Peter Thiel is the co-founder (with Max Levchin) and former CEO of PayPal, the primary e-commerce business that facilitates making payments through the internet in lieu of cheques and money orders. A native Californian and avowed Libertarian, Thiel earned both his undergraduate degree in philosophy and his law degree from Stanford University, where he also founded The Stanford Review. In 2002, PayPal was purchased by eBay. That year, Thiel founded Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund named Global Macro Fund of the Year in 2005 by both MarHedge and Absolute Return magazines.

In addition to managing Clarium, Thiel is now a partner at the venture capital The Founders Fund and serves on the boards of the Hoover Insitution and Stanford Law School (where he has also taught). Last year, he was awarded the Herman Lay Award for Entrepreneurship; this year he was honored as a Young Global leader by the World Economic Forum. An active philanthropist, he has donated millions to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Methuselah Mouse Prize, a scientific competition run by The Methuselah Foundation, an anti-aging research foundation. Thiel has been a contributing writer for Policy Review and he is a co-author (with David O. Sacks and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) of The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. His macro-investing strategies were profiled in a chapter Steven Drobny's 2006 book, Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets.

Ideas recorded on: 9/5/07