Don’t Pitch Bitcoin at Commencement

Each week brings new signs of the widening gulf between ordinary Americans and our tech oligarchs steering our economic future.

 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman breezily predicts that “movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better,” while most of the artists who make movies and video games contemplate forced early retirement.

At the Bloomberg Technology Summit, Whitney Wolf Herd of Bumble pledges to solve the age-old question of finding true love by building “a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.”

And Apple releases an ad so tone-deaf it apologized, depicting its latest iPad crushing totems of human creativity like guitars and paintbrushes into oblivion.

But for a singular look at how out-of-touch Silicon Valley has grown from the heartland, look no farther than this month’s widely slammed train wreck of a commencement speech at Ohio State University by entrepreneur and ayahuasca enthusiast Chris Pan.

When Pan graduated from OSU, the quintessential state school, in 1999, the commencement speaker was Richard Klausner, M.D., director of the National Cancer Institute. A decade later, students and their families heard from Ohio’s storied Senator John Glenn, war hero and the first man to orbit the Earth aboard the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule.

And today? OSU’s standards have fallen just a bit to host a Bay Area “social entrepreneur, musician and inspirational speaker” who hawked Bitcoin as the answer to an uncertain economic future, led the stadium of 12,000 students and their loved ones in two off-key sing-alongs, and brazenly pitched bracelets sold by his company MyIntent.org (which stresses that it’s “not a jewelry company – we are a service project.” It would be far too mundane for a jewelry company in 2024 to simply be in the business of selling jewelry.) Pan also promised to get a free bracelet to every audience member “as an apology” for his Bitcoin advocacy. As of this writing, this logistically daunting promise has not been realized. 

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech is still considered a gold standard, in large part because of its simplicity. He kicked his remarks off by saying, “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

Pan’s speech laid out no such guardrails. There’s a pretty good reason for why his speech veered wildly from one topic to another; in a teaser for his speech on LinkedIn in advance of the big day, the McKinsey/Facebook vet cited the help of “some AI (Ayahuasca Intelligence” in writing his speech to create “something extra heartfelt.” True to form, he only turned to the psychedelic (also favored by folk healers in the Amazon and Will Smith) after he found ChatGPT lacking. Unfortunately, he seems to have not tried bouncing some of his ideas off another human being – or sitting down with a notebook sober to reflect on what it’d be like to sit in the robe of a 2024 graduate in one of the cheap seats in Ohio Stadium. (Or the 50-something sheet metal worker from Dayton who saved to put their kid through four years of school only to sit through an extended pitch for digital currency.) With apologies to Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemmingway never actually said “write drunk, edit sober” and most writers eventually discover that the benefits of substance abuse on the writing process are vastly overstated.

In one of his many post-mortem defenses of the speech, Pan cited an NIH study that emphasizes how ayahuasca “enhances creative divergent thinking.” Not necessarily the most useful quality in outlining a simple speech. 

His post quoted psychedelic aficionado Terence McKenna, “This is our University. You went to Harvard, we went to Ayahuasca.” That about sums up Peter Pan’s regard for higher learning.

In the age of George Santos, it may be true that no press is bad press. Many more people have heard of Chris Pan this week in the wake of the boos and criticism that greeted his ode to cryptocurrency and magical thinking. 

In Pan’s telling, he’s just a disruptor. (Amidst the brouhaha, Pan posted an Instagram story seemingly placing himself among other misunderstood icons, including Socrates, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Joan of Arc.) “Anything there’s innovation, I think that [criticism] is not unexpected, because I really tried to innovate on what a traditional commencement speech could be,” he told New York Magazine. On social media, he suggested the audience just didn’t get it, writing “I think there is a misunderstsnding (sp) about what a graduation vs commencement speech is – many of them never had a high school graduation and perhaps were wanting them (more retrospective) vs commencememt (sp) is more forward looking.”

Chris, that’s not the problem.

For one thing, I don’t see much innovation in hauling out PowerPoint slides to one of the last bastions of public speaking in American life where speakers aren’t generally expected to accompany every statement with a banal photograph or chart. (Do we need to see a drawing of students in masks to remember what life was like during the COVID-19 era?) Everyone has rightfully condemned his use of multiple sing-alongs and a magic trick during his time at the podium, but I see the use of slides as the most unforgivable offense.

Are gassy platitudes like “Hurt people…hurt people” a reflection of what innovative, divergent thinking is possible on psychedelics? 

Here’s the problem: add commencement speeches to the long list of things that don’t necessarily need to be disrupted for the sake of disruption. Regular people don’t want to watch AI-generated movies and we don’t want to listen to psychedelic-fueled commencement speeches. Many of us don’t remember the fine details of our commencement speeches, but that’s also true for our memory of the wedding officiant. A commencement speaker’s job is simple: celebrate the accomplishments of the graduates and humbly offer a few practical words of advice, maybe a self-deprecating joke or two. Mission accomplished.

It's unlikely that most commencement speakers could crash and burn with such gusto, but a few general lessons from this fiasco before this flash and Pan is forgotten: 

Make it about them. Pan begins his speech by saying “I've been here on campus, I've met so many of you, you've told me your stories.” He then launches into a lengthy success story about….himself and his journey from Taiwan to Cincinnati. There’s no doubt some degree of humblebraggery to expect from a commencement speaker, but he would have likely garnered much more goodwill upfront if he had picked an inspiring story or two from the class of 2004. (This would require speaking to a human being, not a chatbot.)

Make it specific. Pan starts promisingly by thanking his alma mater “for the countless opportunities to learn, to grow, and to serve.” But he misses one of the easiest lay-ups in a commencement speech for building rapport with the audience – name-checking greasy campus spoons or dive bars. Nothing in his remarks indicates real-world familiarity with this specific university or its traditions, save for a closing “Go Bucks!” long after he had lost the crowd to their iPhones.  (Former Al Gore speechwriter Eric Schnure has written about the simple power of “Howdahell”s – i.e. adding a local reference to a speech that makes the audience say, “How’d the hell he know about that?”)

Be optimistic. Finally, and maybe most unforgivably, this was a relentlessly downbeat speech, despite his forcing thousands of family members to climb to their feet to sing along with “This Little Light of Mine.” Pan painted a bleak portrait of the future awaiting the graduates, following his divergent thinking to an extended rant about Bitcoin as the only hedge against what he sees as inflationary, out-of-control government spending. In Pan’s world, there seems to be little need for creativity or ingenuity or resilience – just buy Bitcoin and HODL.

Chris Pan seems well-intentioned in his desire to “shake up the system” – but I do not doubt that many of his fellow tech entrepreneurs share his same earnest desire, even as they seem to trample all over the human elements of what it means to make art, find love, or give a simple graduation speech.