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

27:56But 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 influence, 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.

28:46My 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, you know, that's their choice. Why does it seem so critical by the negotiators to secure a 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.

29:29Iran 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.

30:13And 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 sacrificed 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, you know, considering that we are currently at war with your people.

30:58We 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. This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. You know, I always got something going on, lifting, chasing my kid, or heading on a family road trip where I'm somehow both the snack guy and the DJ. But no matter what's going on in my schedule, one thing never changes. I make sure I stay hydrated. That's where Liquid IV shows up clutch. We've said it before. It's the key to faster hydration. You got to have a liquid IV on you.

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32:33Go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code NUTHAUSE for 20 % off your first purchase.

33:03You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC registered advisor.

33:34Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Have you heard about Klarna? Klarna is an app designed to make everyday spending simpler and more transparent. It gives you flexibility to decide how you want to pay. Whether that's paying right away, paying later, or spreading payments over time. depending on what works best for you. Everything is managed in the Klarna app, so you can keep track of purchases and stay organized. You can also discover deals and even earn cash back when you shop through the Klarna app with participating brands.

34:15It's all about flexibility and staying in control of how and when you pay. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. Terms apply. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license. NMLS number 1353190. Klarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. 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 Allbirds and put this up here on the screen.

34:56So in a sign of, I don't know, of something, Allbirds, quote, the struggling shoe retailer, has made a bizarre pivot to AI and added some$127 million in value. So as of this morning, Allbirds 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. Its 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 Allbirds, truly the American dream. If you never wore a pair, they're okay. Crystal's a fan. I think they're okay. I like the slip-ons. They are very comfortable.

35:45I 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. So 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 Allbirds story. I actually have a pair in studio right now. Do you really? Oh, yeah, I'm looking at them. They're very comfy. I don't think they look all that great. Yeah. But they're very like they fit to your foot. I see. And it's also just nice to have a slip-on that you can just wear in there. Listen, I shouldn't hate too much.

36:12You know, sorry. Okay, so anyway, the Allbirds story. Put that back up. Got sidetracked. The Allbirds 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 U.S. store, sold the entire brand for$39 million, renamed itself NewBird 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 Alloway, shout out to her, over at OddLot.

36:53She was the first person, actually, to flag this. She says, and this is from their dateline, following its prior announcement that it's entered a definitive agreement to sell Allbirds to the American Exchange Group, which continues to build on the Allbirds legacy and deliver compelling products to customers, Allbirds 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.

37:34In connection with this pivot, the company anticipates changing its name to NewBird AI. So, yeah, that's where we're at. A shoe company is now an AI company. and 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, you know, 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 fucking shoe company, and you can just raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

38:10Like, okay. I mean, nothing bubbly here, right? Yeah. Well, and I looked too, 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, like 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.

38:44New 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, be like, great, we're all in. And yeah, it demonstrates that there's a lot of fakeness in the hype for AI right now. And it comes at a time, too, where the revulsion at AI and at the data center buildout is only getting larger. We can put E4 up on the screen. This is the first really significant sort of legislative backlash.

39:25The 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 Plattern. It's going to 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?

40:06Back in 2023, 69 percent, so pretty overwhelming, said we're comfortable with that. Now those numbers have completely flipped. Now 35 percent only say they're comfortable and 59 percent, 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-year 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.

40:44Yeah. 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 a couple days ago here on the show of 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.

41:18We wouldn't care that much. We could build them out in the middle of nowhere. Okay, whatever. Obviously, Obviously, we'll 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 CapEx spend, 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.

41:50I 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's, there is, Joe Weisenthal and I have talked about this, is that whenever markets are at all-time highs, it actually increases mania.

42:26Like, 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 Albers thing, although let's not make too much of it. It's$127 million. It's not like 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.

43:12And that's before the full introduction of AI and just how much that may transform our political landscape. This is Julian Edelman from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and Jules. One thing I've learned over the years before you head out on any adventure, you got to be ready to stay hydrated because dehydration ruins the fun faster than you can spell it. Pretty sure there is a why in there somewhere. I was a slot receiver, not a spelling bee champ. Speaking of adventures, Liquid IV has been rolling with us for a while now. Total Pros Pro. Show up, does the job, makes everyone better. We're pumped to have them on the team.

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44:39and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool.

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45:44Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. 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 Point, so it was neat to be able to see their full story 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.

46:23So 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 hardest sell 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.

47:01They 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 tenfold. And then more of them than ever went to college. We had a huge increase in the 2010s in 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.

47:39And the reality was, you know, 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, you know, ultimately voting for people like Azorah Mamdani in New York City, who are, you know, begin to speak to this anger and frustration among the college-educated working class.

48:33Yeah, 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, you know, 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.

49:07I'm urging anyone, do not pay that. Do not pay that. 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.

49:43So 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, you know, got on your computer and started coding the game. And if it was, you know, it was something people like, 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, you know, our graduates typically go work for these, you know, AAA studios or AA studios, you know, places where you can make a living doing this.

50:21In fact, it was much more like a master's of fine arts or a bachelor's of fine arts or going to study acting or short story writing. You know, 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 video game designers their whole lives.

50:52The university has told them, like, 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 like an actual workable game. He barely got an interview or two after like 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.

51:22You know, game testers, it can be incredibly tedious. You know, 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 like$18 an hour, you know. And so I think it's, you know, 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.

51:50So the universities 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 of these graduates over 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, you know, end up Starbucks barista, which they could have done without a college degree.

52:35But now they've got tons and tons of debt. So talk to us a little bit about the kind of profile of the people that you were able to dig in with. Yeah, you know, I think what was so striking to me about meeting these folks and telling their stories is for anyone who graduated from college, you know, over the past 30 years and who went on to do a white collar job. These are folks that you would completely recognize, you know, from your freshman dorm or from your, you know, you know, senior level class in advanced philosophy or history. Like they spoke the same language. They had similar experiences in college.

53:06They had similar kind of paths to college, you know, AP classes and parents who really, you know, leaned on them to go to college. And yet, you know, 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.

53:44She applies 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, you know, either a marketing job or professional development, doesn't get any traction, eventually decides, okay, I'm just going to stay at the Apple store. She had a job, which was kind of like a, you know, a high status job within Apple called a creative, where you kind of teach these classes and help people sort of use their devices to do things, kind of cool things, you know, edit podcasts, edit films, videos.

54:21So she decides, okay, you know, 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 sort of the economy looking worse and worse overall for college grads, but certain employers like an Apple, like a Starbucks that had traditionally been like 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.

54:52But over the kind of 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, you know, Macs and AppleCare Plus, which is their extended warranty, which they constantly harp on and tell people. And so she's like, you know, I took this job. It was already a compromise, but, you know, it was an okay 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.

55:24And 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, Noam, you know, 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 proletarian 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 solve or change the social contract? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

55:57There 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, you know, people with a lot of education who don't find jobs or, you know, 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, in the Russian bureaucracy that typically sustained these folks. And eventually they were the revolutionary vanguard that took down the czarist regime.

56:32You 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 U.K. even. The U.K. historically, college had been free in the U.K. Tony Blair in the late 90s started to kind of impose a nominal fee. And then David Cameron in like 2010, 11 actually increases the fee substantially. And just tens of thousands of students pour into the streets in London, and they actually ransack 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.

57:07And 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 Mamdani 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, Zoran Mamdani won 84 % of college-educated people under 30.

57:45So 84%, like 84 % of people, of a group of people in this country don't do anything, you know, but 84 % of 20-something college grads voted for Zoran Mamdani. So I really think it shows the potency of this. I would expect it to be, you know, a real important dynamic in the 2028 campaign. I think you're already seeing people, you know, kind of following the Bernie Sanders mold, the Zoran Mamdani mold, trying to sort of build a broad working-class coalition. Bernie has talked about this, you know, not just, you know, people without a degree, but everyone from, you know, people with only a high school degree or who dropped out of high school, all the way up through highly educated people, you know, doctors, architects, I write about them a bit in the book, who still, you know, think of themselves as workers who really get frustrated by, you know, all the bureaucracy that they have to deal with and the way they're yanked around at the job.

58:29I quoted a doctor in my book, who was involved in a big union campaign at a healthcare 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, you know, we're basically treated like factory workers. You know, we have these MBAs and these consultants kind of yank us around, you know, 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 like deferring to our professional judgment.

58:59So even, you know, when even doctors and, you know, PhDs and architects are feeling this way. I do think there is space to build this kind of broad coalition. And I would expect that, you know, a Democratic candidate would try to pick up that mantle in 2028. Yeah, it's somewhat of a different way for the sort of like 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.

59:33It does change, I think, the mindset a bit. My last question for you is, you know, 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, you know, how AI is impacting the job prospects of college grads and how much of the AI revolution is hype versus the, you know, 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.

1:00:10Yeah. So, you know, 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, you know, some of it is sort of automation that's pre-AI. You know, 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-ChatGBT. That said, this is something that clearly weighs on a lot of workers. It very much figured into, say, the Hollywood writers and actors strike in 2023.

1:00:45I 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, you know, the screenwriters had put forth a few, you know, 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, you know, for writing a script. We want the writers to be humans. And the studio is 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.

1:01:23I 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 bite on a large scale, I would expect to see the sort of 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 accelerant. You know, it's really going to kind of increase the radicalization and kind of move it up the income scale.

1:01:55So it's not just folks who ended up working in, you know, in retail or restaurants, but even, you know, 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, you know, kind of in the language of workers and worker consciousness and solidarity, language that you didn't, you know, 10 years ago hear very much in Silicon Valley, but increasingly you hear it there too. I mean, the irony could not be richer. They told us all, learn to code. It'll be like your golden ticket.

1:02:25You'll definitely get a job. It'll be secure and stable. And then the first ones eliminated in the, with, 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. 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. Bethany Frankel here from Just Be With Bethany Frankel.

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