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Richard Sutton

Richard S. Sutton is a Canadian computer scientist, co-winner of the 2024 Turing Award for developing the foundations of reinforcement learning, and Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.

Aug 11, 2026

22:16
How do you self-regulate when you look at the emotions that come with it, right? So whether it's fear, uh, whether it's anxiety that is also mixed with w- wanting the best for yourself.
22:30
So, you know, it's, it's interesting.
22:31
Earlier you, you talked about unemployment, and there was a, a large meta-analysis, huge, uh, collaboration between Stanford and Harvard universities looking at around 228 high-quality studies and the implications of unemployment and insecurity in that space and how it impacts mental and emotional wellbeing.
22:52
And, and what they uncovered was that the impact is absolutely astronomical.
22:57
It increases the odds of developing depression or anxiety or even dying from all causes, uh, prematurely.
23:06
Significantly, the depression anxiety piece was a 90% higher risk, and all cause mortality was 40% higher risk.
23:13
So, so it does raise the bar in terms of our emotional dysregulation.
26:48
Mm-hmm.
10:06
Everybody may not understand what that means.
10:08
So there are replica rooms of sacred spaces in the Temple Square Visitor Center replicating temple spaces.
10:16
And so you have an instruction room, you have a baptistry, you have a celestial room, and you have a ceiling room that are all there to walk through and an audiovisual presentation that helps guide a guest through the temple and the experience there.
10:31
And so we're able to open ourselves up as a church to say, okay, usually only when a temple is just about to be dedicated, we have a few weeks, maybe a few months in some areas to go through the temple.
10:42
Even the Salt Lake Temple will be open for six months and then we'll be rededicated.
10:46
But this will be forever on Temple Square.
10:49
365 days a year.

7 MINS LATER

17:37
It's a pleasure to work with all of them.
4:07
But are there any common themes or lessons about change that keep on emerging for you so far?
4:13
I think everyone has a unique story, and that's what I've come to understand.
4:17
But there are two standout pieces for me.
4:20
The first is that success is more of a relationship story than an achievement story.
4:26
Behind every guest, their experiences, their roads, their dreams, their aspirations has been people, people who've believed in them, challenged them, and also carried them through difficult situations or difficult seasons in their lives.
4:43
So that for me really stood out.
4:45
But another piece was also very powerful, and that is deliberate reinvention.
6:45
I mean, what have you noticed about egos in talking to all of these successful people?
16:31
Right.
16:31
Yeah.
16:31
It does not, uh, we don't think, we don't think about training when we think of the, a, an infant growing up.
16:39
These, these things are actually rather well understood.
16:42
If you go to look about how psychologists think about learning, there's nothing like, uh, imitation.
16:48
Maybe there are some ex- extreme cases where humans might do that or appear to do that, but there's no basic animal learning process called imitation.
16:59
The basic le- animal learning process is for prediction and for trial and error control.

39 MINS LATER

55:46
So curious to get more thoughts on that.

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