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PODCAST

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning

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

science life sciences

All Episodes

55:45

Cesar Fortes-Lima: the Fulani out of the Green Sahara

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/08/10

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, the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of

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01:16:24

Jack Despain Zhou: in defense of tracking

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/08/05

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 better known as a former producer for Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog at Blocked and Reported under the pseudonym Tracie Woodgrains. Despain Zhou’s mission with CEP is to push for

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01:20:48

Nikolai Yakovenko: the $200 million AI engineer

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/08/02

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 automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist at

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01:18:54

David Van Ofwegen: a peripatetic philosopher across...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/30

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 philosophical underpinnings of Social Darwinism, Ofwegen has been based in Thailand for the last 15 years. Razib and Ofwegen’s initial connection was over their shared interest in the

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01:35:37

Claire Lehmann: after the Intellectual Dark Web

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/27

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 found the online magazine Quillette to reflect a more traditionally pro-reason and pro-evidence-based worldview. Within three years Lehmann was profiled in 2018 in The New York Times as a

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01:40:49

Nathan Cofnas: Judaism's group evolutionary strategy...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/24

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 University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His Substack is here. First, they discuss Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy,

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57:55

Steve Hsu: China's inevitable rise and America's...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/21

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 SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a prominent public voice on genetics, intelligence and the future of human enhancement. He is also a

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01:14:27

David Gress: Plato and NATO 25 years later

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/18

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 Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and Nordic security. He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, fellow

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01:56:14

Ethan Strauss: sports and the end of the culture wars

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/15

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 Strauss, which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination between broader culture and athletics, notably in the piece Nike's End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be

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01:03:10

Manvir Singh: the shamanic roots of all religion

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/07/02

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 preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like “witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods.” He just came out

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01:54:24

Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/30

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 College. He was an editor at Quillette before moving to Aporia. Carl earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Oxford University. He was a research fellow at St. Edmund’s College,

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55:46

Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/24

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 Research’s capabilities to the state of large language models. But one of the major areas he has focused on is self-driving cars. With expansion of Waymo to Austin, and this

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23:58

Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/21

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 Eurasia and the Spread of the Germanic Languages.

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01:01:18

Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/17

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 the author of two novels, Doctor and The Quick, and a collection of oral history in French from Lausanne entitled Rue Centrale. In 2017, she published Pale Rider, an account of

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19:35

Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/11

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 Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split and rejoin, and demonstrate its application on simulated and real data across multiple species

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01:22:25

John Sailer: a time of troubles in higher education

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/10

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 Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master’s degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics

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01:43:54

Jacob Shell: academia must diversify or die

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/05/02

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 is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politicization of the academy. The conversation begins with Shell’s piece in Compact Magazine, To Save Academia,

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01:28:10

Matt Welch: from blog pioneer to podcasting mainstay

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/04/30

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 of editor-at-large. He co-authored The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America and wrote McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. Today,

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18:12

Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/04/30

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 occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this

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55:04

Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/04/23

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 been profiled IEEE Spectrum, The New York Times and NPR. Razib and Song first talk about the current state

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282 results

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