Hey everyone. Welcome to If Then. Slate's brand new podcast about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. I'm Will Arinos.

And I'm April Glazer.

So April, we finally got this podcast off the ground. I know, finally. I'm so excited.

And the timing is perfect because this is a crazy, historic, potentially defining moment in the technology industry's relationship with society, with the media, with democracy. And we want to

be your guide to what's happening

and what it all means. Yeah. And we're not going to be like the typical tech podcast where you

have two really enthusiastic tech geeks talking about their favorite smart watch or long interviews.

No, we're going to be totally bored. Totally bored to tech geeks. We're not going to have like long

interviews with CEOs that you haven't heard of.

We're actually going to talk about the news that matters, politics and how it affects your life.

Right. So we want the show to focus on the technology news that matters to you, a semi-normal,

intelligent person who cares about what's happening to our society and what the big Silicon Valley

companies are doing to change the ways we get information, the ways we talk to each other, that kind person who cares about what's happening to our society and what the big Silicon Valley companies

are doing to change the ways we get information, the ways we talk to each other, that kind of

stuff. I mean, yeah, these are like the most powerful companies in the world, right? And we're

actually going to dig a little deeper into one topic each week beyond just covering the news.

We're also going to interview a guest who knows more about this stuff than we do.

And we'll definitely end with some of the best things that we've seen this week because, as we all know, there's just so much information coming at us these days. It's hard to keep track of it all. All right. So let's dive into this. What are the types of topics that we want to discuss on this show? Give me an example, April. Well, the big news is

Russian interference in the U.S. election, right? And the role that these U.S. Internet companies,

and I mean Facebook, Google, Twitter, and, you know, even Pokemon Go, we found out Tumblr,

Instagram, that they played in facilitating that. You know, it's a huge story right now, and that's

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