On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nick Cassimatis , erstwhile artificial intelligence researcher and currently an entrepreneur . Cassimatis has undergraduate and doctoral degrees in cognitive and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree in child psychology from Stanford. He studied for his Ph.D. under Marvin Minsky , arguably the most prominent and influential artificial intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th century...
Mar 03, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 176
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about AI, the singularity and the post-human future, with James D. Miller , a Smith College economist , host of the podcast Future Strategist and the author of Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World . Miller and Razib first met at 2008’s “Singularity Summit” in San Jose, and though Singularity Rising was published in 2012, some of the ideas were already presented in earlier talks, including at...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 175
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Rob Henderson , author of the new book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class . Henderson is a commentator known for coining the term " luxury beliefs, " a tendency among elites to use their beliefs to signal social status, with real-life costs of those beliefs born by non-elites alone. Henderson grew up in California foster homes, before being adopted into a working-class family in Redding, CA. After an academically un...
Feb 22, 2024•2 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 174
In this episode, Razib talks to Wilfred Reilly , political scientist, author and fearless cultural commentator . Reilly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he discusses his ten-year diversion from academia, including his stints as a canvasser for the gay rights group the Human Rights Campaign and a corporate salesperson. A prolific public intellectual, Reilly is the a...
Feb 08, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 173
Today Razib talks to geneticist Erich Schwarz , a Research Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University since 2012. Schwarz has a molecular biology degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Caltech. After working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in graduate school, he switched to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans , and has continued studying nematodes ever since. After helping to found the C. elegans genome database WormBase ( wormbase.org ) in the e...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 172
Today, Razib talks to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz , author of Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions and Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are . Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Google and The New York Times , is a freelance data scientist and author. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in economics from Harvard. In this episode, he discusses his process of writing Who Makes the NBA? , which...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 171
Do 20% of the men on dating apps get 80% of the dates? Is the Zoomer generation the sexless generation? What are the best predictors of relationship success? These are some of the questions Razib asks Alex of DatePsychology on this episode of Unsupervised Learning . A psychologist who studied cognitive and behavioral neuroscience in graduate school, Alex explores topics around dating on his YouTube channel and disseminates the latest research via his tweets (you can also subscribe to his newslet...
Jan 30, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 170
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David Lightbringer , a YouTube content creator who focuses on the world of The Game of Thrones and the mythologies of ancient peoples . Though Lightbringer writes essays , and distributes his thoughts via podcast (and you can also read his views in short-form on numerous topics via his tweets on X ), his primary platform is his YouTube channel . Lightbringer’s videos, range across topics as diverse as “ Harappans, Aryans, and the Bactria-Ma...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 169
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his new paper, The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa . Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, African diaspora, transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Most recently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsala Unive...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 168
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Cody Moser , co-author of a recent paper, Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality . Moser is an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results with the...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 166
Katherine Brodsky hosts the Substack Random Minds and is author of the soon-to-be-published book No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority . The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Israel and then Canada, Brodsky has worked as a photographer, in public relations and as a publisher. A recent visiting fellow of the Danube Institute, she is freshly back in North America in the wake of Israel’s Gaza invasion, following the Hamas atta...
Jan 09, 2024•2 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 167
Today, Razib cross-posts an episode of his other podcast . When not working on this Substack, Razib devotes his time to GenRAIT , a startup accelerating scientific discovery by providing infrastructure and tools to researchers. GenRAIT fosters science and discovery by making biological data accessible, usable, and minable. Razib and his cofounders, Dr. Santanu Das and Taylor Capito , will talk about what they’ve built at the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 8th-11th, and showc...
Jan 09, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 166
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Philippe Lemoine , a fellow at CSPI , a philosopher of science trained at Cornell. Lemoine often wades into controversial topics, like whether Chinese COVID data is trustworthy, but recently, he posted on Twitter that “Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it.” Not only did this trigger a response by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution , but the controversy broke out of social media into the int...
Dec 14, 2023•2 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 165
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with Mark Safranski . Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog Zenpundit beginning in 2003. They survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and diplomacy by other means. From an age of flip phones as a luxury item in the early 2000’s to ubiquitous smartp...
Dec 10, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 164
Brent W. Roberts On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses personality with Brent Roberts , professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and how it differs from personality traits , like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the Big Five Personality system, and how it relates to the Myers-Briggs framework. Roberts elucidates what the Big Five’s extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, n...
Dec 05, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 163
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Carl Zha . Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the Silk and Steel podcast, which covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010’s, and often circle back to discussions of China, its history, politics and culture. The course of their conversations...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 162
Today, Razib interviews Nikolai Yakovenko , already a three-time guest on his podcasts ( A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects , GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines and AI and Biology ). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of DeepNews where he currently works. Razib and Yakovenko talk about the economic, technological and socio-political implications of the leadership turmoi...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 162
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks with Curtis Yarvin . The host of the Grey Mirror Substack , Yarvin is the former Mencius Moldbug , a pseudonym under which he wrote extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin’s social and political views have been profiled widely, including by Vanity Fair and Vox . The intellectual father of neo-reactionary thought , Yarvin is also trained as a computer scientist, and in 2010, he released the first version of Urbit , a decentralized...
Nov 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 161
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going . Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics , an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute , Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) , Technical Director of The Database of Rel...
Nov 17, 2023•2 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 160
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about what he memorably calls the crisis of the 23rd century . Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because of scholars like Eric Cline , today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding everything from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia was torn apart by climate change and ...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 159
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist, Steinn Sigurdsson . Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the ScienceBlogs website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed Dynamic of the Cats blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Originally from Iceland, Sigurdsson’s professional accomplishments have been wide-ranging, from serving as sci...
Nov 06, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 158
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark , a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022 . Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History ...
Oct 29, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 157
We’re about a generation into the “age of genomics,” or as it’s sometimes termed the “post-genomic era.” Today Razib talks to John Logsdon , a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled “ Genome Evolution ” to the Princeton Guide to Evolution . Razib uses this mid-2010s...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 156
Yesterday , Razib discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . While Hanania’s focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal , you know ...
Oct 15, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 155
On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib , Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack ), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack ) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack ) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, whic...
Oct 14, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 154
In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics , two months after Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . Both these books tackle the same issue: the US’s Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the “ Great Awokening ” in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we release th...
Oct 08, 2023•48 min•Season 1Ep. 153
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content... For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid . Check them out at orchidhealth.com . Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future , The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purity test: ...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 152
In the US, roughly 1 in 33 infants are born with a congenital disability, about 25 % of which have an identified genetic cause. For the first time ,, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variants and mitigate their baby’s disease risk. Check out orchidhealth.com , and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist. What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Ori...
Oct 01, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 151
Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony , emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age ...
Sep 24, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 150
Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel , host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science . An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s The ...
Sep 15, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 149
