On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about the April 2024 preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans . This blockbuster publication introduces nearly 300 new ancient DNA samples, uncovers the origins of the Yamnaya , and delves into how they transformed the genetic and cultural landscape of Eurasia ~5,000 years ago. Razib addresses: The now-identified ancestors of the Yamnaya The genetic landscape between the Dnieper, Volga and Caucasus before the Yamnaya and that region’s...
May 14, 2024•39 min•Season 1Ep. 186
On this unusual “from the vault” episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to John Massey, a retired Australian engineer who has been a long-time correspondent. Massey and Razib recorded this podcast in the spring of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Australia and China were enacting strict lockdowns to halt the spread of the virus, while the US and Europe were already taking a more relaxed approach. Though the conversation is a bit of a temporal rewind, back to a ...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 185
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Colin Wright, a returning guest, host of the Reality’s Last Stand Substack and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before digging deep into the biology of sex and the cultural politics of gender ideology, Razib and Wright touch on what’s been happening to Jonathan Pruitt, Wright’s erstwhile advisor. He was accused of academic fraud in 2019, and dozens of papers where Pruitt was the primary contributor of data had to be retracted. Notably, ...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 184
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to George Washington University archaeologist Eric Cline . The author of 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed , Cline has a new book out, After 1177 B.C. - The Survival of Civilizations . While 1177 B.C. closed with the end of the first global civilization, that of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, After 1177 B.C. tells the story of those who picked up the pieces. But first Cline and Razib talk about the popular ap...
Apr 24, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 183
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Kristian Kristiansen , an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg and affiliate professor at the Lundbech Center for Geogenetics, Copenhagen University. A past guest on this podcast , Kristiansen has recently contributed to an astonishing lineup of landmark papers published in Nature just in the last few months, Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia , Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastora...
Apr 16, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 182
Today on Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to long-time podcast favorite Samo Burja . Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis and Bismarck Brief , a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation and The Foresight Institute . He is also now the chair of the editorial board of Palladium Magazine . Already a four-time guest on Unsupervised Learning (he has previously shared his views on China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past , his role at Bismarck Analysis and geopolitical uncerta...
Apr 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 181
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Steve Hsu , physicist, entrepreneur and public intellectual. Hsu is an Iowan who earned his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his Ph.D. from Berkeley. Later he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before moving on to professorships at Yale and the University of Oregon, and finally settling down at Michigan State University in 2012. Hsu is founder of Safeweb and Genomic Prediction, and his current focus is on a new AI startup. Between 2012 and 2...
Mar 30, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 180
Today Razib talks to Murtaza Hussain about the social, cultural and political context of recent fissures in the US around the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept and has his own Substack . They begin their conversation talking about Hussain’s response to the 10/7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Hussain discusses his bewilderment and disappointment at some commentators who he saw being knee-jerk and tribalistic in their response. ...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 179
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer . Affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London, Stringer is the author of African Exodus. The Origins of Modern Humanity , Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth and Homo Britannicus - The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain . A proponent since the 1970’s of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our sp...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 178
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Zoe Booth and Iona Italia . Booth is community engagement officer and Italia is managing editor at Quillette . An Australian, Booth has degrees in French, Politics and Law from the University of Newcastle. Italia is an erstwhile academic of British nationality and mixed Parsi and Scottish heritage, with a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. She is the author of Our Tango World , former editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine an...
Mar 07, 2024•1 hr 45 min•Season 1Ep. 177
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•1 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•1 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•1 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•1 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
