Dr. Jill Lepore

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433 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Jill Lepore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

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 to pick the average person.

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.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of this stuff in science fiction.

But 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 write and make art and do things for ourselves.

I know, you know, these are very smart people, but they...

They're not humanists, and they seem to have—I mean, Thiel would say he is, right, that he's a philosopher, a political philosopher.

I'm not so convinced of that.

I think that the capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reading and humanistic reasoning is not something you see in great evidence.

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.

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