Because a suitable physical hand was unavailable for evaluation, the speaker decided to test the pen-spinning task in simulation first.

“do it but then I realized okay today we don't have a dexterous hand that can spin pencil at all so how would I even be able to evaluate the algorithm even if learning from human worked at all so I thought okay we need to first try this in simulation then as soon as I tried to set up a simulated environment for a robot hand with a pen I immediately saw what the issue is the issue is like”