Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with brilliant and interesting people.

I'm Emily Peck. I'm a correspondent at Axios and co-host of Slate Money, and I'm here today with the one

and only Jillian Berman. She's an assisting managing editor at MarketWatch, where she covers student loans.

And Jillian, you have a new book out, sunk cost, colon, who's to blame for the nation's broken student loan system and how to fix it just came out welcome jillian thanks so much

for having me i'm so excited to talk to you because your book just does a really great job

sort of unraveling student loans which i will admit to not really understanding very well even though

i've written about them over the years and just how bizarre and bureaucratic and compromised and

broken the whole thing is. So before we kind of dive into everything, I thought I would just

challenge you and ask you to explain the subtitle of your book in like three sentences.

Who is to blame for the broken student loan system? Sure. Yeah. So I would blame probably

mostly policymakers for the way that they've designed the system and the lack of political

will and imagination to kind of reimagine it. And then also sort of sub-blame the, you know,

third-party actors, which are, you know, lenders,

non-profit, middlemen, things like that, who have had the opportunity to bend the system

to their will sometimes in ways that are not in the best interest of borrowers and taxpayers.

Yeah. So it's not the borrower's fault, even though everyone tries to blame them all the time.

That is my take. It's not the borrower's fault. Okay. So, okay, I want to unpack all of that when we

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