The Wonder of the Emergent Mind (with Gaurav Suri)

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is October 21, 2025, and my guest is neuroscientist and author Grove Suri. He's the co-author with Jay McClellan of the book The Emergent Mind, How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines, which is our topic for today. Grov, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you, Russ.

Pleasure to be here. So this is a rather extraordinary book. It's got some very powerful explanations of the nuts and bolts of neural networks and uh large language models and the different aspects of those models that that have come to be part of our lives now in the form of you know various Chat GPT and Claude and and others but it also has some very deep ideas about the human experience and how we should think about it. So uh I really encourage people to read this book.

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