4/16/26: Professor Marandi On Iran Talks, Allbirds Rebrand As AI, College Grads Screwed

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So for more on the war from the Iranian perspective, we're glad to be joined this morning by Professor Muhammad Mirandi. He is a professor at the University of Tehran and actually was part of the delegation in Islamabad recently. So very grateful to have you this morning, sir. Good to see you, sir. Thank you. Thank you both. So I wanted to get your reaction to some comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegset this morning. He said in a press conference, if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure power and energy. How are you viewing these negotiations? Do you think this is another US ruse? Do you think they are just trying to prepare for a new escalation or do you think that they are serious about doing what it takes to achieve some sort of a deal? I think the Iranians from the very beginning believe that the US was not serious. And the United States backed down from its initial position of unconditional surrender to the 15 point plan to ultimately accepting Iran's 10 point plan as the framework for discussion. But Iran knew that the United States was never going to move in that direction and that Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, they would prevent that. But Iran wanted to show the world in its own people that politically the United States under Trump was floundering. And since the ceasefire, the Iranians have been preparing themselves for the next round of war. And I think the Iranians believe that it could be quite soon. Interesting. So sir, one of the things that we, yeah, we're curious because we are trying to decipher all of these moves from here in Washington. We've seen the Iranian enclosure of the streets of our moves. Now this US blockade of the blockade of the street of Hormuz. We also saw yesterday a threat from Iran to close the Red Sea. I'm curious from your view and some of the talks maybe that you observed in Islamabad, what the seriousness of the blockade is having in terms of the thought process inside Tehran? Well, the Iranians when they went to Islamabad, the negotiators had full authority before leaving the Speaker of Parliament who was the head of the delegation spoke extensively with Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader. But the US side was obviously very different. Vance obviously had no authority who was constantly making phone calls, including to Netanyahu. And later we learned that Netanyahu said that Vance reported to him, which is a strange word to use and that other officials also report to him, US officials, which is also strange. But the blockade from the Iranians perspective is intensifying the pace in which the global economy is moving towards collapse. And the belief here is that the United States by intensifying the blockade and the Israeli regime by violating the ceasefire agreement and attacking Lebanon has, is pushing forward the collapse even faster than before. So basically Netanyahu by blocking the ceasefire and preventing Iran from allowing warships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and Vance by failing to have authority to have an agreement because of Netanyahu, because of both acts of Netanyahu, the belief here is that the global economy will collapse much sooner than expected and that Trump out of desperation will launch an attack pretty soon. Professor, I was also curious for you to contrast these negotiations, especially in terms of the American technical expertise or lack thereof brought to the table versus you were also involved in the negotiations of the JCPOA under the Obama administration, which included a lot of highly technical experts who were negotiating all of these elaborate details. If you could compare and contrast, because I think that's important too to understand whether or not they're actually serious about coming to some sort of a deal at this point. Well, I don't have the details about the American side, but the difference between the JCPOA, where I accompanied the foreign minister, Zarif in Vienna, to help with media, just like in Islamabad, I'm not in government, but they sometimes ask me to help them with interviews. Back then, the US government was serious about a negotiated deal. Now, whether that was a good deal for Iran or a bad deal, that's a big debate, it's always been a big debate in Iran, but the US was serious. And so the negotiations ultimately bore fruit. What we've been seeing before the 12-day war, and before this war, where we were negotiating, was that the United States was not serious. The Iranians knew that. Iran knew that the US would attack before the 12-day war. They knew before this war that the US would attack, but Iran was negotiating so that the international community and the Iranian people would see that Iran is there to solve the problem. And so that after they launch an attack, they won't say that, well, if Iran had negotiated, maybe this would end up happened. But also to see if Trump wanted an off-ramp. But Iran knew there would be an assault last year. They knew there would be an assault before the Ramadan war, the 40-day war. And now they also believe that the United States will attack, but they're still negotiating. But here, they're feeling on all three occasions before the 12-day war, before the 40-day war. And now that the US intention is not a negotiated solution. So, sir, with respect then, why did the Iranian government agree to a ceasefire? Why did they agree to a ceasefire if they are so sure that the war is going to resume? Because from here in Washington, the consensus is that the Iranian government agreed to a ceasefire because they couldn't take the pain anymore. Washington, the Pentagon did a press conference this morning saying that they're reloading. Why would you permit the enemy to reload if you never believed that this was going to happen? Well, there are three reasons. And let me give you an example first. During the 12-day war last year, where the US and Israeli regime carried out an assault on the country, after about six days, the tide turned in favor of Iran. And after eight days or so, it was Netanyahu who was seeking a ceasefire. And after 12 days, Iran agreed to halt for a cessation of hostilities. Some were saying, well, why didn't Iran continue then? Iran saw that during that 12-day war, it had major issues that it had to deal with. It had to, there were shortcomings in the way in which we had planned war, in which the defensive and offensive capabilities of the country were arranged. So they, and they knew that if the war continued, the United States would enter. So they thought that they would use this time to improve their capabilities. And during the eight months, we've seen how everything has changed despite the immense US firepower, which is much greater than that of the Israeli regime, which would be defeated in a fight against Iran. Iran has performed much better. So it was because of the experience of the 12-day war. Right now, the Iranians are rearming, they're preparing. But also, like before, but also every single day that goes by, the State of Hormuz is more or less close. And that is putting more pressure on the United States under Trump. And the belief in Iran is that Trump does not make the decisions. It is the Israeli lobby, the Zionist lobby, and Netanyahu. And so the only way to force the United States to make a decision that benefits its own people is to increase the economic pressure so much that the United States under Trump or the leadership ultimately says, well, here we have to prioritize our own interests over that of Netanyahu. So each day that goes by, we're approaching sadly a global economic catastrophe, which will probably lead to a world economic depression. But Iran is preparing for war. Iran is also negotiating in order to be seen by the international community as participating in negotiations. But also Iran achieved something big in these, through the ceasefire. And that is that everyone saw that on day one, the United States demanded Iran to submit and accept defeat. That didn't happen. And after 40 days, the United States accepted Iran's conditions, well, the 10 point plan as the framework for discussion. Now, later on, the spokeswoman for the White House said we threw it in the bin, but that's not important. What is important is that everyone saw the evolution of the US demands from unconditional surrender to, okay, we'll accept talking within that framework of your own. And that, I think, was a sea change or created a sea change in perceptions of the war across the world. Very interesting. So this morning in this press briefing, which I don't know if you've had a chance to see because this just happened, we're just getting these quotes in in kind of real time at this point. But you not only had Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, you also had General Dan Canis, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he announced effectively an escalation of the US blockade tactics. He said that the US Navy in the Pacific would be called upon to intercept ships moving to resupply Iran, broadening that naval blockade beyond the Middle East. Do you expect the Iranian government to respond with an escalation of their own by closing the Bob Elmonda Strait or other actions? Oh, absolutely. That will happen as quite soon. And I think that basically what Trump is doing out of desperation is that he's dragging down the entire global economy because he is incapable of pursuing policies that are in the interests of the United States. Basically, it is Netanyahu who wants this war to continue and design this lobby. And since Trump is incapable for whatever reason, for whatever reason, I mean, there's speculation as to why, but for whatever reason, Trump is incapable of pursuing his interests. So what is happening is that Trump is dragging down the entire global economy, including the US economy, because he is obedient to design this lobby. Sir, I'm curious for your view here on the streets of Hormuz and what the future will look like. Can we put C3 up here on the screen? Recent report here from Reuters that one possible way that this could go is that the Iran has offered a proposal allowing ships to exit the Oman side of the Hormuz free of attack. Now, obviously that would downplay significantly one of the 10 point plan proposals, which is that Iran would retain total control of the streets of Hormuz. So since you've spoken with many of the people who are in government, do you foresee any future where Iran would agree, passage to the streets of Hormuz without collecting some sort of monetary payment? No, the Iranians have made the decision that they will control the straight of Hormuz. And it didn't have to be like this. We were not controlling the straight of Hormuz before this war was imposed upon us. The regimes, the family, the cater ships in the Persian Gulf, they are complicit in this war. Their base, US bases in these countries were used. Their airspace was used. Their territory was used to fire missiles. They have a lot of Iranian blood on their hands. The first wave of attacks included the slaughter of 168 little school children, mostly girls at an elementary school, which Iranians believed that it was intentional because always in war, the first wave, the first set of targets are very carefully vetted for weeks, if not months. And that school was on every app. It was on every map and it was there for many years. And the belief here is that since many of the school children were the children of military officers, of naval officers, that the US wanted to teach them a lesson. Some people in the United States may have skepticism about this, but they've been bombing hospitals in Iran. They've been bombing schools. They've been bombing ambulances. Trump has said he's going to wipe out a civilization. No one in the Western media has complained. In fact, the Washington Post, when we were going to Pakistan said, and then opinion piece, that they should slaughter the negotiators, which meant us. And on our way back to Iran, we were all expecting to be killed and our plane to be shot down. Although to the credit of everyone on the delegation, no one wanted to stay behind and everyone got on the plane. But this is the mentality that exists in Washington today. And no one should be surprised about the slaughter. And we saw what happened in the genocide in Gaza. And we see a genocide unfolding in Lebanon. And right now, Western media is trying to portray the genocidal strikes in Lebanon as hezbollah targets, hezbollah strongholds in order to whitewash the crime. So people should not be surprised that the Iranians believe that these strikes on children are intentional. Let me get your reaction to some recent comments from Vice President JD Vance. This was speaking at a relatively poorly attended TPUSA, Turning Points USA, Conservative Activists Group, event where he says that what President Trump is looking for is a grand bargain with Iran. Let's take a listen to that. Now we are negotiating to make sure that very thing happens. And here's what's interesting about this is... What's interesting about this is that we have this ceasefire that's in place. I think it's six or seven days old. Right now, the ceasefire is holding. And what you're seeing is the president wants to make, he doesn't want to make like a small deal. He wants to make the grand bargain. And what he's basically offering to Iran is very simple and frankly, it's something that no president has, I think, has had the ability to offer. He said that if you're willing to act like a normal country, we are willing to treat you economically like a normal country. He doesn't want a small deal. And that's one of the reasons why, one, I'd say in Pakistan we made a ton of progress. But the reason why the deal is not yet done is because the president, he really wants a deal where Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon. Iran is not state sponsoring terrorism, but also the people of Iran can thrive and prosper and join the world economy. And that's the trade that he's offering. He's saying if you guys... He's saying if you guys commit to not having a nuclear weapon, we are going to make Iran thrive. We're going to make it economically prosperous. And we're going to invite the Iranian people into the world economy in a way. They haven't been in my entire life. And that's the kind of Trumpian grand bargain that the president has put on the table. So the key quote there is he says, if you're willing to act like a normal country, we are willing to treat you economically like a normal country. What do you think from the U.S. perspective, it means for Iran to act like a quote, normal country? Well, we know from Joe Kent's resignation letter that this is nonsense and that the United States knows quite well that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. And it never was pursuing a nuclear weapon. And all of this is basically a tool to put pressure on Iran, like the human rights issue, like the terrorism issue, all of that, the violations that the West and the United States carry out with regards to human rights. All you have to do is look at Lebanon today and Gaza and the schools that were bombed in Iran and we'll know everyone knows who violates human rights. We all know who created ISIS and al-Qaeda. We know that Jake Sullivan told Hillary Clinton in an email that al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria. All that is clear for everyone today, that the masks have fallen. Iran's problem has always been its independence for the last 47 years and its opposition to ethnic cleansing, ethno-supremacism and Palestine. And of course, the crushing of the people of Cuba and so on. This is the real sin of Iran. The United States has imposed three wars on Iran. In the 1980s, they supported Saddam Hussein, the West gave him chemical weapons. I survived two chemical attacks. Never has the German government or any Western government apologized to us or paid reparations to the many victims, Iranian and Iraqi. And then last year and this year, what the United States wants is what Netanyahu wants and that is to destroy our region. Remember what the US ambassador to the Israeli regime said to Tucker Carlson, that if the Israeli regime takes entire region, that's fine. And of course, they are the most moral army in the world. So that means that genocide after genocide after genocide can take place and they can have the entire region. That is the plan. What Vance is saying is just nonsense. But it didn't have to be this way. There's a very good book that I would propose that you read called Going to Tehran written by Flint and Hillary Leverett. They worked in the White House under Condoleezza Rice and Flint Leverett resigned over the Iraq war, highly educated academics, they were in government. And they dealt with all the many of the myths that exists about Iran. But they also proposed a way forward that the United States, how the United States could have rapprochement with Iran, the real sort of rapprochement, not the fake rapprochement of Vance and Trump. But what happened? Everyone in Washington antagonized them and they chose the policies of the Zionist regime, which I believe is an enemy of the American people, an enemy of the Jewish people and working against US interests. If they had not chosen the Zionist route, the Netanyahu route, today we would probably have ordinary relations with the United States. And one very interesting thing is just, and during the last days of the war, the Israelis bombed a synagogue in Tehran and completely destroyed it. Why? Because it wasn't a Zionist synagogue. Sir, I'm also curious, you seem virtually certain that the war will restart. I saw your tweet this morning, you will attack the Persian Gulf, you will continue to escalate. You were at the negotiations. So how common is that view? Is there any dissenting view within the negotiators or within the security apparatus, which does want to see some sort of successful ceasefire? In other words, how united are people inside the decision-making? You have quite a bit of a view into that, into your view that the war is virtually certain to restart. Well, no one here wants war. We did not start the war with Saddam Hussein at the best of the, with Western encouragement launched against us. I was a volunteer in that war to defend the country. We did not launch last year's war. We did not launch this, the Ramadan war, the 40-day war. And we did not escalate. Every time the United States and the Israeli regime escalated, we responded in kind. So we do not want war now, but what we're seeing is the United States building up its forces. We see that the Israeli regime is slaughtering people in Lebanon against the ceasefire agreement. And the Pakistani leader, the Pakistani leaders have insisted that the United States accepted Lebanon as a part of the ceasefire. And Trump's denying it is just dishonesty. And if the Pakistanis are dishonest, then why is Trump still working through Pakistan? So it's clear that that was a part of the ceasefire. Netanyahu wants more war. He wants the global economy. He doesn't care about the global economy. He doesn't care what happens in India or Indonesia or anywhere else. See, their economies can crash as far as he's concerned. He wants more war. So he destroyed the ceasefire agreement. So no move was taken by Iran to facilitate more ships leaving the Strait of Hormuz. And in Islamabad, the US was not serious. And Vance was clear that he did not have authority. So no one wants war, but we're seeing what's happening before our eyes. And that's why we're preparing. And that's why if war happens, Iran is going to have to retaliate. Those Arab family regimes in the Persian Gulf, they are complicit. And so Iran will strike back. And we are approaching summer. And it is going to get very hot in the next few weeks, in the Persian Gulf. And if there's war, that will basically mean that these regimes will collapse because no one will be able to stay there under those circumstances. And I think that that will really be the tipping point where the global economy collapses in a way that will be much worse than 1929, in my opinion. And of course, the Red Sea will be shut down as well. It will be catastrophic for the world. I don't want this, no one here wants this, but Netanyahu is hell bent on moving in that direction and he's the president of the United States. Let me put C2 up on the screen. This is my last question for you, Sagar, may have more, but there was a Pakistani delegation that came to Tehran hoping to push for more US-Iran talks. Do you think there is a possibility there will be renewed in-person talks in Islamabad very likely before the ceasefire concludes? I don't know the details. I'm not in government. I've never been in government. When I went to Islamabad, it was not paid or anything. I just went there as a volunteer, just like on previous occasions. And I give my opinions. I don't know what is going to happen. I assume that the discussions that they had are now being studied by the decision makers in Iran. But the general sense is that the United States is unable to, or Trump is unable to use an off-ramp. He is not being allowed to use an off-ramp. And Trump cannot gain through negotiations what he failed to gain during the war. He lost the war. And they can say how they destroyed us. They were saying they destroyed us from day one. And they were saying that we ran out of missiles from day one, but during the last 15 days of the war, Iran was striking harder than ever before. So obviously this was all miscalculation. Or the United States, or Trump himself, believed the fake information that Musad was feeding him in order to launch this war. But whatever it is, it was a major miscalculation. We know that the United States is a brutal regime. We know it's a very brutal regime. We know when they say they will obliterate us and the media calls for the assassination of negotiators, that the political class in the United States, the Epsin class, it has no moral compass. And that's why it likes to slander Iran and portray Iran as evil in order to legitimize its brutality. But Iran did not lose this war and it's not going to lose the next war. It will be very painful for everyone. And I think the collapse that is coming will affect the entire world in ways that we cannot comprehend. But Iran has no option but to fight because for us, for the Iranians, this is a fight for survival. For the axis of resistance, this is a fight for survival. For Trump, either he's compromised or he's under heavily influenced, but this is a war of choice. And I think that the last war, the last two wars, and even the last three wars should have been enough to show the people around Trump that this is going to end in disaster for everyone but the United States as well. My last question for you, sir, is on Lebanon. Why is Lebanon so critical to the Iranian negotiators? Why is it that they are so adamant? I believe the vice president said, if it's their choice to blow up the negotiations over Lebanon, that would be dumb, but that's their choice. Why is it seemed so critical by the negotiators to secure ceasefire in Lebanon? Well, Vance does not care about the slaughter of women and children that's happening day and night because he has no moral compass. The reality is that people across the world have woken up to the narratives on Iran. Iran is always the bad guy, but somehow it's only Iran that supports the Palestinian people against the genocidal policies of the collective West. Iran is evil, but somehow it is only Iran that stands up for the Lebanese people, despite the support of the genocidal policies of the Israeli regime by the collective West. People are now seeing through everything and the reality is now clear to all. Hezbollah and the resistance in Lebanon and those who support it, who are Christians, Muslims and Druze, men and women, they are fighting against the Israeli regime because they wanted to draw forces. They fought against the Israeli regime because they wanted to draw forces away from Gaza as the genocide was taking place. Remember, the Palestinians were Amalek and Israeli leaders were saying there are no innocents. And as the genocide progressed, Hezbollah fought to save these kids, to save these men and women. These are the heroes of our era. People who sacrifice themselves, their women and children to spare, to save another people. And we will not relinquish the men, women and children of Lebanon in the face of an evil force, an ethno supremacist master race force that is determined to create another Gaza in Lebanon. Well, Professor Marandi, we are very grateful for your time and for your perspective this morning. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, sir. Thank you for taking the time and for sharing that, considering that we are currently at war with your people, we always think it's important to at least hear the perspective and to try and understand so that we can hopefully try and find some way out of this. So we appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. All right, fun story. We had to drop Cuba. We decided an interview with somebody from Tehran, a little bit more important, but we will cover Cuba on Friday. Let's go ahead and start with all birds and put this up here on the screen. So in a sign of, I don't know, of something, all birds quote, the struggling shoe retailer has made a bizarre pivot to AI and added some $127 million in value. So as of this morning, all birds stock is now, let's see, it is at one point was up nearly 500%. It has actually dropped some 30% as of this morning. It's overall five day gain is 379%. Did anything change with the fundamentals? No, actually, E2, let's put it up there on the screen. Here's the story of all birds, truly the American dream. If you haven't, if you never wore a pair, they're okay. Crystal's a fan. I think they're all like- I like the slip-ons. They are very comfortable. I had one pair and I was like, really? This is the hype. And then this is when they had a store and it was like an Apple store and it was all this. I said, all right, let's go check it out. Got a pair. I think I used it for a few months, eventually threw it away. But anyway, the all birds story. Birds- I actually have a pair in studio right now. Oh yeah, I'm looking at them. They're very comfy. I don't think they look all that great, but they're very like they fit to your foot. And it's also just nice to have a slip-on that you can just wear on there. I shouldn't hate too much, sorry. Okay, so anyway, the all birds story, put that back up. Got sidetracked. The all birds story, IPO'd in 2021 at a $4 billion valuation, Silicon Valley's favorite shoe. It then lost 99.5% of its value in four years, closed every US store, sold the entire brand for $39 million, renamed itself New Bird AI. It is now using 50 million on hand to buy GPUs and compete with AWS. Stock is now 450% at the time of that, 835 normal volume. The most unhinged corporate pivot of the decade, the newest meme stock entrant. Let's put E3 up there on the screen. Tracy Allaway, shout out to her over at OddLot. She was the first person actually to flag this. She says, and this is from their date line, following its prior announcement that has entered a definitive agreement to sell all birds to the American Exchange Group, which continues to build on the all birds legacy and deliver compelling products to customers. All birds will today announce the execution of a definitive agreement with an institutional investor for a 50 million convertible financing facility. The facility, which is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026, will enable the company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service company and AI native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the company anticipates changing its name to New Bird AI. So yeah, that's where we're at. A shoe company is now an AI company. And the stock is now up 400%. So it's all fake. I don't know, what else do you say about this? I mean, some of this is probably retail, people having fun, kind of like with GameStop. Some of it's probably real, some of it could be market manipulation. But if that's all it takes these days, and this is like a meme in Silicon Valley, he's just put AI next to whatever you do, even whenever you're literally a shoe company, and you can just raise hundreds of millions of dollars, like, okay, I mean, nothing bubbly here, right? Well, and I looked to you, I was like, what do you mean AI company? Because there's any number of things that could mean. And so I tried to look for some details about what the plan actually is. And everything I could find was just like the most generic corporate gobbledygook. So this is what they said, they said, the rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized high performance compute that the market is struggling to meet. It added developers and research groups were struggling to secure the resources needed to build, train and run AI at scale. New Bird AI is being built to help close that gap. Just very broad, generic, non-specific. It's just like, you know, the shoe thing didn't work out, AI is hot, I guess we're doing AI now, we'll figure out what that means. And then to see investors, whether it's retail or what's going on there and be like, great, we're all in. Yeah, it demonstrates that there's a lot of fakeness in the hype for AI right now. And comes at a time too, where, you know, the revulsion at AI and at the data center build out is only getting larger. We can put E4 up on the screen, this is the first, you know, really significant, sort of legislative backlash, the main legislature approved a moratorium on building big data centers that has to be signed into law still by Governor Janet Mills, who's obviously locked in this primary battle with Graham Platter, and it's gonna be very interesting to see what she does there, whether she signs it or whether she vetoes it. And then we can also put E5 up on the screen. Virginia is one of the national hotspots for data centers. If it doesn't have the most build out, it is in the certainly top three. And you can see back in 2023, they asked this question of Virginia voters, would you be comfortable or uncomfortable if a new data center were built in your community? Back in 2023, 69%, so pretty overwhelming, said we're comfortable with that. Now those numbers have completely flipped. Now 35% only, say they're comfortable and 59%, a very clear majority, say they are uncomfortable. That is just over the span of three years, a complete reverse of public opinion on data centers. And we saw little inklings of this in the Virginia elections, they have off your elections always that just occurred, where you had a couple candidates in some of these data center hotspot areas that actually ran against data centers and were able to win on that message. Yeah, look, I think this is the hidden issue of our time. I keep trying to sound the alarm, we've seen it now for months and months. Virginia is tip of the iceberg because we have the most data centers on the planet apparently, in the state, it should be a national scandal. Every video that comes out, we played one couple of days ago here on the show, if somebody who lives near a data center, how loud it is, the construction, people don't believe any of the benefits. I think that the tide has really turned. And look, it's also, it's an energy problem because if we had a ton of free, abundant, and cheap energy, yeah, we would all be cool with data centers, we wouldn't care that much, we could build them out in the middle of nowhere, okay, whatever, we'll obviously have some discussion in terms of land use, and I don't want anybody's land being taken away from them. But in the era where it's increasing power bills and gas prices are high, and there's also like zero sum, we talked about this in the tax block, when you choose between who you're financing and who you're not, and the AI companies are getting all this cap expend, you're like, I'm sorry, this is bullshit. Like we can't be running our economy like this because there's no real tangible benefit to create Lego videos for Iran, I mean, it's nuts. So I just think that the tide is really turning correctly. And look, I mean, there's all this societal dislocation that's happening, it's probably a good segue because we have our guest coming up who's talking about how the college educated class now feels increasingly like the proletariat, which is an inversion of how things all used to be. So yeah, I think it's all indicative of a much bigger problem. The Allbirds thing will be like the GameStop thing. Really what it is is mania. Like, and there is, Joe Weisenthal, and I've talked about this, is that whenever markets are at all time highs, it actually increases mania. Like it's one of those things where when there's all this cheaper money or froth that's happening, that's when it's more likely to see things, like it's more of a, it's not a reflection of the fundamentals per se. So that's where the Allbirds thing, although let's not make too much of it, it's $127 million, it's not a huge, it's not a ton. So it's like, what do you have in your company that makes you like well positioned to be able to pull this up other than some tech CEOs wear your shoes? Yeah, it's, I don't know, very bizarre, very bizarre timeline that we are living in. But as you said, it's actually a good segue into our next segment, which talks about the landscape facing college educated workers and how much dimmer their prospects are, how radicalizing that has been already, and that's before the full introduction of AI and just how much that may transform our political landscape. Joining us now is Noam Scheiber. He covers white collar workers for the New York Times and is author of a fantastic new book titled, Mutiny, the rise and revolt of the college educated working class. Great to have you Noam. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. I really have enjoyed the book. I was telling you that a few of the workers you profile, we actually had interviewed here at breaking points that was neat to be able to see. They're full storing more completely. And what you document here is really the difficulties facing college graduates and the way that that has put them more in the same boat as service sector workers and traditional blue collar workers. So just start out laying out your thesis here. What has changed for the average college grad? Yeah, so my book is really about the generation of people who graduated from college after the Great Recession all the way up through this coming May and June. And this is the generation of people that was given the heart of cell of any generation in history about why they need to go to college. Everyone from their parents and neighbors to presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama insisted that college is no longer a luxury. It's absolutely an imperative. They did more to prepare for college than any generation in history. They went to school for longer days. They did more homework. They took way more AP classes. The number of students taking AP classes between the early 80s and the 2010s increased 10-fold. And then more of them than ever went to college. We had a huge increase in the 2010s and the number of people who were going to college and graduating from college. But at the moment that they were doing all these things, a college degree was becoming less valuable than ever before. And so there was this huge gap that opened up between their expectations of what their lives would be like if they did all these things that everyone from the president to their parents had told them to do, and then the reality that they encountered when they got on the job market. And the reality was kind of stagnating or declining wages. Jobs that the only jobs that they were available to many of them were jobs that they were overqualified for, jobs like retail, service sector. And they just became radicalized. This was incredibly frustrating. This was not the image of their adult lives that they had been sold. They took on a huge amount of debt. And so even as wages were only declining slightly, once you factored in their debt, the actual income that was left over in their paycheck was way down. And so this was very radicalizing. It was very frustrating. And then the pandemic ends up being kind of the final straw, which really sets in motion the events that I write about in my book about the unionization, the standing up to their employers, and even ultimately voting for people like Azora Montani in New York City who are, begin to speak to this anger and frustration among the college educated working class. Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean, the word college educated working class seems like an oxymoron. Your book makes the case that it's not. I read the piece in The New York Times. I was very interested by it. I do wonder though how much, because I confess, I've only read The Times Expert, how much though of the anger is directed at the institutions themselves? Because if I were to look at this split screen, a lot of the liberal energy doesn't necessarily focus on the institutions nearly as much. I spoke earlier in the show. I went to George Washington University. It is apparently now charging $100,000 per year. I'm urging anyone, do not pay that, do not pay it. Let me repeat. So how much responsibility do these institutions have? And the government has for incentivizing this? Yeah, great question. I think a lot. I have a chapter in the book where I really try to kind of call out the role of higher ed. And I think you're absolutely right. There's been almost a sort of extractive quality to higher education for, I'd say, at least the past 25 years. And the example I gave in my book, which I think is sort of interesting on its own terms, but also representative of what's been going on over the past generation, is an undergraduate degree in video game design. So beginning in the 90s or 80s or 90s, if you wanted to make video games, you didn't go to college for that. You just got on your computer and started coding the game. And if it was something people liked, they would buy it. And you would succeed. And if not, not. Beginning in the early 2000s, universities started offering degrees in video game design. And the way they marketed these degrees was this is like a vocational degree. You come here almost like a computer science or a STEM degree. You come here, you learn all these practical skills for making video games. And then they would promote these degree programs on their websites saying, our graduates typically go work for these triple A studios or double A studios places where you can make a living doing this. In fact, it was much more like masters of fine arts or a bachelor's of fine arts or going to study acting or short story writing. It was something that was really cool. A lot of people were really passionate about. But the number of jobs available to the people with this degree was minuscule compared to the number of people that were enrolling and graduating with that degree. And yet the universities were just happy to admit those folks and layer on tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And suddenly you get these people graduating with this degree who've wanted to be a video game designer as their whole lives. The university has told them this degree will qualify to do that. They walk out the door. They cannot get jobs. They often can't even get interviews. I mean, there's one worker I profile in my book named Dylan Burton, who was active in organizing a studio at Microsoft. He was a very accomplished game designer. He led this game design class in college, which produced an actual workable game. He barely got an interviewer too after six months with $70,000 in debt. He decides, I just got to get a job. So he accepts a job as a game tester, which is very different from being a game designer. Game testers, it can be incredibly tedious. You can spend 60, 70 hours a week just playing the same game over and over and over again. You can kind of go out of your mind doing it. And for your troubles, you make $18 an hour. And so I think it's telling on its own terms. But I think we've seen a version of this play out in a whole variety of universities across a whole variety of degrees. And I think you allude to this, that it's kind of a structural problem because the universities don't have to do any due diligence. The government is subsidizing the debt. So the university are happy to charge whatever they can get away with knowing that if someone can't repay the debt, it's not their problem. The government's going to go track them down. So I do think it's become this hugely extractive industry. And the higher ed industrial complex has a lot to answer for of the problems that these graduates have the past 10, 15 years. Give us a profile of one or two of the other individuals who you talk about in this book. Because I want people to get a sense of, these aren't people who are barely going, barely getting into college, barely passing. These are people who went to good schools, got good grades, were seen as leaders in their community, graduate from college, and then end up Starbucks Barista, which they could have done without a college degree. But now they've got tons and tons of debt. So talk to us a little bit about the profile of the people that you were able to dig in with. Yeah. I think what was so striking to me about meeting these folks and telling their stories is for anyone who graduated from college over the past 30 years and who went on to do a white-collar job, these are folks that you would completely recognize, from your freshman dorm or from your senior level class in advanced philosophy or history. They spoke the same language. They had similar experiences in college. They had similar kind of past to college, AP classes, and parents who really leaned on them to go to college. And yet, somewhere along the way, it sort of went off the rails. And one person I write about in the book is a woman named Kaya Barrett. She grew up in Baltimore County. She went to a majority black high school. That high school was incredibly persistent in persuading people to go to college. They would actually have them post their college admission letters on the office wall because they really wanted to promote and celebrate people going to college. So Kaya, dutifully, like everyone else, she took all these advanced placement classes. She applied to college. She ends up at Towson University, which is a pretty good and big public university in Maryland. She studies communications. During college, she works at the Apple Store that's pretty close to campus. But in her senior year, she's applying to dozens of jobs. She wants to do either a marketing job or professional development. Doesn't get any traction. It eventually decides, OK, I'm just going to stay at the Apple Store. She had a job, which was kind of like a high status job with an Apple called a creative, where you kind of teach these classes and help people use their devices to do cool things, edit podcasts, edit films, videos. So she decides, OK, this is not my first choice, but I'm going to take this job. She stays at the Apple Store. But the problem is, during the same period that we're talking about, not only is the economy looking worse and worse overall for college grads, but certain employers like an Apple, like a Starbucks, that had traditionally been a decent fallback option for college grads, at least for a few years while they got their footing. Those jobs had steadily become worse and worse within those companies, too. So at Apple, for example, the creative had been this sort of high status exalted position. People really competed for it. But over the past 10, 15 years, it's been steadily degraded. So by the time she does it, it's kind of losing its luster. And then after a few years, a lot of the creatives aren't even teaching classes anymore. They're just getting pulled onto the sales floor to sell iPhones and Macs and AppleCare Plus, which is their extended warranty, which they constantly harp on and tell people. And so she's like, I took this job. It was already a compromise. But it was an OK job. And then the longer I'm here, the more it just becomes an ordinary retail job. And so she's just getting more and more frustrated as this goes. And eventually, she's one of the leaders of the organizing campaign at her store, which becomes the first Apple store in the United States to unionize. Wow, fascinating. So generally, I think a point I've made here before is like with the Russian Revolution, and a lot of people think it's a proletariat revolution. It was really a revolution of the bourgeoisie. So in this case, what you're talking about is effectively an entirely disaffected, educated class. So what type of politics can we expect in the future if we don't resolve or change the social contract? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. There is a famous book, which you may be alluding to, called End Times. And the thesis of that book is that the overproduction of elites, so people with a lot of education who don't find jobs or livelihoods that can sustain them, that typically leads to revolution, social revolution, political revolution. He definitely attributes the Bolshevik Revolution to this overproduction. You had a bunch of children of noble people who were highly educated but could not get the jobs in the bureaucracy, the Russian bureaucracy, that typically sustained these folks. And eventually, they were the revolutionary vanguard that took down the Tsarist regime. You see this throughout history. We saw this actually after the Great Recession in a whole variety of countries in Spain and in Greece. And actually, in the UK even, the UK, historically, college had been free. In the UK, Tony Blair in the late 90s started to impose a nominal fee. And then David Cameron in 2010, 11 actually increases the fee substantially. And just tens of thousands of students pour into the streets in London. And they actually ransacked the Tory party headquarters. They're really pissed off about this. So we've seen it have really destabilizing political effects across countries, across time. And I do think that this is going to continue to kind of destabilize American politics. And I think the most obvious example is just pointing to Zoram Mhamdani in New York City, who really, I think, did speak to the anxieties of this group of people and was actually able to assemble a broad coalition of college-educated working class and non-college-educated working class. And he did that by framing the campaign around affordability, around economics, around people struggling to make a living. And I think that was very effective. And just one data point that I don't think people appreciate from that election. Zoram Mhamdani won 84% of college-educated people under 30. So 84%. Like 84% of a group of people in this country don't do anything. But 84% of 20-something college grads voted for Zoram Mhamdani. So I really think it shows the potency of this. I would expect it to be a real important dynamic in the 2028 campaign. I think you're already seeing people kind of following the Bernie Sanders mold, the Zoram Mhamdani mold, trying to sort of build a broad working class coalition. Bernie has talked about this, not just people without a degree, but everyone from people with only a high school degree or who dropped out of high school, all the way up through highly educated people, doctors, architects. I write about them a bit in the book, who still think of themselves as workers who really get frustrated by all the bureaucracy that they have to deal with and the way they're yanked around at the job. I quoted a doctor in my book who was involved in a big union campaign at a health care system in Minnesota. They now have the largest union of private sector doctors in the country, about 400 doctors unionized there in 2023. And this person told me, we're basically treated like factory workers. We have these MBAs and these consultants kind of yank us around. They tell us how long we can work with patients. They tell us how quickly we have to discharge them from the hospital. They give us all these dumb questions that we have to ask them instead of just deferring to our professional judgment. So even when even doctors and PhDs and architects are feeling this way, I do think there is space to build this kind of broad coalition. I would expect that a Democratic candidate would try to pick up that mantle in 2028. Yeah, it's somewhat of a different way for the class-based left to think about things. Because historically, it's like, oh, we have all these. There's a lot of self-consciousness about the fact that there's all these college-educated individuals who are the most dedicated leftists. But when you see the way that they are also increasingly, their fortunes are the same as the service sector workers, the same as the blue collar workers, it does change, I think, the mindset a bit. My last question for you is, we cover AI and the impact of AI and the backlash against data centers. We actually did a whole block on that before your segment here. And so I'm curious from your reporting on white collar workers and labor movements, what you're seeing in terms of how AI is impacting the job prospects of college grads and how much of the AI revolution is hype versus the claims that are being made by these companies that they intend to replace every white collar worker to start with, and then all human labor effectively with robots? Yeah, so I think maybe the most important high altitude point to make is most of what I'm writing about happens pre-AI. So AI is not causing the job loss and the stagnation I'm talking about. You see some of it is sort of automation that's pre-AI. You have accounting software that makes it less necessary to hire tax preparers. And a lot of college-educated people used to prepare taxes. So there's an element of automation that figures into the story. But most of it is pre-Gen AI, pre-Chat GBT. That said, this is something that clearly weighs on a lot of workers. It very much figured in to say the Hollywood writers and actor strike in 2023. I think the studios really bungled into a much more intense and prolonged strike because they misjudged the sort of emotional potency of AI as an issue. They kind of just ignored the screenwriters that put forth a few pretty reasonable demands on AI. We don't want to be required to use this. And we don't want AI to be able to get credit for writing a script. We want the writers to be humans. And the studios basically stiff-armed on that. And that really led to this intense backlash that really propelled that strike for the five months that it lasted. So we've seen kind of the emotional resonance of this so far, but it hasn't affected that many workers yet. I would expect that when it actually does start affecting workers on a wide scale, certainly it's affected coders and software developers. But when we start to see it on a large scale, I would expect to see this pattern that I've been writing about the radicalization of white-collar workers really increase even more. So I think it's a very potent issue. We haven't really seen the bite of it yet, except in a few isolated circumstances. But I think it's going to be an accelerance. It's really going to increase the radicalization and move it up the income scale. So it's not just folks who ended up working in retail or restaurants, but even highly trained white-collar workers. Certainly software engineers, as I've spoken to them over the past year or two, are completely freaked out about this. And many of them are now speaking in the language of workers and worker consciousness and solidarity, language that you did 10 years ago here very much in Silicon Valley, but increasingly you hear it there too. I mean, the irony could not be, Richard, they told us all, learn to code. It'll be like your golden ticket. You'll definitely get a job. It'll be secure and stable. And then the first ones eliminated with the development of AI. The book is Mutiny, the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. Fantastic book. I recommend people also follow your reporting because I think you're following some really important trends. No, I'm great to have you. Thank you. Thanks, man. Thank you, guys. We really enjoyed it. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. All right, Cuba, that'll be up there tomorrow on The Friday Show. See you then. This is an I Heart podcast.