Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.