Offline with Jon Favreau - The Revolt of the College Grads

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

New York Times journalist Noam Scheiber stops by the pod to talk to Jon about his new book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, in which he argues that stagnant wages and rising student debt have changed the economic promise once offered by a college degree. The two discuss how college-educated workers are responding to this new reality, both individually and collectively; how AI may supercharge the pains already felt by new college grads; and how it's all reshaping — and may even break — our political system.

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mobile is reduced after 20 gigas a month. You had these kind of good non-college jobs that used to function

as the safety valve that, you know, kind of limited the frustration of people who didn't get the job that they hoped they would get. Suddenly, that safety valve is really diminishing. And you can see where, you know, if your fallback job was an insurance agent and it became, you know, barista or it became, you know, retail, you know, assistant manager or sales clerk, that can be a pretty frustrating thing.

I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, author and journalist, Nome Schiber. Noam writes about workers for the New York Times. He's covered union organizing efforts at Starbucks, Amazon, and major tech companies. He's written about AI's impact on white-collar workers, the rise of remote work after COVID, and the Trump administration's attacks on the federal workforce. But today I invited Noam on to talk about his new book, Mutiny, The Rise and Revolt of the College-educated Working Class, where he argues that stagnant wages, rising student debt, and the threat of artificial intelligence has changed the economic promise once offered by a college degree. He follows how college-educated workers are responding to this new reality by taking

jobs they're overqualified for or by organizing their workplaces and how their response is reshaping our political system and has the potential to break it. We had a fascinating conversation about the book. I challenged him on a couple of points if these changes are dependent on the type of degrees people are pursuing or dependent on where they go to college. And I talk to him about the ways that culture and class intersect and sometimes don't intersect when it comes to politics. I also talk to to him about the ways AI may supercharge the problems these graduates face as more white-collar jobs disappear. We'll get into it all in a moment, but before we do, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already so that you don't miss out on any of the great

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Here's Noam Shriver. Noam, welcome to offline. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course. You've written this wonderful book, The Rise and Revoltz of the College Educated Working Class. The book's called Mutiny. Fascinating thesis.

It opens on a Starbucks picket line in Chicago. with a man named Teddy Hoffman. He's Grinnell grad, Watson Fellow, and then has basically been pulling espresso shots for like seven years at Starbucks. When did you first realize that Teddy wasn't an anomaly, but the leading edge of something bigger, a bigger trend in employment? Yeah. So I actually, I'll back up a little before I met Teddy. I started covering the organizing campaign at Starbucks. In the late summer of 21, I got an email from an organizer who I'd worked with, you know, had been a source in the past.

And he said, we've got a great team of folks here at the Starbucks in Buffalo and we're about to file a petition to have a union election. Are you interested in talking to them? And I said, sure, yeah, of course. And so I wrote a piece, announced, you know, making, reporting the news that they were filing these petitions for a union election. They initially tried to do six stores, NLRB rejected three of the petitions. So they had elections at three stores. they won at two of the three. That was like in the late fall of 21.

And then these folks who were doing the initial organizing in Buffalo had thought of it as a kind of Buffalo-specific campaign, but it rapidly spread across the country. So by January, there were maybe half a dozen to a dozen stores in cities like Boston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Florida. By February, there were dozens. And then by, you know, the late spring, there were hundreds of stores filing for union elections. And every time, at least for as long as I could keep up, every time a news store filed a petition for an election, I tried to get on the phone or jump on a Zoom with a few of the people who were involved. And, you know, not to a person, but a large majority of the people turned out to be college educated.

They were often, you know, had a pretty sizable amount of student debt. They were definitely not doing the job that they thought that they would be doing when they entered college and even when they graduated from college. and yet somehow they had found themselves at Starbucks. And so I realized, okay, something's up here. Something's going on. I think I did an initial story in January of 22 saying, hey, you know, there's a lot of college-educated people involved in this stuff.

And then this kind of continued to spread. We saw organizing campaigns at Apple, at REI, at Trader Joe's, at Amazon. And more often than not, it was college-educated people leading those campaigns. And so, yeah, at that point I'm thinking, okay, there's something really going on here. I started looking at economic data, you know, economic research, and it starts to kind of line up. You know, it looks like this is not some kind of fluke anomaly. Actually, the job market for recent college grads has really softened. And it's something that, you know, as I looked at the research, had gone back all the way,

even a few years before the Great Recession even, but then gets much worse during the recession. And it just never really recovers. I think that was the thing. So people who were just entering the job market in 2018, 19, 20, were still. dealing with this kind of sluggish, stagnant job market for recent college grads. So, you know, it kind of went in phases, but I'd say sort of from the late summer of 21 into the spring of 22, you know, it slowly started to dawn on me that there was something bigger going on here. That's like the economic background. You write that this generation of college graduates has been

given, quote, the bank accounts and the politics of the proletariat. What does that mean look like in practice, like walk us through what's different about this working class compared to working classes we've had before with regard to their politics? Yeah. So I think, you know, this is, a lot of these folks were born kind of in the early to mid-90s. They're in, you know, in junior high school, high school, in the kind of early to mid-2000s. So this is, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and then the financial crisis, which, you know, you obviously remember this period very well. these folks were, you know, I'd say there was just a kind of general loss of faith in institutions, a loss of faith in authority, a sense that the people who were supposed to be in charge really

didn't know what they were doing. I mean, these were these kind of formative moments for people in this generation. And so I think that had a real effect on how they looked at, you know, the people who were supposed to be in charge. And, you know, I think from middle school, from high school, there was a sense that the people who were supposed to be in charge really didn't have a clue about what was going on. And so that was the kind of radicalizing thing, I think. And then you overlaid their personal experience with getting a degree and finding it difficult to navigate the job market after getting a degree. And then an additional layer, which is, as I write in the book, this was the generation that was probably given the

hardest sell about going to college of any generation in history. You know, they did more homework. They went, you know, their school days were longer. Between the early age, in the early 2010s, about 10 times more people took AP classes over that 30-year period. So this was like a generation that got a hard sell. They did more to prepare than anyone. More of them went to college than anyone in history. And yet when they get out, they find that their degrees aren't as valuable as they thought. And meanwhile, the world seems to be kind of falling apart around them.

And I think both of those things had a kind of radicalizing effect on their kind of political worldview broadly and their sense of the way that the system may or may not be working for them. Why do you think the college-educated working class matters not just as a sort of sociological economic curiosity, but as a political force? Like what kind of political implications do you see having sort of studied this cohort? Yeah. So I think, you know, anyone who followed the discourse around the 20s, 16 campaign and the 2020 campaign and then the 24 campaign has heard the term diploma divide in their lives. And this idea that, you know, college grads and people without degrees, they never voted exactly the same, but they really start diverging in how they vote

during the first Trump election. And then by 24, there's just this chasm, right? I think people with degrees favored Kamala Harris by about 15 points and people without degrees favored Trump by about 13, 14 points. So just a huge gap in how college grads are voting relative to those without degrees. And I think the story that's kind of spun out of that is these groups are as far apart culturally, politically, socially, as you can imagine, right? It's almost like two different epistemological universes that they're living in. You know, college grads read newspapers and, you know, listen to mainstream news and people without degrees just get their information from TikTok and Facebook. And I guess what I found as I reported this out is while all of that is kind of true,

these two groups are actually getting closer over time on economic issues. So in the 80s and 90s, college grads were typically well to the right of people without degrees on economic questions, you know, on taxes, regulation, the role of government and the economy redistribution. The college grads were, you know, were pretty moderate to conservative on these questions. and people without degrees were pretty left populist. Beginning in about 2004, the college grads, you know, right around this time that we're talking about Iraq and, you know, the housing bubble, the college grads start drifting left on economics.

And by 2020, they're actually slightly to the left as a group of people without degrees, though they're pretty close. So basically what you see is even as we've had this big divergence on cultural questions, on social issues, on, you know, maybe immigration, on kind of core economic questions, these two groups have actually become much more similar than different over time. And so I do think that there is actually this kind of, you know, potential super majority of working class folks out there.

You know, this is something that people like Bernie Sanders have talked about in the past. You know, it's really, you know, 99% of people are actually workers, you know, and there's just kind of a 1% group of capitalists and billionaires. And I think that the data actually bears that out. And I think we've seen that over the past two decades, that this group has become much more left on economics and really developed more of a kind of worker consciousness. You know, in my book, I allude to conversations that I've had with doctors even, you know, highly trained, highly paid. But doctors have undergone this transformation over the past 20 years where their industry has become much more consolidated. So these folks who used to own their own practices, they used to be the boss, they're now kind of clock punchers like everybody else.

They work for these huge medical systems. Typically, they have all these, like, metrics that they've got to follow. You know, you can only spend 10 minutes with a patient, and you've got to discharge them after 48 hours, and there's a series of questions you have to ask them. And these doctors are now thinking, like, wow, I just feel like a factory worker. You know, so I think this, the kind of rise of this worker consciousness is something that's relatively new. And again, it kind of makes them a lot more similar, at least on economic questions, than different from the traditional working class. So I do think that there is this kind of space for a coalition, like we haven't really seen, you know, in a long time.

And, you know, we can talk specifics, but someone like Zwaamandani in New York, I think, really did tap into this. You know, he was very much a self-described Democratic Socialist. He ran on, you know, fast-free buses and publicly owned supermarkets. And yet college grads voted for him overwhelmingly, which would have been unheard of, you know, in the 80s or 90s. In fact, among college grads under 30, so young college. grads, they supported Mamdani by 8415, basically. So overwhelming majority of young college grads for momdani. So yeah, I do think there's this divide that we've heard about. It exists, but it doesn't exist across all issues and some very important issues. College grads are actually pretty

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But first, I just want to dig in on some of the data. Yeah. Since there's been some disagreement on this point, APLU and Public Policy Institute of California still shows bachelor's degree holders earning roughly 75 to 86% more over a lifetime than high school grads. That gap has widened slightly since 2003. Eric Levitts at Vox, I know you guys have gone back and forth on this as well. He argued that the share of college grads who are underemployed has actually declined over time. So recent college grads were less likely to hold a low-wage job

in 2023 than they had been three decades earlier. How do you square some of the macro data with the data that you've seen and some of the on-the-ground storytelling that you've done in this book. Yeah. So, you know, I think there's actually a pretty wide overlap between the story that I tell and the story that Eric tells. So I think we both agree that median wages or average wages, whichever you choose, they're somewhere between flat and declining over the past 25, 30 years. So Eric would say, you know, if you look at median wages for recent college grads between 1990 and today, they're like slightly up, but very slightly over this 35-year period. And I would say, well, if you look at this period that I'm talking about, you know, the kind of early 2000s to the late

2010, so that kind of, you know, 15, 20-year period where these people are getting radicalized, median wages are actually going down for recent college grads. So they kind of max out around 2000, 2001. And by 2017-18, they're still 5-10% below where they were in 2000, 2001. And, you know, Eric, Eric agree, we don't dispute that. We both. kind of looked at the same data from the New York Fed. The other thing is that's just your wage. That's your kind of your gross income. If you then add debt, right, student debt, which just explodes between the mid-90s and

2015, then suddenly you're taking another big chunk out of this wage that either hasn't grown or has declined. And so there's no question that the kind of actual disposable income of this group of folks has declined once you take out debt. I think Eric's argument, which I think is true, is you haven't seen a complete collapse in income. You haven't seen people who were, you know, the median going from 50,000 to 25,000 or something. But I think we both agree that there is like an ideological element in addition to an economic element. He would argue that ideology plays a much bigger role.

I think, you know, ideology plays an important role, but economics is playing a key role too. The one other thing that I think is important in this data, it all comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Well, he and I kind of picked over it. The data point that you cite, college grads in jobs that don't require a degree, he's right that that actually, you know, it kind of hovers between like, you know, 40 and 50 percent over time. So, you know, recently it's lower than it was in the 90s. But in this period that we're talking about, it kind of bumps up and down. So, yes, it's slightly lower now that it was 20, 30 years ago, but not substantially. But there's another data point in that same data set that they include that I think is very telling.

And Eric includes it in his article, but didn't draw a ton of attention to it. And that is the percent of college grads in jobs that don't require a degree, right? So you're working a job that you're overqualified for. That's a good paying job, right? So, you know, the Fed defines it as like insurance agents or HR administrators or, you know, office managers, people in jobs that college grads often do, but they don't require a degree. It kind of functioned at like a safety valve, you know, so you graduate from college. You know, maybe you train to be, you know, you're hoping to be a journalist or you're hoping

to be, you know, a political consultant. You didn't end up in that job. You ended up as an insurance agent. It's not your dream job, but it pays you pretty well and you do okay. The percentage of college, of under-employed college grads in those good-paying jobs, it really drops beginning in 2003. It then drops again during the recession in 2008-9, and it just never recovers. And if you pull up Eric's data, he shows this group of people going from about 21% of college grads in 1990, or maybe the late 90s, to like 14% today. So that group actually

really drops by a lot. And I actually think that is a pretty radicalizing thing. You know, like you had these kind of good non-college jobs that used to function as the safety valve that, you know, kind of limited the frustration of people who didn't get the job that they hoped they would get. Suddenly, that safety valve is really diminishing. And you can see where, you know, if your fallback job was an insurance agent and it became, you know, barista or it became, you know, retail, you know, assistant manager or sales clerk, that can be a pretty frustrating thing. Do you think those jobs have disappeared? Do you think that those jobs just pay less than they used to? Is it both? Great point. Yeah. Some disappear. Some pay less. So you're right. It's a great question.

So if you actually look at insurance agent, which is one of these kind of canonical or was one of these kind of canonical good non-college jobs, we have more insurance agents today, but they make a lot less. Like in real terms, their wages have dropped substantially from the late 90s, early 2000s. And that's because it used to be this kind of, you know, relationship business. You know, you met the customer face to face. And now a lot of insurance, as anyone who's like bought homeowners or auto insurance can probably attest, it happens online, right? So you mostly go to some website, travelers or geico, you enter your information.

They give you a few quotes. If you run into an issue, you call someone in customer support. So we have more of those people. But the kind of, you know, old school person. in an office who comes and glad hands you and lays out your options for you, that job doesn't really exist anymore. So we've really sort of degraded and commoditized that job. And so, yeah, the people make substantially less in that field, even though there are many more of those jobs available. So that's one piece. There's another piece where we actually just have fewer people.

And an example of that is like a tax preparer, you know, prior to the late 90s. You had college grads, you know, you work at H&R block or something. You know, you're pulling your taxes together. the spring, you go see someone, they help walk you through your different options. Well, now, again, that happens online. If you want to go to H&R Block, they're just going to send you their website, you enter all your information. Again, maybe if you run into trouble, you call someone, we have completely like cannibalize that job, you know. So we have about the same number of tax preparers today that we did 25 years ago, even though we have millions and millions and millions and more people. So as a share of the economy, way fewer people who work as tax

in tax preparation than did, you know, 25, 30 years ago. So Roy Tashara made a related point in his Wall Street Journal review of your book, which is that STEM and business majors still have a roughly 90% chance of getting a well-paying job versus about 50% for arts and humanities majors. So is the story you're telling about all college graduates or is it does it index, is it an over-index on like humanity's grads in expensive blue city metros? I'd say somewhere between the two. So he's absolutely right.

There's a chapter 90 book where I talk about one of the big developments among college grads over the past 30 years is in the 80s and 90s, college grads more or less moved in lockstep. You know, obviously if you went to Harvard and you majored in finance or whatever, you're probably going to do slightly better than someone who went to the University of Florida and majored in art history. But it really was a rising tide. College grads, you know, kind of collectively moved forward in the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s.

The story since 2000 has been a lot of diversity in the experience of college grad. So if you go to Harvard and you major in finance, you tend to do, you still do incredibly well. Yeah, but the person who goes to the state school and majors in the humanities does not do that well. And in fact, we then have a few additional wrinkles that have complicated the story. One is the fastest or, you know, by volume, so the largest group compared with 25 years ago is people who go to non-competitive public schools. So not the University of Florida or not even the University of South Florida, but like the University of Fort Pierce or something, right? And these are essentially, some of them are open admission, some, you know, except 80 to 90 percent of the students who apply. But we've seen that the return on that degree is just not that great, but we've seen the largest growth in enrollment there.

And then the other, the sort of fastest growing, you know, so percentage-wise, the largest, not in absolute terms, is for-profit universities. And again, the return there has been pretty low and in some cases, in many cases, negative. So when you add the growth of these non-competitive public schools and people in for-profit colleges, we've had millions and millions of people getting these, like, degrees of pretty dubious value. And we've just seen this huge kind of divergence in outcomes for people to go to college. So I think that's absolutely right. If you go to a really good school and you get a STEM degree, though computer science maybe not anymore, but if you get a degree in electrical engineering, you're probably going to do great. If you go to the University of Fort Pierce and you major in English, it's probably going to be a little dicey for you. Well, your comment about

computer science, maybe not anymore. So it brings me to my main reaction, not just reading your book, but also reading, like, you know, some of the reviews from Eric Levitz or Roy Tashara, like, sort of pushing back on some of the data because it's interesting and I think they make some good points and you clearly make some good points, you know, hitting back at that. But all of this seems beside the point because it feels like AI is going to make this problem, even if it's a smaller problem than you suggest or like it's going to make it exponentially worse no matter. what. And you know, you talk about, you follow someone who's a writer, the 2023 writer's strike. That takes up a big chunk of your book. And that was fundamentally as much about AI as it was about residuals. And then your book argues in general that, quote, too many people with expensive credentials chase too few jobs requiring those credentials. So then we have AI making this problem dramatically worse because entry level white collar work is exactly what the current models are best at automating.

Those stats about STEM seem very primed to be. Those jobs seem very plumbed to be replaced by, yeah. It's a little bit of a backward-looking indicator. So how do you think about how much worse this problem is going to get? Like, is this just, is what you wrote about, is it the snapshot of a transitional moment, or is at the beginning of something much, much larger? Yeah.

So I do think of this as kind of address rehearsal for what's to come. And, you know, I think we see the initial kind of rupture beginning in like, 2003-4, depending on which data set you look at, one is that data set I mentioned, the kind of good non-college jobs starting to disappear. Another is employment rates for recent college grads. There's a really good paper by an economist at Berkeley called Jesse Rothstein. He's actually chief economist at the Labor Department in Obama's first term. He wrote this great paper about employment rates for young college grads relative to older grads. Those two things used to move kind of in lockstep. The younger grads and the older grads used to have roughly the same employment

rates, and around 2004-5, they start to diverge. They diverge again during the recession, and then again, they never reconverge. So we've seen, we kind of see this thing get going in the early to mid-2000s. The recession makes it worse. I think a lot of people thought that, like, okay, once we get far enough out from the recession, you know, maybe this was just a really bad deep recession. The labor market heals. It's just taking longer for the younger folks. But in fact, post-pandemic, you know, we had this year, you know, six months to a year-long period during the great resignation and quiet quitting when it looked like younger folks were actually getting a little more leverage. That disappeared very quickly. And since 21 or so, 22, the picture has gotten worse and worse. So there's

another data point. The unemployment rate for recent college grads, if you look from like 1990 to 2018, it's almost never higher than the overall unemployment rate facing everybody, right? So beginning in 2018, the unemployment rate for recent college grads just kind of pokes up above the overall unemployment rate looks just kind of like noise or a blip. But then beginning again in 21 and through the present, the unemployment rate for recent college grads just shoots past the overall rate and it just stays there. In fact, the gap gets bigger and bigger. So the last few years, if anything, have gotten worse. Only a little bit of that can be explained by AI. I mean, I think we're just starting to see the bite in the last year or two for people in certain careers, you know, software developers, certainly.

But yeah, I mean, I think we've had what's essentially a kind of a slow burn at this, and AI, I think, is going to be this massive accelerant. And, you know, the other wrinkle I think that's interesting is the way that this played out over the past 20 years, it actually was a kind of earlier version of automation in some respects. I mean, I mentioned kind of tax preparation and insurance. But beginning about 10 years ago, we start to see AI, you know, what we recognize as AI start to chip away at white collar employment too, not Gen AI, not chat GPT, but early forms of machine learning.

And the example I like to point to is fashion buyers. You know, these are the people who work for retail outlets like Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom, and their job is to predict, like, what kind of shirt or shoes or jacket you're going to want like a year in advance. So they go to fashion shows, they talk to designers, they talk to wholesomen, they talk to whole They look at historical data. And some of it is just they go with their gut. You know, it's a bit of an art and a bit of a science.

This was like a pretty high status, high paying jobs. You know, people who've been doing it for a few years tend to make $100,000, $150,000, $200,000. Beginning around like 2017-18, retailers start to realize that machines are really good at this job. You know, they can kind of look at 30, 40, 50 years of data. They can find all kinds of patterns that the human eye can't identify. and they actually do better at humans than trying to anticipate what the public is going to want to buy a year out. And so, you know, the big companies like Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom, they still have a lot of human buyers. But you see whenever there's a kind of new startup, a fashion startup, we had all these, like, you know, fashion in a box where they send you a couple of like outfits to try on every month and rent the runway and all these kind of tech enabled fashion outlets.

they were increasingly using AI to do what humans had done, and something had been a very high status and high-paying jobs. So we already see AI at a kind of low level in the last part of the previous decade into the beginning of this one. But as you say, I mean, there are just now whole categories of entry-level jobs that the AI can do. And I think the real trick is, you know, we used to basically subsidize the training of entry-level people with brunt work, you know. So like if you were a young consultant, management consultant right out of school, you spent a year or two just making like PowerPoint presentations and preparing slide decks and, you know, messing around with Excel. And all that sort of grunt work subsidized the training. You know, you did all that stuff.

It was tedious, but you hung around other more experienced consultants. You got to sit in on presentations and meetings and calls and you learned how to do the job. Now the AI is doing that grunt work. It's not clear both it's not clear why we need the young people. to hire them at all, but it's also not clear how we're going to train them or pay for the training. So this is like a multi-dimensional problem that no one really has their head around so far, I think. Offline is brought you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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There's stagnant wages. They're in debt because they went to college with the promise that the college degree would lead to a well-paying job. Housing is very expensive. We haven't talked about sort of the affordability crisis that piles on top of this. And as you said, then there is thus this. potential for an even larger working class political coalition that doesn't just include non-college educated folks, but college-educated folks as well. So then George Packer in his review in the Atlantic sort of raises a different issue, which is about whether class or culture is sort of more

politically salient for the college-educated working class. And he wrote, quote, there are important cultural differences between an internist struggling to treat patients in a private equity conglomerate, which you mentioned, and a John Deereman. machinists on strike because of layoffs, that both belong to a union might matter less than that one voted for Harris, the other voted for Trump, and each has some reason to fear and loathe. The other, the culture war is burning too hot for a class war to snuff it out anytime soon. What's your response to that? Yeah.

So, I mean, look, I don't want to be naive about the potential for a coalition here. George is like 100% right. Obviously, our elections, at least, you know, since 2016. I mean, I think you could argue, and I'm sure you remember it well, that 20s. 2012 was actually like an election fought on economics. You know, it was a pretty populist campaign. The last one. The last one. So I think your boss was very skilled, you know, sounding like pretty resonant populist economic themes.

Obviously, Mitt Romney was a good foil for that. We had a lot of help. The private equity guy, you know. So I think that was a pretty good example of the kind of, you know, the power of that kind of message to unite people, you know, kind of up and down the income scale. But certainly since 2016, We've had elections that were fought on kind of cultural grounds. And there were these obvious huge cleavages that the Democrats really struggle to bridge. So I don't want to be naive about it.

I mean, the one thing I will say, and I think both George and maybe Ruey Tashara in the Wall Street Journal review that you mentioned, I think they overstate the divisions on cultural issues. So one example that Rui cited was Gaza. And it's absolutely the case that this has been. a real cause among young college grads. I write about it in my book. This became, it just, you know, intersected with the Starbucks organizing campaign and it kind of blew up in all kinds of unpredictable ways. But it turns out if you look at polling on Gaza, young people, you know, people under 35 without the college degrees and people under 35 with degrees,

they're both like roughly as skeptical of Israel and both roughly as sympathetic to the Palestinians as one another. So there's like really no discernible gap on Gaza between the college grads and the non-grads. You know, maybe the college grads use more kind of radical rhetoric. But it's not like if you're, you know, trying to appeal, trying to, you know, build a coalition of people under 35, that you're going to like alienate the non-grads if you take the position on Israel and Gaza of the grads. They basically feel the same way. So I think we can overstate the potential cleavages. The other thing is, look, I think there is something to be said just for the skill of the politician. You know, I mean, Barack Obama was an incredibly skilled politician. He was very good at kind of tilting the

landscape to issues that he wanted to run on. I think Azora Mamdani was very skilled at that too. You know, fast free buses and public-owned grocery stores and rent control. I mean, these are like fundamentally economic issues, but they really broke through in an otherwise like really like culturally toxic and polarized political environment. So, you know, I think it can be done. But as I said, I don't want to be naive. I think George is clearly like putting his finger on something that that is not going to be like trivial to solve. It's interesting me that Gaza came up because I actually think that that's an issue. I agree that that's probably an issue that doesn't divide, especially this generation as much regardless of where you fall on

the political spectrum at this point. But I do think and you know, and George point, points out this too, which is 46% of white college educated men under 45 voted for Trump in 2024. There is this shift, especially with young men. And look, if you look at polls now, they have soured on Trump for sure. It doesn't mean that they've come back to the Democratic Party. But I've sat in these focus groups. I've watched some of these focus groups where young people, no matter what everyone thinks they care about, you know, which is like, oh, they all care about Gaza and climate change and it's true that they do care about that but when you ask them what's the most important issue on your mind affordability is like by far number one and when you talk to a lot of

young people who voted for Trump they will still tell especially people who had voted for Republican before and just sort of were sort of in the middle and go back and forth between parties or back and forth between voting they will say oh well I did I voted for Trump because for economic reasons because everything so on affordable comedy was great yeah and so I do wonder if um like how you think about sort of creating that coalition that is tied together by economic interests when sometimes like political views, even with around economics, they're divided not necessarily by just like the role of government in general, but like how much they trust government to actually deliver on what politicians actually promise.

Yeah, I think you make a great point. I mean, going back to the earlier part of our conversation about a sort of loss of faith and institutions. There is this sense, you know, among people who end up skewing right over this issue that like, okay, fine, you know, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to build three million new units of housing and we're going to subsidize, you know, demand. And like, I don't believe any of it because I've been paying attention for the past 20 years and the government hasn't really succeeded at speaking to my needs in any way, you know, except in some, you know, some limited moment. So I do think that you have to be very conscious as you try to articulate this

message about that loss of trust, that loss of faith in institutions. I mean, I think, you know, I'd say there are two lessons, and you know, you're far more, a far more of a student of the politics of this than I am. But as I kind of watch what's worked over the past few decades, the two lessons I take away are one, concreteness and specificity. I mean, I think Mom Dani got a lot of traction over just like super concrete issue, you know, rent control, fast free buses, publicly on supermarkets, just stuff that you could, you could touch, And I think it actually gave him some momentum heading into his mayority because, you know, maybe you're not going to succeed at, you know, bringing up, you know, millions of these disaffected folks.

But you can certainly build like one publicly owned supermarket, right? You can certainly kind of build some momentum with just like a basic proof of concept. So I think the specificity and the concreteness very much played to his strength. And then, you know, the other thing, just to go back to the 2012 campaign that we were talking about, I'm someone I guess who believes you kind of need a foil, you know, and, and sort of just, you know, speaking in abstractions and not sort of naming names. I don't think that's worked, you know, and I think the lesson of, you know, everything, you know, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Mamdani is like people, when they're really mad, they do kind of want someone to blame. And if you don't tell them who to blame, though they may blame someone else. And you may not want them to blame that someone else. So in the vacuum that you leave by. not naming names, you risk having that anger turn in other places that are maybe less constructive. Personally, I would love nothing more than for Democratic politicians to be like completely focused on economic populism. And that's the central message. And if you do that enough and you

don't get caught up in culture wars and you just focus on that and you have like a real populist agenda, then you can sort of overcome other culturally more conservative attitudes, especially in redder parts of the country. The candidate I always think about, who I've known a long time and love, is Sherry Brown, especially in 2024. And I remember Sherry telling stories years ago, talking about how we won Ohio,

even when it went red, about, you know, doing town halls in these small towns and people saying, I do not agree with you at all on gun control or abortion, and I know you have all these progressive stances, but, you know, I like that. that you care about unions and you care about workers. And so I'm all in.

And watching him, and hopefully he'll win this time, get back in the Senate, but watching him lose or just watching sort of Ohio drift away, it did make me wonder about what was, A, what's going on there and B, sort of the ability of even the most economically populist candidates to sort of overcome something that is, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's economic, maybe it's just mistrust or maybe it's just distrust and cynicism about politics and government in general. Maybe it's also younger people, this generation you're talking about moving away from some of these states. But I don't know if you have sort of thoughts on that.

Yeah, I mean, one thing we've sort of, you know, we've kind of touched on implicitly that may just be worth, you know, getting out there explicitly, which I think was a real challenge for someone like Sherrod Brown and other sort of moderate Democrats who lost, you know, in some these Trump waves is just the sort of structural effect of the media on the discourse. And, you know, So, you know, everything from social media rewarding engagements and sort of, you know, anger and kind of fulmination. I mean, I think the way that the media landscape has evolved over the past two decades, you know, largely from social media, but not entirely, obviously. Every outlet in the country, including my own, gets data about what's popular and what people are, you know, most excited about reading. and by and large that data has told them that, you know, people love to get, you know, worked up about

cultural issues, you know, whether it's trans stuff or immigrants or, you know, a whole variety of issues that have played. Yeah, Trump, exactly. And so I think, like, we know when we poll that, as you say, and you do these focus groups, people really care about affordability. They really feel the pinch of inflation and stagnant wages. But they kind of vote with their feet, or at least with a. their eyeballs. And, you know, we know that like when there's a good media story about, you know,

trans rights or immigration, that they're going to read that story. They're going to talk to their friends about that story. They're going to share it on social media. And so I think there is this kind of structural factor that just exerts this kind of gravitational pull on the entire discourse. And my guess is that if you talk to Sherrod Brown, he would tell you some version of, you know, yeah, you know, my whole political career has been premised on this idea that like if I can just talk to people about the things that are most important to them, standard of living, you know, whether they can afford an education for their kids and a decent house and a vacation, like, that's what they care about. But also, like, when I go to some town hall, like,

the number of questions I get about this, like, viral thing that was trending on Facebook or TikTok is probably, like, off the charts, you know. And so, yeah, you just can't be naive about the way that, you know, the media has evolved over the past few decades and the way that shapes our discourse around these elections. Yeah, I do have some hope that this time around, Trump and how he's governed in the second term sort of exists as more of that Romney-like foil that we had in 2012 than he ever has before, partly just because of the sheer scale of the corruption and the fact that he just doesn't seem to care about hiding it at all, whether it's the ballroom or the crypto stuff or whatever else he's done. Like, I do think that the angst over

affordability, high costs, paired with how he and the Republican Party have just sort of gone, you know, whole hog on the corruption without seemingly caring at all, how people react to it, does make me think that you could go back to that sort of fighting an election on those traditional sort of populist grounds and actually have it be content that people care about, right? So it's the stuff that's shared more than just, you know, your typical economic platform information and content that doesn't get shared as much. Yeah, you know, and I think, you know, people have made this point many times, but I think Trump is is very skilled at tilting the landscape to his advantage. But it's usually when he himself is running, you know, when he's on the ticket, you know, he just exerts such a gravitational pull on the discourse, you know, in good ways and in bad. And I do think that once, even when he's still president, but not actually on, you know, on the ballot himself. We saw this in 2018. I think, you know, we're likely to see it again in these midterms. Like he, when he's not personally on. the ballot, he tends to exert like a little less control over the discourse. And I think that maybe

does create a little more space for, you know, for some of these, you know, these efforts to reframe the conversation and the way that we've described. I think, you know, regardless of how you feel about Trump, he has been incredibly deft at like sort of writing and, you know, and taking advantage of these kind of structural changes in the media landscape. And so, you know, as long as he's in the picture, I'm, you know, I'm sort of pessimistic about the ability to be able to change the subject. You know, many people have tried and failed to do that. But I do think, like, when he's not actually the one on the ballot, there tends to be a little more space for these conversations. Peter Turchin's elite overproduction framework shows up both in George Packer's review and sort of

hovered over your book. Yes. Turchin's historical examples, pre-revolutionary France, Russia, Iran, obviously don't end well. You end the book comparing this moment to some of those moments. How dark is your actual read on where this is heading? Yeah, so I don't think we're looking at the Bolshevik Revolution, you know, Turchin does paint like a really grim but compelling picture, you know, talks about how in late 19th century Russia, you had all these children of elites and noble men in Russia. They were highly educated. Traditionally, the safety valve for those folks had been jobs in the kind of upper ranks of the bureaucracy, but there just weren't enough of those jobs to absorb all those people. They were downwardly mobile. They became radicalized. They became

the vanguard of the Bolshevik Revolution. So I don't think we're looking at something like that. But the point that he makes, I think, historically, is accurate. Just when you look at kind of politically destabilizing moments, you know, and I think we saw that after the financial crisis in other countries, you know, certainly in Spain, there was huge, you know, kind of, you college grad unemployment in Spain. People were having to live with their parents until they were, you know, into their late 30s, early 40s. We saw it in Greece.

There was actually like a real explosion in the UK that I think was not well appreciated in the U.S. But, you know, higher ed had traditionally been free in the UK. Tony Blair introduced like a small fee, I think it was like a thousand pounds in the late 90s. And then David Cameron raised it to like three, the limit to like 3,000 pounds around 2010-11. this created this huge backlash. I mean, there was like very high unemployment among college grads.

This was right after the Great Recession. Huge political problem. There was like organizing in like dozens and dozens of cities around the country. There was this massive like 100,000 plus person march on London. They like ransacked the Tory headquarters. It was just, I mean, and this was all just a response to this, you know, raising, which, you know, still kept tuition like absurdly low by U.S. standards, but raising the, you know, the, you know, the,

the fee from 1,000 pounds to 3,000 pounds a year just, you know, exploded politically. So I do think we've seen historically that this is an incredibly volatile issue. You know, and then the one other place that I think you see this playing out, and, you know, we don't have a ton of great reporting just because the political system is kind of opaque. But China is dealing with an enormous problem in youth, you know, young graduate employment. They, you know, their historical solution to this was like economic growth in the kind of six, eight, 10% range, and that's how they kind of kept all the balls in the air. But now that growth has slowed there in the aftermath of their real estate bubble, they have like millions of college

grads who just don't have jobs. So they are, the part of what's kind of shaking that political system is the same problem. So I do think it's, I think it's serious. You know, my guess is in this country, we're, you know, we're not looking at a revolution, but I think, you know, a Mamdani type election, again, where you get 85% of people in their 20s with the college degree voting for the same person. That tells you it's like, you know, there's intensity around around this issue. Yeah. And like we said, AI is just going to accelerate this trend in such a major way. No question. You could see some, I think, pretty unexpected political results as we head into the next decade. Noam Shriver, thank you so much for joining offline. The book is

Mutiny, the rise and revolt of the college educated working class. Thanks again. It's a great book. Everyone check it out. Thanks for having me. It was great to see this over with you. I really appreciate it. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilic Frank, Austin Fisher is our senior producer, and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer.

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