Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib comments on a new paper in  Nature ,  Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage . 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 occu...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib   talks to  Andrew Song , co-founder of  Make Sunsets . An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of the  Y Combinator  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...

  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 Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua's pieces and commentary have appeared in the  Wall...

  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 chart...

  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  Richard Spencer , the American white nationalist public figure with whom he went to high school with, to the  Islamic State . He is the author of  The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes  Leighton Akira Woodhouse  back to the podcast for his  third   visit . 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...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Kevin Klatt , a  metabolism researcher , dietitian and  science communicator . 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'...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , friend of the podcast,  Charles Murray  returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970's. He is the author of  Losing Ground ,  The Bell Curve ,  Human Accomplishment ,  Real Education ,  Coming Apart  and  What it means to be a libertarian   and  Human Diversity , among others. Born in 1943 in Newton...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Titus Techera , 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  PostModernConservative . Techera also hosts a  podcast  ...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to  Nathan Lents  about his new book,  The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution . 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 can...

  Today Razib talks to Antonio Regalado , reporter at  MIT Technology Review . 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...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of  Modern Age . 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. H...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to  Tade Souaiaia , a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint,  Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits . 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"...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks with  Washington Post  columnist  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  assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , co-host of the  Wisdom of Crowds  podcast and website, and now the author of his own  Substack  and a recent book,...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Conn Carroll , the author of  Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy . 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...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the  More Births  account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess' essays on topics like  Israelis' high birth rate  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 fi...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Brian Chau , who writes at the  From the New World  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  Alliance for the Future , a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addr...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest  John Hawks  returns after two years to discuss what we've learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under  Milford H. Wolpoff , and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored   Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Disc...

  Three years ago  David Mittelman  came on  Unsupervised Learning  to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time,  Othram . 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...

  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  Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages , which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Gree...

  This week on  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Megan McArdle ,  author  of  The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success  and Washington Post  columnist and op-ed board  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...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib catches up with  Nikolai Yakovenko  about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional  poker player ,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in  computer science , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the  large-language-model  revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companie...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Yasha Mounk . The founder of  Persuasion , a  contributor  to  The Atlantic  and a professor at  Johns Hopkins , Mounk now has his own  Substack , where he hosts his weekly  column  and  podcast . He is the author of  The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure ,  The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Fr...

  Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist  Anatoly Karlin . Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California's Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to America...

  During the Ice Age our ancestors often painted the horse in caves On this week's episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man's best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity's most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world's subsistence economies, the horse in its mi...