Rand Simberg is the author of 2014's Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space , and a space business consultant , as well as a longtime blogger and commentator. Today, on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Simberg about SpaceX’s ambitiously named vessel, Starship , and what it means for the space business. In the process, Simberg outlines just how much of a lead SpaceX has over its competitors, and how it...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Molson Hart , founder and CEO of Viahart , an educational toy company. He is also co-founder of Edison , an intellectual property-focused litigation financing firm. Hart has gained some visibility as a prominent seller on Amazon, with strong opinions on the company both positive and negative. First, Razib asks Hart about Amazon’s role in the American economy, and how it compares and contrasts with Walmart. Unlike many who have negative expe...
Apr 28, 2022•54 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Alex Nowrasteh , the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute . Alex is also the author of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions . His beat at Cato is immigration, and he has been keeping a close watch on the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. The first issue Razib and Nowrasteh address is the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive crash in ...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee , a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature , Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals . A landmark in the field of cognitive genomics, this publication is the result of years of collaboration between two dozen researchers. Over the course of the episode, they deep dive into t...
Apr 14, 2022•2 hr 35 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley , Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast . They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to understand the workings of the global energy ecosystem. Considering geopolitical events in Europe, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they dive right into how distribution differences between oil and gas will conspire to keep Europeans dependent on Russ...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob L. Shapiro , Director of Geopolitical Analysis at Cognitive Investments . He overviews the geopolitical perspective in understanding international relations, one predicated on looking at nation-states as fundamental units of analysis, in order to achieve a descriptive understanding of the world. Shapiro points out that the more familiar “schools” of foreign policy, from realism to liberal internationalism, use geopolitics as a tool to understan...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Samo Burja , a guest who needs no introduction for long-time listeners. Burja is the podcast’s first third-time guest, and with good reason. Previously, he came on to discuss social technology and China and lost civilizations , plumbing the depths of the human past for insights about the present and future. Today Burja spotlights a timely new venture of his firm, Bismark Analysis : the Bismarck Brief newsletter, which provides a taste ...
Mar 26, 2022•2 hr 1 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zack Stentz , a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, and a former journalist. His credits include 2011 films X-Men: First Class and Thor , as well as the television shows Andromeda , Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous . Considering that working in Hollywood as a writer is a “dream job” for many, Razib and Stentz discuss how to break in and succeed in show business. Like most people, Stentz wrote in...
Mar 17, 2022•53 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to his friend Sarah Haider , founder of Ex-Muslims of North America and the writer behind a new Substack , Hold That Thought . Born in Pakistan, and raised in Texas in a Shia Muslim family, Sarah came to prominence in 2015 after she gave a speech called "Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique" at The American Humanist Association's 74th annual conference. Razib and Sarah first discuss where the Ex-Muslim community is in 2022, ...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast the focus is on genetics, culture and geopolitics with Muhammad Sohail Raza , a Pakistani genomicist living and working in Beijing, China, whose research focuses on bioinformatic methods and high-altitude adaptations. Razib and Muhammad first discuss how he got interested in biology, and what took him to do his graduate work in the People’s Republic of China. Muhammad talks about his various inspirations, in particular David Reich’s work on historical p...
Mar 04, 2022•52 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Suhag Shukla , the Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). Suhag is an attorney who grew up in Cupertino, California, and is now a leading advocate for the interests of American Hindus . Razib and Suhag clear up the fact that HAF does not speak for all Hindus, of whom there are over one billion, or, the world’s 1.4 billion Indians. Additionally, the HAF is an explicitly Hindu-focused organization, as opposed to an India...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past generation, China has gone from a developing nation of bicycles and Volkswagens to a global economic juggernaut that is Mercedes-Benz’s single biggest market. You can track this transformation in charts or follow it in dispatches from foreign correspondents, but this week’s guest on the podcast has seen it up close and personal. Colin is a black American who works in the corporate technology sector and has lived in and visited China on and off since the late 1990’s. He is also a ge...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Caleb Watney is the co-president of The Institute for Progress (along with Alec Stapp ), which exists to foster innovation and technological advancement through public policy levers. Founded in January of 2021, The Institute for Progress declares itself a “think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” Razib’s first major question is why such a think tank even needs to exist. Isn’t there a huge complex of research uni...
Feb 12, 2022•53 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. 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 and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist . On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping , a mix of cultural...
Feb 04, 2022•54 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Have you ever wondered how academic publishing works? If you’re not in academia, probably not, but you might be surprised by how much intrigue and politics it entails. If you are an academic, you probably don’t want to think about it any more than you have to because it’s a mess. Nearly a decade ago, Razib co-authored a paper, Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century , that sketched out a map of a possible future. That future isn’t here ye...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Rav Arora came to public prominence in 2020 with a column for The New York Post provocatively titled “ The Fallacy of White Privilege .” He suffered personal and professional blowback, but today the 20-year-old Canadian undergraduate has a semi-regular column in The New York Post , and is interviewed by the likes of Glenn Loury . Arora’s fearlessness in expressing his opinions on a wide range of topics, in particular politically controversial ones, co...
Jan 25, 2022•59 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Today’s podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph.D. at Johns H...
Jan 20, 2022•48 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn , a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take. Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gene-prom...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology . Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist , telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In the days after ...
Jan 11, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann , political scientist and demographer , and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America , Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities . During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? , the prediction that due to the higher reprodu...
Jan 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse , a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack !), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial , geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transformed the mo...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Dr. Xiaotong Yao , a computational biologist specializing in cancer research at Cornell’s Weill Institute, joins Razib. They first dig deep into genomics, considering the efficacy and costs of expanding whole-genome sequencing to assemble massive population-sized datasets. Not a thousand people, but a billion. Next, they probe the implications of wide-scale sequencing as it becomes integral to clinical di...
Dec 23, 2021•57 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning author and Washington Post columnist (and former blogger ) Megan McArdle join Razib for a wide-ranging conversation reflecting on our reemergence after the year and a half ordeal of COVID lockdowns, rising violent crime rates, defunding policing, and the preposterous genetic distribution on Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire. An urbanite who has spent her life in the US’s own imperial capital cities -...
Dec 16, 2021•2 hr 31 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann , author of 1491 , 1493 , and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined. Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , Razib is joined by Tim Lee , a former columnist at the Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com , to discuss his new project, Full Stack Economics , a newsletter on economics, technology, and public policy. The conversation jumps directly into a major issue facing many Americans today: the cost of housing. In many US cities, access to affordable housing is the most economically important issue facing individual...
Dec 02, 2021•57 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning , researcher, blogger, and essayist Tanner Greer joins Razib to consider the challenges facing conservatism in America today, the future of China and its relationship to the US. Much of Tanner’s extensive research and analysis are featured on his excellent weblog, The Scholar’s Stage , and the conversation also touches on the current state of blogging (and its past). Razib and Tanner first tackle the evolution of a n...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib turns his gaze to space with Eric Berger , Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX . They ask who is Elon Musk anyway, and how did SpaceX come to win the early race to dominate private spaceflight? What does the privatization of the space fleet mean for the prospects and goals of NASA? How has NASA’s mission evolved, and ...
Nov 18, 2021•46 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Harvard professor Carole Hooven joins Razib to discuss her new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us . Though they do talk about the science of testosterone, Razib and Carole end up exploring the public reaction to her writing a book on sex and biology in 2021, as well the culture of censorship and shunning that has become the norm in much of academia. Hooven’s rece...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe no Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be). Alex explains how large datasets where many indiv...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib is joined by genetic genealogist Josh Lipson for a deep dive into the history and genetics of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe. They review the historical demographics of the Jews of both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the possible founding source populations from the Levant (Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Babylon). They discuss the cultural and genetic differences between ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast 
