Will AI really kill us all?

Leah Fieger: I like the nostalgic tone. I miss my Motorola Razr. I miss this every single day. Maybe not exactly the same capabilities, but it gets the job done.

Brian Barrett: This is funny. This. Think of your Motorola Razr, but it opens side to side instead of up and down, and it’s all one big screen, so there are no buttons to press. You cannot send T9 text messages. Then you can watch YouTube on it.

Leah Fieger: I’m waiting, frankly, for the first story to fall from Acela’s quiet car between Washington and New York, where someone, some nice person in the administration, didn’t realize how big that screen was when you unfolded it, and how many messages were visible.

Brian Barrett: Oh, that’ll be great.

Leah Fieger: So it will be, this is a new frontier of eavesdropping. Also, congratulations, Apple. But for me, this is what I’m looking forward to.

Brian Barrett: Leah, what should I do to persuade you to buy a folding phone?

Leah Fieger: It should be a lot less than $2,000.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Leah Fieger: I can’t wait for Zoe to come back next week and tell us about her new purchase. To be clear, I don’t think she got it, but it would be really funny if she did.

Brian Barrett: I bet it will.

Leah Fieger: So our next topic is about the US Census Bureau, which is definitely not as shiny or theoretically life-threatening as our previous topics, but very, very important. Last month, the bureau released a report claiming it had found evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claims that non-citizen voting cost him the 2020 election. He touted the True Social report by saying, “I won the election.” This, as you know, we’ve talked about this many times, is one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories. He can’t let it go. And WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert dug into how this particular report was actually done, who wrote it, and found a lot of holes in it. I kind of want to start with a question: If you’re listening to me and thinking, why do I care about the U.S. Census Bureau report? They’re just doing a census. They tell me how many people live in all these different areas, how big the families are, and so on and so forth. You’re not 100 percent wrong, but this is really important data. These are reports about people and their lives, and the average citizen doesn’t need to know that much about it, but because of the situation we’re in with the current administration, knowing these weird little intricacies of what’s going on in government, I think, has really been the key to understanding the full picture.

Brian Barrett: Also, to be clear, I care about this.

Leah Fieger: You care. That’s all. Everything is fine. Can I tell you some quick and dirty things, Brian, about what the report says?