Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning author and Washington Post columnist (and former blogger ) Megan McArdle join Razib for a wide-ranging conversation reflecting on our reemergence after the year and a half ordeal of COVID lockdowns, rising violent crime rates, defunding policing, and the preposterous genetic distribution on Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire. An urbanite who has spent her life in the US’s own imperial capital cities -...
Dec 16, 2021•2 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann , author of 1491 , 1493 , and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined. Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , Razib is joined by Tim Lee , a former columnist at the Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com , to discuss his new project, Full Stack Economics , a newsletter on economics, technology, and public policy. The conversation jumps directly into a major issue facing many Americans today: the cost of housing. In many US cities, access to affordable housing is the most economically important issue facing individual...
Dec 02, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , researcher, blogger, and essayist Tanner Greer joins Razib to consider the challenges facing conservatism in America today, the future of China and its relationship to the US. Much of Tanner’s extensive research and analysis are featured on his excellent weblog, The Scholar’s Stage , and the conversation also touches on the current state of blogging (and its past). Razib and Tanner first tackle the evolution of a n...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib turns his gaze to space with Eric Berger , Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX . They ask who is Elon Musk anyway, and how did SpaceX come to win the early race to dominate private spaceflight? What does the privatization of the space fleet mean for the prospects and goals of NASA? How has NASA’s mission evolved, and ...
Nov 18, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Harvard professor Carole Hooven joins Razib to discuss her new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us . Though they do talk about the science of testosterone, Razib and Carole end up exploring the public reaction to her writing a book on sex and biology in 2021, as well the culture of censorship and shunning that has become the norm in much of academia. Hooven’s rece...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Subscribe no Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be). Alex explains how large datasets where many indiv...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib is joined by genetic genealogist Josh Lipson for a deep dive into the history and genetics of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe. They review the historical demographics of the Jews of both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the possible founding source populations from the Levant (Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Babylon). They discuss the cultural and genetic differences between ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Recently Yale Law School (YLS) student Trent Colbert wrote Why I Didn’t Apologize For That Yale Law School Email: We must end the culture of performative repentance for Persuasion . I was broadly familiar with the culture-war saga that Colbert was caught up in, having read a piece a few weeks ago in The Washington Post describing how a seemingly innocent and jocular email triggered accusations of racism at YLS (as well as Aaron Sibarium’s piece in The...
Oct 26, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast I’m joined by author and journalist Kat Rosenfield . She has a new novel out, No One Will Miss Her , is a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and a contributor at various places, like UnHerd and Newsweek . We first talk about Andrew Cuomo (the former governor of New York), Al Franken, #metoo, and how the dynamics of fame, power and identity play into the media narrative around sexual harassment, as wel...
Oct 22, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 48
In this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib is joined by author and psycholinguist Steven Pinke r to discuss his new book Rationality: what is it, why it seems scarce, and why it matters . Pinker makes the case the humans are fundamentally rational beings, and that it’s this capacity that has allowed Homo sapiens to spread across the planet and occupy virtually every niche available to us. Our intuitive ability to understand how physical objects, other creatures and other humans think a...
Oct 14, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 47
This week Razib talks to Fredrick DeBoer , author of The Cult of Smart , about the heritability of intelligence and its broader implications for society and education. The two discuss the difficulties of having fact-based conversations around the topic of heritability without being shouted down or accused of being proponents of eugenics. They also talk about how The Cult of Smart compares to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery . Freddie breaks down the evidence that heritability, rather than...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 46
This week Razib is joined by evolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Emily Deans to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The conversation begins with the importance of winning and retaining hearts and minds when managing a pandemic, where nations have succeeded and failed in their public health messaging – and how numerous institutional failings – like sloppy contact tracing and poor communication - have eroded a portion of the public’s trust in the pandemic response. They also discuss the psychology of indi...
Sep 30, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 45
On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib sits down with Mahan Ghafari , a doctoral candidate at Oxford’s department of zoology to discuss his ongoing research in the area of viral evolution. They discuss the difference between RNA viruses and DNA viruses and how viral evolution differs from that of more complex life forms – accentuated by a virus’s short reproduction cycle and high mutation rate - particularly in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 which can mutate orders of magnitude faster...
Sep 24, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 44
This week Razib sits down with author and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about some of the myriad ways in which technology and belief structures underpin and reinforce each other. Antonio discusses how his ongoing conversion to Judaism has broadened his lens and allowed him to gain perspective on how secular manifestations of Protestant Christianity have permeated our culture in strange and unexpected ways, including the “ great awokening ” of the 21st century and the dangers ...
Sep 16, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 43
In this weeks episode Razib sits down with Maximillian Larena of Upsala Universities evolutionary biology department to discuss the peopling of the Philippines via five proposed population pulses and introgression events beginning with the earliest Australasian expansion of the Philippine Negritos and subsequent migratory waves by the Manobo, Sama, and Cordilleran related populations. Max discusses how dispersal models are complicated by the geographic history of the Philippines, which is locate...
Sep 10, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Myra MacDonald is the author of Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War and White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir . The former Reuters Bureau Chief in India, MacDonald is an incisive observer of South Asian politics and commentator on the region’s history (follow her on Twitter !). On the podcast we discussed Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, why India cares about that relationship so much, and the looming role of China in the region. I a...
Sep 02, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Ruben Arslan is a psychologist who works at the Center for Adaptive Rationality . I’ve long tracked his work because of his interest in leveraging evolutionary and genetic frameworks in the context of psychology. Additionally, Arslan has long been an advocate for, and practitioner of, open science . In this episode we discuss some of his work: - Intelligence can be detected but is not found attractive in videos and live interactions , where he tests and rejects one of Geoffrey Miller ’s hypothes...
Aug 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Jared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University . He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion . Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true. Most of the discussi...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Jason Munshi-South is a biologist who studies a creature many of us have an ambivalent relationship to, the rat. His lab is at Fordham University, in the New York City area. Jason is an “urban ecologist,” so he studies the wildlife in and around cities. This is what drew him to the rat. Or, to be more frank, there was public demand for him to study rats, and he gave the people what they wanted. We talk about: The black rat vs. brown rat The origins of the brown rat How do rats and mice interact ...
Aug 13, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 38
