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Hello and welcome to the Big Technology podcast, a show for cool-headed,

nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond.

Our guest today is Max Chaffkin.

He is a features editor at Bloomberg Business Week and the author of the brand new book just hit shelves yesterday.

It's called The Contrarian, Peter Thiel, and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power.

It's interesting that you also say one Silicon Valley,

so we have to get into that. Is there one? Is there many Silicon Valley a location?

Is it an idea? Is it uniform? Does it contain multitudes? Does the LA Times just spoke about

your book? Anyway, Max, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Alex. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you. You see, already got me excited. I've learned so much

from this book, and I'm just like, I'm thrilled to be talking to you. And I think this is going to be

a fun discussion. So why don't we start here? Peter Thiel is one guy. We see him in headlines every now and again. He's done,

you know, a handful of things. Has he built the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley?

...