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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

01:24:01

Jonathan Anomaly and James Lee: is eugenics in our...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/09/19

Recently, the new embryo-selection start-up Herasight has been in the news, finally coming out of stealth. Part of the buzz is because of the public involvement of well-known geneticists and academics like Alex Young and Joe Pickrell in Herasight’s algorithm development. Additionally, Noor Siddiqi, the CEO of Orchid, a competitor to Herasight (and onetime advertiser on this podcast), was a guest on Ross Douthat’s show Interesting Times, triggering another round of conversations around

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01:08:56

Jason Richwine: immigration moratorium now

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/09/10

On last week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib spoke with Alex Nowrestah, a vice president at the Cato Institute and a strong advocate for expanding legal immigration. This week, he turned to the other side of the debate with Jason Richwhine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies and a vocal supporter of sharply reducing immigration. Richwine earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and political science from American University, and later a Ph.D. in public policy from

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01:12:53

Alex Nowrasteh: an immigration libertarian in Trump's...

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/09/01

Three years ago, Razib recorded two podcasts with two immigration experts on different sides of the issue, Alex Nowrestah and Jason Richwhine. While Nowrasteh, who works for the libertarian Cato Institute as Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies, supports higher levels of legal immigration, Richwine, a Resident Scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), favors lower levels of inflows into the US. The initial pair of podcasts was recorded in the midst of the

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53:29

John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed-up

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/08/23

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 essential voice in understanding the origins of our species. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1994 with degrees in French, English, and Anthropology, and received both his M.A

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01:53:13

Noah Millman: from finance to the culture industry

Razib Khan"s Unsupervised Learning ·

2025/08/15

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 Conservative (2012–2017). Millman writes the newsletter Gideon’s Substack, and his work has also appeared in outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. He graduated from Yale

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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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267 results

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