He was warm. He was, for me at that age, probably more grandfatherly…It was just a real grasp and respect for the young people around him.”

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On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Abhinay Lingareddy ’26, Will Flanigan ’27, and John Byler ’28 discuss the storied Yale Political Union, its conservative bent, and the state of debate on Yale’s campus: 

• Byler ’28: “On the left, in the party of the left, the progressive party, I would be shocked to find a single trump voter. But in the Federalist Party, and I what I presume to be other conservative parties as well, there’s a pretty even split between Republican and Democrat voters.”
• Lingareddy ’26: “A lot of the conservatives on campus are conservative on campus but not necessarily right wing on a national scale.”
• Will Flanigan ’27: “Coming to Yale as a conservative, you kind of understand that that’s more unique and so you naturally want to search out opportunities to engage with people that agree with you broadly…There aren’t that many other places to go, one of the few others being the Buckley Institute itself, of which, the vast majority of political union members, certainly on the right, are members as well.”
• Lingareddy  ’26: “There’s also a perception that the union isn’t the safest space for the left, which I think is sometimes true but not all the time.”

Independent journalist Jamie Kirchick ’06 talked about the more censorious new generation of journalists and the decline of campus dialogue: 

• Kirchick ’06: “It seems that things have gone in a bad direction in that there’s less debates going on between people of different opinions, that people sort of cocooned into their ideological corners.”
• Kirchick ’06: “It’s often the more elite and prestigious the school is, the worse it is when it comes to free expression.”
• Kirchick ’06: “The mainstream media are usually right. They’re usually reporting the facts. But there have been major stories, major themes that they’ve gotten wrong over the years and they’ve refused to apologize for.”
• Kirchick ’06: “I do think it is up to leaders in these media institutions to stop bowing down to the 25-year-olds who work for them and are demanding all these radical changes.”

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