what is the myth of peter thiel and what is the reality? the myth of all of these founders is that it is somehow singular and that they are somehow these divine, omnipotent beings. any of these things that i am doing are not solo efforts. i have friends who i talk to a lot. there are people i talk to closely. emily: i am curious about your background, and what has shaped your views along the way. i know that you were born in germany and moved around a lot, you went to south africa and namibia. tell me about your upbringing. peter: i went to seven different elementary schools as a kid, and so i felt a little bit like an outsider and something of an insider. so there is some kind of a combination of outsider-insider perspective that i think shaped things -- shaped things a lot. emily: what were your parents like? peter: my dad was an engineer. my mom ended up being a homemaker after i was born. they were focused on education. emily: you were raised an evangelical christian and questioned things like evolution? peter: i still consider myself a

peter thiel is one of silicon valley's most audacious and contrarian investors. his name founding paypal, then funding facebook. he is now backing rocket ships, dna manipulation, meat grown in labs, and a start-up island off the coast. he has paid kids to skip college and start companies instead, in hopes of reaching a better future, faster.

emily: so while you are at stanford, you met peter thiel. reid: yes. emily: tell me how you met. told about each other by people we knew. i was told there was really right wing person, he was told i was this really left-wing. we both said, i've heard about you. we grabbed coffee, and i think we argued for eight hours. we were like, you can't believe that. we said that was fun, let's do that again. emily: you went to oxford. you studied philosophy. why? reid: i said, i think i will be an academic. because if i'm an academic, i can write about both of these interesting questions. i'm always fascinated about people, how we think, and how we reason. how we communicate. what i realized was that the course of becoming an academic professor was to be a very narrow scholar. you essentially wanted to be an expert on the thing that only 10 to 20 people in the world probably knew about. and actually what i wanted to do was how do you help millions of people? within six months at oxford, i knew that in fact i wasn't going to be an academic. i was going to come back here. emily: that is when