Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast , Razib talks to r eturning guest Alex Young of UCLA and Herasight . Trained originally as a mathematician, Young studied statistics and computational biology at the University of Cambridge before doing a doctorate in genomic medicine and statistics at the Wellcome Trust C...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zineb Riboua , 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 Israel...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today Razib talks to Ed West, a British journalist and author. He has served as deputy editor of UnHerd and The Catholic Herald , and has written columns for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph . He runs the Substack newsletter Wrong Side of History , where he explores culture, politics, and the longue durée of Weste...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today Razib talks to Noah Smith , an American economist-turned-blogger known for his commentary on economics and public policy. His blog, Noahpinion , is one of the most popular on Substack. He earned a PhD in economics at University of Michigan and served as an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook  University...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today, Razib talks to Coltan Scrivner , a behavioral scientist, horror entertainment producer, and author, whose work centers on the psychological and evolutionary roots of our fascination with darkness, horror, and true crime. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Scrivner als...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests . Prior to his work in AI re...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Alexander Cortes . Cortes is a trainer, fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of Ferta , a company that aims to “optimize your reproductive health and conceive naturally.” Born and raised in California, Cortes began his c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today on Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Kat Rosenfield . She is an American novelist, journalist, and culture critic known for both her fiction and commentary on contemporary political debates. She began her career in publishing and as a reporter for MTV News before branching out into broader cultural criticism...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com Today Razib talks to Eric Kaufmann , a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science . He earned his BA from the University of Western Ontario and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics. Prior to his current role, he held positions a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

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), was a gues...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 ess...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 Conservat...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 b...

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 by au...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 philos...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 fo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 SafeWe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com 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 Strau...