 After months of teasing the idea, Joe Biden finally made the announcement that the government is going to offer some student loan debt relief. For many people, this will be $10,000, and for public loan recipients, they could have up to $20,000 of student loan debt wiped away. While there are a lot of people celebrating this announcement, there are many people on the way who are upset about this quote-unquote end-out in a country where college is almost mandatory to make a living wage and has a history of giving trillions of dollars to the rich, I thought we could discuss the moral case for student loan debt forgiveness. And during this process, we're going to be pointing out a lot of the hypocrisy coming from the rich as well as conservatives on the right because of all the money that they've taken in. I've often said that if people truly understood the vast amount of money that's given out as, you know, welfare to the rich and to the right, their minds would explode. And I brought along a very special guest to help me discuss this. All right, everybody, real quick before we jump into this thing, just a really quick update about the channel. First off, welcome to everybody who's new. I really appreciate it. Everybody who's come along as I come back to YouTube. A lot of you are longtime subscribers. I appreciate you for sticking around while I did the podcast thing. And now I'm back. But yeah, everybody that's new, it's awesome. I'm really glad to regrow this thing and create a new awesome community with this different type of video and covering these different topics. But real quick, because it took such a long break, the YouTube algorithm hates me. So if you could all do me a favor, just as a little behind the scenes with how the algorithm, how the algorithm, how the algorithm works, please like, comment, share, tell people about it, because that really helps out. Because naturally, YouTube pushes out certain videos and everything like that. But since I've been gone for so long and stopped doing that, when you engage with the video, when you like it, comment, share, all that kind of stuff, YouTube's like, Oh, this might be decent. So if you could do me that one simple favor, doesn't cost you a penny, helps me out a ton. I'd really, really appreciate it. So we can get this out there because I'm planning on covering a lot of super important topics, a lot of interesting topics. And I plan on continuing to bring on guests for any of you who follow the podcast. I know a ton of authors who are researchers, academics, philosophers like the dude joining me today. So yeah, hope to get this message out there and all this content. All right. But anyways, let's discuss what we're talking about today. All right, let's do the loan debt forgiveness. So I think it's important to start out by, you know, addressing the fact that we were all kind of sold on this idea that college is the way to go. All right. But I'm 57 years old, so I'm a millennial. And growing up, they were like, Hey, this is what you do. You do good in high school, you go to college, you get a good job, you live the American dream. And because this idea was sold to so many people, college degrees have actually been diluted quite a bit. And one of the things that you know, I realized a long time ago was that, you know, there's no guarantee that if you go to college and get that degree, you're going to make that month, right? So that's kind of where we're going to start with talking about the student loan debt forgiveness. And today I brought along Aaron. Okay, so he's the host of the embrace the void podcast. Make sure you check it out. Aaron has a ton of great guests. And he talks about philosophy along social issues. Very cool guy. He was on the podcast a while ago. I went on his awesome. But yeah, he joined me today. And let me check my notes. So I don't screw this up. So Simon being a podcast host, he's also a PhD student in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. And you know, he's like writing papers on, you know, just different aspects of, you know, tackling issues from a moral lens. And here's why I asked him to come on. He made a tweet the other day. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. Because Aaron really looks through that lens of moral philosophy and morality is important. Because when you look at just about every argument and dispute that we have, whether it's about political topics, social issues, or even just debates and arguments between us when we get upset, they're all coming from a moral place. What I think is right when you think's right, where we bump heads and all that. So I love moral philosophy. And I thought anyone would be the perfect guess to discuss this issue. So as I understand it, we have a really severe kind of debt crisis where lots of individuals are sort of in a position where they can't discharge these loans, they can't pay them off, will never be able to pay them off, things like that. And there's, you know, a big complicated history of how we got here involving a mix of cultural valuing of higher education and trying to make it accessible to everyone in a way that I think is good, combined with predatory lending, combined with sort of overselling the economic benefits of that education, etc., you know, on and on. And so, you know, we end up at this place where I think as a culture, we face a serious crisis where if we don't do something about this, you're going to have sort of like a generation kind of loss to endless debt that can't, you know, have children or buy a house or any of these sorts of things, things that we think are important for or that could be important for a good life, or that we think are socially beneficial. So the problem is, how do we back our way out of this crisis? And there we have this problem of democracy, where we have to convince everyone that it's okay to forgive all of these loans. And there we run up against this really, these terrible, I think, kind of moral arguments about who deserves what, essentially. So it's all about desserts. And it's all about choices. And, you know, who made the right choices and who made the wrong choices. And, you know, not to get too far into the weeds, but I just basically think it's both kind of irrational in a self-interested sense to be against the kind of student loan forgiveness we're talking about, and also immoral in a sense that there's no way to consistently be against this without, I think, sliding towards some other deeply immoral kinds of perspectives, essentially the kind of conservative bootstrapping, you know, the poor deserve to be poor kind of arguments that I think a lot of people who are potentially skeptical about this particular sort of issue would not be in favor, I think, of that larger sort of package. And so I think they should be going in the other direction and sort of accepting the realities that, like, luck dominates our lives on every level. And, you know, whether they might feel lucky or unlucky, I would argue that not having a bunch of student loans is a lucky place to be in, even if you had to make sacrifices to get there. And that, like, it's not, it isn't really worth ultimately trying to, like, punish other people who made different choices because you think that they deserve those consequences or you think that it's more fair or just or something like that, which is not to say that fairness never matters, but just that in this particular situation, I think, trying to demand a kind of retributive fairness is just going to sort of be, it's going to be like one of those psychological studies where people do things that are harmful to their own self-interest, feel overly motivated to punish people who they think are wrongdoers. So in the 20th century, you used to be able to get a decent job, even if you were a high school graduate. But then America really started pushing that idea of going to college. Jobs wanted more educated workers, so going to college became the norm. Unfortunately, as we made going to college the norm, the college degree has been diluted, and this has been going on for a while. To give you an idea, in 1960, roughly 7.7% of Americans had college degrees, and now it's 37.5%. So this is from an article titled Bachelor's Degree, Generation-Wise High School De Pola. They say Rita McGrath, Associate Professor at Columbia Business School, said that as more people get college degrees, the more a college degree becomes a commodity. Quote, having a bachelor's used to be more rare, and candidates with the degree could therefore be more choosy and were more expensive to hire. Today, that is no longer the case, McGrath said. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, during the time period between 2002 and 2012, the number of people with undergraduate degrees increased by 25%. The growth in the master's and Ph.D. programs was even stronger. Master's degrees increased 43% or by about 5 million people in the past decade. For graduates, the number increased 45%, equating to about 1 million people. This growth, she said, is indicative of a degree arms race. So yeah, we were sold on this idea, like go to school, don't worry, get those loans. Get those loans, because with this degree, you're going to get a great job making a ton of money and you'll be able to pay that thing back. Easy, alright? And we're going to talk a bit about this and some other stories, but my mom, she got a Ph.D., she's a psychologist, right? And this was, it must have been like 20 years ago. She is still paying that loan back. So when you get adopted, that could be upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, we're told that if you get this degree, you're going to do a great job making some money. And this isn't me bragging at all, okay? But I dropped out of college after a semester. I just kind of looked around. My main reason for dropping out was I was struggling to get by in college, since my credit was terrible. You know, the government loans was only paying for my classes and my housing, but I couldn't do anything else. So I decided to drop out, just start working. I always planned on going back to school, but I never end up going. But anyways, what I was going to say is today, I make and have made more money than a lot of people with college degrees. And again, that's not a brag, but that's a point because we're sold on the idea that you have to go to college to get a good job and make money, then you don't got to worry about student loans. So why on earth is a guy like me without a degree making more money than people with a bachelor's and some people even with a master's degree? All right? So some people, some people out there, ignore what they say that we should not give student loan debt forgiveness because college is a choice, right? You decided to go to college. So because of that choice, you should have to pay it back, right? This isn't quote unquote, fair to other people. But one of the things I wanted to ask and about is, is this really a choice? We talk about, you know, moral luck, what's deserved? Because something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the people who became victims of these like predatory student loans, a lot of them come from bad backgrounds. They were sold on the idea that going to college is going to get them out of that situation. They were taken advantage of by these lenders, right? Put in these situations of debt that are so hard to get out of. And oftentimes the the high class, the higher upper class people who are arguing against this, they were taught from a young age how all this stuff works. They're also in a better position to pay them back. If they fail and can't pay back their loan, most of them have family members who will do that. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of moral luck involved with who this benefits. But when we're talking about deserves, right? Who deserves what? Something that I can't wrap my head around that I'm sure you think about this all the time is this sort of cognitive dissonance, especially from conservatives, because the amount of money that we have given to the rich and corporations, right? Because, you know, Reagan sold America on this idea of trickle down economics, like we have to save them or everybody else is screwed. And my life sure hasn't improved with the trillions of dollars going to these big banks and companies. You know what I mean? So how do you so like looking at that moral argument, how do you think people are justifying? Oh, it's okay. Like we've seen Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, right? Who took these PPP loans, say, Oh, you guys don't deserve $10,000. Even though we see all of these people who have gotten millions or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. How do you think they rationalize that from a moral standpoint? Yeah. So I mean, I think there's there's either two ways these kind of arguments are going to go. Either you're going to argue that this should come down to everybody gets to act in their own self interest. And it's in my self interest to not have my money go towards paying off someone else's loan. Or they're going to say, you know, it's an immoral thing to do, whether or not it's in anybody's self interest, right? So there's kind of two debates to be had there. If it's, you know, if it's the first one, if it's the like, self interest is what matters, you know, like, I think the evidence, as I said, points towards doing loan forgiveness because it's good for the economy and the improving the economy is good for everyone. So as you mentioned, the kind of trickle down idea, I'm just wrapping up reading Piketty's or Capital 21st Center, something like that. And that's been really great and interesting. And at one point, he highlights, you know, the sort of failures, as you say, of the trickle down model that we haven't seen an improvement. What we've seen is a pooling of wealth amongst a very small number of individuals. So, you know, my view is that like, we like that model doesn't work. And we should be trying a model that seems very plausible to me, which is, if you cancel a bunch of debt, especially for lower income individuals, and you, you know, then you suddenly free up a bunch of money that they will likely want to spend on other things that they weren't spending it on because they were under that crippling debt, and you're likely to see increased demand, which is likely to stimulate economic growth. So from a purely self interested perspective, I think everyone should be advocating for a pretty radical redistribution of wealth as a way to fund the paying off of large amounts of debt here. And like, I think this is important because a lot of the psychology that I feel like I'm seeing around this issue is a kind of scarcity mentality. I think implicit in a lot of people's thinking is I sacrifice scarce resources to do this thing while paying it off. And I don't want my scarce resources to go towards someone else's excesses, essentially, right, acting like we are a very poor culture or country when in fact we are quite the opposite, right? Like if we were to exercise our tax programs properly, right, we could redistribute a lot of wealth and, you know, reduce a lot of these debt burdens on lower income individuals without having to do like substantial harm to like middle income tax brackets, right? So I think people should be in favor of that. Now there's a sort of separate straight up moral question about like, well, people made choices, and they deserve to experience the consequences, right? If I go gambling a bunch, and I lose a bunch of money, right, I deserve to be destitute. It's nobody else's fault I chose to go gambling or something like that, right? Now you, as an individual that's experienced with addiction, will immediately be thinking, yeah, but did you choose to go gambling a bunch? In what sense did you really choose that, right? And I think that's the reasonable pushback here as well, because everyone's like, well, you chose to take on all those loans. And I'm like, didn't we all grow up in the 90s and all of us, but like a lot of us having this conversation on Twitter, right? The ones who are too old to have jumped to Instagram and too young to be mostly arguing on Facebook, right? So the people we talked to on Twitter, we all grew up in a period where it was like, college is the solution. There was no debate, right? There was just like, everybody go to college, whatever it takes, because that is the way you get a decent paying, you know, not minimum wage job, you have people like going into the military just so they can go to college, they'll bring their lives on the line just to get a degree. And unfortunately, some of them are like, you know, also now angry about the situation. Though I think we, you know, we have to have a conversation about that as well. But anyway, you know, we told everybody this was the golden ticket, right? Do this thing. And then we sort of let loose on them a bunch of like loans that they couldn't understand. I think a lot of them. And, you know, at an age in which like, we know that you are not well developed psychologically for thinking about the long-term consequences of your choices, right? And then we coupled that with like, college is the most fun time in your life. It's not just the golden ticket, but it's like the best period where you're on your own and you get to hang out with friends and live in a nice walkable neighborhood for the only time in your life, etc, right? So like, we really heavily sold this. And so to then turn around and be like, oh, why did y'all make a bunch of poor choices when you should have known better extremely duplicitous as a society? Like, I just think we're really pull, you know, like trying to pull an about face there that is not justifiable. So as you can see, although you're not making nearly as much with the degree these days, you still need a degree to go and make a decent living. Look at the earnings for people with a bachelor's degree and now look at the earnings for people with a graduate's degree. So we're forcing people to go to college to make a decent wage. Meanwhile, they aren't making nearly as much money as they used to for having that same exact degree. So one of the biggest issues, and this is something that I've been like really trying to get out there lately is that financial literacy in this country is terrible. Like, I don't know about you, but I didn't learn financial literacy for a long time. I had to self educate myself. I had to learn about credit. I had to learn about interest. I had to learn about saving. I had to learn about investing. There's something that I just really started learning about. I'm like, Hey, like I'm in my 30s, maybe I should learn how 401k works and all that. But anyways, what I'm getting at is we're setting these kids up who we never taught how any of these loans work, right? And then we're putting them in this situation where they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in student loan debt. So I tweeted this out earlier. And by the way, make sure you're following me on Twitter at the rewired soul. I love chatting with all of you and talking about, you know, current events, different topics. I also love getting book recommendations. But anyways, I tweeted this out earlier. So check it out, you're going to be paying $22,000 more on a $70,000 loan at the average interest rate. But sometimes that interest rate is even higher. So in order for student loan debt forgiveness, this $10,000 or $20,000, most people are going to need a lower interest rate. And sometimes that comes in the form of refinancing and or consolidating your loans. So check it out real quick. When I'm talking about refinancing or consolidating your loans, so refinancing can help lower your interest rates. Sometimes you're switching banks that can't sustain bagel do it. But with the student loan debt forgiveness, these are like certain types of loans. So some of them that you can't even do that with. Okay. But anyways, do me a favor, leave down in the comment below. If any of you like, I love teaching me people about this, because I don't learn about until I was 36. But leave a comment down below if you want to learn a little bit more about refinancing, just personal finance, how this stuff works, because it's insanely complicated. I wish somebody called it to me. So if you want me to make some content or point you in the direction of some resources, leave a comment down below. All right. But one of the things we're talking about interest rates is that we also need to understand that people who are lower income have higher interest rates. Okay. So like I was just showing you in that tweet, it's really important to do the math on these things. When you have a higher interest rate, you're paying more money. So low income people are paying more money on the same loan because more low income people have worse credit scores. Okay. So just to give you an idea of this thing. Okay. Let's say somebody walks into a car dealership, not even talking about loans. Somebody goes into a car dealership and they have a 700 credit score. Okay. They're going to get a certain interest rate. Okay. Maybe five, six percent below or who knows. Right. Then somebody goes into a car dealership and they have a 600 credit score, 100 points lower. Now they might have a 10, 15 percent interest rate. The same exact car is going to cost a lot more money. And something that you'll notice of this as we discuss good old capitalism in the United States, low income people are often paying more money, which doesn't make any sense when you think about that. So now I wanted to talk about the rampant hypocrisy going on on the right when we're talking about this, like people were losing their mind that people are just getting just a little bit, just a little bit of money. Right. And like, if you're like me, if you're progressive like myself, like we wanted a lot more, we wanted a lot of this like to be like, I don't know, all of it, right? Or at least like 50 grand. And these Republicans are losing their minds. And my girlfriend, she actually just graduated with her master's and we're already trying to set things up so you can start paying this insane amount of money off. So it's good timing that this came through. There's a debate to be had that I'm not going to have today about, you know, should what's better, like should we be grateful just because we got something or should it be more not going to get into that today, maybe another time. But anyways, let's talk about how much money is actually going to other people because yeah, Mike and a bunch of other people, but Mike from the Humanist Report, make sure you check out his channel. There's a lot of great political commentary from a progressive point of view, but he made a great video about this the other day and people like Steven Crowder were screaming about this, but he's not alone because Steven Crowder also tweeted student loan forgiveness sounds really nice to illegal immigrants, people with no life experience, people who don't have families yet, and people who use preferred pronouns. Okay, I don't see how any of that is related. But it also sounds like a right wing propagandist like Steven Crowder who had the entirety of his $70,000 plus PPP loan, including the interest forgiven by big daddy governments. Now, after providing the internet with these receipts, Lance from the surface points out every single right winger who is complaining about government handouts or student loan forgiveness are monstrous hypocrites. Their grip depends on selling you big government and social programs bad, while they love taking advantage of them. Exactly. And to be clear, this is somebody who also runs a podcast. How were you affected? How was your business in particular affected during the pandemic? Steven Crowder. In fact, he was downplaying COVID-19. He's an anti-vaxxer. He complained about masking. So if anything, I mean, you should be the least affected by this pandemic. I get that you have employees, but business was still running. Was it not? So why did you need this $70,000 loan from the government that was eventually forgiven? I mean, the way that we could have had our loans forgiven. If we're, you know, being honest here is we could have just started podcasts and taken out PPP loans and then paid off our student debt with that zero interest. I mean, we saw how they've all been forgiven. So if you want to get really upset about this stuff, there are two book recommendations that I have for you that I just finished. One of them is called pandemic ink. And the other one is called the sickness is the system. Both of these books highlight all of the money that not only went to rich people during the pandemic, but also how much money was wasted, mainly because Trump and his administration were running this whole thing, both incompetently and for their own self-interest. Pandemic ink really points this stuff out. The sickness is the system. That's by Professor Richard Wolff. He is like a socialist economist. He's taught me so much about life, how our system works and how we can do things better. But anyways, highly recommend those books, but they'll make you angry. Like they're super informative, but they'll make it bad. Also, I don't know what got into the White House. I actually found out who runs the White House account and it's great. But the White House account on Twitter was going ham. So they made this thread. I'll link it down below so you can enjoy it as much as I did. But here's Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about how we shouldn't have given this forgiveness. And the White House retweets her clip saying that she received $183,000 in PPP loans that were completely forgiven. But then the thread goes on to show other Congress people and their clips telling people like, oh, we shouldn't have done this. But look at this. So Congressman Vern Buchanan got over $2.3 million. Mullen got $1.4 million. Herman got $1 million. Mike Kelly got $987,000. And the list goes on and on. And so, yeah, I think there's absolutely a moral argument that people were encouraged and pressured and coerced and all the kinds of things into this. Even if they weren't though, like take the person who gambles, right? Let's just set aside addiction for a second. I don't think we still want when we want to be a society where that person dies in the gutter. Right? Like we still are a society that fundamentally thinks that we want to have a baseline of well-being even for people who make a lot of really bad choices as consciously as they possibly could. And so I think the same should apply here. Some people like to make the argument, oh, well, people went in and they got degrees in art management or underwater basket weaving or some like, you know, like non-useful gender theory, right? Like this always gets coupled now with the like anti-woke moral panic stuff. And it becomes, you know, people are going and getting useless degrees even though the data doesn't suggest that at all. Like all of those arguments, even if those were actually the case, you don't want to, you know, like ruin the lives of a bunch of young people because they made a choice and they like they can't discharge it via bankruptcy or anything like that. Like that's just, it's a ridiculous exception to our rules of forgiveness and compassion. Yeah. Yeah. And there's just so many just, just so much luck in our lives, you know, because when the moral conversation comes like, I often think of, you know, I was an alcoholic for nearly a decade of my life, never got a DUI, right? So when we talk about ruining someone's life or a decision they made when they were young, you know, like that, that doesn't sit well for me because people made the same exact decisions, had different outcomes. But even the gambling analogy, it drives me nuts just thinking about how every time there's an economic crisis, it's because big banks in Wall Street made large gambles and we're like, oh, we're going to bail them out. So the gambling is okay in this scenario, but not that scenario and the way to justify it. Think about that for a second. Why is it why is it that when rich people get these bailouts, when they get this money, when they get forgiven, why is that justified? Right? Like I when I got sober, one of my main goals was to do my best to not be a hypocrite, right? And to watch these people do these mental backflips of, oh, here's why I I should get that money and have it forgiven. You see this all the time with welfare as well. You see different different people in the same lower class level, right? And here's why I deserve, you know, Medicare and welfare, right? But you don't. Okay. And this has to do with the attribution bias, where are what's going on with us is a lot more nuanced, right? But them is just a flaw in their character. So for example, a low income person over here, right, like a Republican, like, why are so many Republicans who are lower class voting for Republicans who want to gut these programs, right? Because they're saying, Oh, I need this because, you know, jobs in my area are scarce, big techs coming in, they're closed down the coal mines or whatever. Here's why I need government assistance. But then they hear about people on the West Coast or in Los Angeles, like, why do you need government assistance? Why don't you just move got it out, right? And they get this kind of blanket idea, and it's completely messed up. So what really opened my eyes to all this stuff, just about debt as a whole, was this amazing book called can't pay won't pay by Astra Taylor. And she's from the debt collective. And she discusses how big business gets bailed out all of the time, like this isn't just the pandemic. Like, but this is so key to the hypocrisy that we're seeing with how they're taking so much money. Like, do you know how often like these multi billion dollar companies or these multi millionaires are bailed out? Like, one of the ones that really urged me and there's a lot of great videos about this is Elon Musk, right? He is held up on this throne as the self made man, when a his background does not support self made at all, we need to have a whole conversation about what self made means. But also Tesla, SpaceX, these were all government funded, but people like him are against social programs. Like, do you see how hypocritical that is? So not long ago, I wrote this piece over on my substack. If you want to check it out, it's just the rewired soul.substack.com. But I wrote this piece called the COVID corporate bailout nobody is talking about. Because right now, like we're often told that inflation is because so much stimulus money was given to us, even though it was barely enough to survive. Like for most people, those checks did not even cover rent. But one of the actual primary causes of inflation and the massive layoffs is because of how much money the government has given companies that loaded the stock market during COVID. Like, look at this image. This is from my article, but this is around the time that I started investing and I was I could not understand why were all of these stocks reaching their all time highs when we're in a pandemic and businesses are supposed to be struggling. And it's because the government puts so much money into them. And it's not just this either. This has been going on for years. Just think about 2008, the economic crisis of 2008. That was the year that my son was born, and everything was just going downhill. And I'm freaking out. I actually lost my job. But the whole thing that happened there was that the big banks aside from doing shady, shady loans, but they were all gambling with the economy. And then they were bailed out. And if you look around right now, right this very minute, we're passing things like the Chips Act. And we're also passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which is giving multi billion dollar companies a lot more money. And don't even get me started on the Inflation Reduction Act, because a lot of money is going to fossil fuel companies, even though this is supposed to help the environment. It's undeniable that in the legislative text of the bill, it includes a big buildout of fossil fuels in two huge ways. One, Joe Manchin got put into the bill, a provision that effectively ties the expansion of solar and wind infrastructure development to an expansion of oil and gas leases offshore and onshore. And he went on Fox News and he bragged about this. And he was accurate in how he described it. He said that essentially renewable energy expansion cannot now happen without an expansion of available areas for the fossil fuel industry to drill offshore and onshore. So that's one piece of it. The other piece is this side deal that hasn't been fully fleshed out but has been acknowledged that Manchin got the Democrats reportedly to agree to expedited permitting processes for fossil fuel infrastructure pipelines and the like. So by the way, the side deal is not included in any of the emissions reductions estimates. But if we want to give people $10,000 for $20,000, let's do the low debt forgiveness, that's an issue. So now you might be asking, Chris, why has this been going on? Why is this going on so long? Why are so many big companies and rich people taking all this money and we don't want to give it to lower class people? Well, that goes back to this D-bag, Ronald Reagan. So he came up with this idea of trickle down economics. And the whole idea is give a ton of money to rich people, two companies, and what they're going to do is they're going to hire more employees. So it's going to create more jobs. They're going to use that money to give people increases in wages. Do you see? So that's how it's going to work. And you know what? When it said like that, that sounds amazing, but that's not what happened. Because in the capitalist system, capitalists, these capitalist companies are not incentivized to pay workers more. They're not incentivized to hire more workers. They are incentivized to make more profits for their shareholders. So if they can do that with less people, if they can do that by paying their employees less money, then none of that money that's getting injected in the top is trickling down. Like we're constantly told that all this money needs to go up top because it's going to benefit us. It's going to benefit the economy. And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen anything trickle down to us, right? So when we're talking about student loan debt forgiveness, even this little amount, it's like we've been doing this for decades. It's clearly not working. A lot of people are struggling, barely getting by, barely able to put gas in their car, barely able to put food on the table, barely to keep a roof over their head. Right? Like we need to try something else. But anyways, the last thing I wanted to talk about here and I asked Aaron about is something that, you know, it's kind of weird to think about and it's about how we have free education all through high school. Why isn't there free college? But let me ask you this, this one last thing because this, this keeps coming up and it's something I've been thinking about, but they talk about how, you know, K through 12 public schooling is free, right? A lot of countries, you know, you can at least get like an associates, like what are your thoughts on just getting rid of this whole thing and just having a national, like nationalizing college. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I would say and, you know, like get rid of the student loan system. Like it's hard because a lot of places are going in the opposite direction. So like Australia, for a long time, had effectively free higher education and they have moved towards increased privatizing and like you get loans, but you don't have to start paying them off until you have a decent, you know, like a job or stuff like that. There's various sort of complications to it. But like, it seems to me that we should be going in the direction of again, redistributing large quantities of wealth and income to make either a, you know, bachelor's, an undergrad or, you know, some sort of equivalent training, effectively free for everyone, right? Like that just seems like a very valuable thing as a society to put our resources towards. And I think in a way that doesn't make it too, that doesn't like try to make it constraining, right? So we don't want it to be a system where you can get an undergrad, but only if it's in a degree that we decide is valuable, right? It really needs to just be you can go and have this experience and learn a bunch of stuff, you know, on the house and then you go from there, right? Like most people, you know, like a lot of the degrees for, like a PhD level stuff, a lot of folks will tell you if they're not going to pay for the degree, don't go for it. Like never pay for like, especially in philosophy, like never pay for a PhD in philosophy, because like, you're not going to reliably have a job option. So if you create a situation in which people don't think they're going to reliably have good job options, like what do you, what sort of pathway are you creating for people at this point? So yeah, I think moving as far in that direction as we possibly can feels like one of the many obvious things that we should be doing that, of course, we won't because we don't have a functioning legislature, a functioning government. And because we have like these, these really weird ethical reactions to the redistributing of wealth for, you know, the sake of greater equity in these kinds of ways. Like I just, if people like that, that was the point of the tweet, right? If $10,000 is your cutoff point, where you're like, well, that seems unfair. We're, we're like, there's no chance. We have no hope of doing, of like pulling the levers that are large enough to like divert the energy the way we need to. So I think people just need to like understand that if you actually want to see things get better, you're going to need to swallow a much larger kind of pill of what feels like unfairness for you. Yeah. So I hope you're leaving this video with a few things to think about, to think about how we help each other out. And maybe if you're a panel like I am to rethink how we're talking to children about college, because we're kind of in this tough situation where college is mostly needed to get a decent job and make a living wage. But as we're seeing that's not the things anymore with the dilution of the college degrees with editorial loans, you know, and one of the things that I feel that I have to do as a father is to start educating my son about financial literacy like I was talking about earlier, because it's not tied in schools. It's not common schools at all unless you purposely go and seek it out. If you purposely take some kind of finance course, you know what I mean? So with my son, I'm going to talk to him about education and is it worth it? And to look at these careers and is it going to, you know, be able to pay your student loans back and all of that? Or should you pay out of pocket? Because in my situation, I the only reason that I'm making more than some people who actually have degrees is because I've had to work 10 times as hard. All right. So there's that's like the trade off. I didn't go to school, but I've had to work my way out. I wasn't able to just hit the ground running. And let's not forget, I spent almost a decade of my life as a drug addict. So that definitely got me back a little bit as well. But so it is possible, but it depends on the industry. But kind of like what Aaron was talking about, too, I don't think that we should have to live in a society like that, where people do have to work that much harder should they choose not to go to college. And if they do choose to go to college, we should be able to guarantee them some kind of job that could pay their loans back. But there's so much more that goes into this that's discussed by people a lot smarter than me about how we need to restructure how we pay for college, how the loans work. Like even if you don't want to go full on free college, we need to discuss how expensive colleges because it's getting really crazy how much people are having to pay just for education. And there's a whole conversation to be had about how a lot of people are just graduating without learning much because college has turned into this capitalist industry where it's more about making money than actually educating people. And I have other videos planned out because college is something that I'm very passionate about. But I have future videos planned out about educationism, like about, you know, do you really need education? What does it actually mean? What does it mean for low income people to actually get in to a good college? There's so, so many conversations just about college. And it's something that we press on so many people to this day. We need to have better conversations about it. All right. But anyways, another huge thanks to Aaron for taking the time to come on, hit him up out of nowhere and be like, yo, come on here and talk about it. So huge thanks to Aaron. Make sure you take out the description. Make sure you follow him over on Twitter. Check out his podcast Embrace the Void. But yeah, Aaron, he's constantly taking a look at all sorts of things going on in politics, social issues. He's writing papers. I'm like, love the dude. He has great book recommendations. He's awesome. So make sure you give him a follow. Okay, but before I let you go, just a quick reminder, the YouTube algorithm is doing me dirty. So if you could leave a like, leave a comment, share it. If you're not subscribed yet, make sure you do that. All of those things really help out. I have so many videos planned out. And if I'm being honest, I struggle to work full time and then justify making these super long videos, when they're not getting that many views. But I'm getting a lot more views than I expected. I am very grateful. I love each and every one of you. But we can do better. We can grow this lovely little community. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for you this time. And yeah, I have some more videos coming out very soon. Might be in the next day or two that I'm going to be releasing that sandbag video I'm working on. So make sure you stay tuned.