Abdel Abdellaoui is a researcher in the Netherlands who works in the intersection of psychology and genetics . He’s a pretty active figure on social media, and because of his subject matter interests, he has become embroiled in a few controversies. When scientists talk about genetics and psychology, behavior genetics, the public listens and offers opinions. Over the course of our conversation, I discuss how he got into behavior genetics, and what the lay of the land in the Netherlands is like fo...
Apr 23, 2021•45 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Gabriel Rossman is a sociologist at UCLA. The author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation , Rossman takes a deeply analytic toolkit to questions such as why 2005’s “My Humps” became a viral hit. The last 1/3rd of the podcast is devoted to discussing a recent paper that he is an author on, Network hubs cease to be influential in the presence of low levels of advertising . But first, we discuss other topics. Recently Rossman has been seeing a change...
Apr 17, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Listeners to some of my podcasts on human evolution often tell me, in a friendly enough manner, that the jargon is often tough going. To be frank I can actually empathize with this. It is difficult for me to keep up with all the paleogenetics, let alone the ins and outs of paleoanthropology. What’s the difference between ergaster and heidelbergensis ? Are Denisovans a species? Where in Africa did modern humans emerge? There are dozens of questions like this. This is why I often touch base with D...
Apr 09, 2021•52 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Booth is an English archaeologist who has had great timing in his career, as he’s been riding the massive wave of ancient DNA findings out of Britain over the past decade. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520225/
Apr 02, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Patterson is a computational biologist at the Broad Institute. A collaborator with David Reich for nearly 20 years, Nick has traversed the world of genetics from its medical domain to the realm of anthropology and ancient DNA. But before he was a geneticist Nick had varied lives, including a stint with the British government, as a cryptographer, and a quant for Renaissance Technologies. We also discuss his background in dark post-World War II England, and how it shaped him.
Mar 26, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Normally I post a photograph of the guest for the podcast. But in the case of Matt Ridley, I am making an exception. Rather, I’m highlighting his 1999 book, Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters . This book is incredibly influential for the generation of genomicists who came of age in the 21st century . Written in the late 1990’s when the genomics revolution was barely off the ground, Ridley’s elegant prose anticipated how exciting this field was going to be for many of us. Genom...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Lee Jussim is a social psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Known outside of his field as a major critic of stereotype threat, Lee is involved in online science communication and the replication crisis. A major internal critical of his own field, Lee and I discuss: - His experience after Hurricane Sandy - What he actually believes is true in social psychology - The relationship between political uniformity and results in social science...
Mar 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Cathy Young is a writer who contributes to Reason , Newsday , and Arc Digital . Born in the Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States as a teen in the 1980s. Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood and Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality . In December she wrote The Guillotine Mystique: The French Revolution has long inspired progressive radicals ready for change at any cost for Reason . She has even started the French...
Mar 05, 2021•2 hr 48 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Chad Orzel is a spherical object…actually, no. He’s a physicist. More precisely, a physics professor at Union College, in Schenectady, New York. He’s the author of four books: Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...
Feb 26, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guests made time to chat at a moment’s notice over the last 24 hours as the luckiest of us are just beginning to get back to normal life (though many here remain without water even after power was restored). This is very much a rough draft of history, not my usual evergreen type of content. I’m learning something new daily and I hope you’ll get something out of it, too. My guests: Jon Stokes , a deputy editor at The Prepared . Jon talks about how and why even he was caught flat-foote...
Feb 20, 2021•2 hr 11 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Rob Henderson is one of the most interesting young thinkers active today. A writer with an engaging Twitter account and must-subscribe newsletter , he is perhaps most well known today for his popularization of the concept of “ luxury beliefs .” My conversation with Rob occurred in the midst of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. I was looking for his perspective on the world, and the reality of American decline, because his own life story is so unique, and yet so American. Given up for adoption by ...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in the fields of human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely-read weblog , a book on Homo naledi , and highly cited scientific papers , Hawks’ voice is essential to understanding the origin of our species. In this episode, Hawks talks about how he stumbled onto paleoanthropology, and his work in the 2000’s, where he was at the center of debates between various camps within the f...
Feb 12, 2021•2 hr 38 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast On January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared abortion legal in all 50 states when it decided Roe vs. Wade. This landmark decision was arguably one of the two biggest cases in relation to social policy in the US in the 20th century (the other being 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education). Though abortion has been on the back-burner as an issue over the past decade or so, for most of the whole period after Roe vs. Wade it has dominated and shaped cultural politics ...
Feb 05, 2021•51 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode of Unsupervised Learning, I talked to Richard Hanania of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology .
Jan 29, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Alina Chan is a post-doctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. Since the spring of 2020 Chan has been prominent in online (and “offline”) discussions as to the nature of the origins of SARS-Cov-2. Her argument is that there needs to be more openness to alternative possibilities of the origin of SARS-Cov-2. She is a co-author on two preprints related to SARS-Cov-2: SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence? Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike...
Jan 22, 2021•44 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Armand Marie Leroi is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body and The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science . An evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London , Leroi has tackled race and eugenics , as well as published on the cultural evolution of music and the neutral theory of evolution. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss his attempts to tackle the concepts of race and eugenics as a public intellectual, his exploration of cultural evolution, and finally, the ...
Jan 15, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk at length with Samo Burja , a public intellectual who focuses on the insights that history can provide to the present and future. To be frank, Samo is one of the most historically literate people I’ve ever met. This probably explains how we could talk so easily for well over an hour on topics as diverse as Confucianism, “ social technology ”, and the European view of America and China (the last might surprise you!)....
Jan 08, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Jeremy Kamil is a virologist in the LSU system. He is one of the people I have encountered over the last year whose opinion I’ve learned to take to heart. Not because Jeremy holds forth from on high, but because he doesn’t. As you will hear in this conversation, he is candid about how little he truly knew at the beginning of 2020. A world transformed by COVID-19 has also seen a world of pundits and commentators rewriting history, testifying to their foresight. Masks are useless until they’re...
Dec 24, 2020•52 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Razib talks to political analyst David Shor.
Dec 16, 2020•57 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Razib talks to archaeologists Eric Cline about his book 1177, and the end of the Bronze Age.
Dec 10, 2020•56 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Razib discusses the life and times of Charles Murray. They explore Murray's upbringing, time in Thailand, and his perspective on the USA today.
Dec 03, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, I talk to Anders Bergstrom about the new paper in Science, Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs , on which he is the first author.
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
