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
00:14:16 · Karol Hausman
[00:14:16] S0: of philosophers were contemplating the nature of God and the nature of reality. And there was often this idea that God is this separate entity that either was the creator of everything or had some kind of way of controlling everything that is that is happening in the universe. And I think with with him, what was what was so interesting was that he said that everything around us, like all of reality, that is God. That is that is what it is. And there is some underlying structure to it, and that structure in it itself is where the beauty lies and where the where the intelligence lies. And I and I thought that was very thought provoking. And as you study physics and, you know, things like robotics or AI, I think more and more you realize that there's some underlying structure to things. And in some ways, that structure is quite counterintuitive. Like, why why it's there? Why is it so that you can describe all the complexity of the world in a simple equation rather than in a million different equations? And the the more beautiful and short that equation is, the more real it seems or the more accurate it is. And I thought this was kind of the closest to what it feels like today given the current state of science.
00:15:35 · Mario Gabriele
[00:15:35] S1: You had a tweet where you were talking about a book that I tried to read as much of it as I could in preparation for this called The Inner Game of Tennis. And you sort of mentioned how... I mean, you were really talking about tennis, but it seemed like some deep parallels to robotics. You sort of make the point that they talk about the fact in this book that if you really focus with your conscious mind on improving your stroke, you could sort of get to this local maximum where maybe you are doing a little bit better at hitting a forehand, but really what you need to do to get to an optimal stroke is sort of allow the unconscious mind to to take over in some respect. How do you think about emulating this aspect of almost the unconscious and the role it plays in fluid motion and, I don't know, proprioception and all these sort of things when it comes to robotics. Is that... Were were you thinking about robotics when you were reading that book?