Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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 supe...

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 G...

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 Ya...

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 alrea...

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,...

  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 11...

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 genomi...

  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...

  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 foun...

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 bewildermen...

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 t...

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 f...

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 t...

  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  S...

    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 Califo...

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...

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 nemat...

  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...

  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 ...

  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  Y...

  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 an...

  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...

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 Insti...

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...

  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...