Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Ph.D. student in American politics at Boston College, where her dissertation will focus on affirmative action. Razib asks Mukherjee to discuss the origin of affirmative action as it is practiced in the US today, starting with the Bakke decision in 1978, and then moving on to Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003. She then moves to the details of the current cases, in particular Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast In June 1991, The New York Times published a piece titled “Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds.” Published a year after Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park , on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens “Will it one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?” More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a living dinosaur, nor come even close. But the early 1990’s kicked off the first age of ancient DNA with...
Jun 23, 2023•55 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to journalist Lee Fang . Formerly an investigative reporter at The Intercept and a contributing writer at The Nation , Fang began his journalism career at ThinkProgress . As an undergraduate, Fang was president of the University of Maryland College Democrats, and interned for Democratic representatives Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Steny Hoyer. He was also the first intern for the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America . Toda...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 136•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts Ross Douthat , author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics , Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class , Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream , The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery and The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success . A columnist at The New York Times , often on political and social topics, Douthat also reviews movi...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 135•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a favorite repeat guest, Samo Burja , to discuss matters future, present and past. Burja founded the consulting firm Bismarck Analysis and developed the “ great founder theory .” He contributes to Palladium Magazine , Asia Times , City Journal , and The National Interest . Burja’s first appearance on the podcast , recorded in the fall of 2020, spiraled into a long discussion on the Chinese past and future, and Razib follows up to find out ...
Jun 04, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep 134•Transcript available on Metacast In 1968, Stanford ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb , arguing that rapid growth in human numbers would result in environmental catastrophe and widespread famine. Overall the dire predictions of The Population Bomb did not come to pass, with the Green Revolution staving off the specter of mass starvation. With eight billion people today, the world population has doubled since 1970, and global TFR (totality fertility rate) is now 2.4, down from 4.5 in 1970. When it comes to ...
Jun 04, 2023•55 min•Ep 133•Transcript available on Metacast A few years ago now, Razib talked to Tim Lee about his new Substack Full Stack Economics , which featured deep dives into economic issues (as well as some on-the-ground-reporting, like when he drove Lyft to get a feel for its economics). But recently, Lee decided to put Full Stack Economics on pause to focus on a new Substack: Understanding AI . Artificial intelligence is hot right now, but Lee covered tech for a decade for Washington Post , Ars Technica , and Vox.com , and has a master’s degree...
May 29, 2023•48 min•Ep 132•Transcript available on Metacast Recently, scientists discovered that a two-year mega-drought beginning in 1198 BC hastened the Hittite Empire’s collapse. The finding sheds new light on the history of the decades around 1200 BC, adding specificity to the timing and cause for the period’s social and political chaos. Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib discusses the “Bronze Age Collapse,” the end of the first globalized world. This collapse marked the end of a multi-century period when the Near East’s empires and sta...
May 29, 2023•49 min•Ep 131•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Peter Nimitz, the author behind the Nemets Substack, which explores topics as diverse as the 2014 Donbass War and the likelihood of Eurasian migration into Chad thousands of years ago. Razib and Nimitz walk through his recent post, the Seven Ages of Western Eurasia: A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers to the Present. In the piece, he explores the changes that Europe and West Asia have undergone since ...
May 29, 2023•2 hr 36 min•Ep 130•Transcript available on Metacast Alex Feinberg is anything but your typical trainer. An economics graduate from Vanderbilt, Feinberg willed himself to become a professional baseball player through focus and hard work and then talked his way into a sales and business development job at Google. In the late 2010’s Feinberg moved into the crypto space, but found that one precondition to success was having a large Twitter following. So he pivoted and focused on growing his Twitter following, and noticed that his lifestyle tweets, an...
May 10, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Adam Mastroianni , who runs the Experimental History Substack. Mastroianni was the inaugural guest on the Intrinsic Perspective podcast , hosted by Erik Hoel , where they discussed his post, The rise and fall of peer review - Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing (see also his follow-up, The dance of the naked emperors ). Mastroianni opened a can of worms; the post has more than 800 likes an...
May 10, 2023•57 min•Ep 128•Transcript available on Metacast This week on Unsupervised Learning , Razib and his guest, David McKay , of the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants podcast (Razib was an early guest ), discuss the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This discussion arose after Razib heard McKay’s explainer, Zen and the Art of ChatGPT , a 30-minute layman’s intro to the topic, where he breaks down the technical elements that come together to allow for AI. In this episode, McKay, a Cam...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflections are colored by paleontological findings and begin with the evolution of modern humans and their distinctive physical characteristics in Africa more than 200,000 years ago, then moving on to their breakout from the ancestral continent and the d...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep 126•Transcript available on Metacast Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics, The Language Instinct , Words and Rules and How the Mind Works . Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “ may be the most ...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 125•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. David Sloan Wilson is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Co-founder of the Evolution Institute and Prosocial World , Wilson is the author of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior , Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society , Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives , This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and Atlas Hugged: The Au...
Mar 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell , Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept . Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the current state of the culture from the perspective of “brown” observers of the public sphere dominated by woke vs. anti-woke factions. Despite ideological differences, all four are skeptical of the ideological orthodoxies regnant in American culture, even though one, ...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep 123•Transcript available on Metacast This monologue is incomplete, for the complete monologue, checkout: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Podcast Substack Why does human skin color vary so much? And what is the relationship between hair color, eye color and overall pigmentation? What genes control pigmentation in humans and other animals? Razib addresses all these questions in this episode of Unsupervised Learning , as he discusses the genetic basis and evolutionary origins of variation on this trait that has held such importance...
Mar 09, 2023•38 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the podcast Razib talks to Dr. Glenn Loury , Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. Loury also has a Substack that grew out of his conversations with John McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv starting in 2008. He is the author of One by One from the Inside Out , The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values . An erstwhile progressive, Loury was a neoconservative in the 1980’s before his gradual shift to back the political right in...
Mar 04, 2023•55 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Virginia Postrel, the author of The Fabric of Civilization , The Power of Glamour , The Substance of Style and The Future and its Enemies . Formerly a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg View , and the former editor of Reason , she is now a fellow at Chapman University’s Smith Institute. First, Razib and Postrel discuss her recently reported piece for The Wall Street Journal , Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethic...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 120•Transcript available on Metacast https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. In April of 2021, this Substack published a piece, The ultimate price of costless gestures , that anticipated a spate of articles in the second half of the year in the mainstream media reporting on the rise of murders in 2020. Compare the figure from the Substack piece with one in The New York Times published in November of 2021: The similarity is simply a function of th...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib explores the history of China through the lens of genetics and ancient DNA. This podcast is a companion to the recent two pieces, Genetic history with Chinese characteristics and Venerable Ancestors: untangling the Chinese people's hybrid Pleistocene origins . Today 92% of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are ethnic Han, accounting for 16% of humanity. With China’s new prominence in genomics over the last decade, the genetic structure ...
Feb 10, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast For the complete version of this podcast check out razib.substack.com On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the origins of the people of Madagascar in a companion podcast to his two-part series on the genetics and history of the island. An ecologically unique island off Africa’s southeast coast, for tens of millions of years Madagascar forged its own evolutionary path, distinct from Africa to the west and unconnected to the world of the Indian Ocean coastlines to the north and...
Feb 04, 2023•25 min•Ep 117•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Jonathan Anomaly , author of Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement . Anomaly is currently the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at La Universidad de las Americas, Ecuador. He has been a lecturer at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and holds a philosophy Ph.D. from Tulane University. Anomaly has been thinking and publishing on the implications of the intersection between ethics and...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 116•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Bryan Caplan about Caplan’s new book, Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice . Despite what the narrow purview the title might suggest, Don't Be a Feminist is a wide-ranging book that contains essays on IQ, immigration and identity politics, among other things (in addition, yes, to women’s rights). Caplan is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It , the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, and a...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with John Hawks . First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding Homo naledi , in particular, the finding that they likely used fires deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of Homo naledi , a very small-brained hominin that mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected trajecto...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Shadi Hamid , a senior fellow at Brookings , an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , a contributor to The Atlantic , 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 ...
Jan 04, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast As 2022 draws to a close, the chat AI based on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I asked GPT-3 that particular question, and this was the answer: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not humanity is on the way to creating a true artificial general intelligence, as there is no clear consensus on what exact...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast On this very special episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk to three guests, Josh Lipson , Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper , about their contribution to a new paper, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century . Given that a month earlier, Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century was also published , 2022 has seen a massive growth in our ancient-DNA-informed understanding...
Dec 22, 2022•2 hr 44 min•Ep 111•Transcript available on Metacast Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like 300 , or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus’ The Histories . More recently, Iran has loomed large due to its geopolitical significance, and for Americans of a certain age, the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his successor Ayatollah Khomeini loom large as figures who for a time monopolized television screens and front pages of news maga...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the term ”the West” mean, and how is it different from simply the geographical designation Europe? On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the cultural and genetic origins of Europeans, how they have been viewed over the l...
Dec 08, 2022•47 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast 
