Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/
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Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web
05/30/2025
Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication , founded in 2022. Winegard and Carl are both former academics. Winegard has a social psychology Ph.D. from Florida State University, and was an assistant professor at Marietta College. He was an editor at before moving to Aporia. Carl earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Oxford University. He was a research fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, before becoming a contributor to The Daily Skeptic and UnHerd, and a managing editor at Aporia. First, Razib asks Winegard and Carl about their respective cancellations, and the recent attacks on Aporia from the British media in particular. Winegard observes that many of the criticisms were muddled, as journalists struggled to get basic facts straight about who did what, as well as mixing up present associations among various editors with past ones. The two also address the change in the culture over the last few years, as cancellations seem to have lost some of their bite. Then Razib asks Winegard about the perception that Aporia is fixated on the third-rail of American culture: race and IQ, and its relevance to social policy and politics. Winegard talks about how he has long since said everything he has to say on the topic, but he still finds that the public conversation fails to address the possibility of cognitive differences between populations, and so keeps finding himself wading back in, to fill a gap in the discourse. Razib also asks the editors about their view of “,” which attempts to explain the higher IQs of temperate zone populations versus tropical ones. Then they discuss the disappointments of the MAGA movement, and its appeal to populist emotion. Winegard had hoped that despite its inchoate nature, it might have been able to pare back the radical excesses of the progressive cultural changes of the 2010’s, but now he worries that overreach may up the chances that woke policies make a comeback with the inevitable political backlash in the next few years. Winegard also addresses his personal souring on reflexive anti-wokism, and Carl shares his own views from across the Atlantic, where Britain appears to follow in the US’ footsteps, even if from an entirely different social-historical context. Winegard discusses the difficulties of maintaining a consistent heterodoxy in the face of tribalistic demands for conformity. Finally, they discuss the path forward for publications like Aporia that do not toe any particular party line.
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Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution
05/24/2025
Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution
Today Razib talks to , a on Unsupervised Learning. Lee hosts . Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for , , and . He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from to the state of . But one of the major areas he has focused on is . With expansion of Waymo to , and this June’s debut of Tesla’s robotaxis, Razib wanted to talk to Lee about the state of the industry. They discuss the controversies relating to safety and self-driving cars. Is it true, as some research suggests, that Waymo and self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars? What about the Waymos have been implicated in? Is it true that they were actually due to human error and recklessness, rather than the self-driving cars themselves? Lee also contrasts the different companies’ strategies in the sector, from Waymo to Zoox to Tesla. Razib also asks him about the fact that self-driving cars’ imminent arrival seems to have been overhyped five years ago, with Andrew Yang predicting trucker mass unemployment, to the reality that Waymo has now surpassed Lyft in ride volume in San Francisco. They also discuss the limitations of self-driving cars in terms of their ability to navigate cities and regions where snow might be a major impediment, and why there has been a delay in their expansion to freeway routes.
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Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania
05/21/2025
Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania
This podcast accompanies my post . The two preprints at the heart of this post are, and .
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Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans
05/17/2025
Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans
Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming . A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for,,,, and. Spinney is the author of two novels, and , and a collection of oral history in French from Lausanne entitled Rue Centrale. In 2017, she published , an account of the. She also translated Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel into English. Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University and did a journalism residency at Berlin’s Planck Institute. First, Razib asks Spinney how difficult it was to integrate archaeology, linguistics and paleogenetics into her narrative in , which traces the rise and proliferation of Indo-European languages from its ancestral proto-Indo-European. She talks about why this was the time to write a book like this for a general audience, as paleogenetics has revolutionized our understanding of recent prehistory, and in particular the questions around the origin of the Indo-Europeans. Razib and Spinney talk about various scenarios that have been bandied about for decades, for example, the arguments between linguistics and archaeologists whether proto-Indo-European was from the steppe or had an Anatolian homeland, and the exact relationship of the Hittites and their language to other Indo-European branches. They also delve into how genetics has helped shed light on deeper connections between some branches, like Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, or Greek and Armenian. Spinney also addresses how writing a book like involves placing fields like historical linguistics and archaeology with charged political associations in their proper historical context
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Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster
05/11/2025
Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster
Today, Razib talks about a new paper, : Understanding the history of admixture events and population size changes leading to modern humans is central to human evolutionary genetics. Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split and rejoin, and demonstrate its application on simulated and real data across multiple species. Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans.
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John Sailer: a time of troubles in higher education
05/10/2025
John Sailer: a time of troubles in higher education
On this episode of the podcast Razib talks to John Sailer. Sailer is currently the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He covers issues of academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education. Sailer has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master’s degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College. Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute, he was a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars. Following on last week’s podcast with , Razib continues to discuss the rise and fall of woke politics in academia, and the current backlash exploding out of the Trump administration. Sailer discusses his previous work back to 2020 showing how blatant universities became in their discriminatory policies against white males in particular, and how easy it was to demonstrate this dynamic with even the most minimal level of due diligence like freedom of information requests. They also discuss the reality that universities are attempting to adjust to a new landscape with the administration pressuring them to revoke DEI policies, while many faculty are urging that they instead dig in their heels. Higher education is adapting, but Sailer argues that since fundamental values have not changed, some evasion is to be expected.
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Jacob Shell: academia must diversify or die
05/02/2025
Jacob Shell: academia must diversify or die
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to . Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of , and the . Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politicization of the academy. The conversation begins with Shell’s piece in Compact Magazine, . The more than 3,000-word essay argues that academia must diversify ideologically to save itself, but also engage in a wider range of scholarship. Shell points out that US academia has become an ideological monoculture, with an overwhelming dominance of left-leaning faculty, especially at elite institutions. This imbalance, driven by extreme partisan ratios in fields like anthropology, leaves universities politically vulnerable and out of step with the broader public. He challenges the common view that this trend is due to self-selection, or the “pipeline problem,” suggesting instead that informal screening mechanisms discourage or exclude conservative scholars. Shell also argues that the grant system encourages conformity and limits academic freedom. More audaciously, he argues that some academics should be singled out by their peers, whether through their institution or professional organizations,t when they engage in politically motivated misrepresentation of their scholarship. Ultimately, Shell insists that academia’s unique role in public life is to observe and understand the world, not to risk co-option as an arm of any political movement.
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Matt Welch: from blog pioneer to podcasting mainstay
04/30/2025
Matt Welch: from blog pioneer to podcasting mainstay
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to . He co-founded the Prague-based newspaper Prognosis in the early 1990’s and later worked as an opinion section editor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2008-2016, Welch served as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, where he currently holds the position of editor-at-large. He co-authored and wrote . Today, Welch co-hosts podcast with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan. Razib and Welch first go back to his days in Eastern Europe, and how they shaped his views on foreign policy, making him somewhat heterodox for someone whose primary political inclinations favor libertarianism. Welch discusses how wild, hopeful and chaotic the 1990’s were in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of Communism. He also argues that these nations had strong historic and contemporary geopolitical reasons to fear the former Soviet Union, and so pushed for the eastward expansion of NATO. Razib makes the Russian case that its turn away from the West in the 2000’s was in response to America’s strategy of encirclement, but Welch dismisses this as Russian revisionism. He believes that at the end of the day Soviet-era elites retained an imperial attitude toward Eastern and Central Europe rooted in a centuries-long assumption of Russian hegemonic status in the region. Next, retreating from abstruse foreign policy, Razib and Welch discuss the early days of the blogosphere, in 2001/2002. Then, Welch coined the term “warblogger,” and envisaged a scenario where post-partisan citizen-journalists would play an essential role in the information ecosystem of the 21st century. He discusses his disappointment with the reemergence of partisanship within the blogosphere, as well as the disappointments of post-9/11 interventionism. Welch also talks about the Tea Party, and its connection, and ultimate disconnect, from libertarianism. They also discuss how the Tea Party energy was eventually transferred to the ideologically heterodox and often anti-libertarian Trump movement. Finally, Welch talks about his latest primary venture, the successful The Fifth Column podcast. Razib asks if the current age of podcasting is analogous to the early blogosphere. Welch talks about how organically and gradually The Fifth Column came into being, and the growing pains with greater professionalization. He also addresses their future on The Fifth Column, with a new shift toward video, while continuing the informal and candid nature of the discussions.
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Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara
04/30/2025
Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib comments on a new paper in Nature,. Here is the abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from two approximately 7,000-year-old Pastoral Neolithic female individuals buried in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya. The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco2, associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. Takarkori and Iberomaurusian-associated individuals are equally distantly related to sub-Saharan lineages, suggesting limited gene flow from sub-Saharan to Northern Africa during the AHP. In contrast to Taforalt individuals, who have half the Neanderthal admixture of non-Africans, Takarkori shows ten times less Neanderthal ancestry than Levantine farmers, yet significantly more than contemporary sub-Saharan genomes. Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.
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Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology
04/23/2025
Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to , co-founder of . An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of the class of winter 2016. Before becoming a founder, Song worked at firms involved in data analytics and artificial intelligence. A repeat attendee at the Founders Fund “Hereticon” conference, Song’s company has been profiled , and . Razib and Song first talk about the current state of climate, or more precisely, climate change and anthropogenic global warming. Song argues that the emission-reduction strategy has fundamentally failed, and global warming is inevitable absent a drastic strategy shift. Enter geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth. In the context of global warming Song proposes that humans engage in proactive efforts to cool the world. His company, along with a similar Israeli startup, proposes to introduce particulate matter into the stratosphere to reflect back some of the sun’s radiation. Razib asks Song what the reaction has been, given that the atmosphere is a public resource, and how he proposes to eventually make it a revenue-generating business through government contracts. More generally, Razib and Song talk about other geoengineering projects, including dream of increasing precipitation through his Rainmaker firm.
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Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025
04/17/2025
Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025
Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua’s pieces and commentary have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other outlets. She holds a master’s of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris’ Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is . Razib and Riboua discuss the Trump administration’s theory of tariffs as a tool of foreign policy and his attitudes toward multilateral diplomacy. They explore whether any principle beyond power and dominance underlies the current administration’s approach, and consider the role of principles and values in foreign policy. Riboua elaborates a realist perspective in line with the thinking of Henry Kissinger. States have interests and abilities to execute on those interests; idealism is secondary. Riboua also discusses the fact that Trump seems attuned to how foreign politicians relate to the American domestic scene. He seems willing to punish those abroad whom he perceives to be favorable to his political enemies and reward those who are personally favorable toward him. Razib then asks Riboua about the geopolitics of her native Morocco, a relatively stable monarchy on northwest Africa’s edge that has promoted moderate Islam, a good relationship with Europe and maintained a stable democracy.
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Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future
04/06/2025
Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Mark Lutter. Lutter is an urban development expert known for his work on charter cities—new urban areas aimed at fostering economic growth and progress. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to building the ecosystem for charter cities, as well as the CEO of Braavos Cities, a charter city development company. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests span progress studies, governance, social dynamics and institution-building, with a belief that creating new cities can spark cultural and economic advancements similar to historical periods like the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age. He has been published or quoted in outlets like the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and The Chicago Tribune. Lutter and Razib discuss diverse topics, from the difficulties of the Prospera project in Honduras, to the possibility of developing San Francisco’s Presidio into an Asian-style super-city. They explore the various pitfalls and possibilities faced when attempting to create new jurisdictions in developing nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, along with the major obstacles to urban innovation in the USA. Lutter outlines the economic case for charter cities, along with the normative values that undergird their creation as bastions of liberty and laboratories of cultural experimentation. Finally, they discuss the Trump administration’s openness to the idea of the “Freedom City” in the Presidio, along with local opposition to the project.
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Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right
03/28/2025
Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Graeme Wood. Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he usually covers geopolitics and international affairs. His work ranges from a profile of , the American white nationalist public figure with whom he went to high school with, to the . He is the author of . Wood grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Harvard College. He also studied at the American University in Cairo, Indiana University and Deep Springs College. Today Razib talks to Wood about his piece in The Atlantic, . Wood addresses the economic malaise of contemporary Germany, in particular, the former East Germany, and how that is impacting the national cultural climate. More concretely, they consider why the right-wing Alternative For Deutschland (AFD) party is so popular, and its transformation from an anti-EU party to an anti-migrant party. Wood emphasizes that Germany has become a highly polarized society when it comes to ethnicities, with very cosmopolitan cities, but small towns in rural eastern provinces where he recalls feeling like possibly the only non-white face at the local beer hall (his father is a white American while his mother is ethnically Chinese). Razib muses whether German multiculturalism as an ideology has allowed for more, not less racism, while Wood reflects on his multi-decade experience visiting the nation as an outsider.
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Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA cultural hegemony
03/23/2025
Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA cultural hegemony
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back to the podcast for his . Woodhouse is a journalist and documentarian based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept, UnHerd and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, . He hosts with . Woodhouse was a major left-wing critic of the excesses of woke culture, and now he has turned his skeptical eye upon the regnant MAGA cultural political complex. In posts like and Woodhouse observes how the Trump administration seems to have turned its back on the “working-class politics” espoused by J. D. Vance in favor of the sort of free-market libertarianism preferred by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Razib outlines the divisions in the Trump administration between Steve Bannon and the tech-globalists around Musk, and how these divisions explain online discord. Woodhouse though argues that Trump has clearly sided with Musk, allowing the government to be captured by monied interests that will profit from the military-industrial complex. He also argues that MAGA in power shows the same tendency of the woke movement in terms of clamping down on free speech now that the Right is ascendant. Woodhouse argues that the Right is now using the same tools of cultural hegemony that the woke Left used before 2024. He argues that institutional politicization today is very similar to the dynamic he saw before 2024 on the part of the woke Left.
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Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1
03/15/2025
Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , a , dietitian and . Klatt holds a BA in biological anthropology from Temple University and a PhD in Molecular Nutrition from Cornell University. Before a current appointment as a research scientist at UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. Klatt’s primary platform to communicate about nutrition, health and molecular biology is his . He is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Recently Klatt has about the “MAHA” pivot, “Make America Healthy Again,” driven by RFK Jr.’s appointment as head of Health and Human Sciences. Razib and Klatt talk about new directions driven by RFK Jr.'s focus on preventative health and skepticism of pharmaceuticals. Klatt points out that the past two decades have seen a massive shift away from funding nutritional studies, in contrast to the massive budgets of big pharma. He argues that we now really find ourselves without enough information to outline a public health policy given the underfunding of nutritional cohort studies. If MAHA is going to be a serious movement, it needs to drive a reallocation of funds. Razib and Klatt also touch on the cultural shift over the last decade on the Right, where something like “raw milk” switched from being coded as left-wing to being squarely right-wing. They also consider mounting skepticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccination, that seems to be associated with MAHA and in particular RFK Jr. Klatt also addresses the role that are having in driving down obesity rates in the USA, and how pervasive their use might be in the near future.
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Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene
03/10/2025
Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, friend of the podcast, returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970’s. He is the author of , , , , and and , among others. Born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has held positions at the American Institutions for Research, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. More than four years after their , and seven years after his official retirement, Murray reflects with Razib on where he sees America going in the next decade, and what has surprised him about the last 25 years. Razib asks what it is like to be a long-standing “Never Trump conservative” and a libertarian in Trump’s populist America. They also discuss the end of the “awokening” that began in the mid-2010s, and whether Murray’s long exile from notice and acknowledgement from mainstream opinion-leaders and tastemakers is at an end. Murray also addresses the ideological fractures he sees on the right, and how America will deal with the last generation of mass immigration that has altered the US’ demographic balance. They also discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.
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Titus Techera: Post-Modern Conservative in a post-national Europe
03/04/2025
Titus Techera: Post-Modern Conservative in a post-national Europe
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to , a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack . Techera also hosts a for the American Cinema Foundation. Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 that was overturned by the courts over accusations of Russian interference. Techera explains the social and cultural context of the candidate initially declared victorious against a backdrop of Romanian society’s typical stock characters. Techera also discusses the tension between having a nation-state with a distinctive character and becoming part of the broader EU project that is attempting to forge unity across 27 countries. He then addresses what a “Postmodern Conservative” is in the context of the arts. Perhaps most importantly, PostModern Conservatives take the 20th century and the modernist period seriously; they are not simply reactionaries who want to return to the 19th century. Conservatives who value the arts and culture cannot simply roll the tape back; they have to engage with what has come before. Razib and Techera also consider how inferences from the sciences, like the rejection of the “blank slate,” might influence the arts. They also discuss their disagreements about the latest Dune films, Techera prefers David Lynch’s attempt to adapt the book in 1984 to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version.
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Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars
03/03/2025
Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to about his new book, . A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms to behavioral ecology. He is also the author of and . Lents reached out to Razib after hearing his podcast with , about his book . Lents felt that Carroll overemphasized the role of monogamy during humanity’s long forager phase, and more precisely, failed to distinguish social monogamy and genetic monogamy. As noted in , many socially monogamous species, like most birds, engage in enough extra-pair copulation so that genetic fidelity is considerably lower than 100%. Razib and Lents then go back to first principles, talking about the origins of sex, and its persistence in the face of the in dimorphous organisms. They discuss why specialized males and females exist in complex organisms as distinct as flowering plants and humans. Lents also discusses the reviews empirical literature on homosexual behavior, variation in sex differences across many classes of organisms and the application of evolutionary thinking to our understanding of the human past. Then they discuss the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding the human present, and our current debates about marriage, sex and gender. Finally, they consider the differences between sex and gender, and the idea that both can be conceptualized in a nonbinary fashion.
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Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later
02/27/2025
Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later
Today Razib talks to , reporter at . Regalado covers how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining MIT Technology Review in 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. From 2000 to 2009, he was a science reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. Among the many stories Regalado has broken was the prenatal sequencing of in 2014, but on this episode they talk about another scoop: his 2018 reporting on the (listen to a podcast on the topic with Regalado on ). Starting in 2024, the scientist who led the 2018 gene-editing of two babies in China, He Jiankui, seemed to embrace a new role as self-appointed social media and oracle, mostly about his own future. Regalado talks about what he thinks the Chinese scientist is up to, where the field of CRISPR-gene editing is at present and where it is going. Razib and Regalado also discuss the rise and fall, and future prospects, of CRISPR biotech startups attempting to develop therapies that deploy gene-editing. Regalado also muses on the emergence of companies that provide genomic technologies and services like embryo screening in the “gray market” away from public view.
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Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before)
02/27/2025
Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before)
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of . Former editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, The Spectator, The National Interest and Reason. McCarthy also helped run communications for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign and was a senior editor at ISI Books. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Washington University in St. Louis. First, Razib and McCarthy discuss the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and the realignment of coalitions on both right and left, and what these realignments might presage for both parties’ future. McCarthy also outlines the long march of anti-war conservatives who organized themselves around The American Conservative in the first George W. Bush term, their eventual move into the mainstream and poll position in the discourse under Donald Trump. Razib asks about the origins of modern conservatism’s divisions, going back to William F. Buckley’s founding of National Review in the 1950’s. McCarthy also talks about Russell Kirk’s role in the development of post-World War II conservatism, which included the founding of Modern Age, a more intellectual and philosophical publication than National Review. Razib asks McCarthy how the Right will evolve in a changing America, with a diminishing white majority and a more post-Christian mainstream. This episode is live on Substack 14 days before it premieres on Youtube. For early access, feel free to explore it there. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/daniel-mccarthy-american-conservatism
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Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports
02/20/2025
Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to, a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint, . Souaiaia trained as a computational biologist at USC, but also has a background as a division I track and field athlete. Razib and Souaiaia discuss what “genetic architecture” means, and consider what we're finding when we look at extreme trait values in characteristics along a normal distribution. Though traits like height or risk for type II diabetes can be thought of as represented by an idealized Gaussian distribution, real molecular and cellular processes still underlie their phenotypic expression. Souaiaia talks about how genomics has resulted in an influx of data and allowed statistical geneticists with a theoretical bent to actually test some of the models that underpin our understanding of traits and examine how models like mutation-selection balance might differ from what we’ve long expected. After wading through the depths of genetic abstraction and how it intersects with the new age of big data, Razib and Souaiaia talk about race and sports, and whether there might be differences between groups in athletic ability. Souaiaia argues that the underlying historical track record is too variable to draw firm conclusions, while Razib argues that there are theoretical reasons that one should expect differences between groups at the tails and even around the memes.
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Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America
02/12/2025
Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Washington Post Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an , co-host of the podcast and website, and now the author of his own and a recent book, . Hamid is also the author of and . Hamid and Razib discuss the tail end of the war in Gaza, from the explosion of 10/7 and the wave of atrocities against Israelis surrounding the Palestinian enclave, to the brutal counter-attack that has resulted in tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths. While Hamid points to the deep structural issues that divide the two parties, and make final resolution of the conflict difficult, Razib highlights the many pitfalls of third parties becoming involved in such a highly polarized and fraught topic. They also discuss the growing identification of the global Left, including American progressives, with the Palestinian cause, the difficulties of grappling with and containing anti-Semitism within the movement. Though Israel’s counter-offensive is finally reaching a denouement, Hamid strikes a fundamentally pessimistic note about long-term possibilities. Then they pivot to domestic politics, and recent cultural trends that culminated in a Trump victory in the 2024 USelection, and the alienation of many nonwhites in the Democratic coalition from the hegemony of woke cultural elites. Hamid reiterates his long-standing critiques of racial identitarianism on the Left, and the irony that the progressive awareness of racial minorities only tends to extend to them when these minorities cosign woke nostrums. In contrast to the seemingly interminable nature of the conflict in the Middle East, Razib and Hamid both see hope for a path forward with reduced racial polarization and a reorientation of politics around substantive material interests rather than symbolic racial or ethnic categories.
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Conn Carroll: Sex and the Citizen
02/07/2025
Conn Carroll: Sex and the Citizen
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , the author of . Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner, but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal. Carroll wrote in response to what he felt was misleading and biased reporting in the mainstream media on the origins and implications of marriage and monogamy. Razib asks Carroll how he refutes the ideas presented in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s , which argues that prehistoric humans were non-monogamous. Carroll outlines the current mainstream thinking in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and all the biological reasons that indicate that Homo sapiens is far more monogamous than our common chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, most clearly in our reduced sexual dimorphism. But while our hunter-gatherer past was defined by monogamy, argues that the rise of agriculture resulted in the explosion of polygamy, as high status males in societies defined by incredible inequality began to monopolize access to women, culminating in the explosion of Y chromosomal “star phylogenies,” where supermale lineages exploded all over Eurasian 4,000 years ago. Carroll then explains that the Romans and Greeks took steps toward enforcing monogamy as a legal institution, and Christianity introduced the idea of sexual fidelity upon men. After Christianity popularized egalitarian monogamous marriage, follows in Joe Henrich’s wake in . Carroll discusses the Catholic Church’s strict policies on incest and adoption, which destroyed the power of elite related clans in the West, and hastened the emergence of the Western European marriage norm of independent and separate nuclear families, rather than extended families as the primary unit of kinship in society. In the second half of Carroll addresses the social history and policy changes in relation to marriage in the US. While Western European societies took a significant step away from familialism, Carroll explains that American marriage was even more individualistic and radical, as nuclear families spread out to the frontier, away from their extended kin networks. He also contextualizes the rise of the 1950’s nuclear family, which some scholars have argued was an aberration in American history. Carroll argues that actually it was an extension of earlier American norms, but the rise of the wage-based capitalist economy allowed for couples to set up separate households earlier in their lives. Carroll concludes the discussion outlining the 1970’s policy changes in welfare provision that discouraged marriage, noting the decline of the institution across American society over the last 60 years, and how government policy might reverse it.
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Dan Hess: the fertility collapse
01/29/2025
Dan Hess: the fertility collapse
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years. Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrupt cultural pivot that has occurred since the turn of the century, with the end of the “overpopulation” narrative typified by Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb, the rise of the “birth dearth” and the natalist movement. They talk about the most extreme cases of low total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe and East Asia, but also the decline in societies like the US, Latin America and the Middle East. Hess addresses both possible causes and possible solutions. They also discuss historical and demographic factors that impact fertility; for example, which religions have been the most pro-natalist? Hess also puts a particular focus on South Korea, the world’s most extreme case of a sharp decrease, with a TFR of about 0.70 children per woman (vs. 2.1 replacement), as well as exceptions to the rule like Haredi Jews and the Amish. Finally, Razib and Hess tackle why we should care about slower population growth in this century, from to the impact on cultural vitality.
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Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek
01/29/2025
Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , who writes at the Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the , a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also makes the case that increasing scaling has started to hit diminishing returns, and the expectation that artificial intelligence will continue to gain power purely through throwing more resources at the same problems. Then, they discuss the revolutionary impact of the recent advances DeepSeek has made in China (an issue he addresses on his ). Chau breaks down the technological nuts and bolts, as well as geopolitical and economic consequences.
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John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits
01/26/2025
John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under , and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored and with Lee Berger. Razib first presses Hawks on what we know about archaic human admixture into modern populations, and particularly what we’ve learned about Denisovans. They discuss how many Denisovan populations there were, how many Denisovan fossil remains we have, and why it has taken so long for researchers to assign a species name to this lineage of humans. Hawks also address the puzzle of the phenomenon of why there are at least two pygmy hominin populations in Southeast Asia. Perhaps humans too are subject to island dwarfism like many other mammals? Also, Razib wonders why Southeast Asia was home to such a startling variety of humans at once prior to the arrival of modern populations. They discuss all of this in light of the framework of Out-of-Africa, the recent spread of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa. Razib questions how robust this model is today given our understanding of modern humans’ extensive and repeated interactions with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally, Hawks covers some controversies over fossils being sent into space that the archaeological world last year.
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David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024
01/23/2025
David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024
Three years ago came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, . Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech. Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension. Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering
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In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware
01/20/2025
In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware
On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint , which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s , and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in . Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.
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Megan McArdle: American food culture, artisanal to industrial
01/17/2025
Megan McArdle: American food culture, artisanal to industrial
This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to , of and Washington Post member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A pioneering blogger based out of New York City and covering the site of the WTC in the wake of 9/11, McArdle went on to work at The Economist, The Atlantic and Newsweek. In this episode, the discussion largely focuses on McArdle’s research about the cultural history of food and cooking in the US. But first they discuss the economic implications of Donald Trump’s election, and the domestic consequences shifting toward a tariff-heavy trade regime. McArdle lays out the case that a massive tariff would have the same impact as a tax, not to mention the broad disruptive economic effects on large companies’ supply chains. Then they move on to the changes in American cuisine over the last few centuries, and the shifts driven by technology and innovation. McArdle points out that in the 19th century, gelatin dessert was a luxury and an exotic treat because it was labor intensive to prepare. But by the middle of the 20th century industrial-scale food processing made gelatin, in particular Jell-o, a cheap commodity, and it became associated with the lower classes. Similarly, before factory farming, chicken and eggs were more expensive than red meat, and thus viewed as high-end ingredient (whereas today, chicken is far cheaper than beef). Finally Razib and McArdle talk about how the plentitude of food available in the 21st century contributes to the obesity epidemic that has only its relentless expansion with the advent of Ozempic.
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Nikolai Yakovenko: the Singularity is not here
01/14/2025
Nikolai Yakovenko: the Singularity is not here
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib catches up with about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional ,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of , an AI-driven news startup that leverages OpenAI’s latest model. Full disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company. Razib and Yakovenko first review what makes the last few years special, the rise of large-language-models on top of neural network architecture of transformers. Yakovenkoi discusses how far they’ve come since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in the fall of 2022, and how people have been using the underlying technology to develop applications atop it. Despite predictions of mass unemployment, Razib points out that two years later America is at full employment, and only niche fields like translation have been impacted. In contrast, Yakovenko points out that most software developers use artificial intelligence in some form to aid in their daily engineering work, noting the possibility that the AI revolution is integrating itself seamlessly as a utility for preexistent jobs. They also discuss the fact that though AI is a booming field, only one brand-name company has so far emerged in the industry, OpenAI. Though they agree that the current hype cycle is now abating, it is clear that the major investments in the field like data centers will continue from major players as AI-driven applications like self-driving cars become more and more mainstream.
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