I don't know about changing my mind per se, but I definitely got a new perspective on financial regulation after attending a talk by Barney Frank (famous for the Dodd-Frank bill). I don't remember the exact details now, but hearing about how he designed the regulations was very interesting, even if it was a pretty high-level description. It colored my understanding of the regulation in a way that just reading a description on Wikipedia didn't.
Well, I won't call him a "famous speaker", not outside of a specific field (politics and finance). By famous I mean popular in a broader sense. On the tech side of things that would mean Steve Wozniak famous, so to say (famous for his contribution on a specific field, but broadly recognized as popular).
Look at their list of speakers. Russel Simmons, Deepak Chopra, Shaq. They invite all kinds of people. These are usually in the big offices in NY or London so most of the attendees are likely to be liberals.
I took your comment to mean that could not imagine GS paying for a liberal who championed financial regulation to come speak. I'm countering that they invite a wide array of speakers on a a variety of topcis, many of whom are liberal. I'm not sure if they have ever invites Frank, but it seems like something they definitely would do.
It was actually Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm. The talk was even more interesting because of the context, and because I was learning a lot about finance that whole summer.
