On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , friend of the podcast, Charles Murray returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970’s. He is the author of Losing Ground , The Bell Curve , Human Accomplishment , Real Education , Coming Apart and What it means to be a libertarian and Human Diversity , among others. Born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr•Ep 232•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Titus Techera , a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack PostModernConservative . Techera also hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation. Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 Romanian presidential ele...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep 231•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nathan Lents about his new book, The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution . A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ research ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms to b...
Mar 03, 2025•2 hr 9 min•Ep 230•Transcript available on Metacast Today Razib talks to Antonio Regalado , reporter at MIT Technology Review . Regalado covers how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining MIT Technology Review in 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. From 2000 to 2009, he was a science reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal . Among the many stories Regalado has broken was the prenatal se...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep 229•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Modern Age . Former editor-in-chief of The American Conservative , his writing has also appeared in the New York Times , USA Today , The Spectator , The National Interest and Reason . McCarthy also helped run communications for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign and was a senior editor at ISI Books. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Washington University in St. Louis. First, Razib and McCarthy discuss the outcom...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep 228•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Tade Souaiaia , a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint, Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits . Souaiaia trained as a computational biologist at USC, but also has a background as a division I track and field athlete. Razib and Souaiaia discuss what “genetic architecture” means, and consider what we're finding when we look at extreme trait values in characteristics along a n...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep 227•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , 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 Idea . Hamid is also the auth...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep 226•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Conn Carroll , the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy . Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner , but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal . Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen in response to what he felt was misl...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep 225•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years. Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrup...
Jan 29, 2025•2 hr 45 min•Ep 224•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau , who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the Alliance for the Future , a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also ma...
Jan 29, 2025•52 min•Ep 223•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff , and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origi...
Jan 26, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep 222•Transcript available on Metacast Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram . Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously...
Jan 23, 2025•57 min•Ep 221•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages , which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long...
Jan 20, 2025•36 min•Ep 220•Transcript available on Metacast This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Megan McArdle , author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A pioneering blogger based out of New York City and covering the site of the WTC in the wake of 9/11, McArdle we...
Jan 17, 2025•2 hr 34 min•Ep 219•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player ,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNew...
Jan 14, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Yasha Mounk . The founder of Persuasion , a contributor to The Atlantic and a professor at Johns Hopkins , Mounk now has his own Substack , where he hosts his weekly column and podcast . He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure , The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time . Razib and Moun...
Jan 11, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep 217•Transcript available on Metacast Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist Anatoly Karlin . Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California’s Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to American military and cultural power. With the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he joined a chorus of Russia...
Jan 08, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep 216•Transcript available on Metacast During the Ice Age our ancestors often painted the horse in caves On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity’s most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world’s subsistence economies, the horse in its military roles was a luxury good, with Chinese emperors sending delegations to Central Asia in search of “...
Jan 05, 2025•39 min•Ep 215•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Wilfred Reilly about his new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula . 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 worked in the private sector before his career in academia, including stints as a political canvasser, real estate ...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep 214•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, currently based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept and The Nation , before starting his own Substack, Social Studies , as well as working with Michael Shellenberger. He also has a new podcast with...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Lyman Stone , a soon to be PhD in sociology from McGill University specializing in population dynamics. Stone runs the Pro-natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies , and has had appointments at AEI, and has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times . Well known for his social media presence, Stone is a published academic who has explored COVID policies, religion and divorce rates. Stone has previously been on Unsupervis...
Dec 27, 2024•2 hr 35 min•Ep 212•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator “Peachy Keenan.” A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind , appearing on Fox News and penning Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War . Razib and Keenan discuss her peripatetic and unique journey from a relatively apolitical member of America’s liberal profe...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 211•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Singal , a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack, Singal-Minded , and contributes to Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, Singal is formerly an editor at New York Magazine . His first book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our S...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 210•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to economist Sam Hammond . Canadian-born Hammond serves as the Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. His work primarily focuses on innovation and science policy, with particular attention to the societal and institutional impacts of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. Before his role at FAI, Hammond was Director of Poverty and Welfare Policy at the Niskanen Center. Hammond also held a research fellows...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 209•Transcript available on Metacast The full episode is available on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/14000-years-of-natural-selection On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about what we have learned from a blockbuster new preprint, Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation . Synchronously released was the Ancient Genome Selection browser , which allows you to trace the allele frequency of variants of interest over the last 10,000 years. Razib covers: Th...
Dec 02, 2024•41 min•Ep 208•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the genetic and archaeological history of Europe from the arrival of modern humans (permanently) 45,000 years ago, to the end of the Bronze Age in the decades after 1200 BC. He covers these time periods: Pre-Aurignacian (before 43 kya) Aurignacian (43-26 kya) Gravettian (33-21 kya) Solutrean (22-17 kya) Magdalenian (17-12 kya) Epigravettian (21-10 kya) Mesolithic (12-7 kya) Neolithic (9-5 kya) Bronze Age (5-3 kya) The full episode i...
Nov 27, 2024•38 min•Ep 207•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 206•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 125•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast 
