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More than 12,500 Ohio State graduates gathered inside the school’s football stadium to receive their degrees over the weekend for a ceremony where the commencement speaker was flooded with boos for shilling Bitcoin in a speech he wrote after taking ayahuasca.
Graduation is obviously a monumental day for any college student who’s earned the right to walk across the stage to secure their diploma. However, I doubt I’m the only person who’s endured one while nursing a hangover who would preferred slightly less pomp and circumstance in the lead-up to that big moment.
Now, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who’ve been genuinely inspired by the words that were delivered by a commencement speaker at their ceremony, but I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest they’re in the vast minority of graduates.
All you really need to do if you end up in that position is deliver some generic life advice, try to get a few laughs, and—most importantly—keep things under 15 minutes. If you’re able to check all of those boxes, you’ve probably done a perfectly serviceable job.
Given the nature of the ceremony, it’s pretty rare for a commencement speaker to get showered with boos at some point during the speech.
However, Chris Pan—an Ohio State graduate and self-described “social entrepreneur, investor, transformation facilitator”—managed to garner that reaction when he took to the stage at The Horseshoe on Sunday and decided to use the platform he was given to extol the virtues of Bitcoin for the tens of thousands of people who’d packed into the stadium.
According to NBC4, we were treated to a laughably on-brand development when Pan hopped on LinkedIn to reveal he’d been inspired to plug Bitcoin during an address where he described it as a “very misunderstood asset class” after taking one of Aaron Rodger’s favorite mind-altering substances, saying, he “got some help from AI (Ayahuasca Intelligence) this week to write my commencement speech for 60k grads and family members at Ohio State University next Sunday.”
Of course.