Werner Zagrebbi: Adventures in Forbidden Data

Today Razib talks to Jonathan P. Beauchamp, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, where his research focuses on applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, and the emerging field of "genoeconomics". He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and earned his undergraduate and master's degrees from Queen's University. In addition to his faculty position, he serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and an Associate Investigator at The Centre for Applied Genomics. Before fully transitioning into academia, Beauchamp gained professional experience as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an associate at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He is also a core researcher with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), contributing to large-scale genome-wide association studies on the genetic basis of economic behaviors, risk tolerance, and educational attainment. Razib and Beauchamp explore genoeconomics, the use of genetics to investigate education, income, behavior, and inequality. Beauchamp traces the field's evolution from unreliable claims about individual genes to large-scale studies showing that educational attainment, risk tolerance, and patience reflect thousands of tiny genetic effects. They discuss the promise and limits of polygenic prediction, how sibling comparisons help separate genetic effects from family background, and why larger, more diverse datasets and whole-genome sequencing could advance the field. The conversation turns to Beauchamp's research on how increasingly accurate genetic predictions could destabilize insurance markets when consumers know risks that insurers cannot use in pricing. They also examine his work linking the Western Church's marriage restrictions to weaker kinship networks and distinctive European social institutions, before discussing the professional pressures surrounding controversial research and new sibling-based estimates of heritability.

Philippe Lemoine is a researcher and writer specializing in the philosophy of science, statistical analysis, and epidemiology. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). Lemoine is best known for his detailed, data-driven critiques of COVID-19 epidemiological modeling, lockdown policies, and Western foreign policy, which he primarily publishes on his blog, Nec Pluribus Impar (he now has a Substack). In addition to his independent research, he has contributed analytical essays on science and society to publications like Quillette. Razib and Lemoine discuss France's unrest, demographic change, and political paralysis, with Lemoine arguing that the school riots reflect a volatile mix of teenage behavior, social-media contagion, immigrant integration problems, and far-left agitation rather than a centrally organized conspiracy. They examine how viral footage exaggerates outsiders' perceptions of France's ethnic transformation, overlooking regional differences and widespread intermarriage. Turning to presidential politics, Lemoine argues that Marine Le Pen's prospects depend heavily on whether she faces Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the more competitive centrist Édouard Philippe. Beneath these immediate conflicts lies a deeper fiscal problem: weak growth, mounting debt, and generous pension commitments to an aging electorate make reform increasingly necessary but politically punishing. Lemoine anticipates that inflation and financial repression may prove more politically feasible than explicit spending cuts, while Razib emphasizes that the same tensions between retirees and workers increasingly confront the United States and other developed countries.

Today, Ramez Naam returns 5 years after his original appearance on the podcast. In 2003, he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Naam is also the author of three science fiction books: Crux, Apex, and Nexus. In addition, has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He also has an eponymous Substack, Ramez Naam. First, Razib and Naam discuss how technological change is turning once-futuristic possibilities into everyday realities, beginning with the falling costs of solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles. Naam argues that economics increasingly drives adoption, with Texas illustrating how competitive markets and easy permitting can accelerate clean energy even in a fossil-fuel stronghold. Razib probes the implications for transportation, oil demand, and the Gulf states, while Naam emphasizes that the transition will take decades and that heavy industry remains difficult to decarbonize. The conversation then shifts to AI, where Razib presses Naam on existential risk, industry concentration, and recursive self-improvement. Naam expects increasingly powerful systems but doubts an imminent intelligence explosion, pointing to diminishing returns, hardware constraints, and the difficulty of obtaining reliable real-world data. He sees concentrated corporate or government power as a greater threat than runaway superintelligence and favors broad access and competition.  

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.  

Nikolai Yakovenko is back on the podcast because of the Hugging Face hack. 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. His latest startup is HuggingNews. Razib and Yakovenko talk about the implications of OpenAI's inadvertent hack of Hugging Face, and whether he has been too sanguine about the possibility of AI-apocalypse. Though Yakovenko hasn't gone full doomer, he admits that this sort of behavior by AI agents is alarming. That being said, he cautions we need to keep perspective. They also discuss predictions of the coming obsolescence of software engineers…Yakovenko notes that in some ways Dario Amodei was correct to predict the end of software engineering as a profession: very few write code unaided by LLMs today. In a few years, many professions, especially in tech, have transformed, but warnings of mass unemployment have not materialized.