Peter Thiel

This is a follow-up post and mostly written for Lukas. To everyone else, simply understand that you would have never have heard of JD Vance if it weren't for Peter Thiel. Seriously.

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Elon Musk: I support free speech! Unless it is speech mocking me. 

His buddy Peter Thiel (fellow founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook) took this to a new level. He supports free speech but when the Gawker outed him as gay he made it his passion in life to bring down the tabloid website... for which he succeeded by bankrolling Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the site forcing them into bankruptcy. 

He is an early investor in a company that has cataloged all faces and is used by police (ok, I guess) to identify people and by private companies like Madison Square Garden to keep out any unwanted guests (bordering on Minority Report creepy).

It's safe to say, I'm not a fan but I thought I'd give him another chance so I watched this interview from a few days ago. 

There are three main segments.

1. Politics. His libertarian/right-wing politics don't match with mine so it is not surprising that I didn't agree with him much in this section. Still, I expected worse. 
2. AI and tech. There is nothing newsworthy in this section. He compared the AI bubble to the dot-com bubble and observed that the valuation of Nvidia is greater than the total revenue generated by AI. Nothing he said was provocative.
3. Higher education. This was by far the most interesting section. I found myself agreeing with most of his points (shocker). Thiel was repeatedly goaded into saying the government should offer no support to higher ed by the libertarian panel and he didn't take the bait. 

Bottom line: I still don't agree on much but it was worth my time to hear his opinion.