Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Razib Khan

Alina Chan is a post-doctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. Since the spring of 2020 Chan has been prominent in online (and “offline”) discussions as to the nature of the origins of SARS-Cov-2. Her argument is that there needs to be more openness to alternative possibilities of the origin of SARS-Cov-2. She is a co-author on two preprints related to SARS-Cov-2.

Armand Marie Leroi is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body and The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. An evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, Leroi has tackled race and eugenics, as well as published on the cultural evolution of music and the neutral theory of evolution.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk at length with Samo Burja, a public intellectual who focuses on the insights that history can provide to the present and future. To be frank, Samo is one of the most historically literate people I’ve ever met. This probably explains how we could talk so easily for well over an hour on topics as diverse as Confucianism, “social technology”, and the European view of America and China (the last might surprise you!).

Dr. Jeremy Kamil is a virologist in the LSU system. He is one of the people I have encountered over the last year whose opinion I’ve learned to take to heart. Not because Jeremy holds forth from on high, but because he doesn’t. As you will hear in this conversation, he is candid about how little he truly knew at the beginning of 2020. A world transformed by COVID-19 has also seen a world of pundits and commentators rewriting history, testifying to their foresight. Masks are useless until they’re not.

Razib talks to political analyst David Shor.

Razib talks to archaeologists Eric Cline about his book 1177, and the end of the Bronze Age.