Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
188 episodes - English - Latest episode: 22 days ago - ★★★★★ - 157 ratingsRazib 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
Alex Palazzo: drifting into molecular evolution
June 16, 2022 20:56 - 1 hour - 73.7 MBIn 1973 the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay entitled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Presumably, that would include molecular biology, and as Dobzhanksy was writing, the field of molecular evolution was bearing fruit that would revolutionize our understanding of Darwinian evolutionary biology. Or, perhaps more precisely, it would extend and move beyond a purely Darwinian understanding of changes in the DNA sequence on t...
Ananyo Bhattacharya: The Life of John von Neumann
June 13, 2022 18:17 - 1 hour - 76.3 MBWho was the smartest human of the 20th century? Though intellectual celebrity probably dictates that the majority would answer Albert Einstein, another candidate is the mathematician John von Neumann. Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to science journalist Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, and erstwhile physicist and editor at Nature. They discuss the life and science of a scholar whose mental acuity was so preternatural ...
Stuart Ritchie: bad science, good science and behavior genetics
June 05, 2022 09:09 - 1 hour - 60.7 MBIn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Stuart Ritchie joins Razib., Ritchie is the author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth and Intelligence: All that Matters. Ritchie is also a lecturer at King’s College London and the author of the new Substack Science Fictions. Razib and Ritchie first discuss why he has a Substack considering all the different projects he’s already juggling, and what value he sees coming out of it (beyond the remun...
Jason Richwine: an immigration restrictionist speaks
May 27, 2022 12:19 - 1 hour - 45.7 MBLast month Razib talked to Alex Nowrestah of the Cato Institute about the state of migration and policy in the US in 2022. An enthusiast for immigration, Nowrestah expressed some chagrin that the issue has fallen off the American public’s radar, at least judging by the sharp dropoff in media inquiries to his office. And yet there remains a whole policy class in Washington D.C. that is still attending to the complex and fraught topics in and around migration that shape the future trajectory ...
Sir Walter F. Bodmer: from R.A. Fisher to genomics
May 19, 2022 16:05 - 1 hour - 51.5 MBThree of R.A. Fisher’s Ph.D. students remain active today, C. R Rao at age 101 and A. W. F. Edwards, and W. F. Bodmer, both 86. Bodmer was not only a student of Fisher, the cofounder of both population genetics and modern statistics, he was also mentored by Joshua Lederberg, the 1958 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics. With more than 60 years in science, Bodmer joins Razib on this episode of Unsupervised Learning to discuss everything from his recollect...
Francis Young: Lithuanian paganism during the Reformation
May 12, 2022 05:25 - 1 hour - 60.7 MBThe official conversion of the nation of Lithuania to Christianity was in 1387. This means officially Lithuanians have been Christian for 635 years, and did not adopt the religion until more than 1,000 years after Constantine the Great accepted Christianity and set the Roman Empire on its way to becoming synonymous with the faith. But Francis Young, a historian of religion, is here to tell you there’s more to this story. His new book, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethn...
Rand Simberg: Elon Musk's Starship and making spaceflight great again
May 05, 2022 04:11 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBRand Simberg is the author of 2014's Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space, and a space business consultant, as well as a longtime blogger and commentator. Today, on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Simberg about SpaceX’s ambitiously named vessel, Starship, and what it means for the space business. In the process, Simberg outlines just how much of a lead SpaceX has over its competitors, and how i...
Molson Hart: "Chimerica" and the supply chain
April 28, 2022 16:22 - 53 minutes - 44.3 MBIn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Molson Hart, founder and CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company. He is also co-founder of Edison, an intellectual property-focused litigation financing firm. Hart has gained some visibility as a prominent seller on Amazon, with strong opinions on the company both positive and negative. First, Razib asks Hart about Amazon’s role in the American economy, and how it compares and contrasts with Walmart. Unlike many who have negative expe...
Alex Nowrasteh: the last migration expert standing
April 21, 2022 15:09 - 1 hour - 48.8 MBIn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Alex Nowrasteh, the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. Alex is also the author of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. His beat at Cato is immigration, and he has been keeping a close watch on the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. The first issue Razib and Nowrasteh address is the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive crash in...
James Lee: genes and educational attainment
April 14, 2022 07:53 - 1 hour - 68.6 MBIn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature, Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals. A landmark in the field of cognitive genomics, this publication is the result of years of collaboration between two dozen researchers. Over the course of the episode, they deep dive in...
Josiah Neeley: energy matters
April 08, 2022 04:59 - 1 hour - 47.7 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley, Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast. They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to understand the workings of the global energy ecosystem. Considering geopolitical events in Europe, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they dive right into how distribution differences between oil and gas will conspire to keep Europeans dependent on Ru...
Jacob L. Shapiro: geopolitical pasts, present and futures
April 01, 2022 07:59 - 1 hour - 60.7 MBToday on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob L. Shapiro, Director of Geopolitical Analysis at Cognitive Investments. He overviews the geopolitical perspective in understanding international relations, one predicated on looking at nation-states as fundamental units of analysis, in order to achieve a descriptive understanding of the world. Shapiro points out that the more familiar “schools” of foreign policy, from realism to liberal internationalism, use geopolitics as a tool to understa...
Samo Burja: Bismarck Analysis and geopolitical uncertainty
March 26, 2022 00:50 - 2 hours - 96.3 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Samo Burja, a guest who needs no introduction for long-time listeners. Burja is the podcast’s first third-time guest, and with good reason. Previously, he came on to discuss social technology and China and lost civilizations, plumbing the depths of the human past for insights about the present and future. Today Burja spotlights a timely new venture of his firm, Bismark Analysis: the Bismarck Brief newsletter, which provides a taste...
Zack Stentz: Andromeda to X-Men
March 17, 2022 20:11 - 52 minutes - 39.1 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zack Stentz, a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, and a former journalist. His credits include 2011 films X-Men: First Class and Thor, as well as the television shows Andromeda, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous. Considering that working in Hollywood as a writer is a “dream job” for many, Razib and Stentz discuss how to break in and succeed in show business. Like most people, Stentz wrote ...
Sarah Haider: from Ex-Muslim to gender atheist
March 14, 2022 02:26 - 1 hour - 47.2 MBOn this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to his friend Sarah Haider, founder of Ex-Muslims of North America and the writer behind a new Substack, Hold That Thought. Born in Pakistan, and raised in Texas in a Shia Muslim family, Sarah came to prominence in 2015 after she gave a speech called "Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique" at The American Humanist Association's 74th annual conference. Razib and Sarah first discuss where the Ex-Muslim community is in 2022...
Muhammad Sohail Raza: A Pakistani genomicist in Beijing
March 04, 2022 22:17 - 51 minutes - 36.7 MBToday on the Unsupervised Learning podcast the focus is on genetics, culture and geopolitics with Muhammad Sohail Raza, a Pakistani genomicist living and working in Beijing, China, whose research focuses on bioinformatic methods and high-altitude adaptations. Razib and Muhammad first discuss how he got interested in biology, and what took him to do his graduate work in the People’s Republic of China. Muhammad talks about his various inspirations, in particular David Reich’s work on historical...
Suhag Shukla: American Hinduism in 2022
February 25, 2022 17:19 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBToday on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Suhag Shukla, the Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). Suhag is an attorney who grew up in Cupertino, California, and is now a leading advocate for the interests of American Hindus. Razib and Suhag clear up the fact that HAF does not speak for all Hindus, of whom there are over one billion, or, the world’s 1.4 billion Indians. Additionally, the HAF is an explicitly Hindu-focused organization, as opposed to an Indi...
A black American technologist in China
February 18, 2022 20:49 - 1 hour - 62.8 MBOver the past generation, China has gone from a developing nation of bicycles and Volkswagens to a global economic juggernaut that is Mercedes-Benz’s single biggest market. You can track this transformation in charts or follow it in dispatches from foreign correspondents, but this week’s guest on the podcast has seen it up close and personal. Colin is a black American who works in the corporate technology sector and has lived in and visited China on and off since the late 1990’s. He is also ...
Caleb Watney: onward and upward with progress
February 12, 2022 07:29 - 53 minutes - 36.1 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Caleb Watney is the co-president of The Institute for Progress (along with Alec Stapp), which exists to foster innovation and technological advancement through public policy levers. Founded in January of 2021, The Institute for Progress declares itself a “think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” Razib’s first major question is why such a think tank even needs to exist. Isn’t there a huge complex...
Chad Orzel: A Brief History of Timekeeping
February 04, 2022 06:03 - 54 minutes - 42.4 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. He’s the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, a mix o...
William Gunn: from the bench to tech
January 27, 2022 22:07 - 1 hour - 41.8 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Have you ever wondered how academic publishing works? If you’re not in academia, probably not, but you might be surprised by how much intrigue and politics it entails. If you are an academic, you probably don’t want to think about it any more than you have to because it’s a mess. Nearly a decade ago, Razib co-authored a paper, Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century, that sketched out a map of a possible future. That future ...
Rav Arora: psychedelics and spirituality
January 25, 2022 16:30 - 58 minutes - 39.4 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Rav Arora came to public prominence in 2020 with a column for The New York Post provocatively titled “The Fallacy of White Privilege.” He suffered personal and professional blowback, but today the 20-year-old Canadian undergraduate has a semi-regular column in The New York Post, and is interviewed by the likes of Glenn Loury. Arora’s fearlessness in expressing his opinions on a wide range of topics, in particular politically controversial...
Chris Arnade: walking across America
January 20, 2022 18:13 - 47 minutes - 25.5 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Today’s podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph...
R. Taylor Raborn: evolutionary genetics, good enough for government work
January 13, 2022 19:25 - 1 hour - 57.8 MBThis week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn, a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take. Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gen...
David Sloan Wilson and Charles C. Mann on E. O. Wilson's legacy
January 11, 2022 04:52 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology. Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist, telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In th...
Eric Kaufmann: shall the religious still inherit the earth?
January 08, 2022 01:19 - 1 hour - 67.3 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann, political scientist and demographer, and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, the prediction that due to the highe...
Leighton Woodhouse: from the labor left to the radical center
December 31, 2021 06:37 - 1 hour - 47 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse, a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack!), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial, geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transfo...
Xiaotong Yao: a Chinese biologist in America
December 23, 2021 07:00 - 56 minutes - 33.4 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Dr. Xiaotong Yao, a computational biologist specializing in cancer research at Cornell’s Weill Institute, joins Razib. They first dig deep into genomics, considering the efficacy and costs of expanding whole-genome sequencing to assemble massive population-sized datasets. Not a thousand people, but a billion. Next, they probe the implications of wide-scale sequencing as it becomes integ...
Megan McArdle: Escape from New York
December 16, 2021 18:12 - 1 hour - 68.3 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning author and Washington Post columnist (and former blogger) Megan McArdle join Razib for a wide-ranging conversation reflecting on our reemergence after the year and a half ordeal of COVID lockdowns, rising violent crime rates, defunding policing, and the preposterous genetic distribution on Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire. An urbanite who has spent her life in the US’s own imperia...
Charles C. Mann: 1491 fifteen years later
December 09, 2021 22:45 - 1 hour - 55.8 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined. Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated...
Timothy B Lee: reporting on the intersection between policy and economics
December 02, 2021 05:37 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning, Razib is joined by Tim Lee, a former columnist at the Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Vox.com, to discuss his new project, Full Stack Economics, a newsletter on economics, technology, and public policy. The conversation jumps directly into a major issue facing many Americans today: the cost of housing. In many US cities, access to affordable housing is the most economically important issue facing i...
Tanner Greer: the American New Right
November 25, 2021 08:59 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning, researcher, blogger, and essayist Tanner Greer joins Razib to consider the challenges facing conservatism in America today, the future of China and its relationship to the US. Much of Tanner’s extensive research and analysis are featured on his excellent weblog, The Scholar’s Stage, and the conversation also touches on the current state of blogging (and its past). Razib and Tanner first tackle the e...
Eric Berger: SpaceX and Elon Musk
November 18, 2021 17:47 - 46 minutes - 36.1 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib turns his gaze to space with Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX. They ask who is Elon Musk anyway, and how did SpaceX come to win the early race to dominate private spaceflight? What does the privatization of the space fleet mean for the prospects and goals of NASA? How has NASA’s mission...
Carole Hooven: let's talk about testosterone
November 11, 2021 14:15 - 1 hour - 63.2 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Harvard professor Carole Hooven joins Razib to discuss her new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Though they do talk about the science of testosterone, Razib and Carole end up exploring the public reaction to her writing a book on sex and biology in 2021, as well the culture of censorship and shunning that has become the norm in much of academia. ...
Alexander Young: everything you want to know about cognitive genomics
November 04, 2021 03:26 - 1 hour - 64.5 MBSubscribe no Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be). Alex explains how large datasets ...
Joshua Lipson: on Jewish genetic genealogy
October 28, 2021 14:49 - 1 hour - 60.2 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib is joined by genetic genealogist Josh Lipson for a deep dive into the history and genetics of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe. They review the historical demographics of the Jews of both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the possible founding source populations from the Levant (Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Babylon). They discuss the cultural and genetic di...
Trent Colbert: standing athwart the mob
October 26, 2021 21:13 - 37 minutes - 30.5 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Recently Yale Law School (YLS) student Trent Colbert wrote Why I Didn’t Apologize For That Yale Law School Email: We must end the culture of performative repentance for Persuasion. I was broadly familiar with the culture-war saga that Colbert was caught up in, having read a piece a few weeks ago in The Washington Post describing how a seemingly innocent and jocular email triggered accusations of racism at YLS (as well as Aaron Sibarium’s ...
Kat Rosenfield: how did culture become middle-school?
October 22, 2021 04:20 - 44 minutes - 36.9 MBSubscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast I’m joined by author and journalist Kat Rosenfield. She has a new novel out, No One Will Miss Her, is a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and a contributor at various places, like UnHerd and Newsweek. We first talk about Andrew Cuomo (the former governor of New York), Al Franken, #metoo, and how the dynamics of fame, power and identity play into the media narrative around sexual haras...
Steven Pinker: let's talk about Rationality
October 14, 2021 16:03 - 56 minutes - 42.9 MBIn this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib is joined by author and psycholinguist Steven Pinker to discuss his new book Rationality: what is it, why it seems scarce, and why it matters. Pinker makes the case the humans are fundamentally rational beings, and that it’s this capacity that has allowed Homo sapiens to spread across the planet and occupy virtually every niche available to us. Our intuitive ability to understand how physical objects, other creatures and other humans think...
Freddie deBoer: the "hereditarian Left"
October 07, 2021 16:00 - 1 hour - 54.2 MBThis week Razib talks to Fredrick DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart, about the heritability of intelligence and its broader implications for society and education. The two discuss the difficulties of having fact-based conversations around the topic of heritability without being shouted down or accused of being proponents of eugenics. They also talk about how The Cult of Smart compares to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery. Freddie breaks down the evidence that heritability, rather t...
Emily Deans: keeping sane in the years of COVID-19
September 30, 2021 06:50 - 57 minutes - 48 MBThis week Razib is joined by evolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Emily Deans to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The conversation begins with the importance of winning and retaining hearts and minds when managing a pandemic, where nations have succeeded and failed in their public health messaging – and how numerous institutional failings – like sloppy contact tracing and poor communication - have eroded a portion of the public’s trust in the pandemic response. They also discuss the psychology...
Mahan Ghafari: evolutionary genetics and viruses
September 24, 2021 03:37 - 51 minutes - 33.7 MBOn this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib sits down with Mahan Ghafari, a doctoral candidate at Oxford’s department of zoology to discuss his ongoing research in the area of viral evolution. They discuss the difference between RNA viruses and DNA viruses and how viral evolution differs from that of more complex life forms – accentuated by a virus’s short reproduction cycle and high mutation rate - particularly in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 which can mutate orders of magnitude...
Antonio García Martínez: the chaos cancelled
September 16, 2021 18:31 - 56 minutes - 45.1 MBThis week Razib sits down with author and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about some of the myriad ways in which technology and belief structures underpin and reinforce each other. Antonio discusses how his ongoing conversion to Judaism has broadened his lens and allowed him to gain perspective on how secular manifestations of Protestant Christianity have permeated our culture in strange and unexpected ways, including the “great awokening” of the 21st century and the da...
Maximilian Larena: the most Denisovan ones
September 10, 2021 20:07 - 51 minutes - 46.2 MBIn this weeks episode Razib sits down with Maximillian Larena of Upsala Universities evolutionary biology department to discuss the peopling of the Philippines via five proposed population pulses and introgression events beginning with the earliest Australasian expansion of the Philippine Negritos and subsequent migratory waves by the Manobo, Sama, and Cordilleran related populations. Max discusses how dispersal models are complicated by the geographic history of the Philippines, which is...
Myra MacDonald: the shadow wars in the Indian subcontinent
September 02, 2021 17:22 - 58 minutes - 80.6 MBMyra MacDonald is the author of Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War and White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir. The former Reuters Bureau Chief in India, MacDonald is an incisive observer of South Asian politics and commentator on the region’s history (follow her on Twitter!). On the podcast we discussed Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, why India cares about that relationship so much, and the looming role of China in the region....
Ruben Arslan: sex, intelligence & fitness
August 29, 2021 22:24 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBRuben Arslan is a psychologist who works at the Center for Adaptive Rationality. I’ve long tracked his work because of his interest in leveraging evolutionary and genetic frameworks in the context of psychology. Additionally, Arslan has long been an advocate for, and practitioner of, open science. In this episode we discuss some of his work: - Intelligence can be detected but is not found attractive in videos and live interactions, where he tests and rejects one of Geoffrey Miller’s hypo...
Jared Rubin: Christianity and Capitalism
August 19, 2021 18:05 - 1 hour - 48.8 MBJared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true. Most of the disc...
Jason Munshi-South: rats and evolution
August 13, 2021 09:32 - 1 hour - 34.6 MBJason Munshi-South is a biologist who studies a creature many of us have an ambivalent relationship to, the rat. His lab is at Fordham University, in the New York City area. Jason is an “urban ecologist,” so he studies the wildlife in and around cities. This is what drew him to the rat. Or, to be more frank, there was public demand for him to study rats, and he gave the people what they wanted. We talk about: The black rat vs. brown rat The origins of the brown rat How do rats and mice...
Karl Smith: inflation, the debt crisis, China and the American tripartite class system
August 06, 2021 02:07 - 1 hour - 30.7 MBEconomics is obviously important. Recently in the US, we’ve been talking about the threat of inflation, and spending financed through debt. What does this all mean? Not only are the answers important on a macro level, but they’re also relevant to all of us. To attack these questions I decided to talk to Karl Smith, a columnist at Bloomberg. We tackle four big topics: Are we on the path toward severe inflation? (in the US) Is the US headed toward a public debt crisis in the 2020’s? What ...
Linda Avey: genomics from 23 to 100
July 29, 2021 06:33 - 44 minutes - 30.8 MBFirst, I want to mention that readers of Unsupervised Learning may hear the doorbell from Duke (from “Duke Tales”) mid-recording. While he usually visits me evenings, Duke made a special afternoon stop, perhaps thanks to the appearance of a Tesla in the driveway. With that out of the way, I’m very excited to present this conversation with Linda Avey, the co-founder of 23andMe, and current CEO of Precisely. Most of you probably know about 23andMe, which helped create the idea of “direct-to-...