Billionaire investor Peter Thiel does Q & A at Harvard, completely obliterates the idiotic student audience

This tweet from @zatapatique

"broken record, but SV's "college is worthless" is really just the business owner in an industry with one large input cost asking for that resource to be commoditised asap"

Thiel went to Stanford for undergrad and law school. He rode that meritocracy train right into practicing securities law. When he got board with that, he got friends and family to put $1 mil into a hedge fund he was starting. Through his meritocracy bona fides he got hooked up with some very smart people and was able to ride their accomplishments in PayPal and facebook. Thiel likes to create a myth about himself being some great innovator and entrepreneur, but he is just another guy who rode the meritocracy train into a position where he could capitalize on the work of others by being the money man.

Jamin is definitely Ben Shapiro's burner Lets Run account.

jamin wrote:

Peter Thiel often mentions how liberals use Orwellian words that mean the opposite of their dictionary meaning.

Yes, as one of the founders of Palantir, Thiel knows full well the meaning of Orwellian. One could also say he is one of it's enablers.

Precious Roy wrote:

Thiel went to Stanford for undergrad and law school. He rode that meritocracy train right into practicing securities law. When he got board with that, he got friends and family to put $1 mil into a hedge fund he was starting. Through his meritocracy bona fides he got hooked up with some very smart people and was able to ride their accomplishments in PayPal and facebook. Thiel likes to create a myth about himself being some great innovator and entrepreneur, but he is just another guy who rode the meritocracy train into a position where he could capitalize on the work of others by being the money man.

Glad you see through this. It's mind boggling how someone who owes everything to Stanford can sh*t on college education and lead youngsters astray. Let's look at all of his accomplishments and their connection to Stanford.

His securities law gig => Stanford JD

His derivatives trader gig at Credit Suisse => Stanford background

His teaming up with Max Levchin to found Paypal => Met Max at Stanford giving a talk

His founding Clarium Capital => All of his managmenet committe went to Stanford or Harvard

His founding of Palantir => Joe Lonsdale (Stanford) was his right hand man, Colin Anderson (CFO) -> also stanford

His ivnestment into FB => He got intro'ed to Zuck through a Stanford connection while Zuck was in town

Cornell East wrote:

My goodness Cornel West is an idiot.

"Harvard and other elite college dont want inclusivness they want exclusion. Harvard us like Studio 54." Great stuff.

My favorite Cornell West line was maybe around 1hr 20 into the talk. He said he's not worried about Communists. Then he followed up with the statement that "I'm more worried about Christians running around creating damage than the Communists".

My 2nd favorite part was him looking around for questions from "sisters of color".

Those kids have been taught well at Harvard, 75% of their questions either had to deal with a race or sexism issue. Just as their liberal professor masters have instructed them. Peter Thiel was the only intelligent person in that room.

another perspective wrote:

Cornell East wrote:

My goodness Cornel West is an idiot.

"Harvard and other elite college dont want inclusivness they want exclusion. Harvard us like Studio 54." Great stuff.

My favorite Cornell West line was maybe around 1hr 20 into the talk. He said he's not worried about Communists. Then he followed up with the statement that "I'm more worried about Christians running around creating damage than the Communists".

My 2nd favorite part was him looking around for questions from "sisters of color".

Those kids have been taught well at Harvard, 75% of their questions either had to deal with a race or sexism issue. Just as their liberal professor masters have instructed them. Peter Thiel was the only intelligent person in that room.

Hi again Jamin!

Cornell West is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, so you should check out his faculty page and read some of his works if you want to form a more nuanced opinion on his position on Christianity.

Again, I was in this class, and up to that point I believe only white students had been called on. If you listened to the discussion, you’ll notice it touched on many topics other than race and gender.

cotton shirt wrote:

Tyrone ReXXXing said: Ya know those people working office jobs you compared Jamin's trolling to: psst....they're getting paid ...

your long post just basically says that as long as someone is making money, that's okay, their life has meaning. but Jamin is not making money and therefore his life has no meaning.

......

That's not how I read his post.

You said (paraphrasing): lots of people in offices doing excel leading meaningless lives...

He said (paraprashing): those people are making money to feed their family, they are learning skills to improve their jobs propects. That's a lot different than someone spending hours a day trolling the internet....

In other words, feeding your family is not meaningless. Trolling the internet is.

He said nothing about people giving of their time to help other people being meaningless. He simply compared people working at jobs which may seem meaningless to you to people who spend their time doing truly meaningless things - like posting here every day.

I promise you, I'm not Jamin. I've got my life together a lot more than that guy :) I also live nowhere near the West Coast.

I wasn't in the class like you were but I did listen to all 1 hr 50 min of the discussion. You are right that other topics were covered, I was just commenting on the specific questions the students had. Were only white students putting up their hands? It's pretty weird to not call on students with actual questions and instead seek out questions from only particular types of students that didn't have their hands up.

Thiel brought up a lot of good points and opinions that I doubt many of those students have ever heard from a single professor at Harvard. People out here in the real world that are making things happen everyday have a lot more realistic and intelligent things to say than those career academics. An American society that promotes independent thought, accomplishment, and self-worth is a healthy society. The vision that the media and academia promotes of victimhood, group-think, and govt dependence are what will eventually kill our society. I hope people like myself and Peter Thiel are the ones that win the minds of the American future, not those professors at Harvard.

For Example:

You are a ZuckerBerg™.

+1. The academic left is poison. Identity politics, similarly poison. I've been through grad school and I've been in the real world, and it's astounding to me how isolated academics are from what is real, and how little merit I found in much of what I heard on campus. Who knew lemmings could be so unimpressive?

jamin wrote:

The students get so mad when he tells them their school is a "Studio 54 Night Club" and that they should think about dropping out and not pursuing "tracked careers."

I can't believe some of the idiot questions these students ask. Are Ivy League schools a joke nowadays? The professors seem like idiots too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2TrRWAkbr8

The professors seem like idiots. The students seem like idiots. The questions are "idiot questions."

Dude. It's you.

Lol, I love Peter Thiel's comments on how modern cities "don't work" along with so many other things

Hardloper wrote:

Lol, I love Peter Thiel's comments on how modern cities "don't work" along with so many other things

You mean like his being gay?

We're calling him Zuck now?

Gag!!!

blort said: in other words, feeding your family is not meaningless. Trolling the internet is.

you make a valid point. thank you.

my point was that none of us know the actual circumstances of the person posting the stuff that Tyrone ReXXXing interprets as trolling. it might seem like deliberate trolling, but the poster might not be capable of much more; that might genuinely be the limit of their abilities.

and you, for example, referred to posting here as being meaningless, but for all we know Jamin might be paid by the BroJos to create clickbait threads like this one, in which case Jamin's "trolling," is driving the revenue for the site creators.

stranger things have happened.

cheers.

I have arrived at the point where today's US college zeitgeist bores the heck out of me, and I ignore it except at those times when I cannot--and at that point, it is easy to confuse and dismantle the zealots.

There are 2 kinds of people: smart, and stupid. For those of us who are smart, it is easy to tell the difference. Our current society doesn't reward smart, however--it rewards bellicose, sensational, and unoriginal.

We need a reset. Things in this country will go from bad to worse, and IMO the faster it happens, the better. I stand to live another 40 years if I am lucky, and I don't think that we can just "ride it out" that long--so I'm leaving. By the end of 2019 or summer 2020, we are gone.

It's important to understand that it's not like this everywhere. Don't like it? Vote with your feet and your wallet. Yes it is getting harder to take your wallet with you, but it can still be done.

I personally don't see the worth at this point of engaging the fight any longer. We need to "get through" this period before anything meaningful, or interesting will happen.

Maybe I'm just old, but it's so easy to see "types" now, that it's a bit depressing. The smart ones are more difficult to fathom, because just like some other eras in history, they tend now to keep their thoughts to themselves.

I think that you misunderstand what "obliterate" means. It means total destruction. You cannot achieve that by answering a question. Nor would you want a speaker to obliterate his audience.

In response to Cornell West's question about democratizing financial capital, Thiel was completely clueless, avoided the question and had nothing to say, and that was right around 1:01-1:02. Pretty pathetic. He wants the markets to continue to be dominated by the 0.1%, like himself, and has no ideas whatsoever for making markets work for more people on the capital side. (he pointed to the negative of more home ownership prior to the crash, failing to take account of the structure of the loans that led to home ownership for those who couldn't afford loans structured as they were).