Three blockbuster papers on ancient DNA just landed in Science Magazin e: The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe , A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia , and, Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia (ungated copies available at the Reich lab website ). Why three papers in one issue of Science ? The authors claim there was too much data to pac...
Sep 17, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 97
Katherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000’s was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds , is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film in...
Sep 10, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 96
This week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first “one-man-show,” digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA discoveri...
Sep 07, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 95
The recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the “War on Terror” that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minority dr...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 50 min•Season 1Ep. 94
Despite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach. And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities, there...
Aug 19, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 93
Spectator sports are a massive cross-cultural phenomenon in the modern world, from cricket in India to football in Europe and American football in the US. In the middle of the 20th century, commentary on sports was generally found in newspapers that also reported results from the previous day’s games. By the end of the century, many sports television channels arose that provided new venues for commentary and analysis, and the vocation of “sports commentator” exploded beyond simply analyzing the ...
Aug 14, 2022•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 92
About a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid - How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape , shared across various group chats. For non-Americans, the utility of such a post and the question of why the government couldn’t distribute this drug and communicate its utility might require some explanation. If you are an American, you probably don’t need an explanation. The post's author, Maxim ...
Aug 08, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 91
What if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything , but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthropology got wrong in the past and how it has continued to confuse us into the present. Singh is a scholar at The Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse , as well as an artist and essayist . His academic interests lie in explaining why most human s...
Aug 01, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 90
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn’t share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context. In short, it turns out that for the vast m...
Jul 23, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 89
Dr. Iona Italia ’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian religion of their ancestors, the Parsis migrated to northwestern India about 1,000 years ago. Remaining predominantly endogamous, they nevertheless developed a synthetic culture, adopting the Gujarati language, Indian dress, as well as some very idios...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 89
How do we make science in the 21st century better? Stuart Buck , Executive Director of the Good Science Project has some ideas. More concretely, Buck is part of a broader movement of researchers, activists and philanthropists reimagining how science can be done in the wake of the replication crisis . Between 2010 and 2015 many fields of science relying on statistical methods from the 20th century were found to be plagued by methodological errors that produced the ‘sexy’ results the breathless me...
Jul 09, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 88
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to his friend Claire Lehmann , founder and editor-in-chief of Quillette magazine, and columnist for The Australian . Though Lehmann’s initial public prominence involved her key role in the “ intellectual dark web ,” publishing thinkers critical of identity politics like Coleman Hughes , John Wood Jr. and John McWhorter , Razib was especially interested in the fact that over the last few years she has gotten involved in various online discussio...
Jun 30, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 87
A bit over one percent of Americans are of Filipino ancestry , making them one of the largest Asian American subgroups. Unlike Chinese, Mexicans or Europeans, Filipino immigrants are unique in that their homeland, the Philippines, was actually an American colony for five decades, between 1898 and 1946. This is one reason that the level of English fluency in the Phillippines is very high, a factor in very strong economic integration with the US through outsourcing. And yet despite the historicall...
Jun 23, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 86
In 1973 the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay entitled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Presumably, that would include molecular biology, and as Dobzhanksy was writing, the field of molecular evolution was bearing fruit that would revolutionize our understanding of Darwinian evolutionary biology. Or, perhaps more precisely, it would extend and move beyond a purely Darwinian understanding of changes in the DNA sequence on the mo...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 85
Who was the smartest human of the 20th century? Though intellectual celebrity probably dictates that the majority would answer Albert Einstein, another candidate is the mathematician John von Neumann . Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to science journalist Ananyo Bhattacharya , author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann , and erstwhile physicist and editor at Nature . They discuss the life and science of a scholar whose mental acuity was so preternatural ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 84
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Stuart Ritchie joins Razib., Ritchie is the author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth and Intelligence: All that Matters . Ritchie is also a lecturer at King’s College London and the author of the new Substack Science Fictions . Razib and Ritchie first discuss why he has a Substack considering all the different projects he’s already juggling, and what value he sees coming out of it (beyond the remuner...
Jun 05, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 83
Last month Razib talked to Alex Nowrestah of the Cato Institute about the state of migration and policy in the US in 2022. An enthusiast for immigration, Nowrestah expressed some chagrin that the issue has fallen off the American public’s radar, at least judging by the sharp dropoff in media inquiries to his office. And yet there remains a whole policy class in Washington D.C. that is still attending to the complex and fraught topics in and around migration that shape the future trajectory of Am...
May 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 82
Three of R.A. Fisher’s Ph.D. students remain active today, C. R Rao at age 101 and A. W. F. Edwards , and W. F. Bodmer , both 86. Bodmer was not only a student of Fisher, the cofounder of both population genetics and modern statistics, he was also mentored by Joshua Lederberg , the 1958 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics. With more than 60 years in science , Bodmer joins Razib on this episode of Unsupervised Learning to discuss everything from his recollecti...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 81
The official conversion of the nation of Lithuania to Christianity was in 1387. This means officially Lithuanians have been Christian for 635 years, and did not adopt the religion until more than 1,000 years after Constantine the Great accepted Christianity and set the Roman Empire on its way to becoming synonymous with the faith. But Francis Young , a historian of religion, is here to tell you there’s more to this story. His new book, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethnogr...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 80
Rand Simberg is the author of 2014's Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space , and a space business consultant , as well as a longtime blogger and commentator. Today, on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Simberg about SpaceX’s ambitiously named vessel, Starship , and what it means for the space business. In the process, Simberg outlines just how much of a lead SpaceX has over its competitors, and how it...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 79
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Molson Hart , founder and CEO of Viahart , an educational toy company. He is also co-founder of Edison , an intellectual property-focused litigation financing firm. Hart has gained some visibility as a prominent seller on Amazon, with strong opinions on the company both positive and negative. First, Razib asks Hart about Amazon’s role in the American economy, and how it compares and contrasts with Walmart. Unlike many who have negative expe...
Apr 28, 2022•54 min•Ep. 78
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Alex Nowrasteh , the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute . Alex is also the author of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions . His beat at Cato is immigration, and he has been keeping a close watch on the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. The first issue Razib and Nowrasteh address is the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive crash in ...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 77
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee , a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature , Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals . A landmark in the field of cognitive genomics, this publication is the result of years of collaboration between two dozen researchers. Over the course of the episode, they deep dive into t...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 76
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley , Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast . They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to understand the workings of the global energy ecosystem. Considering geopolitical events in Europe, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they dive right into how distribution differences between oil and gas will conspire to keep Europeans dependent on Russ...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob L. Shapiro , Director of Geopolitical Analysis at Cognitive Investments . He overviews the geopolitical perspective in understanding international relations, one predicated on looking at nation-states as fundamental units of analysis, in order to achieve a descriptive understanding of the world. Shapiro points out that the more familiar “schools” of foreign policy, from realism to liberal internationalism, use geopolitics as a tool to understan...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 74
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Samo Burja , a guest who needs no introduction for long-time listeners. Burja is the podcast’s first third-time guest, and with good reason. Previously, he came on to discuss social technology and China and lost civilizations , plumbing the depths of the human past for insights about the present and future. Today Burja spotlights a timely new venture of his firm, Bismark Analysis : the Bismarck Brief newsletter, which provides a taste ...
Mar 26, 2022•2 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 73
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zack Stentz , a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, and a former journalist. His credits include 2011 films X-Men: First Class and Thor , as well as the television shows Andromeda , Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous . Considering that working in Hollywood as a writer is a “dream job” for many, Razib and Stentz discuss how to break in and succeed in show business. Like most people, Stentz wrote in...
Mar 17, 2022•53 min•Season 1Ep. 72
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to his friend Sarah Haider , founder of Ex-Muslims of North America and the writer behind a new Substack , Hold That Thought . Born in Pakistan, and raised in Texas in a Shia Muslim family, Sarah came to prominence in 2015 after she gave a speech called "Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique" at The American Humanist Association's 74th annual conference. Razib and Sarah first discuss where the Ex-Muslim community is in 2022, ...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast the focus is on genetics, culture and geopolitics with Muhammad Sohail Raza , a Pakistani genomicist living and working in Beijing, China, whose research focuses on bioinformatic methods and high-altitude adaptations. Razib and Muhammad first discuss how he got interested in biology, and what took him to do his graduate work in the People’s Republic of China. Muhammad talks about his various inspirations, in particular David Reich’s work on historical p...
Mar 04, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Suhag Shukla , the Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). Suhag is an attorney who grew up in Cupertino, California, and is now a leading advocate for the interests of American Hindus . Razib and Suhag clear up the fact that HAF does not speak for all Hindus, of whom there are over one billion, or, the world’s 1.4 billion Indians. Additionally, the HAF is an explicitly Hindu-focused organization, as opposed to an India...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 69
