Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests . Prior to his work in AI research, Soares worked as a software engineer at Google. He holds a B.S. in computer science and economics from George Washington University. On this episode they discuss his new bo...
Nov 04, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 268
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Alexander Cortes . Cortes is a trainer, fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of Ferta , a company that aims to "optimize your reproductive health and conceive naturally." Born and raised in California, Cortes began his career in the fitness industry as a personal trainer in 2010. Over the next few years he expanded his efforts online, writing about fitness and nutrition from a science-informed per...
Nov 01, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 267
Today on Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Kat Rosenfield . She is an American novelist, journalist, and culture critic known for both her fiction and commentary on contemporary political debates. She began her career in publishing and as a reporter for MTV News before branching out into broader cultural criticism, contributing to outlets such as The New York Times , Wired , Vulture , Reason , and UnHerd . As a novelist, she has written You Must Remember This (2023), No One Will Miss Her (2...
Oct 25, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 266
Today Razib talks to Eric Kaufmann , a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science . He earned his BA from the University of Western Ontario and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics. Prior to his current role, he held positions at the University of Southampton and Birkbeck, University of London, which he left in October 2023. He is the author of several books, including Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism an...
Oct 20, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 265
Today Razib talks to Ryan P. Williams . He is president of The Claremont Institute , a position he has held since 2017. He is also a contributor to The Claremont Review of Books and started The American Mind . Williams earned a B.A. in political science and Economics from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in politics from Claremont Graduate University. He has taught American politics and political philosophy as an adjunct professor at California State University, San Bernardino and Cal Poly Pomona. ...
Oct 08, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 264
Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for nearly twenty-five years. He's the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects , How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog , How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog , Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist and A Brief History of Timekeeping . The last is a mix of cultural and engineering history, archeology and physics, and reflects Orzel's wide interests as reflected in his Substack , C...
Sep 30, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 263
Recently, the new embryo-selection start-up Herasight has been in the news , finally coming out of stealth. Part of the buzz is because of the public involvement of well-known geneticists and academics like Alex Young and Joe Pickrell in Herasight's algorithm development. Additionally, Noor Siddiqi , the CEO of Orchid , a competitor to Herasight (and onetime advertiser on this podcast), was a guest on Ross Douthat's show Interesting Times , triggering another round of conversations around embryo...
Sep 19, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 262
On last week's episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib spoke with Alex Nowrestah, a vice president at the Cato Institute and a strong advocate for expanding legal immigration. This week, he turned to the other side of the debate with Jason Richwhine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies and a vocal supporter of sharply reducing immigration. Richwine earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and political science from American University, and later a Ph.D. in public policy ...
Sep 10, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 261
Three years ago, Razib recorded two podcasts with two immigration experts on different sides of the issue, Alex Nowrestah and Jason Richwhine . While Nowrasteh, who works for the libertarian Cato Institute as Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies, supports higher levels of legal immigration, Richwine, a Resident Scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), favors lower levels of inflows into the US. The initial pair of podcasts was recorded in the midst of the massive inc...
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 260
Today on Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to John Hawks , a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely read weblog (now on Substack), a book on Homo naledi , and highly cited scientific papers , Hawks is an essential voice in understanding the origins of our species. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1994 with degrees in French, English, and Anthropology, and received both his...
Aug 23, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 259
Today Razib talks to Noah Millman . Millman is an American screenwriter and filmmaker, as well as a political columnist and cultural critic based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the film and theater critic for Modern Age ; previously he was a columnist for The Week (2015–2022) and a senior editor at The American Conservative (2012–2017). Millman writes the newsletter Gideon's Substack , and his work has also appeared in outlets such as The New York Times and Politico . He graduated from Yale Univer...
Aug 15, 2025•1 hr 53 min•Season 1Ep. 258
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his paper from earlier this year, Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel . Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolut...
Aug 10, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 257
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jack Despain Zhou , executive director of the Center for Educational Progress (CEP). Despain Zhou is a graduate of Western Governors University, and is completing his J.D. at Temple University. A former cryptographic analyst for the US Air Force, Despain Zhou is better known as a former producer for Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog at Blocked and Reported under the pseudonym Tracie Woodgrains . Despain Zhou's mission with CEP is to push for in...
Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 256
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , in the wake of Elon Musk's xAI Grok chatbot turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT's release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven by automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist a...
Aug 02, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 255
Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David van Ofwegen, a philosophy teacher based in Thailand. Razib and Ofwegen first met by chance while he was traveling in the US in 2003. A Dutch national, educated at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and then the University of Hawaii, specializing in the philosophical underpinnings of Social Darwinism, Ofwegen has been based in Thailand for the last 15 years. Razib and Ofwegen's initial connection was over their shared interest in the tu...
Jul 30, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 254
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Claire Lehmann . Lehmann has an undergraduate degrees in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide. She was enrolled in a graduate program in psychology, but left it after becoming disillusioned with moral relativism, she went on to found the online magazine Quillette to reflect a more traditionally pro-reason and pro-evidence-based worldview. Within three years Lehmann was profiled in 2018 in The New York Times...
Jul 27, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 253
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to philosopher of science Nathan Cofnas , whose specialty is biology and ethics. An American, Cofnas is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His Substack is here . First, they discuss Kevin MacDonald's theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary stra...
Jul 24, 2025•1 hr 41 min•Season 1Ep. 252
Today Razib talks to repeat guest Steve Hsu about China, a topic with so many currently relevant dimensions gIven the PRC's clear emergence as an economic, military and political rival to the US. Hsu is a Caltech‑trained theoretical physicist who migrated from black holes to big data, co‑invented privacy tech at SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a prominent public voice on genetics, intelligence and the future of human enhancement. He is also a pro...
Jul 21, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 251
Today Razib talks to David Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph.D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and Nordic security. He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge,...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 250
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib welcomes back Ethan Strauss , a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including in the book The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty . More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack, House of Strauss , which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination between broader culture and athletics, notably in the piece Nike's End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us...
Jul 15, 2025•1 hr 56 min•Season 1Ep. 249
Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about shamanism, religion and anthropology. Singh is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. An artist and essayist , he is also now a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like "witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods." He just came out wit...
Jul 02, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 248
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication Aporia Magazine , founded in 2022. Winegard and Carl are both former academics. Winegard has a social psychology Ph.D. from Florida State University, and was an assistant professor at Marietta College. He was an editor at Quillette before moving to Aporia . Carl earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Oxford University. He was a research fellow at St. Edmund's College, Cambrid...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 247
Today Razib talks to Tim Lee , a previous guest on Unsupervised Learning . Lee hosts Understanding AI . Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com . He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from Deep Research's capabilities to the state of large language models . But one of the major areas he has focused on is self-driving cars . With expansion of Waymo to Austin , and this June...
May 24, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 246
This podcast accompanies my post Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia . The two preprints at the heart of this post are, Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages and Steppe Ancestry in Western Eurasia and the Spread of the Germanic Languages ....
May 21, 2025•24 min•Season 1Ep. 245
Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global . A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for Nature , National Geographic , The Economist , New Scientist , and The Guardian . Spinney is the author of two novels, Doctor and The Quick , and a collection of oral history in French from Lausanne entitled Rue Centrale . In 2017, she published Pale Rider , an account of th...
May 17, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 244
Today, Razib talks about a new paper, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans : Understanding the history of admixture events and population size changes leading to modern humans is central to human evolutionary genetics. Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split and rejoin, and demonstrate its application on simulated and real data across multiple species. Using c...
May 11, 2025•20 min•Season 1Ep. 243
On this episode of the podcast Razib talks to John Sailer. Sailer is currently the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He covers issues of academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education. Sailer has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master's degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University, and a bachelor's degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from ...
May 10, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 242
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob Shell . Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals , and the Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants . Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politicization of the academy. The conversation begins with Shell's piece in Compact Magazine , To Save Academia, Hir...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 241
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Matt Welch . He co-founded the Prague-based newspaper Prognosis in the early 1990's and later worked as an opinion section editor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2008-2016, Welch served as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, where he currently holds the position of editor-at-large. He co-authored The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America and wrote McCain: The Myth of a Maverick . Today, Welc...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 240
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib comments on a new paper in Nature , Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage . Here is the abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this regi...
Apr 30, 2025•18 min•Season 1Ep. 239
