00:13:57 · Bernt Øivind Børnich, Ty Morse
[00:13:57] S1: I... I'm I'm I'm I'm probably, like, blunted here in, like, a special way because I think sufficiently advanced engineering is art, and this is clearly advanced engineering. But I think the beauty of the machine kinda comes from the simplicity, not the complexity. So you take something that's extremely complex, and you manage to boil it down to something is like, it is the simplest form, the simplest implementation that can fully solve the problem. And there's a real beauty to that. I think often you can see this in systems. You can kinda see that, like, oh, first principles wise. This is just, like, the minimum implementation of the system. And there's a real beauty to that simplicity, and that's really hope... What I hope we can deliver. That kinda comes from itself. Right? You don't need to design for it to be beautiful in inside. If you've done your job on, like, how do you design the system, then this just automatically happens because it should always be the minimum complexity implementation that solves the problem. That's how you achieve scale. [00:14:58] S0: Do you ever have a feeling where you're looking at something and you say to yourself, like, it is clearly not there yet because it doesn't look simple, it doesn't look beautiful?
00:15:05 · Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:15:05] S1: Oh, yeah. And and, like, every day, every time I look at a robot, all I see is everything that's wrong. So I'm not that lucky in that sense. Like, everyone else sees something as, this is beautiful. I'm like, no. No. No. No. Like, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. And I think that's probably gonna be like that forever. So I'm not the right person to ask that. But I I do think, like, I I find beauty in every time we can do simplifications. And I think the biggest simplification that's happened over the last year is, for example, wire harnessing and just ensuring, like, the complexity of the cabling really going down tremendously, like minimum number of connectors, minimum number of wires. And this is just something we drive top down. Like, we literally have, like, a cable and connector budget, for example. There's a certain number of connectors that you have to have from, like, a first principles point of view, but it's not that many. And every connector that you have more than that, that's an exception that really needs to be defended and needs to be approved because it shouldn't be there, and we should have a plan for how to get rid of it. And this is the same for moving parts. Right? Like, you want the number of parts in your robot to be the number of moving parts. If two parts don't move with respect to each other, like, why are there two parts? Like, they should be one part. You can't always achieve this, but you should absolutely know what is the first principle's minimum complexity and how far away are you and how are you driving it down towards that. Because the ultimate goal should be to reach that.
00:16:36 · Ty Morse, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:16:36] S0: Has there been any specific example where there was, like, a very obvious this should just be one part that you can think of? [00:16:43] S1: This is very niche. But my favorite is actually how the rotational part and shaft on the motor is now one part less than what it's always been, because some very smart people figured out how to do the bearing assembly of the shaft without needing two parts, which usually it's always two parts because you kinda, like, need to sandwich it in, but it's actually one part. As... To me, that's that's very beautiful. It's half the number of parts for that. [00:17:07] S0: If you took Bernt from five years ago and you teleported him to today or teleported yourself back, would you make any decisions drastically differently than you have?
00:17:07 · Ty Morse, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:17:07] S0: If you took Bernt from five years ago and you teleported him to today or teleported yourself back, would you make any decisions drastically differently than you have? [00:17:16] S1: I'd keep the team way smaller and leaner, way longer. I think a lesson you learn again and again and again as you do development is that the beautiful products are the simple products. And the beautiful simple products are made by very small, extremely talented teams. The more people you have, the more complexity you will get in your product. And this type of engineering just does not scale with a number of people. Like, you can scale your manufacturing with having lots of people doing manufacturing processes, testing, automation, all these things. But, like, the core product design, once you have multiple people, you need interfaces. And once you get interfaces, you kinda introduce artificial complexity. There's a real very material advantage to how much of the system can you have in your head and understand so that you as a single person can make the decisions across the full system. Usually, I would tear it like, across the subsystem. But, ideally, there are no subsystems. It's just the system. Right? Now this is not doable for this complex of a product, but you wanna get as close to that as possible. [00:18:18] S0: When you are trying to keep the entire idea of, like, this thousand part product in your head, how do you kind of come up to speed as fast as possible with and have the most, like, accurate representation of what this thing is in your head at any given time?
00:18:32 · Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:18:32] S1: I think it just comes down to, like, have you understood the fundamental principles of how the machine operates and why? And if you really understand the fundamentals, then everything else is just logical, like, if you have a good design. So then the complexity kind of goes... Logic goes away. And then you look at it in the end, and you're like, actually, how do we spend this much time? Like, this isn't that complicated. And, like, that should really be the goal. Right? And maybe other people look at it and are like, oh my god. This is complex. But once you really know how it works, then the magic goes away. Right? And it's just like this pretty simple machine. I think that takes a lot of time. So you also need to create an environment where kind of people stick around and get that intuition and under... Deep understanding of the system. But you can also do a lot on the tooling side, which is quite important. Like, how do you build the design tools on the electromechanical side that allows you to iterate on the product in a in a way that's, like, verifiably correct? And this is increasingly becoming more and more productive because you have so good tools, especially on the coding side. But that's always been a challenge, like, finding people who are very deep on electromechanical but are still general enough that they can kinda develop their own tools to solve the problem. Because most people that are very deep on the electromechanical side, they're not necessarily software people. But by far, the most valuable people are the people who are very broad across all of these domains, preferably even down to, like, material science and everything else. Right? Like, how many domains have you actually mastered? And can you start to see kinda, like, the correlation between them? So kinda like the boundaries disappear. The best people generally end up building a lot of tools for how to do your job.
00:20:15 · Ty Morse, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:20:15] S0: If long term millions of people are going to have these things in their homes, ideally, is something that humans, like, form a connection with, and they start to love. One of the videos that I saw, you were, like, hugging NEO. Mhmm. [00:20:27] S1: And I [00:20:27] S0: was thinking to myself, how do you go through the process of trying to design something that is fundamentally something that humans can learn to love or decide to love?