Today Razib talks to Timothy P. Carney, an American journalist and author who serves as senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His work explores politics, corporate influence, religion, community, and family life, with particular attention to crony capitalism and the weakening of America’s civic institutions. His books include The Big Ripoff, Obamanomics, Alienated America, and Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. He has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Carney and his wife, Katie, have six children and live in the Washington, D.C., area.

First, they begin by talking but Carney’s time covering the Tea Party and the conservative revolution of the late Bush and early Obama years. He argues that voters often object more to perceived undeserved gains and cronyism than to government size or deficits alone. He says Trump widens debate on trade, immigration, and interventionism, but criticizes the party’s turn toward personal loyalty, arguing that a post-Trump conservatism should retain populist concerns while pursuing sound policy. Carney connects economic and cultural dislocation to the weakening of local institutions and relationships, suggesting that isolation drives people to seek answers through politics. He attributes declining birth rates mainly to cultural factors, including individualism and parenting pressures, rather than economics alone, identifying religious communities as an exception with stronger family formation. Looking ahead, Carney says Republicans risk losing both Trump’s voters when he is absent from the ballot and voters alienated by the party’s direction, while Democrats face pressure from their left wing. These challenges raise questions about whether a future conservative leader can build a durable coalition without simply imitating Trump and whether either party can offer a compelling vision centered on family and community.

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Today Razib talks to Kyle Harper, a historian, professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. A native of Norman, Oklahoma, he earned his bachelor's degree in letters from the University of Oklahoma before completing his MA and PhD at Harvard University. Harper's research spans late antiquity, the Roman Empire, environmental history, and the historical impact of infectious diseases and climate change on human societies. His authored books include Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011), From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017) and Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021). Today Razib and Harper talk about his latest book, The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction (2026).

In their discussion of The Last Animal, Razib and Harper explored the profound history of human-animal relationships and our ongoing influence on global biodiversity. Harper detailed how human activities—from early megafauna hunting and livestock domestication to modern industrial land use—have historically driven mass extinction events and fundamentally reshaped terrestrial and marine ecosystems. While dismissing de-extinction as an unscalable novelty, he emphasized that the future of conservation depends on practical re-wilding efforts and deliberate policy choices that protect natural habitats while balancing complex human needs.

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After finishing the last monologue on human origins about the stage-critical status of Out-of-Africa, I felt I should say more. That more needed to be said. In particular, what about the 80% of humanity that is non-African, and is part of the Diaspora that expanded 50,000 years ago?

This is my attempt to tell…

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Related: Monologue: Out-of-Africa, from the IUP to the 38,000-year-old western explosion

Razib talks about David Reich’s new preprint, Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ∼300,000 years ago had a critical role in Neandertal origins, along with another one from April, Genome-wide genealogies …

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Today Razib talks to Jonathan P. Beauchamp, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, where his research focuses on applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, and the emerging field of "genoeconomics". He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and earned his undergraduate and master's degrees from Queen's University. In addition to his faculty position, he serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and an Associate Investigator at The Centre for Applied Genomics. Before fully transitioning into academia, Beauchamp gained professional experience as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an associate at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He is also a core researcher with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), contributing to large-scale genome-wide association studies on the genetic basis of economic behaviors, risk tolerance, and educational attainment.

Razib and Beauchamp explore genoeconomics, the use of genetics to investigate education, income, behavior, and inequality. Beauchamp traces the field’s evolution from unreliable claims about individual genes to large-scale studies showing that educational attainment, risk tolerance, and patience reflect thousands of tiny genetic effects. They discuss the promise and limits of polygenic prediction, how sibling comparisons help separate genetic effects from family background, and why larger, more diverse datasets and whole-genome sequencing could advance the field. The conversation turns to Beauchamp’s research on how increasingly accurate genetic predictions could destabilize insurance markets when consumers know risks that insurers cannot use in pricing. They also examine his work linking the Western Church’s marriage restrictions to weaker kinship networks and distinctive European social institutions, before discussing the professional pressures surrounding controversial research and new sibling-based estimates of heritability.

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Philippe Lemoine is a researcher and writer specializing in the philosophy of science, statistical analysis, and epidemiology. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). Lemoine is best known for his detailed, data-driven critiques of COVID-19 epidemiological modeling, lockdown policies, and Western foreign policy, which he primarily publishes on his blog, Nec Pluribus Impar (he now has a Substack). In addition to his independent research, he has contributed analytical essays on science and society to publications like Quillette.

Razib and Lemoine discuss France’s unrest, demographic change, and political paralysis, with Lemoine arguing that the school riots reflect a volatile mix of teenage behavior, social-media contagion, immigrant integration problems, and far-left agitation rather than a centrally organized conspiracy. They examine how viral footage exaggerates outsiders’ perceptions of France’s ethnic transformation, overlooking regional differences and widespread intermarriage. Turning to presidential politics, Lemoine argues that Marine Le Pen’s prospects depend heavily on whether she faces Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the more competitive centrist Édouard Philippe. Beneath these immediate conflicts lies a deeper fiscal problem: weak growth, mounting debt, and generous pension commitments to an aging electorate make reform increasingly necessary but politically punishing. Lemoine anticipates that inflation and financial repression may prove more politically feasible than explicit spending cuts, while Razib emphasizes that the same tensions between retirees and workers increasingly confront the United States and other developed countries.

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Today, Ramez Naam returns 5 years after his original appearance on the podcast. In 2003, he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Naam is also the author of three science fiction books: Crux, Apex, and Nexus. In addition, has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He also has an eponymous Substack, Ramez Naam.

First, Razib and Naam discuss how technological change is turning once-futuristic possibilities into everyday realities, beginning with the falling costs of solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles. Naam argues that economics increasingly drives adoption, with Texas illustrating how competitive markets and easy permitting can accelerate clean energy even in a fossil-fuel stronghold. Razib probes the implications for transportation, oil demand, and the Gulf states, while Naam emphasizes that the transition will take decades and that heavy industry remains difficult to decarbonize.

The conversation then shifts to AI, where Razib presses Naam on existential risk, industry concentration, and recursive self-improvement. Naam expects increasingly powerful systems but doubts an imminent intelligence explosion, pointing to diminishing returns, hardware constraints, and the difficulty of obtaining reliable real-world data. He sees concentrated corporate or government power as a greater threat than runaway superintelligence and favors broad access and competition.

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Today Razib talks to Jerry Z. Muller, a historian and professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., specializing in modern European intellectual history, capitalism, conservatism, and German and Jewish history. His work explores how ideas shape economic, political, and cultural life, bridging history, philosophy, and public policy. His books include Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, Capitalism and the Jews, The Tyranny of Metrics, and Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Writing for both scholarly and general audiences, Muller examines subjects ranging from the moral arguments surrounding capitalism to the consequences of relying excessively on numerical measures to evaluate institutions and individuals. He has an eponymous Substack.

The conversation revolves to a great extent on a recent post by Muller, Rethinking Faculty Control Scholarly Norms, the Vanderbilt Report, and the Limits of Academic Self-Government. Razib and Muller discuss the challenges facing universities, the resilience of American capitalism, and the effects of AI on intellectual life. Muller argues that scholarship depends on “organized skepticism,” including peer review, replication, and engagement with different viewpoints, but that activism and ideological conformity weaken these practices in parts of academia and undermine public trust. They also tackle whether stronger university leadership can help address these problems while managing declining literacy and numeracy, shifting demographics, uncertain international enrollment, rising costs, and pressure to demonstrate results. Muller suggests that vocational training may increasingly separate from liberal arts education and research, raising questions about how universities can adapt while maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. He remains broadly optimistic about American capitalism, pointing to technological innovation, competition among states, immigration, and social supports. Both view AI as a powerful tool for skilled thinkers but a potential source of intellectual passivity for others, raising the question of how people can preserve their agency and sense of purpose as AI becomes part of everyday intellectual work.

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Today Razib talks to Theo Jaffee, co-host of Monitoring the Situation, a show backed by Andreessen Horowitz that covers the rise of the “intelligence explosion” and AI. Jaffee is writer and podcaster who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida. He studied computer science and economics at the University of Florida. His writing on Theo’s Substack explores artificial intelligence, technology, business, history, and philosophy. He has also contributed to Quillette and received an Emergent Ventures fellowship in 2024.

The podcast covers AI’s accelerating capabilities, broader societal impact, and safety risks. Jaffee talks about estimates of a 10% probability of human technological civilization collapsing within ten years, distinguishing between the disempowerment of humanity and the potential continuation of civilization under AI control. But, he notes, coordination, political intervention, and the logistical difficulty of automating physical infrastructure can mitigate that catastrophic risk. Progress remains broadly on track with AI 2027 expectations, despite there being no predicted labor disruptions and Chinese consolidation failing to materialize as forecast. Jaffee notes events like the Hugging Face incident and an apparent Millennium Prize problem solution heighten concerns surrounding alignment and control. Razib and Jaffee also discuss how critical uncertainties persist over how rapidly recursive self-improvement might yield superintelligence, whether mounting political backlash will establish viable safeguards or trigger heavy-handed stagnation, and how society must ultimately evaluate AI consciousness and moral status.

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Today Razib talks to Scott Greer, an American conservative writer, author, and podcaster who focuses on nationalism, immigration, online political culture, and the transformation of the Republican Party. Formerly an editor and columnist at The Daily Caller, he now hosts the Highly Respected podcast and newsletter and contributes to The American Conservative. He is the author of No Campus for White Men (2017) and Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America (2026), a history of how paleoconservatism, libertarianism, the alt-right, and other internet subcultures helped shape Trump-era politics.

The first half of the conversation focuses on Whitepill, as Greer outlines a narrative history of the rise of the New Right and its relationship to MAGA and Donald Trump over the last decade. The conversation goes back even further, to the origins of the dissident Right in the Ron Paul movement of the late aughts. Then they move to discussing a piece recently posted on Highly Respected, Sunbeltism Takes Over America–And The South. A native of Tennessee, Greer talks about the implicit conservatism of the ascendant Sunbelt culture, but its broader cultural and social influence, and its difference from earlier Southern subcultures fixated on the “Lost Cause” and rooted in an agrarian society.

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Special Note: Palladium Magazine will host a talk on September 10th in the Bay on my piece The Native Americans Before the Native Americans. Reserve your seats!

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is CEO of Effort.News. He was previously with The Alliance for the Future.

Most of this conversation is around why it took so long to put together something like Effort.News, and what they’ve discovered (e.g., “The 19th-century Family Fortunes Funding Degrowth”). Chau also discusses their recruitment and capital needs as a seed-stage startup.

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Transcript (PDF)

Today Razib talks to Kyle Orton. Orton is a freelance researcher, writer, and editor specializing in security and foreign policy, with a particular focus on the Middle East, the Syrian war, regional geopolitics, and terrorist movements including the Islamic State (ISIS), Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). His work also ranges widely across history, including early Christianity, Islam and its relationship with the West, intelligence and espionage, the Reformation, the English Civil War, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, the First World War, Communism and the Cold War, and pre-Revolutionary Iran. Orton writes the newsletter It Can Always Get Worse, where he covers contemporary security issues alongside history, religion, intelligence, books, and occasional film reviews. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, UnHerd, Newsweek, The Independent, The New Arab, and International Business Times.

Orton and Razib’s conversation begins with his post, The Sojourn of Arculf: An Eyewitness to “Early Islamic” Jerusalem - A Frankish bishop sheds some light on a historical dark age. Their discussion continues with probing the possibility that Islam as we know it truly did not exist any recognizable form before the 690s AD, and that the early “Saracens” as their Christian enemies referred to them were in fact a schismatic group of monotheists whose beliefs were adjacent to that of the Jews. Orton also discusses the role of Muhammad, or rather, the lack of the role of Muhammad, in the early years of the Islamic Caliphate. They also explore the possibility that later commentators largely attributed the negative reputation of Islam’s first dynastic Caliphate, the Umayyads, to the reality that they would not recognize them as Muslims. Finally, Orton talks about the reality that some of the layers of text within the Koran seem far older than the time of Muhammad, perhaps by a century or so.

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Note: This podcast was recorded before Jason Arday’s death. It is now being posted with minor edits (removed a few off-color jokes about the late professor).

Today Razib talks to Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA. The author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation, Rossman takes a deeply analytic toolkit to questions such as why 2005’s “My Humps” became a viral hit.

Razib Khan and Rossman discuss the scandal surrounding Dr. Jason Arday, a sociologist of education at Cambridge, who was exposed for plagiarism and fabricating his credentials. Arday claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days and raised $5 million, which were later found to be false. The conversation highlights the poor quality of his research, which relied heavily on autoethnography, a method criticized for its subjectivity. They also discuss the broader issues of ideological capture in academia, particularly in sociology, and the challenges of maintaining academic integrity amidst political biases. The discussion centers on the perception and reality of sociology, particularly the impact of political ideologies on academic engagement. Rossman, a conservative sociologist, notes the open-mindedness of most sociologists and the importance of apolitical basic science.

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Human evolutionary genomics is going through the best of times and the worst of times. We know so much more than we did at the turn of the century, but we are so much less certain about the broad overall narrative of our species’ genesis within and without Africa. An elegant and legible story has given way to complexification; the scientific preference for parsimony has had to yield ground out of necessity to the simultaneous march of ancient DNA and computational genomics in the last 25 years. The elegant house of “Out of Africa,” constructed in the late 20th century via the synthesis of paleoanthropology and molecular genetics, is now looking a bit worn and shabby a generation into the new century. But there won’t be any tear down here; there’s nothing to replace our current understanding. We face an impasse as we grasp at novel findings and probe into the dark with uncertainty.

Today, our understanding of human evolutionary origins is undergoing repeated revisions and renovations. New wings are being added helter-skelter to an already sprawling edifice; alternative paths are being laid down by the startling findings of ancient DNA, with a fresh dab of theoretical paint here and there to cover up incongruities. Something new is coming into shape, but it is yet incomplete, and so ‌definitive answers elude our grasp. A host of powerful new techniques are bombarding the old orthodoxies with result after result, modification, update, and iteration. Now researchers have begun questioning exactly how well they understand the correct shape of the past that they once opined on with such certainty to the public. Over and over, the simple power of ancient DNA has thrown a wrench into the consensus models and established orthodoxies. A generation ago, we imagined that Homo sapiens, “thinking man,” emerged fully formed in Africa over 100,000 years ago and swept away all our monstrous kin before us through dint of our sheer genius. Today, it seems more likely that it was we who were the monsters out of the dark, the demons about which Neanderthal mothers would tell their little-ones.

The exceptional race (no more)

In 2002’s The Dawn of Human Culture, Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein presented what at that time was the standard model of the recent origins of humanity. Some time before 50,000 years ago, a new form of human arose through some sort of mutational jump. Klein posited that our genius, our superiority, was because of a macromutation that enabled us to generate fully articulate language. Before the emergence of this new species of human, there were many varieties of human, or, more precisely, hominin. Neanderthals in Europe and Central Asia, various “archaic” lineages in eastern Eurasia, and also descendants of other Homo forms in Africa. Modern humans, whom many popular slogans would refer to as “Africans,” rapidly swept away all these varieties of humanity after 50,000 years.

And so it was for a decade. There were dissents; in 2006 Jeffrey Wall and Michael Hammer published Archaic admixture in the human genome. This paper reflected suspicion among many evolutionary geneticists that the orthodoxy promulgated was too pat and simplistic (see also Magnus Nordborg’s 1998 On the Probability of Neanderthal Ancestry). But‌ despite an underground counter-consensus, very few evolutionary geneticists were vocal on this issue in public, no matter the private grumblings they may have had (Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s 2009 book, The 10000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, was the exception to the rule). This all changed in 2010, when Svante Paabo and colleagues reported that Neanderthal whole genomes yielded strong evidence of several percent admixture into non-Africans, as well as the discovery of a new human lineage in eastern Eurasia, the Denisovans, who also contributed about 5% of the ancestry of Papuans.

Previous work had almost entirely been a matter of inference derived from contemporary populations. You looked at genetic variation in people alive today and worked backward to plausible models of how that variation could have arisen. In the 1980s, geneticists examined mitochondrial lineages, which represent the direct matrilineal genealogy. Geneticists noticed that all non-African populations nested within African genetic variation. They soon replicated this result with the Y chromosome, passed only through males, and the autosomes (markers on chromosomes 1 through 22) representing the whole genetic heritage. These results neatly dovetailed with the findings of paleoanthropologists like Chris Stringer of the British Museum of Natural History, who argued that modern human morphology, mostly exemplified by traits in human skulls, reflected continuity with African Homo, and not Neanderthals. Following the molecular genetic results, researchers applied similar phylogenetic methods to morphometric traits and discovered the same pattern of non-Africans nesting within African variation.

It was an immaculate and tidy story. The broader public became very familiar with this narrative not just because of the scientific literature, but through documentary series like Nova’s 1987 Children of Eve or Spencer Wells’ 2000 Journey of Man, the latter of which was viewed by tens of millions. It’s no surprise that the first ten minutes of Journey of Man lead up to Wells boarding a flight to Africa, where he reassures us that the human story began.

And that still seems to be much of the story. But not the entire story. Over the last few years, geneticists have concluded that a much higher fraction of non-African DNA was originally Neanderthal. In an interview with Dwarkesh Patel Harvard’s David Reich asserted that as much as 10-20% of the overall heritage of early non-Africans, just as they were expanding out of the Near East 50,000 years ago, may have been Neanderthal. How then is that today we detect only about 2% Neanderthal genes outside of Africa? The genome rapidly sheds genetically incompatible segments within a few thousand years via purifying selection. Because Neanderthals diverged from our predominantly African ancestors 600 to 700,000 years ago, their overall genetic makeup exhibited much more striking incompatibilities with the expanding Africans than occurs when different branches of our own species mix (the deepest division in our own lineage dates to about 200,000 years, when Khoisan ancestors diverged from everyone else). No doubt the same phenomenon applied to Denisovan admixture, which today in some Oceanian populations, like those in New Guinea or the indigenous populations of the Philippines, approaches 5% or so.

What does this all mean? Because natural selection changes allele frequencies in ways that are out of step with the overall genome, the signatures that we get from modern and ancient DNA are deceptive as to the demographic dynamics of early anatomically modern humans and the Neanderthals (and Denisovans) whom they encountered. All the evidence, both ancient and modern, points to a tiny non-African ancestry population between 50 and 60,000 years ago, a few thousand individuals at most (some models posit a bottleneck of 200 breeding individuals!). If 10-20% of the ancestry of the early modern human expansion, also known as the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP), was Neanderthal, that implies the integration of hundreds of Neanderthals, as opposed to ten or twenty. What might the cultural implications of this be? Perhaps early modern humans integrated some Neanderthal folkways, and even loan-words from the Neanderthal ur-language? The reduction of Neanderthal ancestry was a genomic-scale process that took approximately 1,000 years, during which cultural exchange could still have occurred in the mixed individuals.

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As I note in this monologue, I am sitting on a podcast previously recorded about Jason Arday because of his recent death. Instead, I’m posting my thoughts about what happened before he died, and since then, and how it relates to Nathan Cofnas.

Links:

• DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge-University refuses to investigate DEI star’s plagiarism

• Institutional Failures in the Garden of Great Intellects

• Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring

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Nikolai Yakovenko is back on the podcast because of the Hugging Face hack. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player, and was a research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has driven to prominence companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, and an ecosystem that has birthed hundreds of smaller startups. He is also the founder of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup. His latest startup is HuggingNews.

Razib and Yakovenko talk about the implications of OpenAI’s inadvertent hack of Hugging Face, and whether he has been too sanguine about the possibility of AI-apocalypse. Though Yakovenko hasn’t gone full doomer, he admits that this sort of behavior by AI agents is alarming. That being said, he cautions we need to keep perspective. They also discuss predictions of the coming obsolescence of software engineers…Yakovenko notes that in some ways Dario Amodei was correct to predict the end of software engineering as a profession: very few write code unaided by LLMs today. In a few years, many professions, especially in tech, have transformed, but warnings of mass unemployment have not materialized.

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Today, Razib talks to internet personality Werner K. Zagrebi. A statistics and machine learning student at Carnegie Mellon University, Zagrebi has led a peripatetic existence over the past few years, from being Curt Yarvin’s personal assistant and editor of Gray Mirror, and working to launch a media company and think tank . Of late, he has been posting …

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Today, Razib talks to Collin Hogue-Spears, a cybersecurity and artificial intelligence governance expert with more than 20 years of experience in technology, product management, federal compliance and software security. Hogue-Spears is an independent researcher and the author of From Lab to Life: How AI Works in China. His analysis has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal and Politico.

Razib and Hogue-Spears first talk abut China’s rapid AI development, driven by provincial initiatives and significant investments in infrastructure. Hogue-Spears emphasizes China’s focus on practical AI applications, contrasting it with the U.S.’s emphasis on AGI. He predicts China’s dominance in AI, particularly in embodied AI, and warns of the potential global impact if China surpasses the U.S. in AI development. The conversation highlights the striking differences between the U.S. and Chinese technological ecosystems.

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Maxwell Meyer is an American writer, editor, and technology-policy professional known for his optimistic advocacy of capitalism, technological progress, and American civic renewal. A native of Iowa, he studied geophysics at Stanford University, received a Boren Award to pursue language study and research in Israel and the Middle East, and served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Review. Meyer later worked as policy chief of staff to venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and founded Arena Magazine, a print and digital publication focused on technology, enterprise, culture, and civilizational progress. His essays and reporting have appeared in The Free Press, Quillette, and other publications, covering subjects ranging from SpaceX and Silicon Valley to politics, religion, and American identity.

Razib interviews Meyer Arena Magazine’s focus on high-quality print content amidst the rise of AI-generated low-quality content. Arena, which has been publishing for two years, aims to provide a positive, pro-America perspective on technology and industry. Meyer discusses the magazine’s unique position as a tech-right publication, its strategic use of AI for administrative tasks, and its appeal to both reading and non-reading subscribers who value its aesthetic. They also touch on the broader political and economic implications of AI and the future of work, emphasizing the importance of individual choice and innovation over community input.

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On this episode, Razib talks to Daniel Di Martino, a Venezuelan-born economist, speaker, and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his research centers on immigration policy, including selection, assimilation, and high-skilled migration. Born in 1999 and raised in Venezuela, he witnessed firsthand the impacts of socialism, including hyperinflation and shortages, which prompted him to immigrate to the United States in 2016. He earned a BA in Quantitative Economics from Indiana University and a PhD in Economics from Columbia University. He writes for publications such as City Journal, and USA Today, and serves on the board of advisors for Young America’s Foundation while sitting on New Jersey’s advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

First, they talk about the economic and social impact of socialism in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Di Martino describes the country’s decline, including hyperinflation, shortages, and corruption, leading to a significant emigration of 30% of the population. Di Martino also discusses the potential for Venezuela’s freedom under the Trump administration and his ongoing work on immigration and economic policy. He advocates for a selective, high-skilled immigration policy in the U.S., emphasizing its economic benefits and the need for a moral approach to enforcement. They discuss Di Martino’s report, The Fiscal Impact of Immigration, and how Indians in America fit into that picture more precisely.

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