David Sussillo (on foster care and neuroscience)
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Umbrella
4.6 • 69.9K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2026
⏱️ 114 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Sussillo (Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind) is a technologist, neuroscientist, and professor at Stanford University. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss growing up with two parents that were addicts, experiencing extreme poverty throughout his childhood, and the joy of finding a best friend during that time. David and Dax talk about how the immersion and rules of video games amid the chaos of his life became the precursor to his research today, ending up in a series of group foster homes for several years, and his dream of going to college functioning as a protective shield for his future self. David explains being orphaned by the living while in foster care, the elation of receiving a full ride to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science, and the deep learning neural network research he now leads at Stanford.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. |
| 0:02.2 | Experts on expert. |
| 0:03.3 | I'm Dan Shepard. |
| 0:04.4 | I'm joined by Lily Padman. |
| 0:05.9 | Hi. |
| 0:06.6 | Today we have David Cicillo. |
| 0:08.9 | He is a neuroscientist, a technologist, and an author. |
| 0:13.4 | But don't let that sway you. |
| 0:16.2 | This isn't a tech heavy. |
| 0:17.7 | No. |
| 0:17.9 | This is a very personal story. |
| 0:19.7 | Correct. |
| 0:20.3 | And a very moving one. |
| 0:21.7 | Incredibly moving one about really growing up in a lot of public housing or boy homes and homes. |
| 0:30.2 | It's very connected to the episode we had on foster care. |
| 0:36.0 | Yes. |
| 0:36.8 | He mentions that a lot. He felt very seen by that episode. |
| 0:40.2 | And this is kind of like that episode, a personal story. Yes, mixed with turning out to be a |
| 0:45.6 | neuroscientist. Yes. He has a book out. It's a memoir. It's called Emergence, a memoir of |
| 0:52.3 | Boyhood, Computation, and the mystery of mind. It's quite an incredible |
| 0:57.0 | story. I was riveted. It's very moving and touching. Please enjoy David Cicillo. This episode |
| 1:03.7 | of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new U.S. home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete all-access live coverage of every Grand Prix, |
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