Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

By Razib Khan

What's Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning about?

Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/

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Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning episodes:

04.24.2024
Eric Cline: After 1177 B.C.
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...
04.16.2024
Kristian Kristiansen: DNA and European prehistory
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...
04.06.2024
Samo Burja: Palladium Magazine, China, Russia and the future of Eurasia
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...
03.30.2024
Steve Hsu: IQ, artificial intelligence and academia
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...
03.22.2024
Murtaza Hussain: Gaza and the global left
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...
03.15.2024
Chris Stringer: human evolution in 2024
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...
03.07.2024
Zoe Booth and Iona Italia: Quillette's dynamic duo
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...
03.03.2024
Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass
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....
02.23.2024
James Miller: the end of world as we know it
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...
02.22.2024
Rob Henderson: foster-kid to Ivy League graduate
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...
02.08.2024
Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars
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...
02.03.2024
Erich Schwarz: in the beginning was the worm (C. elegans)
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...
01.31.2024
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions
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....
01.30.2024
Alexander: the psychology of dating
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...
01.29.2024
David Lightbringer: mythopoetic interpretations
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...
01.28.2024
Cesar Fortes-Lima: the three thousand-year odyssey of the Bantu
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...
01.09.2024
Cody Moser: the adaptive landscape of cultural evolution
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...
01.09.2024
Katherine Brodsky: After 10/7 in Israel, Europe and the US
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...
01.09.2024
Introducing GenRAIT: when technology drives science
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...
12.14.2023
Philippe Lemoine: French food and American immigrants
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...
12.10.2023
Mark Safranski: the 21st-century way of war and the exhaustion of the American Empire
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with Mark Safranski. Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog Zenpundit beginning in 2003. They...
12.05.2023
Brent Roberts: let's talk about personality
Brent W. Roberts On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses personality with Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and...
11.29.2023
Carl Zha: Chimerica to the Thucydides's Trap
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Carl Zha. Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the Silk and Steel podcast, which...
11.21.2023
Nikolai Yakovenko: OpenAI in chaos, the future of artificial intelligence and effective accelerationism
Today, Razib interviews Nikolai Yakovenko, already a three-time guest on his podcasts (A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects, GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines and AI and Biology). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has...
11.19.2023
Curtis Yarvin: reflections on a life of poetry
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks with Curtis Yarvin. The host of the Grey Mirror Substack, Yarvin is the former Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonym under which he wrote extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin’s social and political...
11.17.2023
Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone - The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Muthukrishna is Associate...
11.15.2023
Peter Nimitz: the end of the first civilizations 4,300 years ago
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about what he memorably calls the crisis of the 23rd century. Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because...
11.06.2023
Steinn Sigurðsson: Black Holes, causality and exoplanets
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist, Steinn Sigurdsson. Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the ScienceBlogs website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed Dynamic of the Cats blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs...
10.29.2023
Gregory Clark: what has genetics to do with social status?
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark, a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance...
10.19.2023
John Logsdon: what has genomics done for evolution?
We’re about a generation into the “age of genomics,” or as it’s sometimes termed the “post-genomic era.” Today Razib talks to John Logsdon, a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in...
10.15.2023
Christopher Rufo - America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Yesterday, Razib discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left...
10.14.2023
IBW Episode #3: The Israel-Palestine conflict
On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now...
10.08.2023
Richard Hanania: The Origins of Woke - Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics
In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, two months after Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered...
10.03.2023
Sundar Iyer & Sudha Jagannathan: the accused speaks the truth about caste and the "Cisco Case"
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content... For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to...
10.01.2023
The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future
In the US, roughly 1 in 33 infants are born with a congenital disability, about 25% of which have an identified genetic cause. For the first time,, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for...
09.24.2023
David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya
Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony, emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in...
09.15.2023
Erik Hoel: The World Behind the World
Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel, host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the...
09.13.2023
Katherine Dee: Is Twitter just our default?
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee. Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn, The Washington Examiner, The American Mind, Tablet Magazine and UnHerd. She has also...
09.12.2023
Inez Stepman: fixing higher education
Today Razib talks to Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Stepman also hosts two podcasts, High Noon and Clown Car. She and Razib first discuss the current distress, both...
09.12.2023
Cory Clark: adversarial collaborations in science
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark, a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the...
09.03.2023
Alex S. Young and James J. Lee: quantitative genetics in 2023
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged...
08.30.2023
Diana Fleischman: evolution, sex and eugenics
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aporia Magazine’s Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist who earned her Ph.D. in David Buss’ lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Fleischman discusses the origins of her field, its methodological framework and presuppositions, and...
08.24.2023
Nicola Buskirk: old books for a new generation
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nicola Buskirk of Elessar Books (see her Substack). A 2022 graduate of Stanford University, Buskirk has already had positions at...
08.22.2023
Hannah Frankman: unlearning the lessons of the past
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Hannah Frankman about the past, present and future of education. Frankman is a Hazlitt Fellow at...
08.20.2023
Lyman Stone: God is dead, long live the Lord!
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. Today Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a demographer and Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, about the fall, rise and fall of religion...
08.04.2023
IBW Episode #2: Muslims vs. LGBTQIA+
https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own...
08.04.2023
Samuel McIlhagga: the UK as a zombie nation
In the fall of 2022 Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US’s 1980’s program of...
06.29.2023
Renu Mukherjee: Affirmative Action's End
Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Ph.D. student in American politics at Boston College, where her dissertation will focus on affirmative action. Razib asks Mukherjee to discuss the origin of affirmative action as it...
06.23.2023
Elizabeth Jones: ancient DNA as "celebrity science"
In June 1991, The New York Times published a piece titled “Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds.” Published a year after Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens “Will it...
06.14.2023
Lee Fang: investigative journalism and investigating journalists
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to journalist Lee Fang. Formerly an investigative reporter at The Intercept and a contributing writer at The Nation, Fang began his journalism career at ThinkProgress. As an undergraduate, Fang was president of the University of Maryland College Democrats, and...

What's Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning episodes:

Eric Cline: After 1177 B.C.

Kristian Kristiansen: DNA and European prehistory

Samo Burja: Palladium Magazine, China, Russia and the future of Eurasia

Steve Hsu: IQ, artificial intelligence and academia

Murtaza Hussain: Gaza and the global left

Chris Stringer: human evolution in 2024

Zoe Booth and Iona Italia: Quillette's dynamic duo

Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass

James Miller: the end of world as we know it

Rob Henderson: foster-kid to Ivy League graduate

Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars

Erich Schwarz: in the beginning was the worm (C. elegans)

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions

Alexander: the psychology of dating

David Lightbringer: mythopoetic interpretations

Cesar Fortes-Lima: the three thousand-year odyssey of the Bantu

Cody Moser: the adaptive landscape of cultural evolution

Katherine Brodsky: After 10/7 in Israel, Europe and the US

Introducing GenRAIT: when technology drives science

Philippe Lemoine: French food and American immigrants

Mark Safranski: the 21st-century way of war and the exhaustion of the American Empire

Brent Roberts: let's talk about personality

Carl Zha: Chimerica to the Thucydides's Trap

Nikolai Yakovenko: OpenAI in chaos, the future of artificial intelligence and effective accelerationism

Curtis Yarvin: reflections on a life of poetry

Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone - The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going

Peter Nimitz: the end of the first civilizations 4,300 years ago

Steinn Sigurðsson: Black Holes, causality and exoplanets

Gregory Clark: what has genetics to do with social status?

John Logsdon: what has genomics done for evolution?

Christopher Rufo - America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

IBW Episode #3: The Israel-Palestine conflict

Richard Hanania: The Origins of Woke - Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics

Sundar Iyer & Sudha Jagannathan: the accused speaks the truth about caste and the "Cisco Case"

The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future

David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya

Erik Hoel: The World Behind the World

Katherine Dee: Is Twitter just our default?

Inez Stepman: fixing higher education

Cory Clark: adversarial collaborations in science

Alex S. Young and James J. Lee: quantitative genetics in 2023

Diana Fleischman: evolution, sex and eugenics

Nicola Buskirk: old books for a new generation

Hannah Frankman: unlearning the lessons of the past

Lyman Stone: God is dead, long live the Lord!

IBW Episode #2: Muslims vs. LGBTQIA+

Samuel McIlhagga: the UK as a zombie nation

Renu Mukherjee: Affirmative Action's End

Elizabeth Jones: ancient DNA as "celebrity science"

Lee Fang: investigative journalism and investigating journalists