You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

My name is Thomas Jones.

My guest this week is David Rundsman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge,

frequent contributor to the LRB and host of the Talking Politics podcast. We're lucky to have

got him for this episode before Talking Politics returns from its summer break, which will be any

day now. He has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the billionaire investor and self-styled

libertarian Peter Thiel. It's a review of a book by the Bloomberg journalist

Max Chaffkin called The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's pursuit of power. Hello, David,

and thank you very much for joining me. Hi. So, I suppose the big question is, who is Peter Thiel? And I suppose

we start with a bit of biography for those you don't know.

Yeah.

And so I'm one of those people who knew about him in sort of different snapshots.

And until I read this book, I hadn't quite got the whole picture because he's one of those

characters who pops up in surprising places.

So he's the son of quite devout Christian, German immigrants to the

United States. He was a chess prodigy as a child, as so many people in his world seem to have been.

He went to Stanford and he first acquired his reputation as a sort of provocateur of the liberal left to

combine those two terms. He founded a publication called the Stanford Review, which really was designed

to rile people up on campus by, as he saw it, puncturing the liberal pieties and he became

notorious through that. But his ambition was

always to make money. He started out as an investor. He established an investment fund. But he also

helped to co-found PayPal. And one of the things that's known about him is he has this sort of

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