On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee . Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn , The Washington Examiner , The American Mind , Tablet Magazine and UnHerd . She has also recently written a piece for Compact : Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter . But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going ba...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 148
Today Razib talks to Inez Stepman , a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum , a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a senior contributor to The Federalist . Stepman also hosts two podcasts, High Noon and Clown Car . She and Razib first discuss the current distress, both economic and cultural, in higher education as several decades of bloat, inflation-beating cost increases and political radicalism run up against their natural limits. Stepman’s recent policy report, T...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 147
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark , a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre . First, Razib and Clark talk about the...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 146
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics’ modern basis in R. A. Fisher’s 1918 ...
Sep 03, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 145
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aporia Magazine’s Diana Fleischman , an evolutionary psychologist who earned her Ph.D. in David Buss’ lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Fleischman discusses the origins of her field, its methodological framework and presuppositions, and why evolutionary psychologists seem obsessed with sex. Razib also brings up the relationship of evolutionary psychology to primatology and the role that behavioral studies of common chimpanzees and b...
Aug 30, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 144
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nicola Buskirk of Elessar Books (see her Substack ). A 2022 graduate of Stanford University, Buskirk has already had positions at Substack (she was behind the At Length series ), Thiel Foundation, Hoover Institution and now, Protocol Labs. At Elessar she is “putting long out-of-print books back into print so that th...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 143
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Hannah Frankman about the past, present and future of education. Frankman is a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education , the founder of Rebel Educator , and the host of an eponymous podcast ( Spotify , Apple and YouTube ). Education as a discipline has been a human concern since Plato outlined...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 142
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. Today Razib talks to Lyman Stone , a demographer and Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, about the fall, rise and fall of religion in America. In 2020, Stone published a report, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline , where he outlined the demographic and religious history of the US, and its possible future. They first cover the ...
Aug 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 141
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack), for the second episode of the “Intellectual Brown Web” (here’s episode #1). Razib, Haider, Ham...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 140
In the fall of 2022 Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US’s 1980’s program of “ Reaganomics ” that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an intervention from the Bank of England . In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodically forgets that it’s the not US, it’s not the largest economy in the world and the pound sterling is no...
Aug 04, 2023•2 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 139
Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Ph.D. student in American politics at Boston College, where her dissertation will focus on affirmative action. Razib asks Mukherjee to discuss the origin of affirmative action as it is practiced in the US today, starting with the Bakke decision in 1978, and then moving on to Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003. She then moves to the details of the current cases, in particular Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 138
In June 1991, The New York Times published a piece titled “Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds.” Published a year after Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park , on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens “Will it one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?” More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a living dinosaur, nor come even close. But the early 1990’s kicked off the first age of ancient DNA with...
Jun 23, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 137
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to journalist Lee Fang . Formerly an investigative reporter at The Intercept and a contributing writer at The Nation , Fang began his journalism career at ThinkProgress . As an undergraduate, Fang was president of the University of Maryland College Democrats, and interned for Democratic representatives Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Steny Hoyer. He was also the first intern for the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America . Toda...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 136
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts Ross Douthat , author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics , Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class , Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream , The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery and The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success . A columnist at The New York Times , often on political and social topics, Douthat also reviews movi...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 135
On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a favorite repeat guest, Samo Burja , to discuss matters future, present and past. Burja founded the consulting firm Bismarck Analysis and developed the “ great founder theory .” He contributes to Palladium Magazine , Asia Times , City Journal , and The National Interest . Burja’s first appearance on the podcast , recorded in the fall of 2020, spiraled into a long discussion on the Chinese past and future, and Razib follows up to find out ...
Jun 04, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 134
A few years ago now, Razib talked to Tim Lee about his new Substack Full Stack Economics , which featured deep dives into economic issues (as well as some on-the-ground-reporting, like when he drove Lyft to get a feel for its economics). But recently, Lee decided to put Full Stack Economics on pause to focus on a new Substack: Understanding AI . Artificial intelligence is hot right now, but Lee covered tech for a decade for Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com , and has a master’s degree...
May 29, 2023•48 min•Season 1Ep. 132
Recently, scientists discovered that a two-year mega-drought beginning in 1198 BC hastened the Hittite Empire’s collapse. The finding sheds new light on the history of the decades around 1200 BC, adding specificity to the timing and cause for the period’s social and political chaos. Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib discusses the “Bronze Age Collapse,” the end of the first globalized world. This collapse marked the end of a multi-century period when the Near East’s empires and sta...
May 29, 2023•49 min•Season 1Ep. 131
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Peter Nimitz, the author behind the Nemets Substack, which explores topics as diverse as the 2014 Donbass War and the likelihood of Eurasian migration into Chad thousands of years ago. Razib and Nimitz walk through his recent post, the Seven Ages of Western Eurasia: A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers to the Present. In the piece, he explores the changes that Europe and West Asia have undergone since ...
May 29, 2023•2 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 130
Alex Feinberg is anything but your typical trainer. An economics graduate from Vanderbilt, Feinberg willed himself to become a professional baseball player through focus and hard work and then talked his way into a sales and business development job at Google. In the late 2010’s Feinberg moved into the crypto space, but found that one precondition to success was having a large Twitter following. So he pivoted and focused on growing his Twitter following, and noticed that his lifestyle tweets, an...
May 10, 2023•50 min
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Adam Mastroianni , who runs the Experimental History Substack. Mastroianni was the inaugural guest on the Intrinsic Perspective podcast , hosted by Erik Hoel , where they discussed his post, The rise and fall of peer review - Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing (see also his follow-up, The dance of the naked emperors ). Mastroianni opened a can of worms; the post has more than 800 likes an...
May 10, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 128
This week on Unsupervised Learning , Razib and his guest, David McKay , of the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants podcast (Razib was an early guest ), discuss the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This discussion arose after Razib heard McKay’s explainer, Zen and the Art of ChatGPT , a 30-minute layman’s intro to the topic, where he breaks down the technical elements that come together to allow for AI. In this episode, McKay, a Cam...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 127
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflections are colored by paleontological findings and begin with the evolution of modern humans and their distinctive physical characteristics in Africa more than 200,000 years ago, then moving on to their breakout from the ancestral continent and the d...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 126
Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics, The Language Instinct , Words and Rules and How the Mind Works . Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “ may be the most ...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 125
Dr. David Sloan Wilson is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Co-founder of the Evolution Institute and Prosocial World , Wilson is the author of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior , Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society , Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives , This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and Atlas Hugged: The Au...
Mar 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 124
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell , Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept . Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the current state of the culture from the perspective of “brown” observers of the public sphere dominated by woke vs. anti-woke factions. Despite ideological differences, all four are skeptical of the ideological orthodoxies regnant in American culture, even though one, ...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 123
This monologue is incomplete, for the complete monologue, checkout: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Podcast Substack Why does human skin color vary so much? And what is the relationship between hair color, eye color and overall pigmentation? What genes control pigmentation in humans and other animals? Razib addresses all these questions in this episode of Unsupervised Learning , as he discusses the genetic basis and evolutionary origins of variation on this trait that has held such importance...
Mar 09, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 122
Today on the podcast Razib talks to Dr. Glenn Loury , Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. Loury also has a Substack that grew out of his conversations with John McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv starting in 2008. He is the author of One by One from the Inside Out , The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values . An erstwhile progressive, Loury was a neoconservative in the 1980’s before his gradual shift to back the political right in...
Mar 04, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 121
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Virginia Postrel, the author of The Fabric of Civilization , The Power of Glamour , The Substance of Style and The Future and its Enemies . Formerly a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg View , and the former editor of Reason , she is now a fellow at Chapman University’s Smith Institute. First, Razib and Postrel discuss her recently reported piece for The Wall Street Journal , Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethic...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 120
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. In April of 2021, this Substack published a piece, The ultimate price of costless gestures , that anticipated a spate of articles in the second half of the year in the mainstream media reporting on the rise of murders in 2020. Compare the figure from the Substack piece with one in The New York Times published in November of 2021: The similarity is simply a function of th...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 119
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib explores the history of China through the lens of genetics and ancient DNA. This podcast is a companion to the recent two pieces, Genetic history with Chinese characteristics and Venerable Ancestors: untangling the Chinese people's hybrid Pleistocene origins . Today 92% of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are ethnic Han, accounting for 16% of humanity. With China’s new prominence in genomics over the last decade, the genetic structure ...
Feb 10, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 118
