Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning artwork

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

186 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 157 ratings

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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Episodes

Murtaza Hussain: Gaza and the global left

March 22, 2024 16:45 - 1 hour - 58.7 MB

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 about Hussain’s response to the 10/7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Hussain discusses his bewilderment and disappointment at some commentators who he saw being knee-jerk and tribalistic in their respon...

Chris Stringer: human evolution in 2024

March 15, 2024 10:30 - 1 hour - 56.8 MB

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 Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. A proponent since the 1970’s of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our ...

Zoe Booth and Iona Italia: Quillette's dynamic duo

March 07, 2024 10:00 - 1 hour - 95.8 MB

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 of British nationality and mixed Parsi and Scottish heritage, with a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. She is the author of Our Tango World, former editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine a...

Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass

March 03, 2024 07:36 - 1 hour - 64.4 MB

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. He studied for his Ph.D. under Marvin Minsky, arguably the most prominent and influential artificial intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th centu...

James Miller: the end of world as we know it

February 23, 2024 18:41 - 1 hour - 139 MB

  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 a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World. Miller and Razib first met at 2008’s “Singularity Summit” in San Jose, and though Singularity Rising was published in 2012, some of the ideas were already presented in earlier talks, includi...

Rob Henderson: foster-kid to Ivy League graduate

February 22, 2024 15:58 - 1 hour - 96 MB

    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 term "luxury beliefs," a tendency among elites to use their beliefs to signal social status, with real-life costs of those beliefs born by non-elites alone. Henderson grew up in California foster homes, before being adopted into a working-class family in Redding, CA. After an academic...

Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars

February 08, 2024 15:25 - 1 hour - 132 MB

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 working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he discusses his ten-year diversion from academia, including his stints as a canvasser for the gay rights group the Human Rights Campaign and a corporate salesperson. A prolific public intellectual, Reilly is th...

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

February 03, 2024 06:12 - 1 hour - 126 MB

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 Caltech. After working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in graduate school, he switched to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and has continued studying nematodes ever since. After helping to found the C. elegans genome database WormBase (wormbase.org) in the...

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

January 31, 2024 22:11 - 1 hour - 164 MB

  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. Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Google and The New York Times, is a freelance data scientist and author. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in economics from Harvard. In this episode, he discusses his process of writing Who Makes the NBA?, w...

Alexander: the psychology of dating

January 30, 2024 22:00 - 52 minutes - 95.7 MB

  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 questions Razib asks Alex of DatePsychology on this episode of Unsupervised Learning. A psychologist who studied cognitive and behavioral neuroscience in graduate school, Alex explores topics around dating on his YouTube channel and disseminates the latest research via his tweets (you can also subscribe to his ...

David Lightbringer: mythopoetic interpretations

January 29, 2024 22:00 - 1 hour - 69 MB

  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 thoughts via podcast (and you can also read his views in short-form on numerous topics via his tweets on X), his primary platform is his YouTube channel. Lightbringer’s videos, range across topics as diverse as “Harappans, Aryans, and the Bactria-...

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

January 28, 2024 13:36 - 1 hour - 111 MB

  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 research areas include African genetic diversity, African diaspora, transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Most recently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsal...

Cody Moser: the adaptive landscape of cultural evolution

January 09, 2024 14:31 - 1 hour - 129 MB

  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 doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results wit...

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

January 09, 2024 13:21 - 1 hour - 87 MB

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 has worked as a photographer, in public relations and as a publisher. A recent visiting fellow of the Danube Institute, she is freshly back in North America in the wake of Israel’s Gaza invasion, following the Hamas a...

Introducing GenRAIT: when technology drives science

January 09, 2024 00:27 - 52 minutes - 41.9 MB

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 data accessible, usable, and minable. Razib and his cofounders, Dr. Santanu Das and Taylor Capito, will talk about what they’ve built at the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 8th-11th, and sh...

Philippe Lemoine: French food and American immigrants

December 14, 2023 12:30 - 1 hour - 191 MB

  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 Twitter that “Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it.” Not only did this trigger a response by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, but the controversy broke out of social media into th...

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

December 10, 2023 16:46 - 1 hour - 59.6 MB

  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 survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and diplomacy by other means. From an age of flip phones as a luxury item in the early 2000’s to ubiquitous...

Brent Roberts: let's talk about personality

December 05, 2023 06:59 - 52 minutes - 96.4 MB

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 how it differs from personality traits, like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the Big Five Personality system, and how it relates to the Myers-Briggs framework. Roberts elucidates what the Big Five’s extraversion, openness, conscientio...

Carl Zha: Chimerica to the Thucydides's Trap

November 29, 2023 20:03 - 1 hour - 158 MB

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 covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010’s, and often circle back to discussions of China, its history, politics and culture. The course of their conversat...

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

November 21, 2023 07:35 - 1 hour - 57.6 MB

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 worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of DeepNews where he currently works. Razib and Yakovenko talk about the economic, technological and socio-political implications of the leadership turm...

Curtis Yarvin: reflections on a life of poetry

November 19, 2023 06:01 - 1 hour - 123 MB

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 views have been profiled widely, including by Vanity Fair and Vox. The intellectual father of neo-reactionary thought, Yarvin is also trained as a computer scientist, and in 2010, he released the first version of Urbit, a decentralized ...

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

November 17, 2023 04:52 - 1 hour - 77.4 MB

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 Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Rel...

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

November 15, 2023 05:35 - 1 hour - 60.2 MB

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 of scholars like Eric Cline, today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding everything from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia was torn apart by climate change a...

Steinn Sigurðsson: Black Holes, causality and exoplanets

November 06, 2023 04:36 - 58 minutes - 53.9 MB

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 had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Originally from Iceland, Sigurdsson’s professional accomplishments have been wide-ranging, from serving as...

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

October 29, 2023 13:21 - 1 hour - 64.5 MB

  For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com. 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 of so...

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

October 29, 2023 13:21 - 1 hour - 64.5 MB

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 of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the Histo...

John Logsdon: what has genomics done for evolution?

October 19, 2023 23:53 - 1 hour - 56.4 MB

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 relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled “Genome Evolution” to the Princeton Guide to Evolution. Razib uses this mid-2010...

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

October 15, 2023 11:14 - 1 hour - 64.2 MB

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 Conquered Everything. While Hanania’s focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal, you kno...

IBW Episode #3: The Israel-Palestine conflict

October 14, 2023 04:21 - 1 hour - 68.4 MB

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 impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, whi...

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

October 08, 2023 17:39 - 47 minutes - 36.2 MB

  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 Everything. Both these books tackle the same issue: the US’s Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the “Great Awokening” in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we releas...

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

October 03, 2023 14:26 - 1 hour - 58.9 MB

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 screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com. Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future, The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purit...

The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future

October 01, 2023 23:53 - 1 hour - 64.5 MB

  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 these genetic variants and mitigate their baby’s disease risk. Check out orchidhealth.com, and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist. What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: T...

David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya

September 24, 2023 18:29 - 1 hour - 67.3 MB

  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 terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bron...

Erik Hoel: The World Behind the World

September 15, 2023 14:49 - 1 hour - 69.7 MB

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 emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s T...

Katherine Dee: Is Twitter just our default?

September 13, 2023 21:02 - 1 hour - 43.6 MB

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 recently written a piece for Compact: Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter.  But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going ba...

Inez Stepman: fixing higher education

September 12, 2023 17:31 - 1 hour - 53.9 MB

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 economic and cultural, in higher education as several decades of bloat, inflation-beating cost increases and political radicalism run up against their natural limits. Stepman’s recent policy report, T...

Cory Clark: adversarial collaborations in science

September 12, 2023 17:27 - 1 hour - 51 MB

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 University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre. First, Razib and Clark talk a...

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

September 03, 2023 07:42 - 2 hours - 86 MB

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 upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics’ modern basis in R. A. Fisher’s 1...

Diana Fleischman: evolution, sex and eugenics

August 30, 2023 17:33 - 54 minutes - 39.2 MB

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 why evolutionary psychologists seem obsessed with sex. Razib also brings up the relationship of evolutionary psychology to primatology and the role that behavioral studies of common chimpanzees an...

Nicola Buskirk: old books for a new generation

August 24, 2023 17:38 - 1 hour - 55.3 MB

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 Substack (she was behind the At Length series), Thiel Foundation, Hoover Institution and now, Protocol Labs. At Elessar she is “putting long out-of-print books back into print so t...

Hannah Frankman: unlearning the lessons of the past

August 22, 2023 16:35 - 1 hour - 55.7 MB

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 the Foundation for Economic Education, the founder of Rebel Educator, and the host of an eponymous podcast (Spotify, Apple and YouTube). Education as a discipline has been a human concern since Plato outli...

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

August 20, 2023 12:39 - 1 hour - 47.9 MB

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 in America. In 2020, Stone published a report, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline, where he outlined the demographic and religious history of the US, and its possible future. They first cove...

IBW Episode #2: Muslims vs. LGBTQIA+

August 04, 2023 12:33 - 1 hour - 45.8 MB

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 Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack), for the second episode of the “Intellectual Brown Web” (here’s episode #1). Razib, Ha...

Samuel McIlhagga: the UK as a zombie nation

August 04, 2023 08:56 - 1 hour - 51.9 MB

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 “Reaganomics” that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an intervention from the Bank of England. In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodically forgets that it’s the not US, it’s not the largest economy in the world and the pound sterling is ...

Renu Mukherjee: Affirmative Action's End

June 29, 2023 18:40 - 1 hour - 158 MB

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 is practiced in the US today, starting with the Bakke decision in 1978, and then moving on to Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003. She then moves to the details of the current cases, in particular Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fel...

Elizabeth Jones: ancient DNA as "celebrity science"

June 23, 2023 11:20 - 55 minutes - 42.5 MB

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 one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?” More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a living dinosaur, nor come even close. But the early 1990’s kicked off the first age of ancient DNA w...

Lee Fang: investigative journalism and investigating journalists

June 14, 2023 23:30 - 1 hour - 40.5 MB

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 interned for Democratic representatives Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Steny Hoyer. He was also the first intern for the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America. Today...

Ross Douthat: fantasy and the literary imagination

June 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 48.3 MB

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery and The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. A columnist at The New York Times, often on political and social topics, Douthat also reviews movies...

Samo Burja: China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past

June 04, 2023 18:39 - 1 hour - 144 MB

On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a favorite repeat guest, Samo Burja, to discuss matters future, present and past. Burja founded the consulting firm Bismarck Analysis and developed the “great founder theory.” He contributes to Palladium Magazine, Asia Times, City Journal, and The National Interest. Burja’s first appearance on the podcast, recorded in the fall of 2020, spiraled into a long discussion on the Chinese past and future, and Razib follows up to find out wher...

Lillian Tara: more babies for a better world

June 04, 2023 15:44 - 54 minutes - 39.3 MB

In 1968, Stanford ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb, arguing that rapid growth in human numbers would result in environmental catastrophe and widespread famine. Overall the dire predictions of The Population Bomb did not come to pass, with the Green Revolution staving off the specter of mass starvation. With eight billion people today, the world population has doubled since 1970, and global TFR (totality fertility rate) is now 2.4, down from 4.5 in 1970. When it comes ...

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