A Conversation With Razib Khan

Rambling thoughts on blogging, politics, religion and the arts

Before I left for vacation, I recorded a podcast with my old friend Razib Khan, who I know from the classical blogging period of the mid-2000s. When I first met him, Khan moved in intellectual circles that were interested in the scientific study of human nature and its variations, with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on the genetic basis of both the nature and variation. At the time, if that described you, it made you an odd duck; a decade later, having those interests could get you banished from respectable intellectual life; yet another decade on, and they purportedly form one of the pillars of the new political dispensation running the country.

But in all that time, I’ve never known Khan himself to be particularly political at all. He definitely has political opinions—he shares them without a hint of shame, however politically incorrect they may be—but he's never been particularly interested in changing the world as opposed to understanding it. That’s an orientation we share, and I suspect it’s one reason why we get along intellectually. His Substack, Unsupervised Learning, focuses frequently on history—nearly everything I know about the Mongols, I learned from Khan—and that’s another concordance between us; my first intellectual training was in history, and I still look at most things through its very classical lens, and I particularly appreciate how Khan brings the tools of modern genomics to bear on historical questions since that’s a subject I know little about.

We didn’t talk much about any of that, though. Instead we had the kind of rambling conversation that old friends who haven’t spoken recently (we last met in person when I was in Texas for the Austin Film Festival in 2022) might have to catch up, and let things wander where the spirit moved us. We talked a bit about how blogging has changed from the classical period to the current Substack era; we talked a bit about politics, and a bit more about religion (Khan was raised a Muslim but has been an atheist since childhood); and then we finally got to movies, and my own experience making one, which I think is what Khan wanted to talk to me about most of all.

Khan posted the podcast last week. I don’t know whether my readers saw it, so I’ve posted the audio above and a link below. I hope you enjoy it—and I hope you take the time to check out Khan’s Substack more generally. There’s fascinating stuff there.

Noah Millman: from finance to the culture industry