Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Available Episodes

5 of 222

Coltan Scrivner: the evolution and psychology of horror
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.
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1:11:35
Nate Soares: we are doomed (probably)
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.
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1:07:27
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1:07:27
Alexander Cortes: broscience, health science and fertility
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.
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1:02:47
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Kat Rosenfield: after the vibe shift
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.
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Eric Kaufmann: a cultural revolution in winter
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.
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1:29:51
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1:29:51