Katherine Brodsky hosts the Substack Random Minds and is author of the soon-to-be-published book No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority . The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Israel and then Canada, Brodsky has worked as a photographer, in public relations and as a publisher. A recent visiting fellow of the Danube Institute, she is freshly back in North America in the wake of Israel’s Gaza invasion, following the Hamas atta...
Jan 09, 2024•2 hr 55 min•Ep 167•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Razib cross-posts an episode of his other podcast . When not working on this Substack, Razib devotes his time to GenRAIT , a startup accelerating scientific discovery by providing infrastructure and tools to researchers. GenRAIT fosters science and discovery by making biological data accessible, usable, and minable. Razib and his cofounders, Dr. Santanu Das and Taylor Capito , will talk about what they’ve built at the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 8th-11th, and showc...
Jan 09, 2024•53 min•Ep 166•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Philippe Lemoine , a fellow at CSPI , a philosopher of science trained at Cornell. Lemoine often wades into controversial topics, like whether Chinese COVID data is trustworthy, but recently, he posted on Twitter that “Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it.” Not only did this trigger a response by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution , but the controversy broke out of social media into the int...
Dec 14, 2023•2 hr 44 min•Ep 165•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with Mark Safranski . Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog Zenpundit beginning in 2003. They survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and diplomacy by other means. From an age of flip phones as a luxury item in the early 2000’s to ubiquitous smartp...
Dec 10, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast Brent W. Roberts On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses personality with Brent Roberts , professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and how it differs from personality traits , like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the Big Five Personality system, and how it relates to the Myers-Briggs framework. Roberts elucidates what the Big Five’s extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, n...
Dec 05, 2023•53 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Carl Zha . Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the Silk and Steel podcast, which covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010’s, and often circle back to discussions of China, its history, politics and culture. The course of their conversations...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep 162•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Razib interviews Nikolai Yakovenko , already a three-time guest on his podcasts ( A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects , GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines and AI and Biology ). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of DeepNews where he currently works. Razib and Yakovenko talk about the economic, technological and socio-political implications of the leadership turmoi...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep 162•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks with Curtis Yarvin . The host of the Grey Mirror Substack , Yarvin is the former Mencius Moldbug , a pseudonym under which he wrote extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin’s social and political views have been profiled widely, including by Vanity Fair and Vox . The intellectual father of neo-reactionary thought , Yarvin is also trained as a computer scientist, and in 2010, he released the first version of Urbit , a decentralized...
Nov 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going . Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics , an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute , Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) , Technical Director of The Database of Rel...
Nov 17, 2023•2 hr 40 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about what he memorably calls the crisis of the 23rd century . Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because of scholars like Eric Cline , today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding everything from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia was torn apart by climate change and ...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep 159•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist, Steinn Sigurdsson . Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the ScienceBlogs website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed Dynamic of the Cats blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Originally from Iceland, Sigurdsson’s professional accomplishments have been wide-ranging, from serving as sci...
Nov 06, 2023•59 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark , a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022 . Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History ...
Oct 29, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep 157•Transcript available on Metacast We’re about a generation into the “age of genomics,” or as it’s sometimes termed the “post-genomic era.” Today Razib talks to John Logsdon , a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled “ Genome Evolution ” to the Princeton Guide to Evolution . Razib uses this mid-2010s...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 156•Transcript available on Metacast Yesterday , Razib discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . While Hanania’s focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal , you know ...
Oct 15, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib , Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack ), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack ) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack ) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, whic...
Oct 14, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics , two months after Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . Both these books tackle the same issue: the US’s Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the “ Great Awokening ” in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we release th...
Oct 08, 2023•48 min•Ep 153•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... For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid . Check them out at orchidhealth.com . Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future , The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purity test: ...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep 152•Transcript available on Metacast In the US, roughly 1 in 33 infants are born with a congenital disability, about 25 % of which have an identified genetic cause. For the first time ,, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variants and mitigate their baby’s disease risk. Check out orchidhealth.com , and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist. What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Ori...
Oct 01, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony , emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age ...
Sep 24, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel , host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science . An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s The ...
Sep 15, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee . Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn , The Washington Examiner , The American Mind , Tablet Magazine and UnHerd . She has also recently written a piece for Compact : Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter . But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going ba...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 148•Transcript available on Metacast Today Razib talks to Inez Stepman , a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum , a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a senior contributor to The Federalist . Stepman also hosts two podcasts, High Noon and Clown Car . She and Razib first discuss the current distress, both economic and cultural, in higher education as several decades of bloat, inflation-beating cost increases and political radicalism run up against their natural limits. Stepman’s recent policy report, T...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 147•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. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark , a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre . First, Razib and Clark talk about the...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 146•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics’ modern basis in R. A. Fisher’s 1918 ...
Sep 03, 2023•2 hr 6 min•Ep 145•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aporia Magazine’s Diana Fleischman , an evolutionary psychologist who earned her Ph.D. in David Buss’ lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Fleischman discusses the origins of her field, its methodological framework and presuppositions, and why evolutionary psychologists seem obsessed with sex. Razib also brings up the relationship of evolutionary psychology to primatology and the role that behavioral studies of common chimpanzees and b...
Aug 30, 2023•54 min•Ep 144•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. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nicola Buskirk of Elessar Books (see her Substack ). A 2022 graduate of Stanford University, Buskirk has already had positions at Substack (she was behind the At Length series ), Thiel Foundation, Hoover Institution and now, Protocol Labs. At Elessar she is “putting long out-of-print books back into print so that th...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 143•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. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Hannah Frankman about the past, present and future of education. Frankman is a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education , the founder of Rebel Educator , and the host of an eponymous podcast ( Spotify , Apple and YouTube ). Education as a discipline has been a human concern since Plato outlined...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 142•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. Today Razib talks to Lyman Stone , a demographer and Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, about the fall, rise and fall of religion in America. In 2020, Stone published a report, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline , where he outlined the demographic and religious history of the US, and its possible future. They first cover the ...
Aug 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 141•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. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack), for the second episode of the “Intellectual Brown Web” (here’s episode #1). Razib, Haider, Ham...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 140•Transcript available on Metacast In the fall of 2022 Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US’s 1980’s program of “ Reaganomics ” that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an intervention from the Bank of England . In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodically forgets that it’s the not US, it’s not the largest economy in the world and the pound sterling is no...
Aug 04, 2023•2 hr 33 min•Ep 139•Transcript available on Metacast 
