Matt Bevan

This is us moving towards what China is doing to their citizens.

People are really quite scared of this company.

The Palantir surveillance.

There are more conspiracy theories swirling around about Palantir than any other Silicon Valley company.

And Peter Thiel and his company Palantir are some of the most evil forces on our planet conspiring against the American people.

Palantir is like a surveillance and predictive policing firm.

And that's because even though it really is just a very fancy PowerPoint slide, which makes intelligence, military, logistics, customer service and cricketing operations more efficient, its leaders have decided to create a kind of weird public image.

And we hope you're in favor of that.

So I think it's important to spend some time talking about this guy, Alex Karp, and what he wants to do with his company that now controls so much of the world's data.

But we're not going to do it today.

We're going to spend our whole next episode on it.

We'll see you then.

This episode of If You're Listening was written by me, Matt Bevan, and Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Cara is also our supervising producer.

It's produced by Adair Shepard and Pat Sunderland.

We'll have our second episode on Palantir next Thursday, but on Tuesday, Cara's got a story to tell me about why the FBI and CIA weren't talking to each other in the late 90s.

I don't know anything more than that, but she says this story's going to make my head explode.

I'll see you next week.

If I had to pick one word to describe America's history in the Middle East, I'd probably go with mistake.

The backpackers crossed the poorly marked border by mistake.