not_fin_advice
I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!"
But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in technical areas than I do technically trained people excelling in anything humanities related.
My experience has also been that most physicists, when confronted with challenging French critical theory, simply dismiss it as nonsense rather than taking any time to understand it. I have met far more people who were trained on reading Derrida who can converse casually about advanced calculus topics than the reverse.
Additionally I find something like Lagrangian mechanics to take far less time to under stand than not just learning French, but learning French well enough to engage deeply with texts and theory spanning a fairly broad period of history.
As to your question:
> Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
That's a combination of a straw man and a false equivalency. First the "dot on a white canvas" represents a very, very narrow part of a very specific field of Modern art which the vast majority of trained academic artists and theorists will agree is not particularly their taste. There's plenty of niche physicists doing work that most physicists find questionable. A better example of postmodern art is Pulp Fiction, and I think if you polled the general public on whether or not they wanted to see the Sistine chapter or watch Pulp Fiction you'd find a bigger split, and likewise each artist would have an equally hard time.
The false equivalency is that you're comparing Michelangelo to some imagined Modernist painting that I'm guessing you don't have a name for. This is a bit like comparing Einstein to an imaginary string theorist a liberal arts college.
I am not a financial advisor by any stretch of the imagination, but, assuming you work in tech it might be a good idea to diversify a bit.
I find it surprising how many people I know in tech keep their RSUs when they vest. Sure it has worked great for a few years but now you're tying your savings/investment and income to exactly the same organization.
If there were ever to be a tech crash not only would your income be at risk but all of your savings and investments as well. Even in the best of times diversification has been the common advice, and now more then ever it seems like a good idea to spread out your extra income to as many different places as you can.