# The best robot design removes complexity

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/the-best-robot-design-removes-complexity/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Bernt Børnich](https://realalpha.app/builders/bernt-bornich/) · Bernt Børnich is founder and CEO of 1X.
- Host: [Ti Morse](https://realalpha.app/people/ti-morse/) · Host, Relentless · Interviews hard-tech founders on Relentless; guests include Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong and Hadrian's Chris Power.
- Show: Relentless
- Episode: [Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/), Sep 18, 2026
- Moment: 13:19 to 17:19 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/the-best-robot-design-removes-complexity/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=799

## Quote

> “the beauty of the machine kind of comes from the **simplicity, not the complexity**.”
> — [Bernt Børnich](https://realalpha.app/builders/bernt-bornich/) at [14:03](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=843) · Relentless

## Takeaways

1. Set a first-principles minimum for system complexity.
2. Extra connectors need a clear justification and removal plan.
3. Combining the motor shaft and rotational part cuts one part.

## About this segment

Bernt Børnich treats simplicity as both an engineering principle and a source of beauty. He describes budgets for connectors and moving parts, plus a motor design that eliminates a part.

From “Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X”, Sep 18, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[13:24](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=804) technically you could call it a recall i was looking at the hand video and i was thinking to myself this reminds me of this idea from steve jobs where if you look at the inside of like an apple computer it's gorgeous and people were kind of wondering to themselves like why is this and it's like because steve wanted to design something that was both beautiful on the inside of the outside and also functional and i think when i look at your robot it's that has that same feel where it's, like, beautiful to look at even when it doesn't have its, like, clothes on or skin on.

[13:53](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=833) What's your kind of, like, philosophy on designing something where even the internals look good? 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 kind of 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 kind of 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

[14:39](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=879) that kind of 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 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 oh yeah and then like every day every time i look at the robot all i see is everything that's wrong so I'm not that lucky in that sense like everyone else sees something as like 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 going to be like that forever so I'm not the right person to ask that but I do think

[15:24](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=924) like 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 uh the complexity of the cabling really going down tremendously uh 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.

[16:01](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=961) 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.

[16:24](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=984) you can't always achieve this but you should absolutely know what is the first principles minimum complexity and how far away are you and how are you driving it down towards that because the ultimate goals should be to reach that has there been any specific example where there was like a very obvious this should just be one part you can think of 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 kind of like need to sandwich it in, but it's actually one part.

[17:04](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=1024) And to me, that's very beautiful. It's half the number of parts for that. 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?