Episode 458: Max Chafkin

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Chafkin is a features editor and reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book is The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. “I think there's like a really good way to come up with story ideas where you basically just look for people who have given TED Talks and figure out what they're lying about. And there's also a tendency in the press to pump up these startups based on those stories…. It's worth taking a critical look at these stars of the moment. Because often there's not as much there as we think. And if you’re talking about Theranos or something, there's some potential to do harm—but also it means that maybe more worthwhile efforts are not getting the attention they deserve.” Show notes: @chafkin maxchafkin.com Chafkin on Longform Chafkin's Bloomberg Businessweek archive 02:00 "Anything Could Happen" (Inc. • Mar 2008) 09:00 "A Broken Place: The Spectacular Failure Of The Startup That Was Going To Change The World" (Fast Company • Apr 2014) 15:00 The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (Penguin Press • 2021) 22:00 Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire (Portfolio • 2019) 25:00 "The Education of a Libertarian" (Peter Thiel • Cato Unbound • Apr 2009) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the long forum podcast. I'm Aaron Lammer. I'm here with my co-host Max Linsky and Evan Ratliffe. Hello.
0:12.5	Hello, Aaron. What have you got for us this week on the show?
0:16.3	Very excited about our guest this week. When I told Max I was doing it, Max claimed that we had
0:22.4	already had this guest on, but we have not. And that is always a good description of an ideal guest.
0:28.2	Someone we can't believe that we have not had on before. My guest is Max Chaffkin, who I guess
0:34.5	when I first became aware of his writing, he was writing for Fast Company. He's now at Bloomberg,
0:41.2	and he has a new book out called The Contrarian about Peter Teal. And it is juicy. And I wanted to
0:49.5	talk to him about it. So I did. I know you like to talk about Peter Teal. I've talked to you about
0:54.4	Peter Teal. I can't imagine what it was like for you to talk to someone who actually knows anything
0:57.2	about Peter Teal. This book's got some pretty great anecdotes in it. Literally before this,
1:03.2	I was looking at the title and I landed on a annotation. And the annotation was just an attribution
1:09.4	for a quote, asless chaps. So there's at least one reference to asless chaps in this book about Peter
1:16.1	Teal. That's all you need to know to listen to this interview. It feels like a perfect segue to
1:21.9	just mention our new partnership with Vox. That's who we're making the podcast with these days. They've
1:26.3	been great and it's a delight. Thanks, Vox. And now here's Aaron with Max Chafkin.
1:39.2	Welcome, Max Chafkin. Hey, Aaron, how you doing? I'm good. I wanted to talk to you because you have a
1:46.6	new book about Peter Teal. But in prepping for this interview, I dug into your long form archive
1:54.0	and noted that you have a piece about Twitter published in 2008 while Twitter was still,
2:01.3	I think, subletting desks in their office space. Were they the buyer, were they as a subletters
2:06.9	or were they being subletted from in that story? Oh my God. I try to remember. I think they were
2:14.5	subletting it from another company that was owned by F Williams, maybe. Like I could recreate
2:20.8	the layout of the office. I think I could draw it. But I can't remember the specifics of the
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