Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to Jerry Z. Muller, a historian and professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., specializing in modern European intellectual history, capitalism, conservatism, and German and Jewish history. His work explores how ideas shape economic, political, and cultural life, bridging history, philosophy, and public policy. His books include Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, Capitalism and the Jews, The Tyranny of Metrics, and Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Writing for both scholarly and general audiences, Muller examines subjects ranging from the moral arguments surrounding capitalism to the consequences of relying excessively on numerical measures to evaluate institutions and individuals. He has an eponymous Substack.
The conversation revolves to a great extent on a recent post by Muller, Rethinking Faculty Control Scholarly Norms, the Vanderbilt Report, and the Limits of Academic Self-Government. Razib and Muller discuss the challenges facing universities, the resilience of American capitalism, and the effects of AI on intellectual life. Muller argues that scholarship depends on "organized skepticism," including peer review, replication, and engagement with different viewpoints, but that activism and ideological conformity weaken these practices in parts of academia and undermine public trust. They also tackle whether stronger university leadership can help address these problems while managing declining literacy and numeracy, shifting demographics, uncertain international enrollment, rising costs, and pressure to demonstrate results. Muller suggests that vocational training may increasingly separate from liberal arts education and research, raising questions about how universities can adapt while maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. He remains broadly optimistic about American capitalism, pointing to technological innovation, competition among states, immigration, and social supports. Both view AI as a powerful tool for skilled thinkers but a potential source of intellectual passivity for others, raising the question of how people can preserve their agency and sense of purpose as AI becomes part of everyday intellectual work.

Today Razib talks to Theo Jaffee, co-host of Monitoring the Situation, a show backed by Andreessen Horowitz that covers the rise of the "intelligence explosion" and AI. Jaffee is writer and podcaster who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida. He studied computer science and economics at the University of Florida. His writing on Theo's Substack explores artificial intelligence, technology, business, history, and philosophy. He has also contributed to Quillette and received an Emergent Ventures fellowship in 2024.
The podcast covers AI's accelerating capabilities, broader societal impact, and safety risks. Jaffee talks about estimates of a 10% probability of human technological civilization collapsing within ten years, distinguishing between the disempowerment of humanity and the potential continuation of civilization under AI control. But, he notes, coordination, political intervention, and the logistical difficulty of automating physical infrastructure can mitigate that catastrophic risk. Progress remains broadly on track with AI 2027 expectations, despite there being no predicted labor disruptions and Chinese consolidation failing to materialize as forecast. Jaffee notes events like the Hugging Face incident and an apparent Millennium Prize problem solution heighten concerns surrounding alignment and control. Razib and Jaffee also discuss how critical uncertainties persist over how rapidly recursive self-improvement might yield superintelligence, whether mounting political backlash will establish viable safeguards or trigger heavy-handed stagnation, and how society must ultimately evaluate AI consciousness and moral status.

Today Razib talks to Scott Greer, an American conservative writer, author, and podcaster who focuses on nationalism, immigration, online political culture, and the transformation of the Republican Party. Formerly an editor and columnist at The Daily Caller, he now hosts the Highly Respected podcast and newsletter and contributes to The American Conservative. He is the author of No Campus for White Men (2017) and Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump's America (2026), a history of how paleoconservatism, libertarianism, the alt-right, and other internet subcultures helped shape Trump-era politics. The first half of the conversation focuses on Whitepill, as Greer outlines a narrative history of the rise of the New Right and its relationship to MAGA and Donald Trump over the last decade. The conversation goes back even further, to the origins of the dissident Right in the Ron Paul movement of the late aughts. Then they move to discussing a piece recently posted on Highly Respected, Sunbeltism Takes Over America–And The South. A native of Tennessee, Greer talks about the implicit conservatism of the ascendant Sunbelt culture, but its broader cultural and social influence, and its difference from earlier Southern subcultures fixated on the "Lost Cause" and rooted in an agrarian society.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is CEO of Effort.News. He was previously with The Alliance for the Future. Most of this conversation is around why it took so long to put together something like Effort.News, and what they've discovered (e.g., "The 19th-century Family Fortunes Funding Degrowth"). Chau also discusses their recruitment and capital needs as a seed-stage startup.

Today Razib talks to Kyle Orton. Orton is a freelance researcher, writer, and editor specializing in security and foreign policy, with a particular focus on the Middle East, the Syrian war, regional geopolitics, and terrorist movements including the Islamic State (ISIS), Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). His work also ranges widely across history, including early Christianity, Islam and its relationship with the West, intelligence and espionage, the Reformation, the English Civil War, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, the First World War, Communism and the Cold War, and pre-Revolutionary Iran. Orton writes the newsletter It Can Always Get Worse, where he covers contemporary security issues alongside history, religion, intelligence, books, and occasional film reviews. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, UnHerd, Newsweek, The Independent, The New Arab, and International Business Times.
Orton and Razib's conversation begins with his post, The Sojourn of Arculf: An Eyewitness to "Early Islamic" Jerusalem - A Frankish bishop sheds some light on a historical dark age. Their discussion continues with probing the possibility that Islam as we know it truly did not exist any recognizable form before the 690s AD, and that the early "Saracens" as their Christian enemies referred to them were in fact a schismatic group of monotheists whose beliefs were adjacent to that of the Jews. Orton also discusses the role of Muhammad, or rather, the lack of the role of Muhammad, in the early years of the Islamic Caliphate. They also explore the possibility that later commentators largely attributed the negative reputation of Islam's first dynastic Caliphate, the Umayyads, to the reality that they would not recognize them as Muslims. Finally, Orton talks about the reality that some of the layers of text within the Koran seem far older than the time of Muhammad, perhaps by a century or so.