Today, Razib talks to Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist, horror entertainment producer, and author, whose work centers on the psychological and evolutionary roots of our fascination with darkness, horror, and true crime. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Scrivner also serves as the executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and founded the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Scientific American and Forbes. He is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away, where he explores how our fascination with horror functions as a survival-oriented, yet deeply human, impulse.

Though working in psychology and behavior, Scrivner's original training is in biological the sciences, and Razib first probes him on the possible evolutionary origins of our persistent interest in horror, and why we might actually be attracted to the phenomenon in the first place. Scrivner also explains how the horror genre differs from other narrative forms, in particular, the power imbalance that makes heroic action and tension much more difficult. Horror, in fact, primarily leverages our intuitions about how predator and prey interact, more than a battle between peers. Scriver also discusses the relationship between fear and our dreams, and the various psychological and evolutionary theories for why we might have so many nightmares.

Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests. Prior to his work in AI research, Soares worked as a software engineer at Google. He holds a B.S. in computer science and economics from George Washington University.

On this episode they discuss his new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, co-authored with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Soares and Yudkowsky make the stark case that the race to build superintelligent AI is a "suicide race" for humanity. Razib and Soares discuss how AI systems are "grown" rather than deliberately engineered, making them fundamentally opaque and uncontrollable. They explore a concrete extinction scenario, explain why even minimally misaligned goals could lead to human annihilation. Soares urges immediate cooperative action to prevent such a worst-case outcome.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Alexander Cortes. Cortes is a trainer, fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of Ferta, a company that aims to "optimize your reproductive health and conceive naturally." Born and raised in California, Cortes began his career in the fitness industry as a personal trainer in 2010. Over the next few years he expanded his efforts online, writing about fitness and nutrition from a science-informed perspective. Cortes developed a following by offering practical advice on strength training, muscle building, and the psychological aspects of fitness to the interested general public, translating the wisdom-of-the-gym for the person on the street.

In the first part of the podcast, Razib and Cortes talk about "broscience," and how it differs from "quantified self" and other movements geared toward self-optimization. They discuss how "bros" arrived on the importance and utility of peptides long before the ozempic revolution, and how the iterative and experimental methods of gym-addicted amateurs predated and anticipated what would later become conventional wisdom. Razib also explores how Cortes' particular style of broscience differs from that of others, with its stronger empirical basis and analytical orientation (and aversion to fads like "raw food"). They discuss the "peptide revolution" and how online fitness and health influencers discovered it earlier, the utility of the macromolecules in health and wellness, and what the online community discovered already that is likely to come down the clinical pipeline.

In the second part of the discussion, Cortes introduces his new company, Ferta, and its situates its position in the fertility space. He explains the origin of his firm as he and his wife began to attempt to conceive in their 30s, and how difficult or easy the process was conditional on the optimizations they engaged in. Cortes explains many people struggle because they do things wrong, and don't maximize their chances by being healthy and fertile.