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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

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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01:07:28

Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/04/17

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 Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other

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01:03:03

Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/04/06

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 charter city development company. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and a BS

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01:05:30

Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/28

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 the Islamic State. Wood grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Harvard College. He also

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01:27:09

Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/23

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 Substack, Social Studies. He hosts Le Pod with Lee Fang. Woodhouse was a major left-wing critic of the

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01:20:04

Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/15

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’s primary platform to communicate about nutrition, health and molecular biology is his Substack. He is

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59:57

Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/10

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, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand

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01:26:24

Titus Techera: Post-Modern Conservative in a...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/04

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 for the American Cinema Foundation. Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 Romanian presidential

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02:09:01

Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/03/03

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 cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ research ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms

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01:16:44

Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/02/27

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 correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. Among the many stories Regalado has broken was the

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273 results

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