Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Political Solutions for Students ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so you and I have been excited about a great number of things that have been taking place outside of the institutional system, but one of the things that I continue to be mystified by is that we are somewhat politically divided, where you are well known as a conservative and I really come from a fairly radical progressive streak. So, we have this common view of a lot of the problems, but sometimes we come to very different ideas about how those problems should be solved.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Do you want to maybe just try riffing?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sure.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Like, assume that we somehow found ourselves in possession of some degree of power, with an ability to direct a little bit more than we have currently. What would you do to create the preconditions - so not necessarily picking particular projects - but what would you try to do to create the preconditions where people are really dreaming about futures, both at a technological level, family formation, making our civil society healthier. Where would you start to work first?

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'm always a little bit uncomfortable with this sort of question, because-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You can turn it on me, too.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... because I feel like, you know, we're not going to be dictators of the United States, and then, you know, there all sorts of things we could do if we were dictators. But certainly, I would look at the college debt thing very seriously. I would say that it's dischargeable in bankruptcy, and if people go bankrupt then part of the debt has to be paid for by the university that did it. There has to be some sort of local accountability. So, this would be-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Love that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... that would be sort of a more right wing answer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The left wing answer is we should socialize the debt in some ways, and the universities should never pay for it, which would be more the, you know, Sanders-Warren approach. But so, that would be one version.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think one of the main ways inequality has manifested in our society in the last 20, 30 years - I think it's more stagnation than inequality - but just on the inequality side it's the runaway housing costs, and there's sort of, there's a baby boomer version where you have super strict zoning laws so that the house prices go up, and the house is your nest egg. It's not a place to live, it's your nest egg for retirement. And I would, yeah, I would try to figure out some ways to dial all that stuff back massively.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And that's probably intergenerational transfer, where it's bad for the asset prices of baby boomer homeowners, but better for younger people to get started in sort of family formation or starting households.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do you think about the idea of a CED, a college equivalency degree, where you can prove that you have a level of knowledge that would be equivalent, let's say, to a graduating Harvard chemistry major, right? Or a fraction thereof, where you have the ability to prove that through some sort of online delivery mechanism, you can-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Great idea. I love it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think it's very hard to implement. Again, I think these things are hard to do, but great idea.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But look, we have all these people who have something like Stockholm syndrome, where they, you know, if you got a Harvard chemistry degree, and if you suspect that actually the knowledge could be had by a lot of people, and if it's just a set of tests you have to pass, that your degree would be a lot less special, you'll resist this very, very hard.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if you're in an HR department, or in a company hiring people, you will want to hire people who went to a good college because you went to a good college, and if we broaden the hiring and said we're going to hire all sorts of people, maybe that's self-defeating for your own position. So, you know, I think one should not underestimate how many people have a form of Stockholm syndrome here.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I should've said earlier that the Thiel Fellowship, for those who don't know, is a program that has historically, at least began paying very young people who had been admitted to colleges to drop out of those colleges. So, they got to keep the idea that they'd been admitted to some fairly prestigious place, but then they were given money to actually live their dreams and not put them on hold.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, it has been an extremely successful and effective program. It's not scalable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, we had to hack the prestige status thing, where it was as hard, or harder, to get a Thiel fellowship than to get into a top university. And so, that's part that's very hard to scale.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' When I was looking at that program for you, one of the things that I floated was the idea that if you look at every advanced degree, like a JD, or an MD, a PhD, none of them seem to carry the requirement of having a BA, which is quite mysterious.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And if you fail to get a PhD, let's say, there's usually an embedded master's degree that you get as a going away present. And therefore, if you could get people to skip college, if you give them, perhaps, four years of their lives back, and you could use the first year of graduate school, which is very often kind of a rapid recapitulation of what undergraduate was, so everybody's on a level playing field, and then, worse comes to worst, people would leave with a master's. They would, in general, get a stipend, because a lot of the tuition is remitted to them in graduate programs. Is that a viable program to get some group of people who are highly motivated to avoid the BA entirely as sort of the administrator's degree rather than the professor's degree?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Let me see. There are all these different subtle critiques I can have, or disagreements, but yeah, I think the BA is not as valuable as it looks. I also think the PhD is not as valuable as it looks.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, you know how to hurt a guy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I sort of feel it's a problem across the board. It strikes me that what you're proposing is a bit of an uphill struggle, because at the top universities the BA is the far more prestigious degree than the PhD at this point. So, if you're at Stanford or Harvard, you know, it's pretty hard to get into the undergraduate, and then you have more PhD students than you have undergraduates.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There are all these people who are a very questionable track. They've made questionable choices. And they probably are going to have some sort of psychological breakdown in their future. You know, their dating prospects aren't good. There are all these things that are a little bit off.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So yeah, in theory, if you had a super tightly controlled PhD program, that might work, but you have to at least make those two changes. As it is, the people in graduate schools, like, it's like Tribbles in Star Trek. We have just so many, and they all feel expendable and unneeded, and that's not a good place to be.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, whereas I think the undergraduate conceit is still that it's more K-selected instead of R-selected, that it's more that everybody is special and valuable. You know, that's often not true either.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'd be critical of both, and I think, but yeah, if we could have a real PhD that was the required, you know, that was much harder, and that actually led to sort of an academic position or some other comparable position, that would be good.