From Phillips Exeter to Inventing AI: How Herbert Simon Recruited Me — Dr. Craig Kaplan

"I was like, wow, I've been working my way through school and paying you, and now they're going to pay me to go to school? I'll do that."Dr. Craig Kaplan — AI researcher who studied under Nobel laureate Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon — walks back through the unlikely path that took a kid from Berkeley to Phillips Exeter Academy (yes, the same prep school as Mark Zuckerberg) and then into the field of AI in 1985, when "AI" was still a tiny niche only a few geeky people cared about.In this 10-minute conversation, Craig shares:• Growing up the second-poorest-dressed kid at one of the most elite prep schools in America• Why senior year of high school was harder than his first year at UC Santa Cruz• The professor who pulled him aside and revealed that grad schools pay you to attend• Studying under Herbert Simon — one of the 11 scientists who named the AI field in 1956• Sharing an office with Jeff Hinton's collaborators when neural networks were still skeptical, fringe research• Self-driving cars at CMU in the 1980s — vans that drove inches per hour stopping to ask "is that a leaf or a person?"—Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.