YouSaid · the spoken record

Jill Lepore

lines on the record: 72
first: 2026-07-20
most recent: 2026-07-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The sake of the accumulation of wisdom and leading a better life and understanding the world with greater clarity and greater compassion. I think it's largely mocked in that world Or feminine or lib tart, whatever. Like, I think especially with the kind of Conservative turn of the tech world. It takes on weird valences. Yeah, I think it is really purposeful, like this kind of knowledge is not worth having. We can't make money off of it. If we had that kind of knowledge, it might slow down what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think of these. Is really instrumental. They're not Pursuing knowledge for its own sake, they are deeply interested in exploration and I think in wonder and I think like one of the things I really love about this moment is the fascination with space and space exploration I think is tremendously exciting. You know harnessed to militarization in certain commercial projects is like wow we went from Star Trek to Star Wars really fast, you know like The sense that You might want to know about the world can be just because it's worth knowing rather than that you can use it to extract money from other people. I just don't think that's part of that tech culture. It's just not that position, right? A kind of humanist commitment to knowledge.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By step towards a more automated society, that there's something messy about democracy that is very, very important. And the decision we're making now is to actually set that mess aside in the name of, I don't know, efficiency, potentially happiness. I'm curious if you see that that kind of setting aside is happening by accident or on purpose.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a fetishization of there's an entire culture of thinking. I won't call it a philosophy because I don't think it's quite that developed, but a culture of thinking around first principles. We're going to do first principles thinking, and that will lead us to some disruptive outcome. And it often, to me at least, feels like where that first principle begins is a choice about what to ignore from the past. And I see that kind of over again in your book and the culture that we live in at large that's deciding what to set aside is the big decision. And that's an assumption that is often not questioned as we go step by step towards a more quantified society.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Joe Lapo about the cast of billionaires who run the artificial state. There's something very interesting about this cast of characters, particularly Peter Thiel, who comes up in your book, Elon Musk, who comes up in your book somewhere over a hundred times, I think. They are falling back to literally Catholicism as some kind of moral foundation for whatever decisions they're making and whether or not they're misreading Catholicism is irrelevant to them. Often in fights with the Pope Which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it doesn't have that, like, let's listen to what other people who came before might have known that still wisdom. And that makes for a very poor reading of literature, right? Like, we could have a great argument about what Asimov meant by that story. Like, it's not like a determinate meaning. I don't like, I'm not authority on Isaac Asimov, but I'm not going to ask Sam Altman what a short story means.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just imagine it all new and you destroy what came before. Such a rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of earlier human beings. Like the posture of the humanist is one of kind of humility. Like, isn't it magisterial and majestic how, you know, Homer wrote the Odyssey so long ago and it's still so powerful and the kind of timelessness of literature and the arts, the infinite beauty of humanity's capacity for making things that's just kind of just not the ethos, right? Like it's like, no, we'll do it better. It doesn't matter what anybody did before. It's we're innovating. We're disrupting. It's like the culture is just so fetishized on the future.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not humanists. And they seem to have, I mean, Teal would say he is, right, that he's a philosopher, a political philosopher. I'm not so convinced of that. Like, I think that the capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reading and humanistic reasoning is not something you see in great evidence. In that culture, and I think it's been really kind of bred out in a way of the culture of Silicon Valley, that even if you look back to the 90s and the culture of, you know, the celebration of the serial entrepreneur as the new man of progress, that particular kind of cultural formulation was all about the disavowal of the past, right? It doesn't matter what came before. You want to start a ride service? You don't study taxis or figure out where the livery service came from. You don't look at traffic patterns. You don't study anything in the past. You just start new.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the only person who votes. And then that guy has to go into hiding because if people don't like who was elected or the presidency goes badly, like his life is destroyed. So there's a lot of this stuff in science fiction, but who maybe last year Sam Altman was, I think, on Joe Rogan, and he started talking about how great it would be if AI chose the president of the United States. And he wasn't, I mean, yes, he was like fucking around, but he was also serious, right? Like, wouldn't that be great? Because it's so efficient and we don't have to bother. And it spares us labor. And that general premise that like, why would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us without the realization that I think the rest of us would have like, but there's some things we want to do, including like meaningful work, right? Including right and make art and do things for ourselves. I know, you know, these are very smart people.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of a big thing starting in the 30s to imagine a future in which the president of the United States is chosen by a machine. There are a bunch of examples of this from the 30s, you know, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanizing of people in the consequence of the machine age. But there's also a lot of it in the 1950s. So there's, for instance, like a classic story by Isaac Asimov that I think is 1955 called Franchise. It's set on the days before Election Day 2008, November 4, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency. And in that imagined future, that Asmavian future, there's this machine called the Multivac that determines using polling data who in the United States is the average man, the most representative man, like the sampling method that pollsters use has been perfected mathematically by this computer get picked the average person.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book traces this evolution step by step, as you're describing, right? This is a slow build to maybe where we've gotten today. And you point out several times in the book, you know, there's a bunch of science fiction authors in the 50s and 60s who are looking at computers and they're drawing a picture of the future. And some of them pick utopia and there are entire movements about technocratic utopia that emerge. And a lot of them pick dystopia. They draw a picture of computer-aided dystopia. You point this out. I mean, everyone has heard the torment nexus meme. It's in the book. You use it in the book that our modern industrialists have read dystopian science fiction and decided that is the model of the future that they're attempting to build. I'm curious, A, why you think they've all gotten it wrong from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel on down. And if that is a moment, an inflection point for us to actually pick a different future.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, is that an icy pond? And we're going to just go through the ice and look, we're all going to drown in there. Or is that like a... A beautiful new political world. I think it looks pretty perilous.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's been kind of great coverage lately of emerging trends for the 2026 election in the US and around the world where a lot of people report that even in these primers that have been going on over the spring and summer, they'll ask ChatGBT, like, how should I vote in the primary? Meanwhile, the campaign messages that you're getting have many of them been crafted by artificial intelligence, right? And the fact that you are getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence. So in a way, it's like AI versus AI in these upcoming elections or even in elections that are already transpiring. You can see how you could fall into that, like just sort of just going downhill on skis. But I kind of wanted to write a kind of grumpy book to say, well, let's pause for a minute. Like, when does, what's at the bottom of that hill?”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By just drawing down, just by doing data mining and data analysis. So we might say, okay, well, that makes politics so much more efficient, right? Like those campaigns can more efficiently use their money and they can get their message out to the right people. But if you think about each one of those conversations that people used to have, right, I'm a campaign volunteer and I'm going to go and I'm going to sit in on some PTA meeting or I'm going to go to a basketball game in some neighborhood and like talk to the parents who are there. All those conversations are kind of the civic glue that kind of holds the civil society together. And so replacing those just kind of like chatting by the side, you know, under a street lamp about what do you think about this guy with just extracting data, which is where we are now, it's just a much more artificial politics than we have had before. And then if you kind of project ahead to”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it has a long history, but the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable. So you could say, here I'll give you two examples that kind of maybe stretch out across a century. So 1930s, the 1930s, the invention of so-called scientific polling. George Gallup starts the American Institute of Public Opinion research in 1935. What polling does gradually over the middle decades of the 20th century is replaces the kind of door-to-door precinct walking that campaigns would need to do, right? If I want to, I'm running for election in some neighborhood, I got to go talk to people, gonna go to baseball games, you're gonna, you know, go to basketball games, gonna go to the public library. But increasingly, it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling, right? But you can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you want to run a campaign.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things that really struck me about this is at least America's conception of itself. The United States' conception of itself is this messy, multi-part democracy. The Senate loves to call itself the most deliberative body in the history of the world, and it's supposed to be a whole bunch of people that are ruled by the consent of the government, and we're all arguing. And your thesis is, yeah, that's what we say about ourselves. But actually, we've automated a way in numerically quantified away a bunch of that. And we are now run maybe by bots on Twitter or at least politicians are overwhelmed by bots on Twitter and they've outsourced their thinking or there's consultants that are turning us all into polling data. Is that the trajectory around that ends the nation state? Is that the core of the idea?”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations who, as many, many people have demonstrated, it's not news to your listeners or to anyone, that public discourse The priority is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation, it is the monetization of attention and of outrage. And more than that, a fairly recent vintage is the fact that public platforms in which we exchange ideas as citizens and democracies are dominated by bots, right? All of them have been inverted for several years now or different numbers of years from X to Facebook to TikTok. There are far more bots than humans on those platforms. And those bots are, many of them are owned by corporations and have particular act, their own kind of financial interests, but they're owned by state actors and non-state actors and criminals and terrorists. And so I think what we're at risk of is losing the liberal constitutional democracy and having”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I mean by the artificial state is a kind of successor to the liberal nation state, the constitutional democracy under which our freedom of speech and free discourse and our constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation state. We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding. And, you know, there's a whole public discussion of what's happening with democracy. But I don't think we talk about the nation state as much as we might. That is to say the state itself. So what I mean by the artificial state is a state in which more and more of the functions of the nation state have been taken over by private multinational corporations. And the easiest example of that to think about is what is sort of euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote and what's going on in the world and how to make decisions and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens. Our public discourse”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the producers and I just had a had a thrill ride reading this book. It is essentially about how computers and measurement flatten us and then systems can take advantage of that flattening. And that is, like I said, it's in the strike zone. So let's just start at the very beginning for folks. The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Tell us what the artificial state is. Define it so we can start from that foundation.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st as people got online. And not all of it was illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, so her response about the way systems of power keep adapting to how people use new technology was as illuminating as ever. Of course, we also talked about the future and where she sees hope for that future. And yes, that includes college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. Okay, Dr. Jillapur on the artificial state. Here we go. Dr. Jillapur, you're a staff writer at The New Yorker. You're a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and most importantly, you're the author of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Welcome to Dakota.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the nation state. You'll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write kind of a grumpy book, but in my reading, it's a pretty dead-ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments and how we got to a place where bots are maybe running everything. Jill's idea of the artificial state starts with the very idea of quantification. From the first stabs at taking a census thousands of years ago, to the invention of modern political polling in the 1930s. But where she really sees a big pivot, in the era she and I talked about the most is in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal, and when computer aided targeting and micro-targeting really and truly became possible in commonplace, not only for ads, but for political campaigns. What Jill and I did disagree about is some of her pessimism about the internet, because the internet is what made jobs and careers like mine and businesses like The Verge and shows like Dakota even possible at all. There was a really great democracy.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Dakota. I'm Nehi Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Harvard professor in New Yorker staff writer, Dr. Jill Lapore, about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25th. Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Dakota is a show about systems. So this book could not possibly be more in our strike zone. You build systems by measuring things, gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill's thesis in the artificial state is that this kind of systemic measurement really dehumanizes people. It flattens us in human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures have grown to touch more and more parts of our lives, not just in obvious places like apps or AI, but all the way up to our politics and governance itself. And Jill's insight here is a telling portrait of the way big tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT