Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Student Debt ===

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's like, again, if you come back to something as reductionist as the ever escalating student debt, you know, the bigger the debt gets, you can sort of think what is the 1.6 trillion, what does it pay for? And in a sense, it pays for $1.6 trillion worth of lies about how great the system is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, the more the debt goes, the crazier the system gets, but also the more you have to tell the lies, and these things sort of go together. It's not a stable sequence. At some point this breaks. You know, again, I would bet on a decade, not a century.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this is the fascinating thing, you, of course, famously started the Thiel Fellowship as a program which, correct me if I'm wrong on this, 2005 is when student debt became non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. The Bush 43 bankruptcy revision. If you don't pay off your student loans when you're 65 the government will garnish your social security wages to pay off your student debt.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. This is amazing that this exists in a modern society. And of course, well, so let me ask, am I right that you were attacking what was necessary to keep the college mythology going, and you were frightened that college might be enervating some of our sort of most dynamic minds?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there are sort of lot of different critiques one can have of the universities. I think the debt one is a very simple one. It's always dangerous to be burdened with too much debt. It sort of does limit your freedom of action. And it seems especially pernicious to do this super early in your career.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, if out of the gate you owe $100,000, and it's never clear you can get out of that hole, that's going to either demotivate you, or it's going to push you into maybe slightly higher paying, very uncreative professions of the sort that are probably less good at moving our whole society forwards. And so I think the whole thing is extraordinarily pernicious.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I started talking about this back in 2010, 2000, it was already like controversial, but it was not, you know... younger people all agreed with me.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The younger people did?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's a decade later, it's a lot crazier, we haven't yet completely won, but I think there are sort of more and more people who agree with this. I think at this point the Gen X parents of college students tend to agree, whereas I would say the baby boomer parents, you know, 15 years ago, would not have agreed.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The 2008 crisis was a big watershed in this too, where you could say the tracking debt, you know, roughly made sense as long as everything, all the tracked careers worked, and 2008 really blew up, you know, consulting, banking, you know, sort of a number of the more track professions got blown up, and so that was kind of a watershed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean this is incredibly dangerous, but also, therefore, quite interesting, if you imagine that the baby boomers have, in some sense, in order to keep the structure of the university going, have loaded it up with administrators, have hiked the tuition much faster than even medical inflation, let alone general inflation, this becomes a crushing debt problem for people who are entering the system.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I saw a recent article that said that the company that, I think it's called Seeking Arrangements, which introduces older men and women with money to younger men and women with a need for money for some sort of ambiguous hybridized dating, companionship, financial transfer. And the claim was that lots of students were using this supposed sugar daddy-ing and sugar mommy, I don't know what the terminology is, in order to alleviate their debt burden.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost as if the baby boomers, in so creating a system, are subjecting their own children to things that are pushing them towards a gray area a few clicks before you get to honest prostitution.

'''Peter Thiel:''' No, look, I don't want to impute too much intentionality to how this happened.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no, it's somewhat emergent.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think a lot of these, it was mostly emergent, mostly these things people, you know, yeah, that we had sort of somewhat cancerous, we don't distinguish real growth from cancerous growth, and then once the cancer sort of the metastasizes at a certain size, you know, you have, you sort of somehow try to keep the whole thing going, and it doesn't make that much sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes, I think one of the reasons, one of the challenges in, on our side, let's be a little more self critical here, on this, is that the question we always are confronted with, well, what is the alternative? How do you actually do something?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's not obvious what the individual alternatives are. You know, on an individual level, if you get into an elite university, it probably still makes sense to go, you know, it probably doesn't make sense to go to number 100 or something like this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, I think that's right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There is sort of a way it can still work individually even if it does not work for our country as a whole. And so, there are sort of all these challenges in coming up with alternate tracks.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think in software there's some degree to which people are going to be hired if they're just good at coding, and it's not quite as critical that they have a computer science degree. You know, can one do this in other careers, other fields? I would tend to think one could. It's been slow to happen.