Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Year in Review 2022 

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

As 2022 winds down, we revisit some of the year’s most inspirational and fascinating conversations with makers, engineers, award-winning sci-fi authors, and tech leaders—discussing topics ranging from building diversity into the ways we do work, to what the metaverse looks like now and far into the future, to imagining robots that know what you need before you do.  Kevin Scott  Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott  Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.  

. 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 have made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did.

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 a special episode of Behind the Tech. I'm Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And today we are doing our year-in-review episode, our year-un unwrapped, if you will. And this means that we're going to

revisit a few fascinating conversations with our guests from 2022. We've had some amazing people on the show this year. We had Alexis Ohanian, who's the founder of Reddit and is married to Serena Williams. We had Simone Yetch, who literally deconstructed a Tesla and made it into a pickup truck just for the joy of making things. And, of course, Randall Munroe, who writes the incredible webcomic XKCD. Yeah, it really has been an amazing year just in terms of the interesting people we got to chat with. Sometimes I wonder how we got fortunate enough to be able to have these conversations and that folks are willing to let us record them to share with everyone. It's also like crazy that I think this is our third year in review episode. Like we've been doing this for a long while now,

which I just don't really think about all that much. So that's sort of cool. You know, it is cool. I was thinking about that earlier today, too. I was like, oh, wow, we've been doing this for a while. And it's been really, really amazing to see all the, you know, the incredible people who've come through. And as you mentioned, yeah, it's, honestly, it's an honor that they've chosen to spend their time with us. And one of the things that came up in so many of your conversations this year was representation and what we can do in tech as an industry to make sure that we're bringing all different kinds of voices and lived experiences into the room. Yeah, I mean, it really is interesting that representation came up pretty much across the board in every conversation, no matter who I was talking to this season, it's just a reminder of how important it is.

And it's just so exciting to see that conversation be organically on the top of people's minds. Yeah, I think the fact that it came up organically was one of the things that really stood out to me. And because it emerged as such a powerful theme this year, I was thinking that we could start with a snippet of your conversation with Irma Olguin, who's the founder of Bitwise Industries. Oh, yeah. Irma and her company are so interesting. She grew up in a family of farm workers in the California Central Valley, and she got into computer science basically by accident. But it opened up so many possibilities and literally changed her life. And now what she's doing with Bitwise Industries is trying to create that same transformational effect

for other people like her who don't have access to the typical pipelines into the tech industry. Here's that interview. Do you have any examples of what's happened in these communities when the tech jobs come? Absolutely. I mean, I have thousands of examples. That's the best part is that this is not conjecture any longer. We've got literal proof. When a tech job, so one of the neat things about the technology industry is that it has a high multiplier. And what that means is that for every technology job that's created in a place, 4.3 additional local goods jobs are also created. We're talking about the FedEx person and the Panini person and the box builder and on and on. And Joe's automotive shop

changes as a result of technology sort of coming into town. And what that turns into over time is not just that you've got this human being or a dozen human beings who are earning high growth, high wage, community transformative money at this point, but those folks are spending that money at home. 90% of the folks that we train stay in their hometowns. That's tremendous. These folks are buying houses. They are buying cars. They are stabilizing the neighborhoods that they're already in. So rather than, you know, I know that technology generally has a bad rap for like gentrification and those types of things and the effect on neighborhoods. But when you literally skill the folks who are from those neighborhoods into these jobs, they get to turn around and give back to their neighborhoods. And so they get to rebuild them for themselves and for their communities. That's what happens in these cities. And we're most excited about that. So yes, of course, we buy dilapidated buildings and we renovate them. We lease them back out to ourselves and others in this industry. But those folks who come and go from those buildings every day go

to neighborhoods that they can change. And we see that effect over and over again. Yeah, it's so awesome. I mean, having grown up in one of these places, like I can tell you just by watching my friends and family, you know, being employed, like what a big impact it has. And it's sort of, it's like, this is the industry of the future, right? Like it's probably not going to be the case. Like where I grew up, it was tobacco farming, furniture manufacturing, and textile manufacturing. And the jobs that those industries provided probably are not coming back to rural central Virginia. But tech jobs could come there. Absolutely could.

And have a huge impact. Absolutely. That's 100% right. And same story where I grew up, right? The job that my grandmother moved to California to take, right, to have in the fields doesn't exist for me any longer. And it's not going to exist in generations after me. So what else are we going to do? We're going to have to find something different to do with our hands. Yeah. And something different with their with our hands. Yeah. Something different with

their hands that will help build the community. I mean, it's not like I've said it a couple of times, I think it's an important thing to realize. These are jobs that are helping build the future in the same way that the jobs that your grandmother and her friends and family had were helping to build the communities that they were in. Yes, that's exactly right. That was a bit of Kevin's conversation with Irma Olguin. And as I was listening back just now,

I was thinking about how much that conversation shared in common with some of the things that you talked about with Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. Yeah, I love talking with Alexis about his new venture firm, 776. He's so passionate about working with up-and-coming founders, and his firm is really innovating on the VC model to expand how they support their founders, and especially founders of color. Let's take a listen. So this generation of founder, the Gen Z, they've grown up in the shadow of social media. So they're a lot smarter, like I said, than I was, because they've seen the good, they've seen the bad. I think they're a lot more thoughtful. They're playing know if it's cynicism. There is also a vein of like, well, why bother? The earth is screwed, right? Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. And yes, we have huge, huge problems that we need to solve. But the part I think is so important, especially right now and for this coming decade, is to make sure that we have people building to solve problems

and we're supporting those people who are building to solve problems. Because yeah, we have some huge problems we need to solve, but the only way we will solve them, the only way we will improve things is by building, is by creating, is by doing. And I want to see that culture win. I don't want to see the culture of nihilism

and like, well, well, to hell with it, win. Because we don't get better stuff from that, right? I mean, similarly, we just announced, I just funded the first 20 million of a foundation that I very creatively named 776 Foundation that I started for basically our version of a similar to a Teal Fellowship where telling college students 18 to 23, if you have a big swing idea, like a big hairy audacious idea for climate in particular, you should apply.

We'll give you a hundred grand, take a couple of years, bring into our network, et cetera, et cetera. And like, I know this is an existential threat. I know it disproportionately affects communities of color, marginalized communities broadly.

So like, let's get as many of the best and brightest from all over the world to be part of this cohort and just give you money, resources, network support, and just see what the hell you can come up with. Because I, you know, every time I see a TikTok video go viral of some kid who's just depressed about the state of things and, you know, doesn't want to have any children or doesn't want all, like, that's not the energy that's going to help us solve this. It's going to be the folks who inspire us and make us go like, oh, my God, how did you figure out a way to catch your carbon and do this thing? Or how did you create this movement that accomplished this goal? Like, that's that's what

we need. Yeah, I could not agree with you more strongly. And Like you as a historian should appreciate this. Technology has always been the instrument that we use to create the future that we want. Like inspiring that impulse to figure out, like how to take the things that we know how to do, how to just jump off cliffs and try to invent things that we don't know how they're going to work yet really is the way

that you shape the future. And like defining who the we is, who is doing all of that stuff is also super important. Like it can't just be, you know, a bunch of tech companies and venture capitalists and urban innovation centers in the coastal United States. You have to have a whole bunch of people feeling inspired to go create this future. That was Alexis Ohanian talking with Kevin on the podcast. Another leader of a really popular tech company that I was able to speak with this year was David Buzuki, co-founder and CEO of Roblox. We obviously talked about how Roblox is a huge driver of community and creativity, but we also got into another topic that was huge in 2022, the metaverse. Let's check out some of that conversation.

We're talking about innovation now. I'd love to get your take on the metaverse. I have this definition of the metaverse, which is a metaverse is a fully immersive environment that lets you connect with other people to express the fullness of your identity and to accomplish your creative endeavors. If I say that definition and I look at Roblox, Roblox feels to me like a metaverse.

Even though it's a 2D screen, you don't have to put anything on your head. There aren't many things more immersive than Roblox for my 11-year-old, for instance. I think that's very close with what the definitions going to emerge to. I like to think of it as an inexorable category following a long mail, telegraph, telephone, video call, simulated 3D immersive communication. Definitely about identity.

Definitely about friends and connection in a social graph. Definitely about immersiveness. That immersiveness isn't just pure 3D fidelity, it's functional fidelity, it's social fidelity, it's device by device going from phone all the way to immersive VR. I think it'll more and more be about an infinite array of places and content and objects as part of that. I think these are evolving to always get into economic aspects.

And then I think metaverses will have various levels of safety and civility, just like places on the web, we're leaning in really hard on a civilized place for people together. I think it's still so fun and so early that every company is still trying to figure out their own view of this. It's fun because it's still emerging. Yeah. Well, so thinking about this stuff as an engineer, for an instance, for an instance, there are a bunch commerce with other people in the metaverse.

There's some value store that you're going to have to have. There's some way to, like here's what property means in this metaverse. Have you all thought about what those things are? Because again, I think you have a whole bunch of them. Yeah, this is really interesting. It's funny because if we were building cars 60 years ago, this would be some biz school make versus buy discussion, and what do you have to make,

and what can you buy, and all of that stuff. Some of these components aren't yet invented, and that makes it really exciting. The components that might allow us to go together to a 50,000-person photorealistic concert with great audio and hang out and dance and wave across the stadium at everyone else and have them wave back, that's a long ways off. So I like the notion that it's still early and there's a lot of deep tech that needs to be invented to support this, as well as a lot of proven tech, whether it's the economy,

is it running on blockchain or a database, identity, what's the graphics drivers on all the machines, how do we do a social graph, all of that. It's an interesting mix of some technologies that are mature and some that are a long ways off and being actively invented. One of the interesting things is way more complicated than I think most people would recognize is you having your own financial infrastructure.

So you all have this currency called Robux. That's a thing that players have. You can spend them across all of the games that are happening. Like they let you purchase entitlements inside all of these games. My best friend used to run product and engineering at Linden Lab, and so they had their own currency.

It is complicated, having your own economy is an interesting thing, especially you guys are at, what, 50 million daily active users? Yeah. That is bigger than some countries, right? That's right. Well, it's complicated in many dimensions. It's complicated in a reliability, anti-theft, anti-hack, anti-hack,

Sarbox-compliant SEC way, in that it just has to be run at a certain level of rigor and reliability and fraud detection and all of that. It's contemplated from an infrascalings standpoint, which many companies do really well, but still, we shouldn't take that for granted. It's also, I think, complicated looking to the future where more and more, if we can see things happening in real life, we're going to see them in digital life. And we're still very early on this as far as advertising, as far as shopping, as far as collectibles, as far as a lot of other economic things that we're used to that have digital equivalents.

So there's a lot of complexity going forward in designing elegant systems that work well in the digital domain that we're very used to in our real world life. That was from your conversation with David Buzuki from Roblox. And of course, that was not the only time the metaverse came up this season. And it seems like most of the time, the conversation was starting about how to define what the metaverse is.

That is absolutely right. And we got the very, very good fortune this year of being able to talk to the person who actually coined the term metaverse, sci-fi author Neil Stevenson and one of my heroes. I love this so much. Let's check out some of that conversation. So let's talk about today,

like how it seems to me at least that life is imitating art in a certain sense, that many of the things that you talked about in some of your earlier books and even in your more recent books are unfolding pretty closely to the way that you describe them in the books. So maybe let's talk a little bit about Metaverse, which is obviously a thing that is going to see a lot of change over the next handful of years just because there's so many people inspired enough to invest a lot of their time and energy and capital in this space. What's your rough take on where things are headed?

Well, Metaverse, avatar, terms like that have been bouncing around the technical world for a long time now, but more as a kind of in-crowd kind of terminology. And what's happened in the last year or so is that that's kind of broken out into public discourse as a marketing term as a you know sort of catch-all term to mean to mean a lot of things and so um the um you know i think kind of the most general thing i can say about it is just that we're bumping up against the limits of what can really be done with flat displays. So when I look at just the displays that are around me here at my workspace, they're spectacular. They're gigantic screens that are showing images in incredibly high resolution. They show movies at full resolution, full sound quality.

I've got a TV, which is middle of the road. I mean, it's not a super special TV, but it's capable of showing movies that are as finely resolved as my eyes can detect. Like if we added more pixels to my TV set, it would be interesting technically, but I wouldn't be able to see the difference. So beyond a certain point,

that kind of technology can't really get any better. And I think that people who are in the business of selling hardware and the associated software and operating systems to the general public need a place to go. They need a place to go they need a next thing you know that they can use to drive their businesses forward and so metaverse is kind of a catch-all term now for stuff that people want you to buy a few years from now and you know by process of elimination it's got to be something beyond screens. It's got to be stereoscopic or better displays, AR, VR.

And then with that hardware, there has to be huge jumps forward in the capabilities of the software and the operating systems that drive pixels and sound into that hardware. That was your conversation with your hero, Neil Stevenson. And I loved the way that he talked about how we have to imagine the future if we're going to invent the technology to get us there. Dr. Daniela Roos said something similar when you spoke to her. Yeah, Daniela is a roboticist who heads up the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab, which is a very impressive and inspiring job. And we had a fascinating conversation

about how robots in the future might be inspired by the natural world. Now, one of my passions is to bring machines, materials, and people closer together. I want to have more intelligent materials, and at the same time, I want to have more flexible, safer, more dexterous machines. And one way to think about this is to consider what robots were like

when they were introduced in 1961, also 60 years ago. The first industrial robot was Unimate. It was introduced in 1961, also 60 years ago. The first industrial robot was Unimate. It was introduced in 1961, and it was invented to do industrial pick and place operations. Now, since then, the number of industrial robots in production reached tens of millions. And these industrial robots are true masterpieces of engineering that can do so much more than people do. And yet these robots remain isolated from people on the factory floor because they're large and heavy and dangerous to be around. So we'd like to have machines that are safer to be around and that can be teammates for people. Now, if we compare industrial robots with organisms in nature, organisms in nature are soft and safe and compliant

and more dexterous and more intelligent. How can we get to the point where we have robots that are like that? And so as I think about our interaction with machines and the natural world, I actually feel inspired to rethink what a robot is. Because while the past 60 years have defined the field of industrial robots and empowered hard-bodied robots to execute complex assembly tasks in industrial settings, I really wish for the next 60 years to be ushering in robots for human-centric environments and robots that can help people with cognitive and physical tasks. Now, as we think about what these robots might look like, I'd like to ask us

to look back at what our current robots look like. So when you think about a robot today, the images that come to mind are like an industrial manipulator, a humanoid, or a box on wheels, right? These are the robots that are most used today. And so these robots are primarily inspired by the human form or by boxes on wheels. And so what I believe is that, I believe that we can do more than that. I believe that we can stretch ourselves and go to a different stage where we think about soft robots

that are inspired in shape by the animal kingdom, with its form diversity, by the natural world with its form diversity, and even by the built environment, because then we would have so much more potential for applications. I also believe that we can consider a wider range of materials that we have available to us to make these extraordinary machines. The robots of the past 60 years have been made mostly by hard

plastics and metal. But what about machines that are made out of all materials available to us? And so we can consider plastic and silicone and wood and paper, even food. And we can also consider synthesized materials. I think there is so much opportunity to create a whole new type of machine that will be a good teammate for people, that will be a more capable tool for people who need help with physical and cognitive work. Yeah, I'm really excited about the possibility. So it feels like we're at this point in time where we're really ripe for new breakthroughs. I'm a hobbyist, a machinist, and one of the things that I'm seeing in a bunch of machine shops now and one of the things that people are thinking more and more about is how to integrate simple things like six-axis robotic arms into their workflows. machine, place it into a fixture in the machine, cycle start, the part gets made, and then

you reverse the whole process. You pull the finished part out, put it on a pallet. And that can be an amazing thing in some of these shops where you can run an extra shift and you keep these really expensive machines running all the time. But they are simple things. You program them by basically having a human guide them through a bunch of waypoints in the process you want them to accomplish. And you usually are custom designing some sort of end effector so that it can pick up the things you want it to pick up. But it's really exciting to think about things that aren't that simple, that have really complicated, dexterous end effectors and that can be programmed in more robust ways.

Well, and Kevin, let's even go beyond that. Let's even bring more cognition to these tools. And let's say that these tools, these machines will be able to watch you and understand what you want to do and come and give you a hand. So let's say you're trying to lift a heavy box and a machine comes to help you lift it up, just like a friend would today. Yeah, that's a great vision. I'm so glad you all are working on these things. Yeah, I love that image of a robot seeing you struggling with a box

and just kind of walking over to you to help with it. And if somebody was going to build that robot tomorrow, it might be Simone Yetch. I had so much fun talking to Simone. I've watched her videos so frequently over the past handful of years. She creates all of these wacky inventions, but she does it with the mindset and skill set of a serious technologist. And something that really stood out for me was the idea of how valuable mistakes and

accidents and errors can be. Like building is messy and it's always like frustrating. And then when you do get it to work, it's like exhilarating. And I think for me, it was always discouraging to watch videos where people just nailed it because then I would feel like I was doing something wrong because I'm like, my builds never feel like that. Like they're always, I mean, it's never feel like that like they're always I mean it's like the difference between like the really beautiful Instagram vacation photo versus like

what it actually was and you're like I was kind of cold and hungry and like upset with my dad or whatever and I don't know I'm just trying to be transparent. Plus, like, the thing is, when bad things happen and builds, I'm always so annoyed with it. But then when I'm editing the footage, I'm always kind of happy that it happened because I'm like, oh, that's where the story is at. And it's also like, it is nice to see, like, how I can overcome those adversities. Like, even for myself, I'm like, yeah, I did solve it. And I was really upset and I felt like I wasn't going to come around on top. And then I managed to finagle my way through it somehow. Yeah.

And I don't know how you think about it philosophically about, you know, just the whole struggle of making things like being a creator, whether you're writing software, making a company or building a project or whatnot, there's a whole bunch of things that can make that go easier. It's good if you're curious, it's good if you're willing to explore. But the thing that you show is

that resilience is super important. Nothing ever goes perfectly. I felt this the same way when I was a young software engineer, all you ever saw was the computer science paper that someone had written where they got into all of the answers and you saw none of the process how they got there. You just felt so bad about yourself that you're imagining how much easier it must have been for everybody else when in reality it wasn't.

But the thing is, I think, yeah, it's resilience. But also for me, the reason that I am resilient in these situations is because I'm so genuinely excited about what I'm doing. If I wasn't pumped about it, then I'd be like, whatever, I'll just move on and like, go play video games instead. But since I'm like, I really want to pursue this and push it through and like, make this build come to life. I think that's what's making me resilient. And also just because I think I am really stubborn. But it's not that I'm like, oh, I have to push myself and work harder and like be really disciplined about it. It's mostly that I'm just like laying in bed at 3 a.m. being like, oh, I can solve it like

this. Or what about if I do that and my brain just kind of can't let it go because I really want to see it, see it through. That's awesome. Well, so, you know, Maybe we can talk a little bit about how you get the inspiration to make the things that you make. Because you have chosen over the years to make a bunch of interesting things. If you watch makers on YouTube,

there's a lot of, I don't even know whether it's, it's not that people are copying each other, but there seem like there are these things like everybody of woodworking goes and makes an epoxy river table at the same time, and there are these trends and the things that you do are just so unique to you. How do you do that? I think it's because I'm setting that bar for myself. I've just always been like, I want it to be something that you haven't really seen before or a spin on something in a way that you haven't done before. And I think it's just, it's because it's what I'm

most interested in making, but it's also because I am, I think it has to do with the platform that I'm creating for. So it is now YouTube and social media. And then I'm always like, what's the hook? What's the interesting thing? And then if I, I think if, if I'm being totally honest, if I was just making stuff for myself, then it would still be in that realm. But I probably wouldn't push myself as hard. But now I'm just always like,

you know, in some way, I think it might almost be insecurities because I'm like, to justify to exist in the space, I feel like I have to present something really unique. And I'm always like, because there's so many different videos I could be making. And I'm like, it's not interesting enough. I don't feel like I can ask people to spend time watching this if it's not elevated in some way. And I do think that has a little bit to do with like insecurities or like being apologetic about taking up space, which goes very against like being on YouTube. But then I think it's also just what I'm interested in. And I love like trying to find unique solutions to everyday problems. And that's also what I've been doing now trying to transform or like apply that thinking to product design. So it's like making things for YouTube, but then also

using those same kind of qualifiers to develop products and try to create for that arena as well, which is like a whole other world. It was so much fun talking with Simone. Like you, I love her videos. And that is a great episode to check out on YouTube, the one you were talking about, where you can see footage of some of her incredible inventions. I really recommend it for all the time I spent on YouTube, which is a lot, embarrassingly, Simone's videos are among my favorite. Creativity and collaboration were other things that came up over and over this year. Your conversation with Sam Scalace got very technical.

Yeah, it often does with Sam. And I think in this conversation, we got pretty in the weeds. But it was a great conversation. And we also talked about creativity and collaboration. I thought we'd share a snippet of that part of our conversation here. We have this kind of Calvinist idea in our heads that work is equivalent to suffering. You're not really working if you don't hate it. And I don't think that's true. I actually think the place for people to be, this is the career advice I always give people, is find the thing you feel kind of guilty

about getting paid for, do the hell out of it, right? Like, if you feel kind of guilty that you're getting paid to do something, it probably means you're really good at it and it's fun for you. And if people are willing to pay for it, just go do the heck out of that. Like, career growth usually comes from having impact,

which usually comes from doing something you love with a lot of passion. Like, it's not that much more complicated than that. So that's how, I mean, so I never started to think, I never started off with like, I'm going to go do a bunch of startups. I just was like, what's the next interesting thing I want to go work on?

Let's just go do that with all this energy. I always liked working with my friend. So we just kept doing stuff and we kept making money and it kept being successful enough. So like, why stop? I think you had another couple of pieces of interesting career advice in there as well. I totally agree with what you just said.

I also agree that working with your friends, whether they were your friends before you start something or whether you form bonds with folks when you join a company and you start working with them. I think that's pretty important because on most days, even when you've got a thing that you're passionate about and you nominally enjoy, there's just a bunch of hard stuff you've got to go do to make anything worthwhile. And so you do want to be doing

it with people whose company you enjoy and where you feel like some degree of camaraderie with them. Otherwise, it's just, I mean, you and I do this now, right? Like, I don't want to sell the image that Microsoft is, you know, somehow perfect. Like, we got hard things we work on all the time.

And then the two of us, like, you know, because we're friends, we will, you know, we will complain to one another. And, you know, the thing that you try to do, I try to do, yeah, I even do this in my marriage, is like, you want to sort of be grumpy out of phase with each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

You know, you want to be complimented. There's all kinds of complementarity that you want in these partnerships, right? That's definitely one of them. Skill sets is another one, right? You want a linear thinker and a nonlinear thinker, and then you want them to be in creative tension with each other, basically, in a constructive way, right? Yeah. I mean, the other, like, the most interesting, like, complementarity advice that I ever got is I had a mentor years ago who told me to imagine a histogram that has five buckets. And on the extreme left end of the histogram, the bucket is labeled idiot. And on the far right end of the histogram, the bucket is labeled

genius. And in the middle is average. And you can take everything that you do and every skill that you possess and put it into one of those buckets. So, like, that's not the, you know, the breakthrough thing for me. Like, the breakthrough thing was this mentor said, if you work really, really, really, really hard, you can move something over one or two positions on that histogram, which means that if you've got a thing that you are an idiot at, like... You might get to average if you're lucky. Yeah. And every minute that you spend trying to get to average is a minute that you're not

spending doing the thing that you're a genius at. Right. And, you know, like what you want to do with teams or partnerships or anything else, to your point about, you know, nonlinear versus linear thinkers is you want to, like, you're trying to do something together. You need a set of skills to go do the thing. So, like, how do So how do you figure out this thing where everybody's histogram adds up to above average

where you can have everybody focus on what they're really good at? The real challenge with this is that just to keep going with that example, sometimes if you've got two geniuses that are pulling in different directions, they neutralize. And then you don't have either genius.

And so like, and like, in fact, that often happens, right? Like this, I had this tension a lot with my co-founder, Steve. Like, you know, when you have genuinely different perspectives on the world and you are genuinely both good at them, those are often, you know, you're kind of blind to the other perspective to some degree. And so finding a way to like understand and respect the other perspective, even if you don't really get it, like you just understand like this person, I don't get their domain. I don't even maybe necessarily fully value it, but I understand that it is valuable and they're good at it. And so I'm like, you know, deliberately like carve out some space. I always tell founding teams, like pick somebody you like arguing with. Yeah. That's, you know, don't pick somebody you like. Like, you know, it's easy.

Don't just go found something with a friend. Pick somebody that you enjoy arguing with, where, like, you have genuinely different perspectives, where you're struggling to even find common vocabulary. But it's okay. Like, you're willing to have those arguments kind of find that common ground in between. Yeah. Because often there's, like, super small overlap in the Venn diagram of even like the language of these, right? That was from Kevin's conversation with Sam Scalace. And that theme of collaboration and feedback

came up with another Microsoft person you talked to. That's right. My colleague, Phil Spencer, who heads up gaming at Microsoft. I just love the way that he talked about the feedback that they get from users and how much it matters to him personally. The feedback on the work that we do, good and bad, is out there front and center.

And while there's obviously good days and bad days for myself and the teams and the products that we're building, for me, that complete loop of we have an idea, whether it's iterative on something that we've already done or completely new, we're going to work that over multiple years in the case of these big games that we were talking about to deliver something. And that

end result in the feedback that you get is the thing that gives me momentum into the next thing. But that's, like I said, that's kind of how I'm wired. I like the completeness of that. I mean, I'm enthralled by, I think of like, you think four, three, 400 years ago, there's like architects in Europe working on these massive churches that are going to take 200 years to build. And they're in the middle of this. And if you're like a Mason, you know that you didn't see the beginning and your life will not exist. You won't live long enough to see the end. And these people throw themselves into these builds.

We have similar kind of projects at Microsoft, as you know, that take like multiple, multiple decades, especially some of these things where they're way out there, Horizon 3 things. And I am just so impressed by people that have that amount of kind of intellectual drive to see through it. For me, that tighter feedback loop is just part of how I'm wired. And I'm glad we have those people that can think longer term about infrastructure and longer term investments. It's not just longer-term, but it's at a different level in the stack, the things that we do. And the conversations, one of the reasons I always love having conversations with you, because the conversations of how different people think about these problems and opportunities are just awesome feedback into what we do.

That was Phil Spencer, CEO of Gaming at Microsoft. We've got one more guest from this season that we want to make sure and we highlight today. I don't want to say we saved the best for last, but Randall Munroe, the physicist and artist behind XKCD is such a fascinating person to listen to. Yeah, XKCD is one of my absolute favorite things on the whole internet. So I was beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to get to chat with Randall. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things as well. Let's take a listen to some of what you two talked about. When I started drawing comics about this science stuff, I really wasn't expecting it, but people started sending me questions now and then.

They'd be like, me and my friend have been arguing over this, you know, Superman physics question or, you know, this thing about the skyscraper or something. And they're like, but it seems like it's like too pointless a question to bother a real scientist with. So, which is sort of a, feels like a little bit of a burn, but at the same time, I mean, they were,

they're like, you seem like you probably have a lot of you know free time to or like you're enthusiastic about like doing a completely pointless but incredibly hard task because it sounds funny or cool and i was like sort of insulted but also they were they were definitely right um i was so i would get these emails and I would like, the kinds of questions that would really hook me were the ones where it seemed like there must be an answer, but I don't immediately know what it is.

And I have a guess about what it is. And so I would find that someone would send a like one line email with a question in it. And I would like spend six hours, like going down rabbit holes of research, being like, oh, it must be this, right? And then I look up, no, I don't think it's that. Oh, man. Well, okay, we could solve it this way, you know, and I would like get sucked into and I would finally get to the solution and I'd

write them up this whole email and reply, you know, of like, okay, I've worked it out. I've done this. Here's the citation. Here's the thing and then send it and then like the email would bounce or something and I would be like, oh, okay oh okay you know they and then and so at some point i started thinking like if i'm gonna put all this work into this i other people would probably want to read these too um and so so i started uh you know sort of soliciting questions and and uh writing out my answers. But it really is, it's, you know, it's nice. It's a way of showing people that you can use the tools of science to, you know, how to answer questions with them. But it's really more about, to me, it's like, you can take a question that is really interesting and showing like a way of getting to the answer it's not like a way of sneakily

giving you science it's a way of like sneakily giving you uh uh the answer itself you know and like it's not that the answer is important but that's okay it doesn't have to be it's like telling you you can figure this stuff out you know, there are ways to figure this stuff out. You don't have to feel like, like people don't like asking questions sometimes because they worry that it makes them look like they don't know what they're, you know, they don't know something. And so I try to encourage that, you know, like in myself, I have a hard time. Like when someone uses a word and I don't know what it means. I had a New Year's resolution a while back that was like i'm gonna start asking people what words mean and it was really hard like it was i was not expecting that like how difficult that is but then also they're happy to tell you you can just ask it's fine you know yeah um and so so i try to like so and they

don't think you're stupid when they respond, right? Like, they do not think less of you. No, yeah, and, like, and then the next time someone uses the word, you don't have to feel like you don't know it because you've learned it, you know? And so with, like, these tools, you know, of science and calculation and stuff, like, they'll give you an answer. They don't care if the question is, like, pointless or not or if, like, why you want to know.

You know, it's just like if you're curious about something, you can ask. There's probably an answer out there. If there is, you know, here are ways we can try to find it. And it's okay to not know stuff and be curious about it, you know. It's such an awesome thing. Like, I do think that curiosity is almost like a muscle. Like, the more I let myself be curious about things,

like, the more curious I become. And, like, I think that's a good's a good thing, like asking lots and lots and lots of questions. It maybe even is more important than being able to answer lots and lots and lots of questions. Yeah, I think that it's like, sometimes people say like, how do you encourage people to be curious or encourage them to be interested in, you know, science or interested in any of this stuff? And like, I don't know. I'm not a psychologist. I don't know. Like, I really feel though, like, like people are curious. Like, it's a question of, like, do they feel like they...

have a way to get, you know, to satisfy that curiosity? Um, or do they feel like the things they're curious about are just like, oh, well, that's something I could never understand, or that's unknowable, or that's like, you know... Like, uh, this is something that i really i really admire um carl sagan who had a really good i think a lot a lot of time the people who would who would write about science or talk about science were kind of like smug or condescending about like people are just you know uh uh incurious or they're, you know,

they believe in superstition or they're not scientific or not rational or not logical. And like, I think that that, that stuff kind of rubs me the wrong way. Like, and I think one thing that Carl Sagan really appreciated is that like, people are just all looking for answers. And like, if you don't offer them answers, you know, if you can offer them answers through science, then they will be interested in science. Like if you can offer them like answers, like here's a way of figuring out the answers to your questions,

they'll jump at that. And if you don't, they'll find someone else who has answers, you know, someone else who's offering a way to think about the world that satisfies their curiosity or gives them, you know, a sense of understanding and power. What a fascinating chat with Randall Munroe. Kevin, with the benefit of hindsight and hearing all these great conversations with such fascinating individuals one more time, I think we can safely say that 2022 was an interesting year for Behind the Tech. Your ingenuity, compassion, and dedication to your craft, whatever that may be, truly makes an impact on the world. We're grateful that these folks took time away

from that amazing work to chat with us. Yeah. Thank you seriously to all of our guests. As always, thank you for listening. As 2022 draws to an end, please take a minute to drop us a note at BehindTheTech at Microsoft.com and tell us about what you'd like to hear from in 2023. We'll be kicking off the new year with a conversation with CEO and founder of Shopify,

Toby Lutka. See you next time.