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 Zineb Riboua discuss the concept of Third Worldism (following up on an earlier podcast), its historical context, and its contemporary relevance. Riboua explains that Third Worldism positions the decolonizing world as a historical actor seeking revenge and redistribution from the West, emphasizing the West’s role in global South underdevelopment. They explore its manifestations in politics, particularly in the US and Europe, and its influence on foreign policy, highlighting the role of Israel as a central issue. Riboua also touches on the economic and political challenges faced by Iran and the Middle East, and the evolving dynamics of Islam in global politics.

Subscribe now

Share

Give a gift subscription

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation, again, with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X. He has an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 45,000 in less than 4 years. His tweets have been boosted by Elon.

Today Razib and Hess start the conversation talking about East Asia, and its massive fertility crisis. Hess makes the case against urban density, observing how low fertility is in some of these Asian cities in particular. Razib also brings up economic and cultural creativity, as he and Hess ruminate on the consequences of reduced dynamism due to an aging population. Hess also argues that we cannot rely on evolution to fix our demographic imbalances; the source nations of immigrants are experiencing demographic collapse as well.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brianna Wu. Wu is an American video game developer, programmer, and political activist best known as the co-founder and CEO of the independent game studio Giant Spacekat. Raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, she attended the University of Mississippi to study journalism and political science but withdrew in 2001 without earning a degree in order to pursue early entrepreneurial ventures. After establishing herself in the tech industry and leading the development of the 2014 indie game Revolution 60, Wu became a prominent advocate for marginalized groups in gaming, a role that expanded significantly after she was targeted during the Gamergate harassment campaign. She later transitioned into political organizing, running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020, and co-founding Rebellion PAC to support progressive political initiatives. In the last few years Wu has been pivoting more toward the center, expressing concerns about the power of the anti-Israel faction on the Left.

Razib and Wu discuss their political differences, he, being on the political Right his whole adult life, and, Wu, a partisan of the Left. Wu makes the affirmative case for a liberal Left vision of American politics, a welfare state without express support for socialism. They also discuss the excesses of both the woke Left and the MAGA Right, and Wu challenges Razib on the actions of state-level Republicans. She argues that for many Americans the Right presents no option, because it does not welcome many identity categories as the Left does.

Subscribe now

Share

Give a gift subscription

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to geneticist Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou about two papers, Ancient DNA evidence for the history of the Albanians and Uniparental analysis of Deep Maniot Greeks reveals genetic continuity from the pre-Medieval era. He is an entomologist and evolutionary biologist specializing in insect morphology, biomechanics, bioacoustics, systematics, and taxonomy. Born in Greece, Davranoglou earned a B.Sc. (Hons) in Zoology from Imperial College London (2012–2015) before completing a DPhil (2015–2020) in insect morphology and biomechanics at the University of Oxford under supervisors Graham Taylor and Beth Mortimer. He is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (with support from the John Fell OUP Fund), where he investigates the evolutionary origins of sound production in hemipteran insects. He also serves as Curator of Hemiptera and a senior researcher at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv.

Over the course of the episode Razib and Davranoglou cover the intersection of history, archaeology and genetics. Who are the Greeks of the Mani peninsula, south of Sparta? Are they particularly “genetically pure” compared to other Greeks, and what is their connection to the ancient Greeks? How do Albanians differ from other Balkan populations and what are their deep origins? The podcast explores genetic results that demystify the demographic history of the southern Balkans, and two of the deeply indigenous peoples to the region.

Share

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Read more

It’s been a minute since we’ve had Nikolai Yakovenko on the podcast. 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.

Razib and Yakovenko have been discussing the Age of AI for about 4 years now, and it’s time for a temperature check. Nearly four years ago, Razib put in a “prompt” that generated the below image:

The same prompt now returns the image at the top of this post. It illustrates the strides that AI has made in the last four years.

On this podcast, Razib and Yakovenko talk about the current top of the line “frontier labs,” OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind, why xAI has faltered, and the reality that only DeepSeek in China seems up to challenging the American firms. Yakovenko notes that AI’s transformative impact is mostly in the massive capital influx into the sector, as well as becoming a ubiquitous part of the software engineer’s toolkit. They discuss how programming without an AI-assist is now likened to “raw dogging” coding, while artificial superintelligence seems a rather distant prospect. The technology is getting better, but predictions of the doomers seem not to have panned out.

Subscribe now

Share

Give a gift subscription

Transcript

Transcript (PDF)

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Christopher Rufo. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. A contributing editor at City Journal, author of the New York Times bestseller America’s Cultural Revolution, and 2025 Bradley Prize recipient, he also serves as a New College of Florida board member and Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College. He is also co-host of the podcast Rufo and Lomez. Raised in Sacramento, California, Rufo graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2006 and a Master of Liberal Arts in Government from Harvard Extension School in 2022. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and children.

Razib and Rufo first discuss his California upbringing and the idyllic environment of the Golden State. They discuss what they both love about California and why it matters for the US as a whole. Razib brings up the contrast with Texas, where the weather and scenery are less attractive, but pro-business and pro-housing regulatory framework has attracted many migrants from California. Rufo then details exactly what he’s uncovered about the poor governance in his home state under Gavin Newsom. They also discuss the prospects in the current governor’s race, and whether California’s pathologies can ever be fixed.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to physicist Gregory Cochran. Cochran is best known for his work in human evolution, often at the intersection of biology, anthropology, and history. Trained in physics, he later turned to population genetics and became widely known through collaborations with researchers like Henry Harpending, producing influential but controversial work on recent human evolution, including the idea that natural selection has accelerated in the Holocene. Cochran has also been a prominent public intellectual, co-authoring the book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. He writes at the blog West Hunter.

First, Razib and Cochran examine the controversy surrounding Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia, including Davide Piffer’s complaint that the authors did not cite his work. Then, they review chapter-by-chapter the arguments in The 10,000 Year Explosion, from Cochran and John Hawks’ prediction that Neanderthals likely admixed with modern humans, to the importance of agriculture in driving adaptation in human beings and the ecological context of the increase in Ashkenazi intelligence.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Russ Greene, who promoted the idea of “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.” Greene currently serves as the Executive Director of the Prime Mover Institute, a public interest organization and think tank he launched to advocate for American energy dominance. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow for the Economy at the Stand Together Trust. In this role, he managed a grantmaking portfolio centered on federal regulatory affairs and strategic litigation, with a strong focus on classical liberalism and critiques of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) corporate frameworks. Greene also directed brand defense and government affairs for CrossFit Inc. He has a Bachelor of Science in International Politics from Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Greene and Razib talk about the fiscal insolvency of Social Security in six years, and the shift of the federal budget to focus on transfers from younger generations to older ones. Greene also talks about the fiscal situation in the developed world more generally, out of the United States, and the general issues engendered by massive pension systems. They discuss the history of past changes to benefits programs for senior citizens, and how it puts the squeeze on all other areas of the budget.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Transcript

Transcript (PDF)

Despite the preprint being out for two years, Akbari et al.’s Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia publication in Nature this week has resulted in a massive media response. Though Razib has discussed this work before, he thought it would be useful to review it, and put it in context in a new monologue.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

Today Razib talks to Matthew Schmitz, a journalist who previously served as an editor at the religious journal First Things. He is the cofounder of the online magazine Compact, alongside Edwin Aponte and Sohrab Ahmari. He currently serves as editor of Compact, religion editor of Washington Post Opinions, and co-host of the podcast Against the Grain. Compact His essays on politics and culture have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Claremont Review of Books. A native of O’Neill, Nebraska, Schmitz is a graduate of Princeton University.

First, they discuss Schmitz’s piece in the Washington Post, The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics. Here Schmitz articulates the view that the nationalist-inflected Christianity exemplified by many MAGA and MAGA-adjacent figures is quite different from the sincere but earnest evangelicalism of the older religious right. Rather, it is more performative, more civilizational, and tied into white identity politics. Additionally, it turns away from the philo-Semitism that has been typical of the American religious landscape. Schmitz and Razib also address the rise and fall of the New Atheism over the last 20 years, from the decline of public Christian faith as the center of the body politic, the rationalist critique and the marginalization of both by woke social-justice political theology. They also discuss the difficulties and travails of religious pluralism in the US today, including the tensions caused by the arrival of large numbers of Hindus in places like Texas, where they erect statues to their gods, including the semi-monkey divinity Hanuman.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Megan McArdle. She is the author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and a Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle grew up in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. McArdle’s previous positions were at The Economist, The Atlantic and Newsweek. She has a new podcast for the Washington Post, Reasonably Optimistic, and also contributes to Central Air and The Dispatch.

Razib and McArdle talk about the follies of populism, left and right, and the damage being done to America in the name of anti-elitism. Razib asks McArdle if there is any way out of a national debt crisis and fiscal insolvency (answer: probably not). Then they discuss the role high cost of living and confiscatory tax rates on the flight of capital and high-income individuals from blue states, and McArdle explains the historical-structural reasons that liberal cities cannot cut back on their top-heavy labor force. Razib and McArdle discuss immigration, trade and globalization, and the short-sightedness of MAGA-populism. Finally, they address AI, McArdle’s usage of it, and the promise it has in revolutionizing work and transforming our society.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode, Razib talks about race, and how to think about this touchy subject.

• Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease

• The Apportionment of Human Diversity

• Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy

• A Family Tree in Every Gene

• How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

• Race: The Power of an Illusion

• A Genealogical Interpretation of Principal Components Analysis

• Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode Razib talks about where we are when it comes to “Out-of-Africa,” Neanderthal origins and the broader state of understanding the dynamics of Homo evolution.

Cited:

• Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins

• Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human?

• Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern…

Read more

Today Razib talks to Chris Bradley, a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Co-Founder of Matter Bio, a company dedicated to preserving genome integrity and addressing the root causes of aging. With a multidisciplinary background spanning neuroscience, cell biology, and computer science, Bradley aims to translate early-stage biotech concepts into practical therapies that can extend human lifespan Matter Bio is focused on diagnosing, quantifying, and repairing the structural variations and mutations that accumulate in human DNA. Bradley has BS is neuroscience and cell biology from Rutgers and a MS in computer science from New York University.

The discussion first aims to focus on fundamental science concepts. What is genome integrity, and why does it matter? Bradley reviews the current state of the science to understand how errors creep into our genomic code over our lifetimes, and how it can lead to cancers and other pathologies. He points out that there is a wide variation in lifespan and cancer-risk across animal species, showing that in some ways nature may have “solved” the problem. In addition, Razib reiterates how complex and amazing any genome is, with billions of base pairs, and how incredible it is that our body’s repair mechanisms function as well as they do.

Bradley then discusses the practical goals of Matter Bio as they begin their first clinical trials. Rather than just focusing on basic science, Bradley’s long-term focus is to make a difference in human lives. He discusses how the drastic gain in human life expectancy over the last 150 years already shows that we can increase longevity. Ultimately, Matter Bio aims to push the frontier so that we are less and less surprised by centenarians. Bradley also addresses the reality that a lot of the innovation in biotech right now, including what Matter Bio wants to achieve, is limited by the regulatory state, rather than what can be done in terms of the science or funding environment.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

Today, Razib talks to Chris Masterjohn, a nutritional scientist and leading expert in mitochondrial biology who believes hidden energy bottlenecks underlie much of modern disease. After years of work as a professor and researcher, he founded Mitome, the first mitochondrial analysis designed for everyday health, and serves as its Scientific Director. His mission is to make mitochondrial testing accessible so people can identify and correct the specific energy limitations holding them back. After earning his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2012, he completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and subsequently served as an Assistant Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College. He has a Substack.

Razib and Masterjohn first discuss the impact of social media on the communication of science, and his wrangling with the public health establishment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Masterjohn explains how digging into the primary literature showed that the authorities were claiming far greater certainty than they should have, and recounts attempts to censor and rebuke him when he pointed this out. He also addresses some misrepresentations that Anthony Fauci engaged in during his tenure. Next, Razib asks Masterjohn about the insights he has gained from nutritional science in terms of how he lives his own life, and his overall philosophy of public health. Masterjohn pushes against the tendency to over-medicalize and rely on pharmaceuticals before looking to common-sense nutrition and exercise. They then discuss the importance of the mitochondrion in molecular genetics, and how that is relevant both in terms of physiology and evolution. Masterjohn then talks about his company, Mitome, and the added value of greater and greater metabolic and genetic information in the present age.

Share

Give a gift subscription

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Mike White, a Genetics professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. White has a position at the School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he leads a research team focused on understanding the biophysical architecture of regulatory DNA. He earned a B.A. in music before pivoting to the sciences, receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 2006 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Wash U under Dr. Barak Cohen. White’s work combines functional genomics, synthetic biology, computational biology, and deep learning to decipher how cells interpret regulatory sequences. His lab aims to predict how non-coding genetic variations impact complex human traits and disease risk, while exploring how to apply transcriptional circuits for broader applications in health and agriculture.

Razib first talks to White about the cultural, political and social winds moving through academia since 2010. How did academic science become so politically polarized, and what significance does it have for future funding streams? White brings his insights from the viewpoint of someone whose perch is in a medical school, and so somewhat at the margins of the cultural revolution sweeping through academia and even STEM. He notes it seems that the activist high tide peaked around 2020, though the hostility between the Right and institutional academia continues unabated, affecting NIH funding.

Then White discusses where we are in terms of understanding gene regulation, and its importance in biological function. Razib and White review how almost 99% of the human genome does not code for proteins, so often it is called “junk DNA,” but the reality is that there are other functions in that region, first and foremost, regulating and modifying protein expressing regions. Razib asks White where we are in human genomics more than 25 years after the draft, has it lived up to expectations? And where we are going in the future?

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aaron Renn. Renn is a writer, consultant, and urban analyst known for his work on the challenges facing American cities and religious institutions in the 21st century. He is a contributor to The American Reformer and the author of Life in the Negative World, a book exploring the cultural shifts regarding Christianity in America. Renn previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for five years and as a contributing editor for City Journal, having established his voice on urban policy through his widely cited blog, The Urbanophile. Prior to his career in public policy and journalism, he spent 15 years in management and technology consulting, including a tenure as a partner at Accenture.

Before getting into the meat of the discussion, Renn and Razib discuss management consulting and the value that a firm like Accenture provides a corporation. Razib wonders whether consultants are simply brought in to rubber-stamp what management has already concluded, but is aiming to pin the blame on an external actor (e.g., layoffs). Renn argues that this is not the case, and in fact, though he acknowledges that management consultants provide an outsider view unencumbered by internal politics that allows them to be taken more seriously. They also discuss the impact of AI on some services that management consultants provide, and the future of white-collar work.

Then Renn goes on an extended riff on the rise and fall, and possible new rise, of the Midwestern social and economic landscape. A native of southern Indiana, Renn has spent time in Chicago and New York before settling down in the affluent suburb of Carmel, Indiana. Razib and Renn discuss the decline of the Northeast and the industrial Heartland, and what makes the Midwest unique, with its origins as part of the original early American republican frontier. Renn discusses candidly the upsides and downsides of living in “flyover country,” from its peace and tranquility, to the reality that Midwestern metropolitan areas do not have the same intellectual and cultural dynamism as coastal cities.

Finally, Razib asks Renn, a Protestant Christian who identifies as evangelical, about the cultural and theological shifts occurring on what was once called the Religious Right. Renn argues that this movement’s peak was really in the mid-1990’s, and the whole thirty-year period since has seen retreat and retrenchment. He believes that Christians have lost control of the cultural narrative and have to accept a position as outsiders. Renn also addresses the decline of premillennial dispensationalism, most famously illustrated in the Left Behind series of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the rise of Christian nationalism, and in particular, the role of Reformed pastor Doug Wilson in this shift.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel Tabin, a 5th-year Ph.D. student in David Reich’s lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on using ancient and modern DNA to answer questions about human history. Tabin completed a degree in Computer Science and Math and Master’s in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He Ph.D. project involves the population genetic history of Central and East Asia.

First, Razib and Tabin discuss a recent paper he co-authored that looks at problematic results in the paleogenetic literature due to contamination and DNA damage. Tabin reviews all the processes and analyses that paleogeneticists go through to validate that the ancient DNA data they have is truly ancient, rather than recent contamination, from wet-lab precautions to downstream analysis. Then they dig into the empirical results over the last 15 years from the field of ancient DNA, from what we know (or don’t) of the out-of-Africa bottleneck, early modern humans in Asia and how we think about persistent mysteries like “Population Y” in the New World (Population Y is more closely related to Papuans and Andamanese than Northeast Asians).

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more

Between 2017 and 2020 Razib co-hosted the podcast The Insight. A year ago it went offline, but now the archives are back! On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib re-posts two important episodes from The Insight. First, a conversation with evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich about his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Second, starting at 51 minutes and 45 seconds, Razib interviews Cosimo Posth about a paper on which he was co-author, The genetic history of Ice Age Europe.

With Henrich Razib initially discusses the emergent field of cultural evolution, and his earlier book The Secret of Our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smart. Then, they discuss the confluence of history, anthropology and economics that led him to propose, along with his colleagues, the thesis that psychological peculiarities of medieval Europeans explains their dynamic success down into the modern period, leading to the emergence of “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies.”

Changing tacks, Razib’s conversation with Posth surveys the field as it was in the late 2010s, and in particular focuses on what we had learned about the genetics of Upper Paleolithic Europeans. This refers particularly to the period between 45,000 and 11,700 years before the present, the end of the last Ice Age, when various big game hunting societies dominated the continent after the extinction of Neanderthals.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about the rise of the Slavs. His Substack, titled Nemets, explores world history through the lenses of archaeology, paleogenetics, and historical processes. His writing focuses on "deep history," such as the Bronze Age Collapse and the migration of Indo-European peoples, while connecting these ancient shifts to broader patterns of civilizational rise and fall. Nimitz often integrates technical data from genetics and climate science to challenge traditional narratives about nomadic tribes and early state formations across Eurasia. Beyond antiquity, the newsletter also touches on modern geopolitical developments and regional studies, ranging from the war in Ukraine to the cultural history of the Americas.

Razib and Nimitz explore the thousands of years of Slavic history and prehistory, from their fragmentary mentions in antiquity, to their explosion in the Middle Ages. Nimitz discusses the many archaeological cultures in northeastern Europe that might be candidates for the proto-Slavs as they emerged from the Corded Ware Culture during the Bronze Age, as well as the historical, cultural and genetic effects of the Slavic migrations that impacted Christian Europe after 600 AD. He also addresses the role of Slavs as one of Europe’s preeminent ethnolinguistic configurations in early modern Europe.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Read more