On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Misha Saul , the host of the Kvetch Substack . Saul is a first-generation Jewish Australian, born in Georgia (former Soviet republic), who grew up in Adelaide and now lives in Sydney. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with degrees in commerce and law. His day job is in finance, but the Kvetch highlights his interests in history and Jewish culture . Razib and Saul discuss extensively the differences and similarities between the US...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 206
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Cremieux , a Twitter anon who is regularly retweeted by the likes of Paul Graham, Noah Smith and Elon Musk. A data scientist and statistician, Cremieux specializes in visualizations and analyses that cut to the heart of social and cultural dynamics, from economics to behavior genetics. Cremieux and Razib first discuss the polls and demographic results of the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump seems to have made broad-based gains across al...
Nov 07, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 125
On this episode of "Unsupervised Learning," Razib talks to Rachel Haywire , who writes at Cultural Futurist . Haywire is the author of Acidexia and began her career in futurism as an event planner for the Singularity Institute . She got her start as part of the "right-brain" faction around the Bay Area transhumanist and futurist scene circa 2010. Currently, she is working on starting an art gallery in New York City that serves as an event space for avant-garde creators who are not encumbered by ...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 124
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Halie May , the host of the Substack The Sequence , and a genetic counselor at Natera. May has a B.S. in chemical biology from Stevens Institute of Technology and a M.S. in human genetics from Sarah Lawrence. Before working at Natera she was a researcher and instructor at Columbia University and designed testing panels at genetics start-up, Tomorrow’s Health. Razib and May discuss how much the field has changed even in her short career, in ...
Oct 30, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 203
On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib talks to native Californian, Inez Stepman . Stepman has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from UC San Diego, and obtained her J.D. from University of Virginia. She is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum , a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributor to The Federalist . Stepman is also a co-host of the High Noon podcast . Razib and Stepman first talk about her reaction to Marxist author Malcom Harris’ Palo Al...
Oct 19, 2024•2 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 202
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Christina Buttons , who writes at Buttons Lives . A native Californian and erstwhile artist, Buttons switched to journalism two years ago, writing about gender medicine. A contributor to Quillette , The Post-Millennial and The Daily Wire , Buttons is now a freelance journalist living in Nashville, Tennessee. The first part of the conversation breaks down what “gender medicine” entails in its gory details. In April Razib had a conversation w...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 201
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to returning guest, Sarah Haider . Haider is the co-host of the podcast A Special Place in Hell and the Substack Hold That Thought . A native of Houston, graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, Haider is the founder and former executive director of Ex Muslims of North America . Today Razib asks her about her move out of the nonprofit world, and into being a full-time public intellectual, speaking and writing on topics of interest to he...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 200
Today Razib talks to Aria Babu , a British think-thank professional who is part of the growing number of young men and women who are taking an interest in population decline and promoting pro-natalism . Babu has a degree in chemistry from University College London, and has long worked in areas related to the study of economic growth and entrepreneurship. Prior to her interest in pro-natalism Babu held conventional views about population growth and its ties to environmental alarmism. But she quic...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 198
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Louise Perry . A British journalist known for her commentary on feminism and gender issues, Perry is the author of the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution . She also contributes to The New Statesman , UnHerd , and The Daily Mail , and has a Substack at Maiden Mother Matriarch . Perry is a graduate of University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, with a degree in anthropology. Perry and Razib first discuss Britain’s ...
Aug 06, 2024•2 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 197
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to archeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins about his 2005 book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization . Ward-Perkins was born and grew up in Rome, a son of architectural historian and archaeologist, John Bryan Ward-Perkins. Educated at Oxford University, Ward-Perkins eventually became a fellow of Trinity College at the same university, from which he has since retired. An archaeologist with a deep interest in economic history, Ward...
Aug 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 196
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a returning guest , J. P. Mallory, to discuss his reaction to the recent preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans . Mallory is the author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth , The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West . He is also a retired professor from Queen’s Univ...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 195
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to professor Sean Anthony about his book Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam . Anthony is a historian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. with honors in 2009 at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and has a mastery of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, French, and German. Anthony’s interests are broadly religion and...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 194
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nikolai Yakovenko , a returning guest to the podcast , about his new AI startup, DeepNewz , and the state of the LLM -driven AI landscape circa the summer of 2024, where we are in relation to earlier expectations and where we might be in the next decade. Yakovenko is an AI researcher who has worked at Google, Twitter and Nvidia, and is now a serial entrepreneur. He is also a competitive poker player. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, th...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 193
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Chad Niederhuth, an erstwhile academic plant geneticist now working in industry. Niederhuth and Razib discuss the reality that in 2024 it is often human genetics that gets the glory, even though experiments on plants go back to the field’s very origins with Gregor Mendel and his peas . Niederhuth’s original training is in molecular genetics, and they discuss the relevance of differences in basic biological machinery between plants and anima...
Jun 23, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 192
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jonathan Keeperman, an former lecturer in writing at UC Irvine and proprietor of Passage Press . Keeperman also posts on the internet under what was until recently an anonymous pseudonym, Lomez . Unlike many anonymous accounts on X, “Lomez” developed a decade-long identity, to the point where Keeperman wrote articles under that name for publications like First Things , The Federalist and The American Mind . Razib and Keeperman talk about wh...
Jun 16, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 191
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about religion with Ryan Burge , professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University , and author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America . Burge also has a Substack, Graphs about Religion , where he posts the latest data on trends in American society. First, Razib asks Burge to outline the wave of secularization that has impacted American society ...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 190
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the idea of “lost civilizations,” the possibility that there were complex societies during the Pleistocene Ice Age. This topic recently rose to salience after a dialogue between writer Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Hancock is a longtime guest on Rogan’s show and he promotes a theory that an advanced “lost civilization” during the Ice Age left remnants of its culture across the world, for example the ...
May 31, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 189
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Akshar Patel of The Emissary about his recent sojourn in India. Patel began The Emissary because he felt there were many gaps in the media representation of India. Razib asks whether The New York Times’ claim that Modi is a strongman is correct, and whether India is an illiberal democracy. Patel notes that despite a Westernized super-elite embedded in global Left politics, India is fundamentally a conservative society where communal identit...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 188
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jeremy Carl , Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he focuses on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America. Previously, Carl was a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he analyzed and wrote about energy policy. He has BA with distinction from Yale University and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Today Carl talks about his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-W...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 187
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•2 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•2 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•2 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
