This is the 3rd post of 5 containing the transcript of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein interviewing Peter Thiel.

Interview

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 ye...

Transcript of Eric Weinstein / Peter Thiel Conversation

Transcript of Eric Weinstein / Peter Thiel Conversation