
Today on Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist who has been a researcher and commentator in human evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology for over two decades. With a widely read weblog (now on Substack), a book on Homo naledi, and highly cited scientific papers, Hawks is an essential voice in understanding the origins of our species. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1994 with degrees in French, English, and Anthropology, and received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, where he studied under Milford Wolpoff. He is currently working on a textbook on the origins of modern humans in their evolutionary context. Hawks has already been a guest on Unsupervised Learning three times. In this episode, Razib and Hawks focus on a very specific question: What were the different contributions to the heritage of modern humans in a world more than 200,000 years ago that was inhabited by at least half a dozen hominin species? First, Hawks takes us back to the year 2000 and his early work extending a more multiregional framework of human evolution, exploring what could be gleaned from the archaeological and paleontological record. Then Razib and Hawks discuss the ancient DNA revolution and the discovery that modern humans had ancestry from Neanderthals, as well as from an entirely new species, the Denisovans. They also examine the fact that, unlike Neanderthals, Denisovans appear to have been separated into very different regional populations that made distinct contributions to various modern populations. Razib also asks Hawks about the discovery of new pygmy human species in Luzon, as well as the current state of research on Homo naledi in South Africa and the Hobbits of Flores. Hawks contends that DNA will likely be extracted from all these lineages at some point and, if not, protein sequence data may be obtained. This would finally give researchers the statistical power to evaluate the possibility of extremely archaic admixture events. Hawks and Razib also address the potential role of natural selection driven by introgressed genes from sister lineages of humans and how this shaped modern variation.
Aug 23
53 min

Today Razib talks to Noah Millman. Millman is an American screenwriter and filmmaker, as well as a political columnist and cultural critic based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the film and theater critic for Modern Age; previously he was a columnist for The Week (2015–2022) and a senior editor at The American Conservative (2012–2017). Millman writes the newsletter Gideon’s Substack, and his work has also appeared in outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. He graduated from Yale University and initially worked on Wall Street for 16 years, starting in a hedge fund's mail room, before leaving after the financial crisis to pursue creative endeavors full-time. Millman has been a producer on seven films, and written three and directed three. His most recent film is Resentment, and he is working on a novel, Fables of a Jewish Century. Razib and Millman begin their conversation discussing their history as bloggers who began writing early in the first decade of the century, in the wake of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Millman discusses his disillusionment with neoconservatism, and his evolution into a moderate, if heterodox, Democrat. They also discuss their positionality in a political commentary landscape that has radically shifted over the last twenty years, and what it’s like to be strongly partisan. They discuss how their views of religion have changed, especially in the wake of the New Atheist movement after 9/11 and the emergence of psychedelic spirituality in the 2020s. Millman articulates his views as a Jew whose own theological commitments are minimal, stating that he believes that the “Hindus are right about God” but John Calvin was probably right about humans. In the second half of the discussion, they pivot to the arts, beginning with how film as a medium has developed over the last generation, from the high tide of independent films in 1999 and through the “comic book” movie heyday of the 2010s, and on finally to the reemergence of more classic movies like Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick 2 and Brad Pitt’s F1. Razib argues that the Marvel universe exhausted its creative possibilities, and the same content no longer compels the younger generations, especially in a 90-minute format. Millman addresses whether film as a medium has reached the end of the line as a mass medium, and how fan-culture and “stan” culture has transformed the experience of the arts. He also asserts that cultural fragmentation is driven by technology, as consumers have a much greater range of options in their choices than in the past. Millman observes that as top-down cultural dynamics have collapsed, shifts are now driven by bottom-up drives. He also argues that movies will continue to be a major art form because filmmaking is now far cheaper than it was in the past, but he is not optimistic about the future of mass-market tent-pole films that can transcend myriad fan subcultures. Movie studios still do not know which films will become hits and which will flop, even the magic of Pixar and Marvel Studios are no longer a sure thing. In fact, Millman argues that fragmentation has masked the revival of art forms like the novel. As the gatekeepers are gone, many consume low art, with middle-aged people reading copious amounts of YA fiction. Millman argues that any aspiring artist needs to grapple with the competitive realities of the new attention economy. Technology has made it easier for anyone to create art because new tools are cheaper and self-publishing is now a real option for writers. However, all of this unleashed creativity is competing for the same amount of funding, support and a relatively fixed audience.
Aug 15
1 hr 53 min

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his paper from earlier this year, Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel. Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsala University, Forest-Lima is now an instructor in genetic medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also a returning guest to the podcast, having earlier come on to discuss his paper The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa. Razib and Fortes-Lima first contextualize who the Fulani are in the West African socio-historical context, in particular, their role as transmitters of Islam across the Sahel. They also discuss the importance of having numerous Fulani subpopulations in the publication; earlier work had generalized about the Fulani from a small number of samples from a single tribe. Fortes-Lima highlights the primary finding, in particular, that the Fulani seem to have what we now call “Ancient North African” (ANA) ancestry. That people was related to, but not descended from, the “out of Africa” population which gave rise to Eurasians. They also explore the role of natural selection in allowing the Fulani to subsist on a diet high in milk, and how the Fulani lactase persistence mutation is exact same with Eurasians rather than East Africans. Fortest-Lima also reviews some of the earlier 20th-century anthropological speculations about the origins of the Fulani, and what his results show about their affinities (or lack thereof) to groups in West Asia and the Maghreb.
Aug 10
55 min

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jack Despain Zhou, executive director of the Center for Educational Progress (CEP). Despain Zhou is a graduate of Western Governors University, and is completing his J.D. at Temple University. A former cryptographic analyst for the US Air Force, Despain Zhou is better known as a former producer for Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog at Blocked and Reported under the pseudonym Tracie Woodgrains. Despain Zhou’s mission with CEP is to push for individualized learning programs “where every student can advance as far and as fast as their curiosity and determination will take them.” In short, not only does CEP support tracking, but it believes that more individualized learning environments are what allow students to flourish. Despain Zhou talks about how his own life informed his interest in this topic, going from a precocious and curious toddler to a sullen elementary school student. He explained to his mother at the time how the boring, regimented one-size-fits-all mentality of the public school system removed all his passion for learning. Despain Zhou talks about how the levelling and equity oriented philosophy of the modern educational establishment is extremely unpopular, but has nevertheless taken root in ed schools and therefore has advocates among both teachers and administrators. He makes the case that CEP’s advocacy is needed given the educational theorists’ intense and passionate fixation on keeping students of all talents at the same level; this is a case where Despain Zhou argues common sense is far superior to esoteric research for which there is truly no robust evidence.
Aug 5
1 hr 16 min

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, in the wake of Elon Musk’s xAI Grok chatbot turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT’s release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven by automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist at Google, Twitter (now X) and Nvidia (now the first $4 trillion company). With more than a decade on the leading edge computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that was a necessary precursor to the rise of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages the latest models to retrieve the ground-truth on news-stories. Disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company. Razib and Yakovenko first tackle why Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offering individual pay packages north of $200 million, poaching some of OpenAI’s top individual contributors. Yakovenko observes that it seems Meta is giving up on its open-source Llama project, their competitor to the models that underpin OpenAI and ChatGPT (he also comments that it seems that engineers at xAI are disappointed in the latest version of Grok). Overall, though the pay-packages of AI engineers and researchers are high; there is now a big shakeout as massive companies with the money and engineering researchers pull away from their competitors. Additionally, in terms of cutting-edge models, the US and China are the only two international players (Yakovenko notes parenthetically that Chinese engineers are also the primary labor base of American AI firms). They also discuss how it is notable that almost three years after the beginning of the current booming repeated hype-cycles of artificial intelligence began to crest, we are still no closer to “artificial general intelligence” and the “intelligence super-explosion” that Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for generations. AI is partially behind the rise of companies like Waymo that are on the verge of transforming the economy, but overall, even though AI is still casting around for its killer app, big-tech has fully bought in and believes that the next decade will determine who wins the future.
Aug 2
1 hr 20 min

Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David van Ofwegen, a philosophy teacher based in Thailand. Razib and Ofwegen first met by chance while he was traveling in the US in 2003. A Dutch national, educated at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and then the University of Hawaii, specializing in the philosophical underpinnings of Social Darwinism, Ofwegen has been based in Thailand for the last 15 years. Razib and Ofwegen’s initial connection was over their shared interest in the turmoil in Europe post-9/11 and the 2002 assassination of the right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortyun. They discuss what has happened in the Netherlands over the last generation, with both immigrant assimilation into Dutch society, and the assimilation of Dutch society to immigrants. Ofwegen reflects on returning to a homeland where he encounters bartenders who don’t speak Dutch, only English, and youth culture where white Dutch affect the accents of Moroccan immigrants. He also observes that in his hometown of the Hague, it is as common to hear Arabic or Turkish on the streets as Dutch. This is in contrast with the countryside outside of the large cities, which remain overwhelmingly white and native-born. Ofwegen also notes that global multiculturalism has had an impact on the practice of some Dutch customs, in particular the traditions surrounding Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), a character in Dutch Christmas celebrations that is wildly offensive to American sensibilities, given the longtime convention of blackface. Ofwegen argues that the Netherlands is becoming less Dutch and more global, homogenizing into a node in the pan-American cultural sphere. They also discuss the contrasts between Thailand and the Netherlands, and what it is like living outside the developed world. Though in nominal terms the GDP per capita of Thailand is about 10% of that of the Netherlands, Ofwegen does not feel that his adopted homeland is particularly underdeveloped or behind the times. Bangkok in particular is fully in the modern world, with all the comforts and technologies we avail ourselves of in the West. Ofwegen also observes that while the poor in the West live in deprived ghettos, in Thailand, the poor are usually rural peasants who own their own property. Nevertheless, he is clearly a guest. Though married to a Thai native and with a child who has Thai citizenship, he is legally an expatriate of the Netherlands. He notes that the same is true of Thailand’s large Burmese and Cambodian populations. The Thai have a very clear idea of their nation and its identity, in contrast to the more globalized vision common among Western elites.
Jul 30
1 hr 18 min

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Claire Lehmann. Lehmann has an undergraduate degrees in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide. She was enrolled in a graduate program in psychology, but left it after becoming disillusioned with moral relativism, she went on to found the online magazine Quillette to reflect a more traditionally pro-reason and pro-evidence-based worldview. Within three years Lehmann was profiled in 2018 in The New York Times as a major figure within the nascent “intellectual dark web.” Razib and Claire discuss the evolution and current state of Quillette, a publication founded in 2015 to counter anti-enlightenment thinking, and later a platform for many thinkers associated with the intellectual dark web. Initially anti-left and anti-post-modernist, it later became known for its stance against cancel culture and woke ideologies, albeit without ever explicitly aligning with the American right. Lehmann clarifies her publication’s classically liberal stance. They also touch on the evolution and disintegration of the intellectual dark web, the corrosive impact of woke culture on academia over the last decade, and the likely future role of AI in disrupting traditional education. Lehmann also discusses the changing landscape of social media and public discourse, particularly the impact of Elon Musk's interventions at Twitter over the last few years. They also explore the "woke right" debate, alluding to the authoritarian tendencies emerging among ascendant conservatives, citing discussions of the topic by former Quillette contributor and editor Colin Wright and journalist Jesse Singal. Razib asks about the future of Quillette, and Lehmann talks about its new focus on long-form articles on culture, science and the arts, and addresses the magazine's pro-Israel stance, which has polarized some American readers that don’t understand why an Australia-based publication should take a strong pro-Zionist stance.
Jul 27
1 hr 35 min

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to philosopher of science Nathan Cofnas, whose specialty is biology and ethics. An American, Cofnas is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His Substack is here. First, they discuss Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, which is outlined in his three-book series, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Cofnas reviews his own critiques of MacDonald’s theory, and the reception they received professionally and from MacDonald’s large cohort of online fans. He also discusses the impossibility in obtaining a hearing for MacDonald’s response to Cofnas’ arguments in academia given anxieties today about so much as “platforming” offensive ideas. Razib brings up the evolutionary biological aspects of MacDonald's theory, and why there are reasons to be skeptical due to the unrealistic parameters of mathematical models required by MacDonald’s theories. They then turn to attempts to cancel Cofnas over his hereditarian views. Cofnas articulates his perspective that actually a woke-Left egalitarian perspective is probably the most rational position if you utterly reject hereditarianism, especially as regards group differences. Cofnas believes conservative arguments about the importance of culture in shaping outcomes have run their course. Finally, Razib presses Cofnas on the actual career prospects for a heterodox academic in the 21st century, and possible alternate routes to become a public intellectual.
Jul 24
1 hr 40 min

Today Razib talks to repeat guest Steve Hsu about China, a topic with so many currently relevant dimensions gIven the PRC’s clear emergence as an economic, military and political rival to the US. Hsu is a Caltech‑trained theoretical physicist who migrated from black holes to big data, co‑invented privacy tech at SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a prominent public voice on genetics, intelligence and the future of human enhancement. He is also a professor of physics at Michigan State, and from 2012-2020 was vice president for research and graduate studies there. Razib and Hsu discuss whether China is innovating and how meanwhile American regulation and culture are stifling its domestic creativity. A proud Iowan, Hsu rebuts the notion that he is pro-China, seeing himself simply as a realist convinced that it is important to face the PRC head on and assess its strengths candidly. He and Razib talk about China’s demographic headwinds. Hsu points out the reality of demographic inertia. The generation already born in the 21st century is an abundant young workforce who will power the nation’s rise for the next 30-40 years; that disastrously plummeting fertility making headlines today is a concern post-dated for at least a generation down the road. They also discuss the quality of Chinese higher education, and the reality that the population today is far more educated than it was 25 years ago. Hsu also talks about possible cultural and biobehavioral differences between East Asians and Europeans, and addresses why South Asians seem to be better adapted to succeed in American corporate culture.
Jul 21
57 min

Today Razib talks to David Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph.D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and Nordic security. He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, an assistant professor of Classics at Aarhus University, and professor of the history of civilization at Boston University. He co‑directed the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and remains a senior fellow of the Danish free‑market think tank CEPOS while writing a regular column for Jyllands‑Posten. His breakthrough book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998), argues that Western success sprang from a hard‑edged fusion of Roman order, Germanic liberty, Christian morality, and Smithian economics, rather than being a single disgraceful arc from Greco‑Roman‐paganism to secular Enlightenment that bypassed the Middle Ages. Razib asks Gress how he would have written Plato to NATO today, more than 25 years later, and he says he would have emphasized Christianity’s role in creating a unified Western culture out of Greco-Roman and Germanic diversity more. Gress also reiterates that he does not deny the Greek foundation of Western Civilization, but rather, his work was a corrective to a very thin and excessively motivated and partisan narrative that stripped out vast periods of European history. They also discuss Gress’ own own peculiar identity, the son of an American, born to a Danish mother, raised in Denmark who converted to Catholicism as an adult, and how that all fits into a broader European identity. They also discuss the impact of mass immigration on the national identities of Europe in the last generation, and Gress’ opinions as to the European future. Razib also asks Gress about the role that evolutionary ideas may have in shaping human history, and how his own views may have changed since From Plato to NATO. They also discuss when it is plausible to say that the West was a coherent idea, and whether the Protestant Reformation was the beginning of the end for the unitary civilization that was Latin Christendom.
Jul 18
1 hr 14 min
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