Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Steven Bathiche: Microsoft Technical Fellow

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Steven Bathiche, who’s behind some of the most innovative Microsoft products, shares his philosophy of life and talks about new computing form factors from AI and machine learning to robotics. Listen in as Kevin talks with Steven about where creative ideas originate – and how to use failure to create your next success. Kevin Scott Click here for transcript of this episode.

A big part of invention, engineering, product development is managing complexity and moving complexity around. In fact, like if you think about high level, what we can do, and if you understand the different systems and the different disciplines, you can effectively move complexity around where it's really hard in one area, but not so hard in another area. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind the scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Christina Warren, senior cloud advocate at Microsoft. And I'm Kevin Scott.

And our guest today is Stevie Batiche. And Stevie leads the Applied Sciences group here at Microsoft. And this is a multidisciplinary team that combines physics and optics and AI and machine learning. And it creates the devices and the UI experiences that we encounter in our day-to-day and at work and at home, which I guess for most of us is kind of the same place, right? It certainly has been over the past year and change, although changing. Although, yeah. Yeah, although. So I'm just super, super excited to be having this conversation with Stevie.

He has been and is one of my favorite colleagues and collaborators here at Microsoft. He's had this amazing 20-plus year career, really leveraging what I think is a monumentally broad curiosity. He's just interested in so many things and pulling all of those different areas together to find new and innovative ways to harness the power of those disciplines together. It's just so interesting talking to him always and to actually see the work that he's able to produce with this unique approach to doing stuff. I love it. I love it. Great. So let's see what Stevie is up to these days. Joining me today is Stevie Batiche. Stevie is a technical fellow at Microsoft. He leads our Applied Sciences group,

which is an interdisciplinary team of scientists and product engineers. His expertise lies in multidisciplinary approaches to inventing technologies and experiences for Windows and devices. He's been shipping and inventing new devices, interfaces, and experiences for 20 years from the original Surface table to our present line of tablets and laptops. Welcome, Stevie. Thanks, Kevin. It's so cool you do this, man. I'm excited. I'm giddy. I appreciate the time you're going to spend together.

And this is just so cool. I love that you do this for the company. Yeah, it's exciting for me, too. I always love opportunities to chat with you, so being able to do this on tape so that everybody can hear it, I think is neat. Yeah, no pressure that it's recorded. So I'd love to start with you as a kid and how you got interested in science and technology because you have a really broad curiosity and set of interests and you know

I'd love to understand how that started. That's a great question. Yeah I mean as a kid we I was born in Lebanon right in the middle of the civil. And that kind of set us off and moving every few years, different countries. And so we moved around a lot as a kid. You know, I lived in Libya, Pakistan, I lived in Stockholm for five years, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, you know, Queens, New York. And then finally, we landed in Texas, where I started going to, you know, New York and then finally we landed in Texas where I started going to you know junior high school and then we finally moved to Virginia where I went to high school and eventually a college but you know that moving around like it exposed me to a lot of different cultures a lot of different environments but it also gave me a fair bit of alone time you know which allowed me to kind of develop you you know, and kind of poke my curiosity and like go in my room and build a whole bunch of stuff. And, you know, and I got really interested in like robotics. I built a lot of robots when I was younger and that kind of set me off in college as well. And who was supporting you in that

interest when you were a kid? Were your parents scientists or engineers? Did you have those folks around you or you were just figuring this out on your own? My parents are not scientists or engineers, but they were just supportive and letting me do whatever I wanted. I was a good kid, you know, but, you know, I broke a lot of stuff and, you know, I didn't really get yelled at

too much for that. And I liked building things, taking things apart. You know, my dad helped me get my first computer. It was like the Atari, one of the really old ones, Atari 130. You know, I was in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I didn't get exposed to like the typical computers that were exposed in the US.

So I got like Atari and Acorn and, you know, that sort of thing. And my dad was just, everyone was just very supportive, both my parents. It wasn't until really high school where I started getting my teachers being great mentors. And then in college when I had people that really changed my life forever. Where did you guys move to in Virginia? Where did you go to high school? Northern Virginia, Broad Run High School.

I'm in Ashburn over here about 40 minutes away from D.C. Very rural sort of place. It's built up now. You know, this is where all the data centers are, by the way. You know, so like you drive around, there's like data centers left and right all over. That wasn't like the case before. This is where AOL was here. That's where they started, you know, kind of crazy stuff.

And so when you went to college, did you know you wanted to major in engineering? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think like in high school, I was really inspired by the robotics that were happening at MIT. There was a professor there named Rodney Brooks, and I would just read their papers and, you know, like try and understand. I got interested in this technique that they had developed called subsumption architecture. And it was inspired by ants or like insects and how to basically develop a control system for a robot. And so, you know, I wanted to build something like that myself. And I did that. And so I knew like computers and engineering was kind of my path. And Virginia Tech was a really good option here for me.

Yeah. Virginia Tech is a great school. I'm also, I grew up in Virginia. I know, you're UVA, I heard. I am UVA. But like, we don't need to have any of the UVA, Virginia Tech tension. No, no. We're all good.

That's right. It's not necessary. I mean, even though we're better at football, but that's totally fine. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's sort of funny. My two best friends who, you know, have been my best friends since I was a little kid, both of them went to Virginia Tech. Like one got an electrical engineering degree there and the other got a chemistry degree there. And like I was computer science elsewhere.

But yeah, Tech's a great school. My mentor was Professor Amaretto in the chemistry department. So interesting. And I got my double E. So interesting sort of parallels there. Yeah, they had a fantastic, and probably still do have a fantastic chemistry department. Just some really, really interesting characters there.

Oh, yeah. So, you know, one of the things that is super interesting about you and you already alluded to it is you really have this curiosity and in these boundaries between disciplines so you know this subsumption uh robotic stuff that's uh you know inspired by ants uh you know that you just mentioned is i I think, an example. And you've gone on to build a bunch of robotic systems while you were in college that were at this intersection. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So first I did three internships at Microsoft.

And in one of the kind of in-between rotations, I got really interested in trying to do biomimetics of ant behavior and colonies. I was really excited by the fact that, you know, while you might have a robot that had simple rules, a swarm of them would have kind of emergent behavior. And I wanted to kind of replicate that. But that led me to something else. And I got into an idea where instead of trying to build a control system for a robot, why not just steal it? And so I went to the entomology department at Virginia Tech. And I said, I had this idea where I want to use a control system from an insect to power my robot. And the guy, Dr. Blomkos, was his name. He's like, oh, that's really crazy, but let's try it. And we took a cockroach and we attached the cockroach to one of my robots. We used probes to

kind of get signal from the insect itself. And we had the robot kind of like an, as an exoskeleton, sorry, the cockroach had an exoskeleton of this robot and it would drive around. And I took that work into the Tom Daniel lab at UW and I did it with Moss later on. But it was this idea of the synergy of essentially transducing biological signal, putting him in some sort of environment. That environment, the biological system was essentially affect through end effectors that are artificial, like my robot. It would affect the environment. That environment would generate signal back into the senses of the insect. And you kind of close the loop there.

And the fascinating thing is like, you know, the system, the biological system adapted. It was plastic. It conformed to the parameters that I gave it and was able to eventually kind of control the car effectively and even obstacle avoid. And I was like, that's so cool. I mean, that was, that was kind of the experiment, you know, that showed me, you know, how powerful biology is and how bad I was at programming. Those are two things that are, that are good for all of us to learn like i think every computer scientist or software engineer has that moment in their career where they just realize how

much they have left to learn about getting better at their craft that's right so you know this is a funny story like i did a podcast with tom dan Daniel and Tom was telling me this story about you. And like I'd known you pretty well for three and a half years at that point. And I was like, wow, I didn't realize Stevie had done that sort of work before. the interesting thing is you have taken that multidisciplinary approach and just continue to do it over and over again. I'd love to talk now a little bit about what you do here at Microsoft, which is extremely multidisciplinary. You're absolutely right. It's one of my core philosophies, and it's helped me have this opportunity to build this team, this applied sciences group that mixes the disciplines. I try not to organize around function. I organize around really people and really encourage folks to look at the problem holistically

and try to solve the problem holistically and pull tools from the various disciplines to kind of solve problems. And the broader your approach is, you know, I think sometimes the more surprised you could come at the solution, sometimes the more optimal the solution is. So I've been lucky. I have, I think one of the best jobs, you know, the most cherished thing is to do something every day that you love so much that you kind of feel lucky that you're able to do. And I think maybe the internships helped me set up, but the people around me really encouraged me. I've been in the same job for Microsoft for 21 years.

I haven't really changed roles. It's just kind of just things have kind of just evolved. And this role, which is this boundary between doing research and product development, it's just the same thing I've been doing for 21 years. I've just kind of grown it and grown it organically into the various disciplines that we have today from, you know, physics, optics, you know, AI, machine learning, software development, you know, sensing and display. So, you know, and we try to mix all these kind of technologies together to create optimal systems.

Yeah. One of the things that I've always believed, and it may be a convenient belief, not a good one, is that you can be so much more creative when you have lots of different tools that you have at your disposal. And you don't need to be a master even at all of the tools, but just knowing a little bit about a lot of things can let you discover stuff that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise or to approach problems in ways that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And it seems like that's something that you, you may believe as well. A hundred percent.

A big part of invention, engineering, product development is managing complexity and moving complexity around. In fact, like if you think about high level, what we can do, and if you understand the different systems and the different disciplines, you can effectively move complexity around where it's really hard in one area, but not so hard in another area. And that's why I love this boundary that I kind of work in between hardware and software. I can move it back and forth. And I could do something really hard in optics and like, man, but then like shift it over to software and have software essentially solve the problem

instead of doing an optic or vice versa. Right. Yeah. And I think it's everywhere i mean just uh just an example like i uh i spent a couple hours yesterday making um make an amount for a tablet uh you know just sort of a silly thing but i wound up uh solving the problem of like how to hold this uh this little touchscreen tablet on a flexible arm with 3D printing and laser cutting and CNC machining. And there were parts mechanically of building this thing that were easy in each of those tool sets that would have been very hard in the others.

And just having those tools at your disposal and knowing how to use them made a thing that would have taken a few days to build into something that took an hour, which is awesome. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a big believer in having the right tool. It just changes the whole game. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about some of the stuff that you've been doing with AI, which is a relatively new but extremely powerful tool that we're increasingly use to do exactly what you're talking about.

Like this, you know, taking something that's very, very complex to solve any other way and making it possible using this new tool. So talk a little bit about what you have been doing with Edge AI. Yeah, let me digress a little bit. And so one of the core axioms that I have is that, and one of the things I've been doing almost my entire career is, like I said, you know, transducing, you know, biological signal, interpreting them, and then giving signal back. And, you know, I did that like with the mothmobile, but at Microsoft, you know, the person is the one generating the biological signal, right? And using hardware and software to understand and to do some tent to gather their information, I think, has been, you know, so far, you know, a lifelong career at it. to like the surface table that we developed to these magic window displays where we put cameras behind them to try to make people feel like they're in the same room to now shifting that complexity to software and edge AI.

I'm a big believer in doing computation in the right place. And one of the right places right now that I'm really excited about is doing computation in our computers, in our devices, right there at the source, right in front of a person, and using computational capacity to do extraordinary things. And I think that's kind of the revolution that's right in front of us. That is so exciting, especially in the PC world. Yeah, so there was this really interesting Scientific American article that got published, I think in 1995, where the term ubiquitous computing or ambient computing,

I forget which one he used, like were coined. And I think, you know, this notion of trying to figure out how to use technology to serve human needs, where you adapt the technology to the human needs versus forcing humans to adapt themselves to the technology is like a really interesting way to think about problem solving. And I think, you know, that's maybe another way of talking about what you just said. So like a lot of the things that you're doing, you know, you're shifting the complexity into the technology to benefit the human rather than like, you know, forcing the human to bear the burden of the complexity. That's right.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And if you want to be even more abstract about it, it is a form of robotics or automation. It is trying to take high-level commands and essentially deconstruct them and have them do work for you. Yeah. It's such

a fascinating thing like this uh and i think it's important for us to it's really important for us to focus on like this this idea that the human is always at the center of what it is that we're doing and like our purpose is to build tools for humans to help them do more of what they want to do. And it's one of the things that makes me really excited about the work that you do, because like you're just sort of constantly exploring that that landscape of opportunities. And like I've seen so many demos that you've created since I've been here over the past four years where you're just constantly looking for those opportunities. How do you decide what to poke at next? One of the things that I've learned over the past 20 years is that ideas come from everywhere. And one of the important things that I have to do is leave room for serendipity, leave room for the creative process. I've learned so many times

that if you're overly prescriptive in the beginning, you're probably going to stifle invention and you're going to stifle ingenuity. But at the same time, if you let it go hog wild, you won't get things that are essentially guided or directed or useful to the business. And so that's kind of the beauty about the culture that we have in our group. You know, the Applied Sciences Group being so close to Windows and devices, understanding and getting signal about the problems that we're having. And we have, I would say, a fair degree of ability to try to solve problems that are directly focused for the business. And I would say we try to do that by essentially creating a portfolio of projects that are from near term to slightly further term and ensure that what we do actually has impact today but potentially can give us room to change the direction of the future

which is i think a beautiful way of looking at things like especially this idea that you all you really do need to leave room for serendipity because some of the interactions between creative people and the interactions between complex technologies and the interaction between the now and the future are so complex that if you believe that you understand everything and that uh right you know you're in control uh like you're probably wrong 100 you know and and the way we've managed that in the past, you know, it's funny, like people will make fun of me. Like early in my career, I would do so many like projects and some of them were good and made it in the products.

Some of them were kind of crazy and didn't necessarily make them the products. But I knew that there was a thread there and I would put them in a box, put a label on them and put them on a shelf. And so I was known for like this, you know, this, you know, archive of plastic boxes and bins of little tiny research projects. And, you know, when ideas would kind of reshuffle themselves, I would go up and look at my bin to see what I've done in the past, pull the bin out, you know, and then like, see what I did. Cause these were all like functional demos and prototypes, you know, that are really

helpful to kind of elucidating if this is actually idea as possible or not. That is such a good idea. Like really, really a good idea. I, I wish, uh, you know, now that you said it, like I'm sort of regretting not, uh, not more faithfully archiving all of the failed things that I've done. And there have been more failed things than there have been successful things. And actually, I don't even use the word failure as much because I use this terminology with my team is like, you know, failure is only if you measure it at that moment in time. They're just

waypoints towards successes because they just guide you along your path. And we all know this, right? But yeah, no, I think it makes it difficult to move when you have all those bins though. So I was looking at, I'm like, hey, Steven, we need to move your office. I'm sorry. Look at that. Look at my, you can't. And they're like, all right, we'll just leave you there. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Like most of my output over the course of my career have been software things where it's hard to think about how to even put it into a bin to keep. And it's a shame because I do think that the software that you've written that hasn't worked in the moment, we just treat it as ephemeral and it evaporates and goes away. And there are just lessons in there right now.

I will occasionally think to myself, well, how I wish I had that code that I wrote back in grad school, or I wish I, you know, like, what was it that I learned from like this thing that didn't quite work? And like, we just, like the tools have changed so dramatically

that I've just lost a huge amounts of this code that I've uh that I've written where I just can't see it anymore I love it that you uh that you do this like I think it's incredibly uh incredibly interesting so um one of the things that I would love to get your perspective on is, what do you think the most interesting technological shifts have been over the past few years? And like, what are you excited about over the next few? You know, the one that has really guided a lot of the work that I have done is, you know, this disruptive evolution of new computing form factors and you know the thing that

that i've seen that changes or that gives us or grants us the ability of creating these new types of forms that allow us to put these forms into different environments into different use cases and the different places on the body into different places in the environment is the creation of interactive technologies. You know, basically, how do I digitize information and how do I communicate that information back to you? So display technology, you know, has been just an amazing kind of transformation since the old CRT days. And that has really enabled us to build all sorts of computers. The sensing technology where, you know, in the old days I was using, we were using computer vision to sense what you're doing on top of a screen.

And now it's all shifted to capacitive technology and pen and trying to sense essentially there, but we treat it like an imager. And now we're at the place where we're starting fusing signal from all these different sensors of the camera, of the context, of the environment, of the information that you've generated in the world using AI to try to deduce and understand intent. And I think we just scratched that idea. We've just scratched that surface. That's going to change the game for us and this whole ai field is you know something that to me is going to blow our minds in yeah we're just beginning kev right it's just like you know i mean to the point where it's going to change how we deploy how we how software is

created it's going to change how software actually ends up being like right now like i you know thinking about this actually this morning um you know like, like, you know, thinking about this, or actually this morning, you know, like Word, when we write Word, Word is like this static fixed thing. Like we send, we give to the customer and then we update it once in a while. But what if Word actually adapted to the customer in the environment because it actually understood what you wanted

and it wrote code itself that was custom to you, right? And we didn't really deploy like specific versions of Word. We deployed things that essentially would help people do word processing. Yeah. Well, it's one of the interesting things about machine learning. Like I think the thing people get like really caught up in this sensationalism around the idea of AGI or the vision of AI from 1955 when the

founders of the field coined the term and these science fictional AIs that are in movies. But as a machine learning practitioner for the past almost 20 years, it's hard to imagine AI in those terms because, to me, it's always felt like a tool. And it's like a tool to do this thing that you've been talking about in our conversation today. It's like managing complexity.

You use it to solve problems that are just too hard to solve any other way. And I think the big paradigm shift for me has been that for 175 years or so, programming a computer or leveraging a machine to go do, a digital machine to go do work for you has been programming. And programming requires a specialist understanding of the capabilities of the machine and then like a whole bag of tricks that you learn over the course of a long number of years to instruct the machine how to solve a problem and like translating these human understandings of problems into a form that the machine can go do something with, which is very different from what you do with machine learning, where you are teaching a machine how to solve problem with data and examples. And yeah, it's a very profound shift in the way that you harness the power of a computer.

And I think exactly what you said is the real possibility. It's the opening up the power of a machine to a huge number of people, maybe everyone, to, in very sophisticated ways, help them solve their problems. I can't agree with you more. That is it. That is the gold. That is absolutely, it's democratizing, you know, things that took like, you know, eight years in college to go figure out. And now you can hand it to millions of people in the world and imagine what the world could do, you know, with that ability. ability i mean you're just continuing to evolve society and culture to develop more sophisticated tools that get become more and more ingrained in our culture in the way of living and how we actually go do things and it's going to affect every industry everything that we do right it's

going to it's going to change the world and that that's the thing, like, I wish I could, like, pause time and go 50 years forward because I want to go see that or 100 years forward because it's going to be so different than it is today. And the other point is, you know, to your earlier point about AGI, I mean, like, you know, these are just things where I think society ends up getting a little anxiety over in the beginning, like any technology. I mean, you know, like when photography was just first incepted, people thought like when you took a picture of someone, you stole their spirit, you know, like, and now today, like we capture pictures all the time. You're not, you're not really steering. You're not really capturing my spirit, you know, stealing it. Like, you know,

I think it just takes a little time because uh it's about understanding and what it can do and really what it can't do yeah and it's you know it's also about like figuring out what the norms are and like you know what the acceptable use i mean like with cameras for instance like there's paparazzi and like all sorts of obnoxious uses of technology and we sort of learn of learned, you know, where, you know, where it's appropriate to take a picture and where it's inappropriate, like where it's legal and where it's illegal. And like, you know, we'll have to develop all of that stuff as well with with any new technology that we build. The, you know, the thing that we have to do, I think, is we have to help everyone understand what the tools are capable of so that

as many people as possible have a voice in deciding how the tool should be used as quickly as possible, because that's the true way to make sure that we get these norms mapped out in a reasonable way quickly. I think that's one of the really things I admire about Microsoft in general is that, I feel like we believe we have such a responsibility to make sure that evolves well for our governments, for our society, for people. We are so responsible in that category and very proactive in regards to that. I think that's, that's cool because that level of productivity allows us to go invent this technology.

Yeah. You know, the thing is it doesn't mean that we get it right a hundred percent of the time, but it like, it does mean that like we feel a very serious commitment to goal seek to write, you know, as quickly as we can. Yeah. So, you know, as quickly as we can. Yeah. So, you know, switching gears a little bit, I wanted to ask this question in two ways. So it's about advice for people who are starting their careers.

And so I'd love to know if there's anything that Stevie today would give advice to Stevie from 21 years ago. You know, like if you could go back in time and like whisper in your younger ear, like what would you, what would you tell yourself? That's such a great question. And I appreciate that. Actually, I get right now, it's funny. I don't know why I've been getting a lot of requests to mentor or give advice to kids, especially transitioning to college. And the thing that I was taught that I've held dear and near to my heart and used as kind of a guiding principle is this thing we talked about in the beginning, this thinking of a multi-disciplinary nature, where what you want to do is create a unique combination of skills that sets yourselves apart from everyone else. That makes you unique.

Drawing from crazy different fields. And so studying different subjects, fusing disciplines together. I mean, these things are silos. Nature didn't put those silos around though. People did put those silos around there. Nature doesn't see those silos. though people did put those silos around their nature nature doesn't see those silos they use all of it right and nature is our best engineer our best inventor and therefore you know use it another one is um gary starkweather taught me this he was one of my early mentors at microsoft gary starkweather is a dear person. He was the inventor of the laser printer, had an amazing career. And he taught me that if your idea isn't absurd enough, it's probably not good enough.

And to really kind of stretch and do it. And he actually taught me, he said, don't worry about people stealing your ideas, because if it's really a good idea, you have to shove it down their throats. You know, it was like, I'm like, okay, Gary. But he had like all these whimsical sayings that he's built up over, over time. And he was, I would say that that sort of thinking is quite helpful. It just shows that you have to, it goes kind of that the whole serendipity of thinking where you don't know what you don't know and you want to kind of get out of the fray you know and if I were to go back in time and kind of whisper a little bit in my ear you know I really liked the journey I went through I loved it like you know doing three internships at Microsoft really exposed me to a whole bunch of things turning down a full-time

offer from Microsoft between my undergrad and grad was really important because I needed that grad school exposure that grad school exposure. That grad school exposure, again, advice for everyone. It teaches you how to acquire new fields because, you know, I was a double E bioengineering guy. But now I'm like a display expert, optics person. AI is now a new field, you know, that I've kind of migrated towards and developed. But life evolves and if you have the tools to evolve with it i think you you've set yourself up for a happy kind of happy and evolving life yeah i i look i

couldn't agree more with this notion of getting yourself into a position where you've got a huge breadth of skills and like maybe yeah maybe the most important thing that anyone can do this is what i tell my kids all the time is like you have to figure out how to learn uh how to learn to love learning that's it and that's right you know if you are always curious and always wanting to like understand how things work and uh and it's like absolutely necessary in our field because the technology itself is changing so fast. Most of what we use in our day-to-day job right now didn't exist when we started our careers, when we were getting educated. Totally.

Yeah, I know. We have to learn this as we've moved, right? Yeah. And part of it is we're inventing it and part of it is we're adapting to what's going on around us. But it's sort of an interesting thing. Part of our job is we're way out on the frontier of what's possible. And the interesting thing about that is every day you're sort of taking the step across that border from possible to impossible like everything's impossible before you figure it out uh and it just requires

like intense commitment to like learning new things and curiosity and determination and uh you know like all things that i that I think you're sort of exhibiting every day and like that your group exhibits, which is just, it's tremendous. Yeah. I mean, I don't have to, I mean, just mention my team, like my, you know, like the team members that I have are phenomenal and they're the ones that I learned from. And, you know, they're educators. It's funny, like they're important, but they're the ones that I learned from. And, you know, they're educators. It's funny, like they're important, but they're educators to me. And in their respective fields, I think they're one of the best people anywhere around. And, you know, every one-on-one is not like it's

for them, it's for me. I just learn from them and absorb the information. I'm lucky because of the people that I get to work with every day. I get to because of the people that I get to work with every day. I get to learn from those people. I get inspired by those people and I get to help essentially create and make decisions as a result of those learnings to kind of move forward. And I'm not bashful about saying that. But I totally agree with what you're saying. I have a couple of quotes I love to share with you. And I use this sometimes at kind of my end of my talks, but it kind of shows, you know, human evolution and human culture. There's a quote from this Roman engineer from 10 AD.

And he goes, inventions have long since reached their limit. And I see no hope for further development. You can imagine like, you know, that's, that's like a thing. Sometimes people think right. And in fact, I can tell you like, that's, that's even, I have talked to people like even 10 years ago where, where people said that, like, I think we're kind of done. It's not going to stop. And then like this, this is Lord. Lord Kelvin said this and he, heavier than air flying machines are impossible.

Yeah. And that's a scientist, right? And what a first very logical statement, you know, and that, you know, just kind of goes shows like when you're trying to do something absurd, you know, you get run into these sort of stop signs that people hold up. But it took a philosopher, essentially, to kind of twist it around. So Paolo Chiolo said, you know, be creative. Men only learned how to fly when they stopped imitating birds. Yeah, I think that's a great quote. My favorite state of mind is I don't know. Like it really is because like that's where interesting things start with. I think the smarter someone is and the more conviction they have around a pedantic point of view, the more skeptical I am. You're so right, Kevin.

100%, man. That's such a great way. Well, this was really, really awesome. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to chat with us. I'm sure folks are going to love hearing from you. It was fun. Awesome. So that was Kevin's conversation with Stevie Batiste.

What I found remarkable was, and you touched on this when we were talking earlier, Kevin, is just the multidisciplinary aspect of everything that he does and the fact that he's kind of using those different disciplines to really make things better. But what struck me by that, I think, first and foremost was, you know, he's lived so many different places. Like as a young kid, you know, he grew up all over the world. And I have to think that that really had an impact on his worldview and plays a role in this multidisciplinary approach that he's taken to his work. Yeah. I mean, I think it's really amazing, you know, just talking to Stevie and watching the work that he's done, how much he gets out of this broad curiosity

by not being one-dimensional, by understanding that the world is really, really broad. And I think it's absolutely his experience growing up has influenced that. But just coupling that broad curiosity with the desire to make and build, I think you see in a lot of folks, like from Bill Gates and some of the founders of our modern technological computing revolution, those two things, like that broad curiosity and the impulse to like go do something with the curiosity to make a thing is like a really powerful combo. And you

really see it in Stevie's work. No, you really can. And what I like about it is, is you're right, we have founders and we have examples, you know, like Bill Gates and others who have this, you know, broad curiosity and this broad kind of sense of interest. But a lot of times as workers and as scientists or engineers or whatever the case may be, you're kind of encouraged starting in school to focus on one thing and to really do that. And they kind of hone into, yeah, to be successful, if you want to grow your career, if you want to grow your profession, whatever it is, you need to do this one thing. And what I think is great about Stevie is that he's really, he's done all these different things and he's got this

curiosity and he's able to show, no, you can weave these things together and you can be successful. And if anything, having these additional perspectives can sometimes unlock stuff that you might not be able to unlock otherwise. Yeah, it's a great observation. I used to, until relatively late in my career, feel guilty that I was broadly interested in things rather than just interested in a single thing that I could focus on and polish and craft and perfect and just be the absolute best at that one thing. But I was never wired like that. And my parents, when I was a little kid, even gave me permission. I would get interested in a whole bunch of musical instruments.

I played the flute and the clarinet and the piano. And I never mastered any of those instruments. And I would play around with the thing and so learn what was stimulating to learn. And then I would move to the next thing. And I felt bad about that for many, many years. And I'm just sort of realizing with these conversations that we have with folks like Stevie and like we've had many other folks like that on the podcast that mastery is important

and you have to invest a lot of energy in getting good at a thing. But it's okay to do that across a bunch of different things. And sometimes magic happens when you can connect the dots between a whole bunch of different things that you've gotten reasonably good at. No, I totally agree. I totally agree. I read an essay recently about T-shaped engineers. And it really resonated with me because even though I'm not someone who's as accomplished as many things as Stevie is one of those things that kind of when you see people who've done well in that, it's like, yeah, you know what, it's okay to do this. And being able to draw the conclusions between different areas can be just as important

as being a bona fide expert in one area. And when I was thinking about Stevie, or rather I was thinking about that essay when I was listening to you and Stevie talk, because he, to me, is like that quintessential T-shaped engineer. And I think that that's really remarkable. Yeah, look, and I think even with you, like you have such an interesting background. Like you've been a journalist. You've been an advocate.

You're a coder. You're a technology enthusiast. You have all of these facets of who you are. And when those come together, that makes something unique and interesting. I love that in people. Definitely. And I appreciate that. That makes me feel good. But I think that seeing stuff that Stevie's talking about and the amazing work that's being done, it just, I don't know, I guess it to me reiterates whether it's a singular person or just getting different perspectives, having those perspectives is really the key to unlocking the best technologies that we can. I could not agree with that more. All right. Well, that is a wrap. Thank you again to Stevie for joining us today.

And remember that you can message us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.