PREVIEW LIVE: Realpolitik #51 | Big Tech and Geopolitics
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
lotuseaters.com
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, good afternoon. Welcome to another episode of Real Politics. I am your host, Firas Madad. |
| 0:06.1 | And today we're going to be talking about a couple of things. We're going to be discussing the |
| 0:11.0 | origins of some of the major technology companies that are very much in our lives today |
| 0:17.1 | and how they interface with intelligence, a little bit about their background, a little bit about |
| 0:24.0 | their relationship with intelligence agencies, and their relationship with Israel. And then we're going |
| 0:30.1 | to talk about the Iran-U.S. deal that was announced yesterday by President Trump, and that is |
| 0:36.2 | supposed to be signed on, I I believe Friday the 19th. |
| 0:40.6 | So let's just get started. I got into a bit of trouble last week because I said that |
| 0:45.0 | Facebook and Google were sort of started by the CIA and that they are not separable from |
| 0:51.4 | intelligence. And that is in fact true. That is actually very, very much the truth. |
| 1:02.7 | There is a gentleman by the name of Chester Gordon Bell, who came up with the idea for the product |
| 1:10.3 | that actually became Facebook. |
| 1:13.2 | And in an interview that he had with Y Magazine, or actually from the Pulse podcast as well, |
| 1:24.7 | he pretty much said how he got the idea. Initially, in 1997, a colleague of his asked him if he could scan all of his books and make them digital. And he said, why stop at books? And his idea was how could you scan everything in your life and put it online and capture the |
| 1:47.7 | data that was impossible to collect without the emerging technology finally at his disposal. |
| 1:53.5 | He brings the idea to Microsoft and he starts logging everything, his emails, his browsing |
| 2:00.0 | history, his pictures, he takes to |
| 2:02.5 | moving around the place with a camera around his neck that automatically took pictures and that |
| 2:08.7 | was tied to a GPS and to an altimeter, meaning that, you know, he could instantly locate |
| 2:14.3 | each of his photos, which is one of the settings that you now have on pretty much all social media. |
| 2:19.9 | Do you want to add your location to the photographs? And he started doing it, and he basically was |
| 2:29.9 | trying to create a log of his life. And it was called initially life log. |
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