Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to  Ryan P. Williams . He is  president  of  The Claremont Institute , a position he has held since 2017. He is also a contributor to  The Claremont Review  of Books  and started  The American Mind .   Williams earned a B.A. in political science and Economics from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in politics from Claremont Graduate University.   He has taught American politics and p...

Chad Orzel  is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for nearly twenty-five years. He's the  author  of four books,  Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects ,  How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog ,  How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog ,  Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist  and  A Brief History of Timekeeping . The last is a mix of cultural and engi...

Recently, the new embryo-selection start-up  Herasight  has been  in the news , finally coming out of stealth. Part of the buzz is because of the public involvement of well-known geneticists and academics like  Alex Young  and  Joe Pickrell  in Herasight's algorithm development. Additionally,  Noor Siddiqi , the CEO of  Orchid , a competitor to Herasight (and onetime advertiser on this podcast), w...

On last week's episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib  spoke  with Alex Nowrestah, a vice president at the Cato Institute and a strong advocate for expanding legal immigration. This week, he turned to the other side of the debate with Jason Richwhine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies and a vocal supporter of sharply reducing immigration. Richwine earned undergraduate deg...

  Three years ago, Razib recorded  two   podcasts  with two immigration experts on different sides of the issue,  Alex Nowrestah  and  Jason Richwhine . While Nowrasteh, who works for the libertarian Cato Institute as Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies, supports higher levels of legal immigration, Richwine, a Resident Scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), favors l...

Today on  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  John Hawks , a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely read  weblog  (now on Substack), a book on  Homo naledi , and highly cited  scientific papers , Hawks is an essential voice in understanding the origins of our species. He graduated fro...

  Today Razib talks to  Noah Millman . Millman is an American screenwriter and filmmaker, as well as a political columnist and cultural critic based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the film and theater critic for  Modern Age ; previously he was a columnist for  The Week  (2015–2022) and a senior editor at  The American Conservative  (2012–2017). Millman writes the newsletter  Gideon's Substack , and...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to human geneticist  Cesar Fortes-Lima  about his paper from earlier this year,  Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel . Fortes-Lima has a Ph. D. in Biological Anthropology, and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade, demographic inferen...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Jack Despain Zhou , executive director of the  Center for Educational Progress  (CEP). Despain Zhou is a graduate of Western Governors University, and is completing his J.D. at Temple University. A former cryptographic analyst for the US Air Force, Despain Zhou is better known as a former producer for Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog at  Bloc...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , in the  wake of Elon Musk's xAI Grok chatbot  turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with  Nikolai Yakovenko  about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT's release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven...

Today on  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to David van Ofwegen, a philosophy teacher based in Thailand. Razib and Ofwegen first met by chance while he was traveling in the US in 2003. A Dutch national, educated at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and then the University of Hawaii, specializing in the philosophical underpinnings of Social Darwinism, Ofwegen has been based in Thailand...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to returning guest  Claire Lehmann . Lehmann has an undergraduate degrees in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide. She was enrolled in a graduate program in psychology, but left it after becoming disillusioned with moral relativism, she went on to found the online magazine  Quillette  to reflect a more traditionally pro-reaso...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to philosopher of science  Nathan Cofnas , whose specialty is biology and ethics. An American, Cofnas is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His...

Today Razib talks to repeat  guest  Steve Hsu about China, a topic with so many currently relevant dimensions gIven the PRC's clear emergence as an economic, military and political rival to the US. Hsu is a Caltech‑trained theoretical physicist who migrated from black holes to big data, co‑invented privacy tech at SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a...

Today Razib talks to David  Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph. D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and N...

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib welcomes back  Ethan Strauss , a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including in the book  The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty . More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack,  House of Strauss , which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination bet...

  Today Razib talks to  Manvir Singh  about shamanism, religion and anthropology. Singh is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. An  artist  and  essayist , he is also now a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like "witchc...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication  Aporia Magazine , 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  Quillette   before moving to  Aporia . Carl ear...

  Today Razib talks to  Tim Lee , a  previous   guest  on  Unsupervised Learning . Lee hosts  Understanding AI . Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for  Washington Post ,  Ars Technica , and  Vox.com . He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from  Deep Research's capabilities  to the state of  large language models . Bu...

  This podcast accompanies my post  Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia . The two preprints at the heart of this post are,  Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages  and  Steppe Ancestry in Western Eurasia and the Spread of the Germanic Languages .

  Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming  Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global . A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for   Nature ,   National Geographic ,   The Economist ,   New Scientist , and   The Guardian . Spinney is the author of two novels,  Doctor  and  The Quick , and a collection...

  Today, Razib talks about a new paper,  A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans : 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...

  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 ed...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Jacob Shell . Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of  Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals , and the  Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants . Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politiciza...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Matt Welch . 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  The Declaration of Independents: How...