Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to Noah Smith, an American economist-turned-blogger known for his commentary on economics and public policy. His blog, Noahpinion, is one of the most popular on Substack. He earned a PhD in economics at University of Michigan and served as an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook  University before leaving academia to become a full-time writer. He wrote a column for Bloomberg until 2021, when he turned his focus entirely to independent writing and his Substack newsletter. Smith is based out of San Francisco but spends part of the year in Japan. An enthusiast for Japanese culture, he is also one of the central nodes in English-speaking rabbit-twitter. First, Razib and Smith talk about the current cultural and political situation in Japan. In particular, how did Japan transform itself from a country with non immigration to one with a non-trivial number of migrants? Additionally, Razib asks Smith about the new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, the first woman in that role. Smith elucidates her relationship to the politics of two of her most prominent predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Junichiro Koizumi. Razib also asks, is she as far right as some people are saying? Then Smith and Razib discuss the "vibe shift" in American culture over the last five years, from the peak period of wokeness around 2020, to the current political ascendancy of MAGA and how Democrats are reconfiguring their politics.

Today, Razib talks to Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist, horror entertainment producer, and author, whose work centers on the psychological and evolutionary roots of our fascination with darkness, horror, and true crime. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Scrivner also serves as the executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and founded the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Scientific American and Forbes. He is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away, where he explores how our fascination with horror functions as a survival-oriented, yet deeply human, impulse. Though working in psychology and behavior, Scrivner's original training is in biological the sciences, and Razib first probes him on the possible evolutionary origins of our persistent interest in horror, and why we might actually be attracted to the phenomenon in the first place. Scrivner also explains how the horror genre differs from other narrative forms, in particular, the power imbalance that makes heroic action and tension much more difficult. Horror, in fact, primarily leverages our intuitions about how predator and prey interact, more than a battle between peers. Scriver also discusses the relationship between fear and our dreams, and the various psychological and evolutionary theories for why we might have so many nightmares.

Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests. Prior to his work in AI research, Soares worked as a software engineer at Google. He holds a B.S. in computer science and economics from George Washington University. On this episode they discuss his new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, co-authored with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Soares and Yudkowsky make the stark case that the race to build superintelligent AI is a "suicide race" for humanity. Razib and Soares discuss how AI systems are "grown" rather than deliberately engineered, making them fundamentally opaque and uncontrollable. They explore a concrete extinction scenario, explain why even minimally misaligned goals could lead to human annihilation. Soares urges immediate cooperative action to prevent such a worst-case outcome.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Alexander Cortes. Cortes is a trainer, fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of Ferta, a company that aims to "optimize your reproductive health and conceive naturally." Born and raised in California, Cortes began his career in the fitness industry as a personal trainer in 2010. Over the next few years he expanded his efforts online, writing about fitness and nutrition from a science-informed perspective. Cortes developed a following by offering practical advice on strength training, muscle building, and the psychological aspects of fitness to the interested general public, translating the wisdom-of-the-gym for the person on the street. In the first part of the podcast, Razib and Cortes talk about "broscience," and how it differs from "quantified self" and other movements geared toward self-optimization. They discuss how "bros" arrived on the importance and utility of peptides long before the ozempic revolution, and how the iterative and experimental methods of gym-addicted amateurs predated and anticipated what would later become conventional wisdom. Razib also explores how Cortes' particular style of broscience differs from that of others, with its stronger empirical basis and analytical orientation (and aversion to fads like "raw food"). They discuss the "peptide revolution" and how online fitness and health influencers discovered it earlier, the utility of the macromolecules in health and wellness, and what the online community discovered already that is likely to come down the clinical pipeline. In the second part of the discussion, Cortes introduces his new company, Ferta, and its situates its position in the fertility space. He explains the origin of his firm as he and his wife began to attempt to conceive in their 30s, and how difficult or easy the process was conditional on the optimizations they engaged in. Cortes explains many people struggle because they do things wrong, and don't maximize their chances by being healthy and fertile.

Today on Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Kat Rosenfield. She is an American novelist, journalist, and culture critic known for both her fiction and commentary on contemporary political debates. She began her career in publishing and as a reporter for MTV News before branching out into broader cultural criticism, contributing to outlets such as The New York Times, Wired, Vulture, Reason, and UnHerd. As a novelist, she has written You Must Remember This (2023), No One Will Miss Her (2021), Inland (2014) and Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (2012). Rosenfield also co-authored the New York Times bestselling A Trick of Light (2019) with Stan Lee. She is currently a contributor to The Free Press and a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. In the four years since Rosenfield was last on Unsupervised Learning the "culture wars" have seen a changing of the front lines; the woke ascendancy is no more, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, and Donald J. Trump is back in the Whitehouse. After the recording of this podcast Rosenfield was the target of a "cancellation" campaign due to her making light of white liberal gushing over the prose stylings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. But this being 2025, Rosenfield seemed more amused than afraid of the concerted attempt to "drag" her online and notify her employers. The first portion of this podcast discusses where we are now in the culture wars, how things have broadly changed, and which institutional pockets of the old woke ascendancy remain. Rosenfield and Razib also discuss the rise of gender polarization in online culture, and in particular, among Gen-Z.

Today Razib talks to Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He earned his BA from the University of Western Ontario and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics. Prior to his current role, he held positions at the University of Southampton and Birkbeck, University of London, which he left in October 2023. He is the author of several books, including Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, and The Third Awokening. His research interests include nationalism, political and religious demography, and national identity. Kaufmann is a previous guest on the podcast. Razib and Kaufmann begin their conversation by exploring the thesis of one of his earlier works, 2004's Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. They discuss the definition of "WASP," White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and cultural changes in the white American majority because of the massive immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th century. Kaufman argues that a coalition of liberal WASPs and "white ethnics" was instrumental in the eventual overthrow of the cultural hegemony of elite Protestant whites in the second half of the 20th century. Razib and Kaufman then relate the history of the WASPs to his latest book, The Third Awokening, which chronicles the rise of "cultural socialism" centered around race. Kaufman documents the potency of the ideas of the latest variant of wokeness, their traction among the youth, and argues for its historical roots in earlier forms of Anglo liberalism.

Today Razib talks to Ryan P. Williams. He is president of The Claremont Institute, a position he has held since 2017. He is also a contributor to The Claremont Review of Books and started The American Mind. Williams earned a B.A. in political science and Economics from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in politics from Claremont Graduate University. He has taught American politics and political philosophy as an adjunct professor at California State University, San Bernardino and Cal Poly Pomona. Razib and Williams first discuss the origins of The Claremont Institute and the influence of Harry Jaffa on the think-tank's founding and current thought. They explore the influence of Jaffa's mentor, political philosopher Leo Strauss, upon his worldview, and the differences that define the "west coast Straussianism" associated with the Institute and "east coast Straussianism." Williams also articulates how the conservative thought of Claremont affiliated scholars and pundits differs from other movements on the right, and in particular, how it is differentiated from both neoconservatism and paleoconservatism. Razib and Williams then go over The American Mind's decision to publish Michael Anton's "flight 93 election" piece, and the connection of many Claremont scholars to the Trump administration and the MAGA movement.

Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for nearly twenty-five years. He's the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist and A Brief History of Timekeeping. The last is a mix of cultural and engineering history, archeology and physics, and reflects Orzel's wide interests as reflected in his Substack, Counting Atoms. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib surveys the state of physics communication and science, as well as our broader culture's relationship with academia. Orzel and Razib first discuss the massive success of physicist-turned-YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder. Emerging from academic physics and associated with Lee Smolin and the Perimeter Institute, Hossenfelder has shifted from skepticism of mainstream theories like string theory to arguing that academic science as a whole must be restructured. Orzel also notes that contrarian or heterodox views in popular areas such as astrophysics and particle physics receive much more attention than applied fields like solid-state physics. Razib and Orzel reflect on how science communication has changed over the past two decades, moving from the text-driven blog era before 2010 to the rise of podcasts and video. They also discuss the many technological applications of physics in the 21st century, particularly in battery technology, an area that is transforming daily life but rarely serves as fodder for glossy popular-press treatments. In the second half of the podcast, Orzel considers how science, and academia more broadly, have navigated the adversarial stance of the Trump administration. Razib asks whether institutional science, shaped in the post–World War II era, may be due for a major transformation, or whether it is even approaching the end of its line. Finally, Orzel addresses whether academics can regain broad public trust in the wake of the extreme politicization of the 2010s.

Recently, the new embryo-selection start-up Herasight has been in the news, finally coming out of stealth. Part of the buzz is because of the public involvement of well-known geneticists and academics like Alex Young and Joe Pickrell in Herasight's algorithm development. Additionally, Noor Siddiqi, the CEO of Orchid, a competitor to Herasight (and onetime advertiser on this podcast), was a guest on Ross Douthat's show Interesting Times, triggering another round of conversations around embryo-selection, including in The Wall Street Journal and Breaking Points. To hash out some opposing viewpoints, Unsupervised Learning decided to bring on two guests that stake out very different positions, Dr. James Lee, a psychometrician and behavior geneticist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, a philosopher and Herasight's sales lead. Lee has been on the record with his skepticism of reproductive technology, writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal four years ago warning against the consequences of polygenic embryo selection. Meanwhile, Anomaly's last book was Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement, where he advances the idea that such technologies will unlock human potential.

On last week's episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib spoke with Alex Nowrestah, a vice president at the Cato Institute and a strong advocate for expanding legal immigration. This week, he turned to the other side of the debate with Jason Richwhine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies and a vocal supporter of sharply reducing immigration. Richwine earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and political science from American University, and later a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard. Before joining CIS, he served as deputy director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and worked as a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. The conversation begins with an overview of the dramatic swings in U.S. immigration policy under Biden and Trump. Both note the surge of the foreign-born population in the early 2020s, with the unauthorized share now estimated at 15-16 million. Richwine faults Biden for lax border enforcement and the abuse of parole programs, and points to the comparative effectiveness of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy. He also presses the case for a moratorium, arguing that even legal immigration must be scaled back to sustainable levels. Razib and Richwine weigh the economic and cultural consequences of high-skilled immigration and close by considering whether meaningful reform is politically possible in the years ahead.

  Three years ago, Razib recorded two podcasts with two immigration experts on different sides of the issue, Alex Nowrestah and Jason Richwhine. While Nowrasteh, who works for the libertarian Cato Institute as Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies, supports higher levels of legal immigration, Richwine, a Resident Scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), favors lower levels of inflows into the US. The initial pair of podcasts was recorded in the midst of the massive increase in immigration that occurred after the loosening of the pandemic-era controls, resulting in the highest proportion of the foreign-born since the turn of the 20th century. Though the Biden administration tightened controls in its last year, the swell of illegal immigration resulted in a backlash that fueled the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency and a turn in policy toward restriction. Recently, Razib recorded two conversations with Nowrestah and Richwine, revisiting the topic in 2025, and after three years of policy shifts. Today, Razib talks to Nowrasteh about the record of the Biden administration, the pivot occurring in the first year of the Trump administration, and where he sees the Republicans going in the future. Nowrasteh addresses the reality that the Democratic administration's lack of interest in controlling illegal flows resulted in anger and frustration at migration in general, and emphasizes the importance of borders and rules in allowing for legal immigration. Razib and Nowrasteh also discuss the controversy over H1-Bs, the role that skilled immigration plays in buttressing American power, and the conflicts on the Right regarding how immigration policy relates to geopolitics. They also explore the relationship between immigration and population, and how both connect to urban policy and economic growth.

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.

  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.

  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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.