Welcome to the Waves Slates Podcast about gender, feminism and student loan forgiveness.

Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off our

minds.

And today you've got me, Lizzie O'Leary, host of WhatNextTVD.

I'm me, Emily Peck, co-host of SlateMoney.

Hello.

Hello, Lizzie.

It's nice to see you.

Yeah.

We are going to dig into Biden's loan forgiveness plan.

But I just want to drop my background, which is I have been really interested in student

debt and debt relief since I started covering it, which was about 2013 or so.

And that reporting really upended a lot of, I think, my assumptions about debt, who has

it, what it looks like, how much there is.

And by that point, I had paid off my grad school loans.

I did not have undergrad loans, thanks to my parents and my grandfather.

And when I started doing, like, the in-depth reporting, I did a big series and I thought

that I would be hearing the, like, I have $200,000 in loans, horror stories.

And instead, you know, the things that were really trapping people were balances of $8,000,

$12,000, $22,000.

They were especially hurting women the most, especially hurting women of color.

And often they were, like, degrees that weren't seen as having a high earnings premium in

...