Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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...

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

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 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...

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 i...

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 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 o...

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

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 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 at...

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 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...

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 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 Isl...