For the complete version of this podcast check out razib.substack.com On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the origins of the people of Madagascar in a companion podcast to his two-part series on the genetics and history of the island. An ecologically unique island off Africa’s southeast coast, for tens of millions of years Madagascar forged its own evolutionary path, distinct from Africa to the west and unconnected to the world of the Indian Ocean coastlines to the north and...
Feb 04, 2023•25 min•Season 1Ep. 117
On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Jonathan Anomaly , author of Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement . Anomaly is currently the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at La Universidad de las Americas, Ecuador. He has been a lecturer at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and holds a philosophy Ph.D. from Tulane University. Anomaly has been thinking and publishing on the implications of the intersection between ethics and...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 116
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Bryan Caplan about Caplan’s new book, Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice . Despite what the narrow purview the title might suggest, Don't Be a Feminist is a wide-ranging book that contains essays on IQ, immigration and identity politics, among other things (in addition, yes, to women’s rights). Caplan is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It , the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, and a...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 115
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with John Hawks . First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding Homo naledi , in particular, the finding that they likely used fires deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of Homo naledi , a very small-brained hominin that mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected trajecto...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 114
What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Shadi Hamid , a senior fellow at Brookings , an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , a contributor to The Atlantic , co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website , and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an ...
Jan 04, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 113
As 2022 draws to a close, the chat AI based on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I asked GPT-3 that particular question, and this was the answer: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not humanity is on the way to creating a true artificial general intelligence, as there is no clear consensus on what exact...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 112
On this very special episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk to three guests, Josh Lipson , Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper , about their contribution to a new paper, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century . Given that a month earlier, Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century was also published , 2022 has seen a massive growth in our ancient-DNA-informed understanding...
Dec 22, 2022•2 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 111
Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like 300 , or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus’ The Histories . More recently, Iran has loomed large due to its geopolitical significance, and for Americans of a certain age, the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his successor Ayatollah Khomeini loom large as figures who for a time monopolized television screens and front pages of news maga...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 110
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the term ”the West” mean, and how is it different from simply the geographical designation Europe? On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the cultural and genetic origins of Europeans, how they have been viewed over the l...
Dec 08, 2022•47 min•Season 1Ep. 109
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left , with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and The Culture Transplant is the third book in what he likes of think of as his “Singapore trilogy,” beginning with Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own , and then moving to 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should ...
Dec 02, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 108
How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of “baby talk” from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent paper on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. Moser first discusses what cultural evolution today means in the context of American anthropology, and how it relates to the new field of evolutionary psychology. He observes that some of the conceptual ideas that un...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 107
When Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last year, I wondered what we could expect from the new leader, Parag Agrawal . Luckily, I knew Nikolai Yakovenko , who worked at Twitter on deep neural networks in the mid-teens. Yakovenko told me Agrawal was not a rock-the-boat kind of guy, and perhaps that’s why Dorsey tapped him to head Twitter after some tumultuous years. Now that Twitter and its leadership is in the news again, due to Elon Musk’s status as “chief twit,” I wanted to talk to Yakov...
Nov 20, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 106
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the history and genetics of Anatolia, from the first farmers to the Ottoman conquest of the peninsula. He focuses on the underappreciated reality that prehistoric Anatolia was the font of the first wave of farmers that built the majestic Neolithic societies of Europe, from arid Iberia north to the shores of the Baltic. These people left the vast stoneworks that dot Europe’s Atlantic coasts to this day, beginning with the megal...
Nov 18, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 105
Today, on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Erik Hoel , author of the novel The Revelations , and host of The Intrinsic Perspective Substack. Hoel is a neuroscientist at Tufts who is interested in the problem of consciousness. Hoel admits right off that the questions and answers around consciousness motivate neuroscience in the first place, but throughout the conversation, he also points out that the discipline has a long way to go before it uncovers deep and insightful counterint...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 104
Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure , The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom . One of the pioneers of Moral Foundations Theory and a founder of Heterodox Academy , over the last few years Haidt has been focused on the impact of social media on our politics and culture (he is writing two book...
Oct 28, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 103
On this monologue episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib considers the different roles religion plays in various world civilizations. To explore this topic, he contrasts religion in the West (which includes Christendom and the Dar-al-Islam ), on the Indian subcontinent and in China. Depending on which characteristics you focus on, these societies deploy and understand religion quite differently, even though religion as a cultural phenomenon is easily recognizable to all humans. Razib argues th...
Oct 22, 2022•43 min•Season 1Ep. 102
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses approaching politics through philosophy, political philosophy, and what it’s like being an excessively online academic in 2022 with Oliver Traldi . Currently working on a book on understanding politics through a philosophical lens, Traldi explains the relevance of epistemology to the project, while Razib queries the role that deductive , abductive and inductive reasoning might play in political views. Both also consider that political orie...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 101
Evolutionary psychology is a field that has made headlines ever since its inception as a distinct discipline in the 1980’s. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Dr. Tania Reynolds of the University of New Mexico, who researches i ntrasexual competition and cooperation, as well as sexual and social selection. Reynolds outlines what evolutionary psychology means for her and explains why she thinks it is helpful in our quest to understand human behavior. In particular, her fiel...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 100
How do we know when to trust the experts? On January 23rd, 2020, Vox published a piece titled The evidence on travel bans for diseases like coronavirus is clear: They don’t work . Journalists are largely limited to reporting what experts tell them, and in this case, it seems Vox's experts misled them. By December 2020 The New York Times could reflect that “interviews with more than two dozen experts show the policy of unobstructed travel was never based on hard science. It was a political decisi...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 99
“Yankee go home!” has often been hurled at Americans indiscriminately. But the reality is that Yankee as a category initially meant the people of New England and its colonies across the northern fringe United States, from upstate New York to Minnesota. Yankees were a minority of Northerners during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, Yankee spearheading the Northern cause meant that Southerners disparaged all their occupiers with that label. This reflects the core insight that Yankees were, and...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 98
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•2 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•2 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
