Leighton Woodhouse: against the rise of the anti-woke cancel culture and MAGA cultural hegemony
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast for his third visit. Woodhouse is a journalist and documentarian based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept, UnHerd and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, Social Studies. He hosts Le Pod with Lee Fang. Woodhouse was a major left-wing critic of the excesses of woke culture, and now he has turned his skeptical eye upon the regnant MAGA cultural political complex. In posts like MAGA Globalism and Neoliberalism is Back! Woodhouse observes how the Trump administration seems to have turned its back on the “working-class politics” espoused by J. D. Vance in favor of the sort of free-market libertarianism preferred by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Razib outlines the divisions in the Trump administration between Steve Bannon and the tech-globalists around Musk, and how these divisions explain online discord. Woodhouse though argues that Trump has clearly sided with Musk, allowing the government to be captured by monied interests that will profit from the military-industrial complex. He also argues that MAGA in power shows the same tendency of the woke movement in terms of clamping down on free speech now that the Right is ascendant. Woodhouse argues that the Right is now using the same tools of cultural hegemony that the woke Left used before 2024. He argues that institutional politicization today is very similar to the dynamic he saw before 2024 on the part of the woke Left.
--------
1:27:09
Kevin Klatt: Nutrition, health, MAHA and GLP-1
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Kevin Klatt, a metabolism researcher, dietitian and science communicator. Klatt holds a BA in biological anthropology from Temple University and a PhD in Molecular Nutrition from Cornell University. Before a current appointment as a research scientist at UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. Klatt’s primary platform to communicate about nutrition, health and molecular biology is his Substack. He is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Recently Klatt has been writing about the “MAHA” pivot, “Make America Healthy Again,” driven by RFK Jr.’s appointment as head of Health and Human Sciences. Razib and Klatt talk about new directions driven by RFK Jr.'s focus on preventative health and skepticism of pharmaceuticals. Klatt points out that the past two decades have seen a massive shift away from funding nutritional studies, in contrast to the massive budgets of big pharma. He argues that we now really find ourselves without enough information to outline a public health policy given the underfunding of nutritional cohort studies. If MAHA is going to be a serious movement, it needs to drive a reallocation of funds. Razib and Klatt also touch on the cultural shift over the last decade on the Right, where something like “raw milk” switched from being coded as left-wing to being squarely right-wing. They also consider mounting skepticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccination, that seems to be associated with MAHA and in particular RFK Jr. Klatt also addresses the role that GLP-1 drugs are having in driving down obesity rates in the USA, and how pervasive their use might be in the near future.
--------
1:20:04
Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, friend of the podcast, Charles Murray returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970’s. He is the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment, Real Education, Coming Apart and What it means to be a libertarian and Human Diversity, among others. Born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has held positions at the American Institutions for Research, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. More than four years after their last conversation, and seven years after his official retirement, Murray reflects with Razib on where he sees America going in the next decade, and what has surprised him about the last 25 years. Razib asks what it is like to be a long-standing “Never Trump conservative” and a libertarian in Trump’s populist America. They also discuss the end of the “awokening” that began in the mid-2010s, and whether Murray’s long exile from notice and acknowledgement from mainstream opinion-leaders and tastemakers is at an end. Murray also addresses the ideological fractures he sees on the right, and how America will deal with the last generation of mass immigration that has altered the US’ demographic balance. They also discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to face the reality of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.
--------
59:57
Titus Techera: Post-Modern Conservative in a post-national Europe
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Titus Techera, a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack PostModernConservative. Techera also hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation. Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 Romanian presidential election that was overturned by the courts over accusations of Russian interference. Techera explains the social and cultural context of the candidate initially declared victorious against a backdrop of Romanian society’s typical stock characters. Techera also discusses the tension between having a nation-state with a distinctive character and becoming part of the broader EU project that is attempting to forge unity across 27 countries. He then addresses what a “Postmodern Conservative” is in the context of the arts. Perhaps most importantly, PostModern Conservatives take the 20th century and the modernist period seriously; they are not simply reactionaries who want to return to the 19th century. Conservatives who value the arts and culture cannot simply roll the tape back; they have to engage with what has come before. Razib and Techera also consider how inferences from the sciences, like the rejection of the “blank slate,” might influence the arts. They also discuss their disagreements about the latest Dune films, Techera prefers David Lynch’s attempt to adapt the book in 1984 to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version.
--------
1:26:24
Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nathan Lents about his new book, The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution. A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ research ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms to behavioral ecology. He is also the author of Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals and Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. Lents reached out to Razib after hearing his podcast with Conn Carroll, about his book Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy. Lents felt that Carroll overemphasized the role of monogamy during humanity’s long forager phase, and more precisely, failed to distinguish social monogamy and genetic monogamy. As noted in The Sexual Evolution, many socially monogamous species, like most birds, engage in enough extra-pair copulation so that genetic fidelity is considerably lower than 100%. Razib and Lents then go back to first principles, talking about the origins of sex, and its persistence in the face of the two-fold cost of reproduction in dimorphous organisms. They discuss why specialized males and females exist in complex organisms as distinct as flowering plants and humans. Lents also discusses the reviews empirical literature on homosexual behavior, variation in sex differences across many classes of organisms and the application of evolutionary thinking to our understanding of the human past. Then they discuss the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding the human present, and our current debates about marriage, sex and gender. Finally, they consider the differences between sex and gender, and the idea that both can be conceptualized in a nonbinary fashion.
USA