You're listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast presented by Smead Capital Management.

At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who play the long game.

You can learn more at Smeadcap.com or by calling your financial advisor.

Welcome to a book with legs podcast.

I'm Cole Smead, CEO, and portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management.

At our firm, we are readers, and we believe in the power of books to help shape informed investors.

In this podcast, we speak to great authors about their writings. The late

great Charlie Munger prescribed using multiple mental models and analysis. We analyze their work

to the lens of business, markets, and people. Welcome to this episode of a book with legs.

We're doing something different than we've done typically. Instead of one author and one book, which is our typical style, you know, over 20 times in the year, I wanted to step back.

We've had some questions and conversations that have flourished around similar topics across the episodes, across different professions.

And so I want to open those up to kind of ask what I think are some deeper questions.

We're going to look across through a computer scientist, a geneticist, a neuroscientist,

and a cognitive scientist.

I keep asking a version of this same question.

Can a human being be fully explained by the machine, by code, by chemistry, biology, by data,

or is there something left over? Today I want to play you the best answers I've gotten from people who would never share a stage, frankly.

We'll start with the first question and then look at the sharpest place to show up, a small

child learning to speak, and then turn and look straight at the machine

of our moment of artificial intelligence, three conversations, but all in the same thread.

First, Tom Griffith. He wrote a history of the quest to build a mathematical theory

of the mind. Basically, the story of how we got to, what we now know is

...