On this very special episode, Razib talks to paleoanthroplogists John Hawks and Chris Stringer. Hawks is 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.

Chris Stringer is affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer is the author of African Exodus. The Origins of Modern Humanity, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth and Homo Britannicus - The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. A proponent since the 1970's of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our species' relationship to Neanderthals. In the 1980's, with the rise to prominence of the molecular model of "mtDNA Eve," Stringer came to the fore as a paleoanthropological voice lending support to the genetic insights that pointed to our African origins. Trained as an anatomist, Stringer asserted that the fossil evidence was in alignment with the mtDNA phylogenies, a contention that has been broadly confirmed over the last five decades.

Razib, Hawks and Stringer discuss the latest work that has come out of Yuxian, China, and how it updates our understanding of human morphological diversity, and integrate it with the newest findings about Denisovans from whole genome sequencing. They talk about how we exist at a junction, with more and more data, but theories that are becoming more and more rickety in terms of explaining the patterns we see. Hawks talks about the skewing effect of selection on phylogenetic trees, while Stringer addresses the complexity of the fossil record in East Asia.

Today Razib talks to Sean Trende. He is a prominent American political analyst who currently serves as the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, a position he has held since 2010. He is also a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a lecturer at The Ohio State University, where he earned his Ph.D. in political science in 2023. Before transitioning to full-time political analysis, Trende practiced law for eight years at firms including Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Hunton & Williams LLP, holding a J.D. and M.A. from Duke University and a B.A. from Yale University. Known for his expertise in election forecasting, redistricting, and political demographics, he authored the book The Lost Majority (2012), co-authored The Almanac of American Politics 2014, and served as a court-appointed special master to redraw Virginia's legislative districts in 2021.

Trende and Razib first talk about the elections in the fall of 2025 in Virginia and New Jersey, and what they tell us about the elections next year. They also discuss the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, and the rise of populism on the Left and Right. Razib asks Trende about why political commentary often assumes single-party rule is about to happen, only to be refuted by the reality of the opposition's resurgence once these claims are made. They also talk about Trende's distinctive personal background, and his perspective as a more centrist-libertarian commentator and professor in the political analyst field.

This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib talks to returning guest Alex Young of UCLA and Herasight. Trained originally as a mathematician, Young studied statistics and computational biology at the University of Cambridge before doing a doctorate in genomic medicine and statistics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, under Peter Donnelly. He also worked at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik and at Oxford with Augustine Kong, developing methods in quantitative and population genetics.

Razib and Young talk extensively about what we know about heritability and genomics in 2025, four years after their first conversation. In particular, they discuss what larger sample sizes, high-density genotype-arrays and whole-genome sequencing have told us about heritability and the ability to predict traits in individuals from their sequence. They discuss quantitative and behavioral traits like height, intelligence and risk of autism, and the differences between classical statistical genetical methods utilizing twins and modern molecular genomic techniques that attempt to fix specific physical markers as causal factors in characteristics of interest. In addition to his academic work, Young has also been consulting for the polygenic embryo-screening company Herasight, working on cutting-edge methods for genomic prediction in the context of in vitro fertilization. They dig deep into the new method Young and colleagues worked on that helps democratize embryo selection using genomics, ImputePGTA.

Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zineb Riboua, a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua's pieces and commentary have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other outlets. She holds a master's of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris' Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is Beyond the Ideological.

Razib and Riboua discusses two pieces on her Substack today, Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution and Zohran Mamdani and Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism. Riboua explains that contrary to some assertions Mamdani is not an Islamist, but neither is a standard-issue class-based socialist or an identitarian in the woke model that was ascendent a few years ago. Rather, Riboua's contends that Mamdani, a "Third-Culture Kid," emerges out of the post-colonial world that reframes the Marxist framework into a Western vs. non-Western dyad. Rather than the Islamist Iranian Revolution of 1979, she traces Mamdani's intellectual lineage, that of anti-colonial Third-Worldism, to the Islam-inflected Algerian Revolution of the early 1960s. With conventional racial and gender identitarianism exhausted, Riboua contends that Third-Worldism is likely going to be the most potent force in the American Left over the next decade.

Today Razib talks to Ed West, a British journalist and author. He has served as deputy editor of UnHerd and The Catholic Herald, and has written columns for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He runs the Substack newsletter Wrong Side of History, where he explores culture, politics, and the longue durée of Western history. West is the author of books including Small Men on the Wrong Side of History and The Diversity Illusion, as well as popular-history titles such as 1066 and Before All That.

A previous podcast guest, West and Razib revisit the topic of British decline three years on. They discuss Britain's economic transformation, from one of the standout economies of Europe a generation ago, to a laggard. Razib probes why the British seem so attached to their welfare state, and why the state has embraced anti-growth policies along with high migration rates. They also discuss the tensions within Britain's large Muslim minority, and the cultural environment that allowed for mass migrant inflows despite their political unpopularity.

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.