This episode was recorded live at Manifest 2026. Razib Khan is a prominent writer, population geneticist, and podcaster. He is best known for his extensive deep-dives into human evolutionary history, consumer genomics, culture, and ancient DNA.

Chapter Markers:

(00:00) - Razib Khan at Manifest 2026: Genetic Discoveries, AI, and Academia
(01:18) - Manifest Q&A Kickoff
(02:43) - Yamnaya: Ancient DNA Mysteries
(15:01) - Yamnaya: Y Chromosome Conquests
(22:10) - Embryo Screening and AI
(42:15) - Conformity and Tenure
(46:34) - Academia: Reforms
(53:55) - Academia: Ideological Capture and Funding
(58:19) - Controversies and Closing Q&A

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models.

Mechanize is hiring!

https://mechanize.work/b/hsu

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists.

For example:

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors $500K salary

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve $300K salary

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.