Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Oremus.

And I'm April Glazer.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

On today's show, we'll talk about a new study that suggests the Internet might not have played the crucial role in Trump's election victory that we tend to assume.

And then, flying cars and self-driving cars.

We'll be joined by Justin Erlich, who until recently was the head of policy for autonomous vehicles and urban aviation at Uber. He's now off on a new venture as VP of Strategy Policy

and Legal for a startup called Voyage. We'll talk to him about his

work at Uber and Voyage and get his perspective on the hype over flying cars, or as he might

call them, VTOLs. VT, right. That's vertical takeoff or on landing in some way. And just to let you all

know, you are listening to this episode that was recorded far into the past. It was recorded on July 24th, and you're hearing it two weeks out. That's because we had some travel ahead of us, but it's still a great show. Thanks for tuning in. Will, how's it going? It's going well. Thanks, April. How about you? I am doing okay. I know that for news this week, we actually are going to talk about a bit of academia.

What's on the plate? All right. So there's a new study that was published in the journal Plus One.

The study comes from economists at Stanford University and Brown University. And the conclusion, or at least the strong implication of the study, is that the

internet did not play the deciding role in Donald Trump's victory that we sometimes tend to

assume. Okay. So we've been talking about how the internet played a role in the election,

pretty much nonstop since the election and before the election. So what you're saying is kind of a

punch in the get here. Yeah, it's like the whole point of our show. I mean, like, I don't know what I'm doing with my life, but that's fine. Okay. So, so what's the conclusion? Right. So, all right. Well, let me back up to the methodology, actually. Okay. What the study looked at is how did Donald Trump perform among voters who actually use the internet versus voters who don't

use the internet? And it gets a little complicated when we dive into the weeds. They looked at

three different measures to try to figure out whether people use the internet. Two of them come

from a survey called the American National Election Studies. This is a dataset that goes back to 1996.

And then a third one is a model that the authors of the study developed that predicts the likelihood of Internet use for a given person based on their demographics.

But by all three of these measures, what they found is that Donald Trump actually underperformed

...