On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to archeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins about his 2005 book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization . Ward-Perkins was born and grew up in Rome, a son of architectural historian and archaeologist, John Bryan Ward-Perkins. Educated at Oxford University, Ward-Perkins eventually became a fellow of Trinity College at the same university, from which he has since retired. An archaeologist with a deep interest in economic history, Ward...
Aug 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 196•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a returning guest , J. P. Mallory, to discuss his reaction to the recent preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans . Mallory is the author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth , The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West . He is also a retired professor from Queen’s Univ...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 195•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to professor Sean Anthony about his book Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam . Anthony is a historian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. with honors in 2009 at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and has a mastery of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, French, and German. Anthony’s interests are broadly religion and...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep 194•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nikolai Yakovenko , a returning guest to the podcast , about his new AI startup, DeepNewz , and the state of the LLM -driven AI landscape circa the summer of 2024, where we are in relation to earlier expectations and where we might be in the next decade. Yakovenko is an AI researcher who has worked at Google, Twitter and Nvidia, and is now a serial entrepreneur. He is also a competitive poker player. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, th...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep 193•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Chad Niederhuth, an erstwhile academic plant geneticist now working in industry. Niederhuth and Razib discuss the reality that in 2024 it is often human genetics that gets the glory, even though experiments on plants go back to the field’s very origins with Gregor Mendel and his peas . Niederhuth’s original training is in molecular genetics, and they discuss the relevance of differences in basic biological machinery between plants and anima...
Jun 23, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 192•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jonathan Keeperman, an former lecturer in writing at UC Irvine and proprietor of Passage Press . Keeperman also posts on the internet under what was until recently an anonymous pseudonym, Lomez . Unlike many anonymous accounts on X, “Lomez” developed a decade-long identity, to the point where Keeperman wrote articles under that name for publications like First Things , The Federalist and The American Mind . Razib and Keeperman talk about wh...
Jun 16, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep 191•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about religion with Ryan Burge , professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University , and author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America . Burge also has a Substack, Graphs about Religion , where he posts the latest data on trends in American society. First, Razib asks Burge to outline the wave of secularization that has impacted American society ...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 190•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the idea of “lost civilizations,” the possibility that there were complex societies during the Pleistocene Ice Age. This topic recently rose to salience after a dialogue between writer Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Hancock is a longtime guest on Rogan’s show and he promotes a theory that an advanced “lost civilization” during the Ice Age left remnants of its culture across the world, for example the ...
May 31, 2024•53 min•Ep 189•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Akshar Patel of The Emissary about his recent sojourn in India. Patel began The Emissary because he felt there were many gaps in the media representation of India. Razib asks whether The New York Times’ claim that Modi is a strongman is correct, and whether India is an illiberal democracy. Patel notes that despite a Westernized super-elite embedded in global Left politics, India is fundamentally a conservative society where communal identit...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep 188•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jeremy Carl , Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he focuses on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America. Previously, Carl was a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he analyzed and wrote about energy policy. He has BA with distinction from Yale University and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Today Carl talks about his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-W...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep 187•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about the April 2024 preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans . This blockbuster publication introduces nearly 300 new ancient DNA samples, uncovers the origins of the Yamnaya , and delves into how they transformed the genetic and cultural landscape of Eurasia ~5,000 years ago. Razib addresses: The now-identified ancestors of the Yamnaya The genetic landscape between the Dnieper, Volga and Caucasus before the Yamnaya and that region’s...
May 14, 2024•39 min•Ep 186•Transcript available on Metacast On this unusual “from the vault” episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to John Massey, a retired Australian engineer who has been a long-time correspondent. Massey and Razib recorded this podcast in the spring of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Australia and China were enacting strict lockdowns to halt the spread of the virus, while the US and Europe were already taking a more relaxed approach. Though the conversation is a bit of a temporal rewind, back to a ...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 185•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Colin Wright, a returning guest, host of the Reality’s Last Stand Substack and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before digging deep into the biology of sex and the cultural politics of gender ideology, Razib and Wright touch on what’s been happening to Jonathan Pruitt, Wright’s erstwhile advisor. He was accused of academic fraud in 2019, and dozens of papers where Pruitt was the primary contributor of data had to be retracted. Notably, ...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Ep 184•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to George Washington University archaeologist Eric Cline . The author of 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed , Cline has a new book out, After 1177 B.C. - The Survival of Civilizations . While 1177 B.C. closed with the end of the first global civilization, that of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, After 1177 B.C. tells the story of those who picked up the pieces. But first Cline and Razib talk about the popular ap...
Apr 24, 2024•2 hr 35 min•Ep 183•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Kristian Kristiansen , an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg and affiliate professor at the Lundbech Center for Geogenetics, Copenhagen University. A past guest on this podcast , Kristiansen has recently contributed to an astonishing lineup of landmark papers published in Nature just in the last few months, Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia , Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastora...
Apr 16, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast Today on Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to long-time podcast favorite Samo Burja . Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis and Bismarck Brief , a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation and The Foresight Institute . He is also now the chair of the editorial board of Palladium Magazine . Already a four-time guest on Unsupervised Learning (he has previously shared his views on China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past , his role at Bismarck Analysis and geopolitical uncerta...
Apr 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 181•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Steve Hsu , physicist, entrepreneur and public intellectual. Hsu is an Iowan who earned his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his Ph.D. from Berkeley. Later he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before moving on to professorships at Yale and the University of Oregon, and finally settling down at Michigan State University in 2012. Hsu is founder of Safeweb and Genomic Prediction, and his current focus is on a new AI startup. Between 2012 and 2...
Mar 30, 2024•2 hr 34 min•Ep 180•Transcript available on Metacast Today Razib talks to Murtaza Hussain about the social, cultural and political context of recent fissures in the US around the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept and has his own Substack . They begin their conversation talking about Hussain’s response to the 10/7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Hussain discusses his bewilderment and disappointment at some commentators who he saw being knee-jerk and tribalistic in their response. ...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 179•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer . Affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London, Stringer is the author of African Exodus. The Origins of Modern Humanity , Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth and Homo Britannicus - The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain . A proponent since the 1970’s of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our sp...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep 178•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Zoe Booth and Iona Italia . Booth is community engagement officer and Italia is managing editor at Quillette . An Australian, Booth has degrees in French, Politics and Law from the University of Newcastle. Italia is an erstwhile academic of British nationality and mixed Parsi and Scottish heritage, with a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. She is the author of Our Tango World , former editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine an...
Mar 07, 2024•2 hr 45 min•Ep 177•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nick Cassimatis , erstwhile artificial intelligence researcher and currently an entrepreneur . Cassimatis has undergraduate and doctoral degrees in cognitive and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree in child psychology from Stanford. He studied for his Ph.D. under Marvin Minsky , arguably the most prominent and influential artificial intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th century...
Mar 03, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep 176•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about AI, the singularity and the post-human future, with James D. Miller , a Smith College economist , host of the podcast Future Strategist and the author of Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World . Miller and Razib first met at 2008’s “Singularity Summit” in San Jose, and though Singularity Rising was published in 2012, some of the ideas were already presented in earlier talks, including at...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 175•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Rob Henderson , author of the new book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class . Henderson is a commentator known for coining the term " luxury beliefs, " a tendency among elites to use their beliefs to signal social status, with real-life costs of those beliefs born by non-elites alone. Henderson grew up in California foster homes, before being adopted into a working-class family in Redding, CA. After an academically un...
Feb 22, 2024•2 hr 55 min•Ep 174•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Razib talks to Wilfred Reilly , political scientist, author and fearless cultural commentator . 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 discusses his ten-year diversion from academia, including his stints as a canvasser for the gay rights group the Human Rights Campaign and a corporate salesperson. A prolific public intellectual, Reilly is the a...
Feb 08, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 173•Transcript available on Metacast Today Razib talks to geneticist Erich Schwarz , a Research Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University since 2012. Schwarz has a molecular biology degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Caltech. After working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in graduate school, he switched to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans , and has continued studying nematodes ever since. After helping to found the C. elegans genome database WormBase ( wormbase.org ) in the e...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 172•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Razib talks to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz , author of Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions and Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are . Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Google and The New York Times , is a freelance data scientist and author. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in economics from Harvard. In this episode, he discusses his process of writing Who Makes the NBA? , which...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep 171•Transcript available on Metacast Do 20% of the men on dating apps get 80% of the dates? Is the Zoomer generation the sexless generation? What are the best predictors of relationship success? These are some of the questions Razib asks Alex of DatePsychology on this episode of Unsupervised Learning . A psychologist who studied cognitive and behavioral neuroscience in graduate school, Alex explores topics around dating on his YouTube channel and disseminates the latest research via his tweets (you can also subscribe to his newslet...
Jan 30, 2024•52 min•Ep 170•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David Lightbringer , a YouTube content creator who focuses on the world of The Game of Thrones and the mythologies of ancient peoples . Though Lightbringer writes essays , and distributes his thoughts via podcast (and you can also read his views in short-form on numerous topics via his tweets on X ), his primary platform is his YouTube channel . Lightbringer’s videos, range across topics as diverse as “ Harappans, Aryans, and the Bactria-Ma...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep 169•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his new paper, The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa . Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, African diaspora, transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Most recently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsala Unive...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr•Ep 168•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Cody Moser , co-author of a recent paper, Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality . Moser is an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results with the...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 166•Transcript available on Metacast 
