00:07:40 · Mario Gabriele, Karol Hausman
[00:07:40] S1: You had a tweet that I I saw where you were talking about Fei Fei Li's biography and how it sort of spoke to you in some sense that, you know, the immigration story and also the fact of, you know, having teachers that believed in you along the way were were sort of parallels to your own life. In high school, was that when you sort of had that first batch of those teachers who maybe saw some of that, you know, really remarkable early talent? [00:08:04] S0: I think it was throughout. It wasn't just high school. It was it was throughout. There were multiple people that now looking back, I'm really grateful to, that either saw something or just encouraged me to to dig deeper or motivated me or give me some opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise. And I think at at every single stage, there was someone I could point to. And reading Fei Fei's book just reminded me of that. And I remember after I read it, I I pinged some of them and thanked them for everything they did for me. So, yeah, it was it was a long journey from from Poland through Germany to The US, going through multiple places in The US. And it felt like at every single stage of the journey, was someone kind [00:08:51] S1: of rooting for me and and helping me. You know, before you realized that you wanted to work in robotics in particular, as an undergrad, you studied sort of computer science and philosophy. But I'm curious if there were interests before that. Like, as a kid, were you thinking I'm gonna be a astrophysicist or, I don't know, a neuroscientist? [00:09:12] S0: Yeah. I was I
00:09:12 · Karol Hausman, Mario Gabriele
[00:09:12] S0: Yeah. I was I [00:09:13] S2: was really into physics, actually. Right after high school, I applied to a lot of physics and and math programs, and I thought I was gonna be an astrophysicist or a theoretical physicist. I was really fascinated by it. I was reading a lot of books. I was really into physics in high school.
00:09:28 · Karol Hausman
[00:09:28] S0: But then a lot of my friends decided to go for engineering degrees, and we're all gonna go to Warsaw. And I thought that I could maybe try to study both or I could start with engineering and then go back to physics if it turns out to be boring. It wasn't like a very intentional choice at that time. It was more like, these are really smart people. I really wanna stay with my friends. And and and robots are really, really cool, so let me try that and then see how it goes. So I went to I went to Warsaw to study... It was called mechatronics at the time, which was basically like a mixture of electronics, some mechanical engineering, computer science. Then I also studied philosophy. But I I think that's when once I moved to Warsaw, whether that's when I started realizing that robotics is a thing, that it's a thing that is very disappointing. I remember studying robotics in Warsaw. The the kind of the dream job you could get was being a roboticist at an Avon factory that was right next to Warsaw. That was like the job that everybody was competing for. If you could work for Avon at the... On on the production line, that's like... That's how you made it in the robotics industry. And I remember I went there once and and saw that production line, and it was the most uninspiring thing I've ever seen with robots. As I said before, robots just moving from a to b, not being intelligent whatsoever. And I think that's when when it started clicking for me that I would really like to do something beyond that. And it seemed like no one was working on it, which sparked my interest even more. So that's where I started digging who is doing intelligent robots and is it even a thing? And that's then what defined, I think, the rest of the journey of trying to find those people, move from place to place as I try to as I try to find them, and then eventually start working on it myself. This sort
00:11:21 · Mario Gabriele
[00:11:21] S1: of study of philosophy, as you've looked back on that time, you know, maybe it's a a line on the CV at this point, and you're like, you know, I I don't reflect on it necessarily that much. But I'm curious if there are writers that you've ended up coming back to more and more as you start to do this sort of work around, I don't know, the nature of consciousness or the, you know, the certain senses that make us more or less human.
00:11:44 · Karol Hausman
[00:11:44] S0: It was a really interesting period. So I think there was a few realizations I had while studying it. I think one was that a lot of philosophy is the history of philosophy. It's not philosophy itself. It's talking about what others thought about years ago. From the outside looking in, it always it always sounds like, you know, Plato or or or people like that. They they were these geniuses that kind of like figured everything out way before their time. But then when you actually read their works and that was part of the deal of studying philosophy, you realize that there's a very small percentage of things that kind of sound right and there are a lot of things that they said that are absolutely wrong. Yes. And and that was quite eye opening that, you know, the history of philosophy shows that there are people who made many, many mistakes along the way and thought that the world worked a certain way when it's now very clear that it doesn't. They had some really interesting observations, and I think we we often over index on those. But we were wrong a lot. There were still some philosophers that I remember studying that I think were very relevant and I was a big fan of. One of them is Spinoza. That was, I think, my favorite philosopher when I when I look back at at what I studied. But then there were some subjects, very, very few, that were more about philosophizing today rather than looking at the history. And I think those were the ones that were the most fun for me. There was this one subject called ontology, which was a study of of things of how they are. I think it's even difficult to to comprehend what this means. But it was one of those subjects where you just like sit and contemplate reality. It just was very fun even though it was very unstructured and it was it wasn't clear what is what is right and what isn't. It just seemed like to touch something real and probably does the subject I remember the most. That's where I had the most fun, much more so the history of philosophy.
00:13:55 · Mario Gabriele
[00:13:55] S1: So interesting. And and these things I love to explore because there is, to me at least, such deep parallels between some of the things that you're trying to build to fruition. Why Spinoza? What was it about him that that seemed deep to you or true? The the one thing that that really resonated with me was this idea that, you know, at that time a lot