Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning podcast

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web 1:54:24

for 3 dager siden1:54:24

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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, Cambridge, before becoming a contributor to The Daily Skeptic and UnHerd , and a managing editor at Aporia . First, Razib asks Winegard and Carl about their respective cancellations, and the recent attacks on Aporia from the British media in particular. Winegard observes that many of the criticisms were muddled, as journalists struggled to get basic facts straight about who did what, as well as mixing up present associations among various editors with past ones. The two also address the change in the culture over the last few years, as cancellations seem to have lost some of their bite. Then Razib asks Winegard about the perception that Aporia is fixated on the third-rail of American culture: race and IQ, and its relevance to social policy and politics. Winegard talks about how he has long since said everything he has to say on the topic, but he still finds that the public conversation fails to address the possibility of cognitive differences between populations, and so keeps finding himself wading back in, to fill a gap in the discourse. Razib also asks the editors about their view of “ cold winters theory ,” which attempts to explain the higher IQs of temperate zone populations versus tropical ones. Then they discuss the disappointments of the MAGA movement, and its appeal to populist emotion. Winegard had hoped that despite its inchoate nature, it might have been able to pare back the radical excesses of the progressive cultural changes of the 2010’s, but now he worries that overreach may up the chances that woke policies make a comeback with the inevitable political backlash in the next few years. Winegard also addresses his personal souring on reflexive anti-wokism, and Carl shares his own views from across the Atlantic, where Britain appears to follow in the US’ footsteps, even if from an entirely different social-historical context. Winegard discusses the difficulties of maintaining a consistent heterodoxy in the face of tribalistic demands for conformity. Finally, they discuss the path forward for publications like Aporia that do not toe any particular party line.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution 55:46

for 9 dager siden55:46

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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 June’s debut of Tesla’s robotaxis, Razib wanted to talk to Lee about the state of the industry. They discuss the controversies relating to safety and self-driving cars. Is it true, as some research suggests, that Waymo and self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars? What about the accidents Waymos have been implicated in? Is it true that they were actually due to human error and recklessness, rather than the self-driving cars themselves? Lee also contrasts the different companies’ strategies in the sector, from Waymo to Zoox to Tesla. Razib also asks him about the fact that self-driving cars’ imminent arrival seems to have been overhyped five years ago, with Andrew Yang predicting trucker mass unemployment, to the reality that Waymo has now surpassed Lyft in ride volume in San Francisco. They also discuss the limitations of self-driving cars in terms of their ability to navigate cities and regions where snow might be a major impediment, and why there has been a delay in their expansion to freeway routes.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania 23:58

for 12 dager siden23:58

23:58

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 .…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans 1:01:18

for 16 dager siden1:01:18

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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 the 1918 flu pandemic . She also translated Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel Derborence into English. Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University and did a journalism residency at Berlin’s Planck Institute. First, Razib asks Spinney how difficult it was to integrate archaeology, linguistics and paleogenetics into her narrative in Proto , which traces the rise and proliferation of Indo-European languages from its ancestral proto-Indo-European. She talks about why this was the time to write a book like this for a general audience, as paleogenetics has revolutionized our understanding of recent prehistory, and in particular the questions around the origin of the Indo-Europeans. Razib and Spinney talk about various scenarios that have been bandied about for decades, for example, the arguments between linguistics and archaeologists whether proto-Indo-European was from the steppe or had an Anatolian homeland, and the exact relationship of the Hittites and their language to other Indo-European branches. They also delve into how genetics has helped shed light on deeper connections between some branches, like Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, or Greek and Armenian. Spinney also addresses how writing a book like Proto involves placing fields like historical linguistics and archaeology with charged political associations in their proper historical context…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster 19:35

for 22 dager siden19:35

19:35

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. Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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John Sailer: a time of troubles in higher education 1:22:25

for 23 dager siden1:22:25

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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 from The King’s College. Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute, he was a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars. Following on last week’s podcast with Jacob Shell , Razib continues to discuss the rise and fall of woke politics in academia, and the current backlash exploding out of the Trump administration. Sailer discusses his previous work back to 2020 showing how blatant universities became in their discriminatory policies against white males in particular, and how easy it was to demonstrate this dynamic with even the most minimal level of due diligence like freedom of information requests. They also discuss the reality that universities are attempting to adjust to a new landscape with the administration pressuring them to revoke DEI policies, while many faculty are urging that they instead dig in their heels. Higher education is adapting, but Sailer argues that since fundamental values have not changed, some evasion is to be expected.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Jacob Shell: academia must diversify or die 1:43:54

for 4 weeks siden1:43:54

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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, Hire Conservatives . The more than 3,000-word essay argues that academia must diversify ideologically to save itself, but also engage in a wider range of scholarship. Shell points out that US academia has become an ideological monoculture, with an overwhelming dominance of left-leaning faculty, especially at elite institutions. This imbalance, driven by extreme partisan ratios in fields like anthropology, leaves universities politically vulnerable and out of step with the broader public. He challenges the common view that this trend is due to self-selection, or the “pipeline problem,” suggesting instead that informal screening mechanisms discourage or exclude conservative scholars. Shell also argues that the grant system encourages conformity and limits academic freedom. More audaciously, he argues that some academics should be singled out by their peers, whether through their institution or professional organizations,t when they engage in politically motivated misrepresentation of their scholarship. Ultimately, Shell insists that academia’s unique role in public life is to observe and understand the world, not to risk co-option as an arm of any political movement.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Matt Welch: from blog pioneer to podcasting mainstay 1:28:10

for 5 weeks siden1:28:10

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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, Welch co-hosts The Fifth Column podcast with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan. Razib and Welch first go back to his days in Eastern Europe, and how they shaped his views on foreign policy, making him somewhat heterodox for someone whose primary political inclinations favor libertarianism. Welch discusses how wild, hopeful and chaotic the 1990’s were in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of Communism. He also argues that these nations had strong historic and contemporary geopolitical reasons to fear the former Soviet Union, and so pushed for the eastward expansion of NATO. Razib makes the Russian case that its turn away from the West in the 2000’s was in response to America’s strategy of encirclement, but Welch dismisses this as Russian revisionism. He believes that at the end of the day Soviet-era elites retained an imperial attitude toward Eastern and Central Europe rooted in a centuries-long assumption of Russian hegemonic status in the region. Next, retreating from abstruse foreign policy, Razib and Welch discuss the early days of the blogosphere, in 2001/2002. Then, Welch coined the term “warblogger,” and envisaged a scenario where post-partisan citizen-journalists would play an essential role in the information ecosystem of the 21st century. He discusses his disappointment with the reemergence of partisanship within the blogosphere, as well as the disappointments of post-9/11 interventionism. Welch also talks about the Tea Party, and its connection, and ultimate disconnect, from libertarianism. They also discuss how the Tea Party energy was eventually transferred to the ideologically heterodox and often anti-libertarian Trump movement. Finally, Welch talks about his latest primary venture, the successful The Fifth Column podcast. Razib asks if the current age of podcasting is analogous to the early blogosphere. Welch talks about how organically and gradually The Fifth Column came into being, and the growing pains with greater professionalization. He also addresses their future on The Fifth Column, with a new shift toward video, while continuing the informal and candid nature of the discussions.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara 18:12

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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 region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from two approximately 7,000-year-old Pastoral Neolithic female individuals buried in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya. The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco2, associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. Takarkori and Iberomaurusian-associated individuals are equally distantly related to sub-Saharan lineages, suggesting limited gene flow from sub-Saharan to Northern Africa during the AHP. In contrast to Taforalt individuals, who have half the Neanderthal admixture of non-Africans, Takarkori shows ten times less Neanderthal ancestry than Levantine farmers, yet significantly more than contemporary sub-Saharan genomes. Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology 55:04

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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 of climate, or more precisely, climate change and anthropogenic global warming. Song argues that the emission-reduction strategy has fundamentally failed, and global warming is inevitable absent a drastic strategy shift. Enter geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth. In the context of global warming Song proposes that humans engage in proactive efforts to cool the world. His company, along with a similar Israeli startup, proposes to introduce particulate matter into the stratosphere to reflect back some of the sun’s radiation. Razib asks Song what the reaction has been, given that the atmosphere is a public resource, and how he proposes to eventually make it a revenue-generating business through government contracts. More generally, Razib and Song talk about other geoengineering projects, including Augustus Doricko’s dream of increasing precipitation through his Rainmaker firm.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Zineb Riboua: realism in foreign policy in 2025 1:07:28

for 7 weeks siden1:07:28

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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 outlets. She holds a master’s of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris’ Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is Beyond the Ideological . Razib and Riboua discuss the Trump administration’s theory of tariffs as a tool of foreign policy and his attitudes toward multilateral diplomacy. They explore whether any principle beyond power and dominance underlies the current administration’s approach, and consider the role of principles and values in foreign policy. Riboua elaborates a realist perspective in line with the thinking of Henry Kissinger. States have interests and abilities to execute on those interests; idealism is secondary. Riboua also discusses the fact that Trump seems attuned to how foreign politicians relate to the American domestic scene. He seems willing to punish those abroad whom he perceives to be favorable to his political enemies and reward those who are personally favorable toward him. Razib then asks Riboua about the geopolitics of her native Morocco, a relatively stable monarchy on northwest Africa’s edge that has promoted moderate Islam, a good relationship with Europe and maintained a stable democracy.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Mark Lutter: charter cities and the urban future 1:03:03

for 8 weeks siden1:03:03

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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 in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests span progress studies, governance, social dynamics and institution-building, with a belief that creating new cities can spark cultural and economic advancements similar to historical periods like the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age. He has been published or quoted in outlets like the Financial Times , The New Yorker , and The Chicago Tribune . Lutter and Razib discuss diverse topics, from the difficulties of the Prospera project in Honduras, to the possibility of developing San Francisco’s Presidio into an Asian-style super-city. They explore the various pitfalls and possibilities faced when attempting to create new jurisdictions in developing nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, along with the major obstacles to urban innovation in the USA. Lutter outlines the economic case for charter cities, along with the normative values that undergird their creation as bastions of liberty and laboratories of cultural experimentation. Finally, they discuss the Trump administration’s openness to the idea of the “Freedom City” in the Presidio, along with local opposition to the project.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Graeme Wood: Germany's turn to the right 1:05:30

for 9 weeks siden1:05:30

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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 studied at the American University in Cairo, Indiana University and Deep Springs College. Today Razib talks to Wood about his piece in The Atlantic, Germany’s Anti-Extremist Firewall Is Collapsing . Wood addresses the economic malaise of contemporary Germany, in particular, the former East Germany, and how that is impacting the national cultural climate. More concretely, they consider why the right-wing Alternative For Deutschland (AFD) party is so popular, and its transformation from an anti-EU party to an anti-migrant party. Wood emphasizes that Germany has become a highly polarized society when it comes to ethnicities, with very cosmopolitan cities, but small towns in rural eastern provinces where he recalls feeling like possibly the only non-white face at the local beer hall (his father is a white American while his mother is ethnically Chinese). Razib muses whether German multiculturalism as an ideology has allowed for more, not less racism, while Wood reflects on his multi-decade experience visiting the nation as an outsider.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA cultural hegemony 1:27:09

for 10 weeks siden1:27:09

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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 excesses of woke culture, and now he has turned his skeptical eye upon the regnant MAGA cultural political complex. In posts like MAGA Globalism and Neoliberalism is Back! Woodhouse observes how the Trump administration seems to have turned its back on the “working-class politics” espoused by J. D. Vance in favor of the sort of free-market libertarianism preferred by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Razib outlines the divisions in the Trump administration between Steve Bannon and the tech-globalists around Musk, and how these divisions explain online discord. Woodhouse though argues that Trump has clearly sided with Musk, allowing the government to be captured by monied interests that will profit from the military-industrial complex. He also argues that MAGA in power shows the same tendency of the woke movement in terms of clamping down on free speech now that the Right is ascendant. Woodhouse argues that the Right is now using the same tools of cultural hegemony that the woke Left used before 2024. He argues that institutional politicization today is very similar to the dynamic he saw before 2024 on the part of the woke Left.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1 1:20:04

for 11 weeks siden1:20:04

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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 also an associate editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition . Recently Klatt has been writing about the “MAHA” pivot, “Make America Healthy Again,” driven by RFK Jr.’s appointment as head of Health and Human Sciences. Razib and Klatt talk about new directions driven by RFK Jr.'s focus on preventative health and skepticism of pharmaceuticals. Klatt points out that the past two decades have seen a massive shift away from funding nutritional studies, in contrast to the massive budgets of big pharma. He argues that we now really find ourselves without enough information to outline a public health policy given the underfunding of nutritional cohort studies. If MAHA is going to be a serious movement, it needs to drive a reallocation of funds. Razib and Klatt also touch on the cultural shift over the last decade on the Right, where something like “raw milk” switched from being coded as left-wing to being squarely right-wing. They also consider mounting skepticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccination, that seems to be associated with MAHA and in particular RFK Jr. Klatt also addresses the role that GLP-1 drugs are having in driving down obesity rates in the USA, and how pervasive their use might be in the near future.…

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