Hello, everyone, and welcome to talk nerdy. Today is Monday, February 10th, 2025, and I'm the host of the show, Dr. Kara Santa Maria. And as I do every week, I want to thank

those of you right at the top of the show who make Talk Nerdy possible. If you are interested

in supporting the show on an episodic basis, I recommend you go to patreon.com slash Talk Nerdy. Do it

in your browser, not in the app. All right, this week's top patrons include

Anu Baravage, Daniel Lang, David J.E. Smith, Mary Neva, Brian Holden, David Compton, Gabriel F. Haramio,

Joe Wilkinson, Joseph Lomore, Pasquale Jalati, and, oh no, Rika Maharaj and O'Rika Hagman.

Thank you all so, so much. All right, let's get into it without any

time to waste. I had the wonderful opportunity to speak today with Dr. Rina Bliss. She is the author of

the previous books Rethinking Intelligence, Race Decoded, and Social by Nature. She's an associate

professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and she has a new book out. It's called What's

Real About Race, Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society? So without any further ado,

here she is, Dr. Rina Bliss. Well, Sareka, thank you so much

for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I am very excited to talk about your new book. This is

your second book, if I'm not mistaken, called Humans, A Monstrous History. But before we get into that,

which I don't know, I feel like is very relevant right now, I would love to get to a little bit of

your background. So are you, would you call yourself a historian, a historian of science and

art? How do you define your academic role? I suppose I would say I'm a historian of science and art. How do you define your academic role? I would say I'm a historian

of science, art, and ideas, especially of science. Science art and ideas. Of course, the things that

really make us human. And what a theme for this book. So tell me a little bit about what it was or what it is

about monsters that drew you in maybe personally, maybe academically, and sort of spoke to you to

say, hey, you could do an entire book about this.

I think personally it started incredibly early.

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