Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode ofUnsupervised Learning, Razibtalks toAndrew Song, co-founder ofMake Sunsets. An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of theY Combinatorclass of winter 2016. Before becoming a founder, Song worked at firms involved in data analytics and artificial intelligence. A repeat attendee at the Founders Fund Hereticon conference, Songs company has been profiledIEEE Spectrum,The New York TimesandNPR.

Razib and Song first talk about the current state of climate, or more precisely, climate change and anthropogenic global warming. Song argues that the emission-reduction strategy has fundamentally failed, and global warming is inevitable absent a drastic strategy shift. Enter geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth. In the context of global warming Song proposes that humans engage in proactive efforts to cool the world. His company, along with a similar Israeli startup, proposes to introduce particulate matter into the stratosphere to reflect back some of the suns radiation. Razib asks Song what the reaction has been, given that the atmosphere is a public resource, and how he proposes to eventually make it a revenue-generating business through government contracts. More generally, Razib and Song talk about other geoengineering projects, includingAugustus Dorickos dream of increasing precipitation through his Rainmaker firm.

 

Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zineb Riboua, a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua’s pieces and commentary have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Jerusalem Post and Tablet among other outlets. She holds a master’s of public policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She did her undergraduate studies in France, where she attended French preparatory classes and HEC Paris’ Grande Ecole program. Her Substack is Beyond the Ideological.

Razib and Riboua discuss the Trump administration’s theory of tariffs as a tool of foreign policy and his attitudes toward multilateral diplomacy. They explore whether any principle beyond power and dominance underlies the current administration’s approach, and consider the role of principles and values in foreign policy. Riboua elaborates a realist perspective in line with the thinking of Henry Kissinger. States have interests and abilities to execute on those interests; idealism is secondary. Riboua also discusses the fact that Trump seems attuned to how foreign politicians relate to the American domestic scene. He seems willing to punish those abroad whom he perceives to be favorable to his political enemies and reward those who are personally favorable toward him. Razib then asks Riboua about the geopolitics of her native Morocco, a relatively stable monarchy on northwest Africa’s edge that has promoted moderate Islam, a good relationship with Europe and maintained a stable democracy.

 

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Mark Lutter. Lutter is an urban development expert known for his work on charter cities—new urban areas aimed at fostering economic growth and progress. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to building the ecosystem for charter cities, as well as the CEO of Braavos Cities, a charter city development company. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests span progress studies, governance, social dynamics and institution-building, with a belief that creating new cities can spark cultural and economic advancements similar to historical periods like the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age. He has been published or quoted in outlets like the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and The Chicago Tribune.

Lutter and Razib discuss diverse topics, from the difficulties of the Prospera project in Honduras, to the possibility of developing San Francisco’s Presidio into an Asian-style super-city. They explore the various pitfalls and possibilities faced when attempting to create new jurisdictions in developing nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, along with the major obstacles to urban innovation in the USA. Lutter outlines the economic case for charter cities, along with the normative values that undergird their creation as bastions of liberty and laboratories of cultural experimentation. Finally, they discuss the Trump administration’s openness to the idea of the “Freedom City” in the Presidio, along with local opposition to the project.

 

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Graeme Wood. Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he usually covers geopolitics and international affairs. His work ranges from a profile of Richard Spencer, the American white nationalist public figure with whom he went to high school with, to the Islamic State. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Wood grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Harvard College. He also studied at the American University in Cairo, Indiana University and Deep Springs College.

Today Razib talks to Wood about his piece in The Atlantic, Germany’s Anti-Extremist Firewall Is Collapsing. Wood addresses the economic malaise of contemporary Germany, in particular, the former East Germany, and how that is impacting the national cultural climate. More concretely, they consider why the right-wing Alternative For Deutschland (AFD) party is so popular, and its transformation from an anti-EU party to an anti-migrant party. Wood emphasizes that Germany has become a highly polarized society when it comes to ethnicities, with very cosmopolitan cities, but small towns in rural eastern provinces where he recalls feeling like possibly the only non-white face at the local beer hall (his father is a white American while his mother is ethnically Chinese). Razib muses whether German multiculturalism as an ideology has allowed for more, not less racism, while Wood reflects on his multi-decade experience visiting the nation as an outsider.

 

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.