I realize this is unfair to later posts which have had less time to steep in the broth of the Internet, so take the following with a grain of salt.

#10: Bold Bathtub on a Buggy

Absurdity always seems to perform well, and this is no exception. For you superfans, go forth and live your best life.

#9: Soothing Seascape Sculpture by Sylvain

Sylvain’s seascapes were much appreciated this year. Poor guy makes amazing sculptures only to be out-SEO’d by a Fire Emblem character 🥲

#8: Terrifying Tree-trimming Technology

I have a confession: every few months I post a version of this when I’m in a pinch for new material. It’s such a wild piece of machinery that people love it every time 😅

#7: Alarming Atlas Android Accidents

Poor Atlas, destined to be scapegoated as a harbinger of a robot uprising when it succeeds, and laughed at when it fails. It’s tough being a robot.

#6: Radical Ring Receptacle

I got to interview Brian Ignaut about his creations in 2020!

#5: Adorable Automaton

Disney Research publishes some incredible technical work and has a fascinating YouTube channel.

#4: Humongous Hydraulic Hole

Dams are a technology that keeps on giving gifs.

#3: Macaque Masters Mind-over-Matter

Brain-machine interfaces are fraught with ethical and philosophical considerations (and rightfully so), but damn this is pretty cool.

#2: Robotic Rack Rovers

I think the reason this made #2 is because Elon Musk commented on it. For the sake of accuracy I should have mentioned the video is sped up.

#1: Mass Manufactured Marijuana

Congrats to drugs for winning the War on Drugs! Honestly didn’t expect this one to be the winner this year but here we are.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (or interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out!

—Kane

I’ll be picking up the regular in-depth weekly in January, but I didn’t want to end the year as yet-another-lapsed newsletter.

In 2021 I interviewed fourteen incredible engineers, creators, and writers, and I always made a point to ask them their favorite book. So to send off 2021, here is the MachinePix Holiday Reading List, curated through a year of interviews:

Frank Ippolito is the founder of Thingergy, which makes costumes, props, statues, special effects makeup, and all kind of things for epic sci fi series including Star Wars. Fitting that his favorite book this year was a space opera series, Expeditionary Force.

Laura Kampf makes and restores delightfully creative tools from unexpected scrap on her eponymous YouTube channel. Her recent favorite book was creative fiction The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

Dr. Steve Gass is the inventor of SawStop, a top-selling table saw and beloved by woodworkers that enjoy keeping their fingers. When he wasn’t woodworking, he was reading the epic fantasy Stormlight Archive.

fnnch is a prolific and mysterious street artist who nonetheless sat down with me to explain his artistic and technical processes. He recommended a book which became one of my favorite nonfiction reads this year, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark.

Kyle Wiens is the man behind iFixit, staunch advocate for Right to Repair, and a general pain-in-the-ass to corporate lawyers. His very-on-brand favorite book this year was The Innovation Delusion.

Milo Werner was the woman that made the Model S and Model X happen as Director of NPI for Tesla, no doubt aided by her favorite book Radical Candor.

Shyam Srinivasan is an electrical engineering who’s designed electronics for iPod, Nest, Snap, and EVs. He has an axe to grind with the fossil fuel industry and recommended Internal Combustion.

Alfred Jones is the Director of Mechanical Engineering at Peloton and formerly Fitbit and Lyft. He swears by the leadership principles of Extreme Ownership.

Abe Askenazi is the CTO of Zero Motorcycles, an EV motorcycle company and my favorite vehicle I’ve ever owned. His favorite book? The Call of the Wild.

Dorrian Porter is the CEO of Vestaboard, a company that makes a modern split-flap display (you know, those whimsical flippy displays in train stations and airports). His favorite book also evokes a sense of adventure: The Neverending Story.

Eric Migicovsky created the Pebble, the first commercially successful smartwatch, which surely made him empathize with the title of his favorite book this year: Project Hail Mary.

Will Ahmed is the CEO of high-performance wearable company Whoop. He takes inspiration from the story of Nike, documented in the book Shoe Dog.

Brian Potter is a structural engineer and the author of Construction Physics, one of my favorite technical newsletters. When we spoke about the political challenges of building housing, he recommended Neighborhood Defenders.

Jason Crawford runs the nonprofit progress studies institution Roots of Progress. He is writing his own book, The Story of Industrial Civilization—but he was quick to recommend The Beginning of Infinity.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (or interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out!

—Kane

Our undergrad intern didn’t understand a lot of the references, which implies that some web design primitives that have largely died off. I’m reminded of the “programmer archaeologists” in Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, who maintain ancient software in case its ever needed.

I’m not sure how to articulate the joy that people have expressed when they see the new website, but it feels related to concepts like stylistic suck in TV or sprezzatura in fashion. A few prominent websites have leaned into this web aesthetic: Balenciaga’s I Love Pets, my favorite chicken sandwich place World Famous Hotboys, and the Yale School of Art—the latter being interesting because it’s a wiki that also incorporates neo-brutalist web touches like fancy typography. Yes yes, I know that it’s not “really” brutalist, but it’s a useful phrase here and the backlash has already begun.

The most popular post this week was a waterfall glazing machine. I believe these are built-to-spec for Krispy Kreme. One ambitious employee ran the same donut through a glazing machine 25 times.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

Water infrastructure remain a perennial favorite on @machinepix.

It’s sad to see stuff like this as US ports remain woefully under-automated due to flagging investment and sandbagging by organized labor.

Amazingly, this is only 1/3 the volume of the largest exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium.

Postscript

I have a friend with a prosthetic leg that wants to restore a manual transmission sports car. Does anyone know of any way to move clutch controls to the shifting hand? I know sequential transmissions somewhat fit the bill, but their roughness and high maintenance feel less ideal for a daily driver.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

I first learned about The Roots of Progress (and the field of progress studies in general) when one of Jason’s posts, Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?, went viral. I had spent a few years deep in the bowels of the bicycle industry, and it was an eye-opening new way to think about the industry and how innovation happens (or doesn’t). Check out the full interview below the fold.

The most popular post this week was a pretty unique excavator attachment:

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

Interview with Jason Crawford

I’ve been a fan of The Roots of Progress since I found the viral bicycle article, but you’d been writing since 2017. What prompted you to start writing?

The Roots of Progress started out as a hobby side project. It was just going to be “what book am I going to read next?” or “what theme am I going to read on?”—At some point I decided I wanted to learn about the industrial revolution—and very quickly I broadened that to the entire story of human progress.

Joel Mokyr’s book A Culture of Growth was very influential—he explicitly discusses how important the idea of progress is, how it didn't exist through most of history, and how it sort of arose in the West in the 1500s and 1600s. And so I just read one book after another and a few months in, I decided to start making notes and publishing them on a blog. The blog grew, the audience grew, and I just got more and more obsessed with the topic. A couple of years in, I decided to go full-time on it.

Ok, dumb question: what exactly is “progress studies,” and why is it important?

The term was originally coined to propose an academic field, an interdisciplinary field that would cut across economics and history and related disciplines to better understand the causes of progress—especially technological, industrial, and economic progress—and to answer the question of “how do we get more of it?” An interdisciplinary field that leans prescriptive rather than purely descriptive.

That concept was proposed in a mid-2019 article in The Atlantic by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison; the article galvanized a community of people who strongly resonated with this concept. The broader idea is just the fact that material progress over the last two or three centuries is one of the—perhaps the most important—fact in all of human history. For thousands, tens of thousands of years life was pretty crappy; it’s only in recent decades that we've gotten anywhere close to the standard of living that we all now enjoy.

So if you care about human life and well-being and health and happiness, then you have to look at that fact and be somewhat in awe of it. You have to ask, “how did we get here?” “Why did it take so long, and how can we keep it going?” So those are the three questions that I identified early on in this project, and those are the central questions of progress studies.

I know there's probably not a simple answer, but to the extent that there are a few agreed upon things that caused that massive recent inflection, what changed?

So this is perhaps the biggest question of an entire field of study, which is economic history. And there are many people who have devoted entire careers to this and are shelves full of books addressing the question. At the highest level, economic growth throughout all of human history is like a super-exponential curve. In specific segments, it’s maybe exponential: certainly since about the beginning of the industrial revolution. But even in the segments before that there is some growth, some progress, so it wasn't totally flat. If it was, the world of 1700 would have looked exactly like the world of 10,000 BC—which is obviously not the case.

So growth was extremely slow in the hunter-gatherer era, right? Major innovations that come along, maybe once a century or something, or less than that: maybe once a millennium. And then growth probably kicked up into a higher rate, but still extremely slow by modern standards when we got the agricultural revolution. I mean the first agricultural revolution back in 8000 BC or so when you got permanent agriculture and settled societies and so forth, and then growth was sort of slow for another 10,000 years or so—then kicked into high gear a few hundred years ago.

At the broadest level, some fundamental technology or societal shift happens, like agriculture or settled societies, or the printing press or the industrial revolution—and each of these things provide some fundamental infrastructure or capability, which not only helps the economy and human living, but also feeds back into the process of progress itself. That's why exponential growth is even possible: these things work on self-reinforcing feedback loops. With that perspective though, we can ask: “all right, what was the big change a few hundred years ago that kicked us into the industrial revolution?”

Joel Mokyr makes a compelling case that a significant part of it was the very idea of progress: for most of human history, even though progress was happening, it was happening so slowly that nobody could really perceive it within their own lifetime.

I am reminded of cathedral projects that used to take multiple generations.

Yes, exactly. And on the one hand, you know, we can look back on those projects and marvel at the longevity of those projects; on the other end, construction productivity was super low if it takes you a hundred years to build. Rivaled only by the New York subway lines (laughs).

Mokyr points out that throughout most of history, people saw history as flat, or maybe cyclical with ups and downs. They didn't see it as an upward progression of any sort. In fact there was this reverence for ancient civilizations and ancestors. A sort of societal ancestor worship, where cultures looked back to people of antiquity as the smartest and greatest people who ever lived: all knowledge that mattered had been revealed to them in ancient times, and their accomplishments were so great that we could never surpass or even equal them. 

Throughout the 1500s and 1600s there was a big debate in the West about the ancients versus the moderns. Could we, the moderns, possibly ever equal or even surpass the achievements of the ancients? Some of the first cracks in this wall came about through the Age of Discovery where we started discovering entire new continents that were unknown to the ancients. And so, hey, maybe not all of the knowledge was revealed to them in ancient times. And then finally just to put a pin in it, by the works of Newton and his Principia it was very clear this was better than anything that Ptolemy or anybody had ever thought about before.

We have now surpassed the ancients and maybe we can keep going. So I think there are a number of things, but that idea of progress, that sort of fundamental cultural attitude towards it, is really essential. Going along with that, Francis Bacon promoted the idea of progress, but he also promoted the fundamental method for achieving it, the method of scientific observation and experiment. That underpinning of the scientific revolution was key. It's common for people to look at the early industrial revolution and think that it actually didn't have much to do with science because so much of it was sort of mechanical tinkering, but I think this is wrong— it had a lot to do with the broader scientific culture, the approach to observation and measurement. A lot of what engineers were doing in those days in say the 1700s was careful, systematic observation and measurement using the techniques of science. Even if they were doing engineering rather than science itself.

This is a bit of a meta-question: why has it taken so long for people to start thinking seriously about progress? It’s only shown up in the last second of human history

I don't have a full answer here. I think that a certain amount of progress needs to be made in random fits and starts before people could really get the concept. I think a big part of it is globalization, with increased contact between civilizations. One of the things that Francis Bacon noted was that China had these inventions that were unknown to the West—the compass and paper and gunpowder—Bacon pointed to them as examples of inventions and discoveries that were not just scientific curiosities, but could be applied for useful purposes. That was part of what motivated him to ultimately say “knowledge is power.”

What was the most unexpected thing you’ve learned over the past four years of writing for The Roots of Progress?

I've come across a number of technologies that are not very well known or talked about but have been crucial to progress. The idea of precision in machine tools is one of these. (Editor’s note: Simon Winchester, a previous guest on MachinePix Weekly, wrote The Perfectionists on the history of precision).

When the average consumer thinks about inventions, they might think about things like the light bulb and the microwave and the automobile—things that consumers interact with. But it turns out that you know, producer goods can be just as important to the overall economy, and machine tools were absolutely essential to manufacturing and ultimately to all of mechanization. It turns out that in order to mechanize everything, in order to create home appliances, in order to create agricultural machinery, etc, you really need the precision that advanced tooling can get you or else the machines are just completely unreliable and basically don't work.

Another interesting thing is just how long some of the timelines are: how long it took to go from, for instance, key discoveries and electromagnetism in the 1830s to the practical light bulb in the 1880s—like 50 years. Or for that matter, you got Newcomen’s steam engine in 1712, James Watson’s proved steam engine in 1769, and then you didn't really have a practical working locomotive until about 1815 and locomotives weren't widely adopted for railroads until about 1830 or so.

How much of that is engineering bottlenecks? Where I can prove a concept like locomotives, but to make a hundred thousand miles of high grade reliable steel rails is a whole different ball game. And how much of that is just inherent reactive anti-progress in society in general?

So in the examples I just gave it definitely wasn't a general anti-progress sentiment. Certainly in the late 1800s with electricity, society was generally pro-progress, at least in the west. That doesn't mean that people welcomed every new development, every new development is almost always opposed and fought no matter what people think about progress in general. But I think a significant amount of it is certainly engineering work that needs to be done.

Take the first prototype of a locomotive engine: the first prototypes in the late 1700s and very early 1800s were not ready for prime time. They were not reliable nor efficient, and so more engineering work was required. But what is striking is kind of how little attention was being paid to that engineering work and how little investment was going into it. There were a very small number of engineers experimenting with locomotives for decades. And then it's also remarkable that once a practical locomotive had been invented and was working, it still took like 10 or 15 years for like the rest of the—I was about to say the rest of the world, but even just the rest of England—to be, to be really convinced that railroads were the way to go.

So in the 1820s you have long roads being built and they're not even sure if they're going to work it via engines or via horses, even though there was an example of a locomotive working a coal railway for many years. Part of that I think is just the lack of information technology when people wanted to learn about this locomotive. I mean, they couldn't just Google it obviously, nor could they just see a video of it. They had to literally go there and visit and watch it in action. And repeatedly people would go to these coal fields where George Stevenson had built this working locomotive and they would see it in action and they would come away totally convinced. But they had to actually go make the journey, and that itself was not an easy thing to do because of the lack of the very railways which we're talking about. They had to go there by horse and carriage.

So there's this thing again where progress feeds back onto itself where progress gives you the foundation for more and faster progress. Transportation, information technology, manufacturing: all of these things feed back into our ability to make faster progress. So today, if George Stevenson invented the locomotive, it would be on YouTube immediately and people around the world would know about it instantly.

This reminds me of one of your more popular pieces on why it took so long to invent the bicycle. Is there a name for the concept of the things like the locomotive where you’re not bottlenecked by fundamental science, but just waiting for someone to come up with it?

I think Alex Tabarrok coined the term “ideas behind their time” in contrast to ideas that are ahead of their time. Some ideas seem to be behind their time.

What are some recurring patterns, like “ideas behind their time,” you see across technologies and industries?

So one I already mentioned is the very long timelines. Related to that is the importance of reliability and efficiency. Let me back up: you will often hear this sort of claim that, oh, the famous inventor of X was not the true inventor, because look, there are these other people who invented it first. This is like the light bulb, right? “Oh, Thomas Edison didn't really invent the light bulb because look, there were like 20 light bulb patents before him” or “Cyrus McCormick didn't really invent the reaper” or “Stevenson didn't really invent the locomotive” or whatever.

For all of these different major inventions, usually it's the case that people were trying to invent the thing for decades. There were lots of patents and there were many prototypes and some of the prototypes even kind of worked and or had been demonstrated. But the challenge is always reliability, efficiency, cost, or some combination of those things.

The true inventor is not just the person who creates the first prototype to demonstrate core concepts or a key architecture of a machine. The true inventor, in my opinion, is the person who actually iteratively works through all of the practical problems that are standing in the way of mass adoption.

So this is what Edison did for the light bulb, for instance. Light bulbs before Edison were expensive, short lived, or both. Often expensive because they used materials like platinum for the filament and then they burned out quickly. The idea of having a filament of material and running an electric current through it inside a glass bulb: lots of people had that idea, lots of people experimented with that idea. But it turns out that key to making a practical light bulb that people are actually going to use is one getting a good vacuum inside the glass. There was a new vacuum pump I believe, invented around the 1860s or so that Edison used to get a good vacuum. Even just figuring out how to make the bulb, create the vacuum and then seal it off without losing that vacuum was key. And then of course finding the right filament—famously Edison's lab experiments with thousands of materials before they found something that would actually give off a good glow and last for a long time.

You find similar things with almost every other invention. It's not some flash of insight where you get the key idea for the machine or the architecture of it, and that's all you need. It's actually that plus a whole lot of engineering iteration to make it really work. 

Is there a favorite piece to write for The Roots of Progress? Whether because of the topic or you just really liked the way that piece turned out narratively? 

Yeah, the bicycle piece was pretty good. That's one of my most popular pieces. Another popular one that I've done is on the history of cement. That was actually one of my most popular Twitter threads.

But one of the ones where I really liked the way the writing turned out is called Progress Studies as a Civic Duty. It was kind of the precursor to another post I wrote called Industrial literacy, but I came up with a lot of lines and paragraphs and passages in the civic duty post I just really like.

Any side projects you’re working on right now?

I am. As I mentioned I’m studying the history of railroads for an upcoming talk about the history of transportation, which I'm doing as part of my series through Interintellect. I have also been researching nuclear power and have only written a couple of things about that publicly.

Nuclear power feels like one of the hot button topics in progress studies.

Yeah, it's the number one example that I point to of technological stagnation in the late 20th century technology that should have grown much farther than it did and was really stunted in its infancy.

In terms of hot buttons: I have never gotten so much pushback and dog piling as when I said that actually the automobile was one of the greatest inventions ever. I thought people were going to come after me when I started saying nice things about nuclear, but God help you if you ever say anything nice about cars.

I saw that one and thought “oh this one's going to be a spicy debate.” Any favorite books or books you’re reading now?

Currently reading Samuel Smiles’s biography of George Stevenson. Smiles is quite good, he was a biographer of the late 19th century who wrote biographies of engineers. He was one of the early ones to do so.

Let’s see, a couple of top book recommendations: Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. I'm looking forward to his new book on rationality that just came out as well. David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, which is some of the best philosophy of progress that I've read. And I'll recommend Josh Hall's book, Where Is My Flying Car? as an excellent look at both technological stagnation and the potential for an ambitious technological future. It is coming out in a new edition from Stripe press. 

What’s your favorite simple (or not so simple) tool or hack that you think is under-appreciated?

Journaling, writing down your thoughts in full sentences and paragraphs just to yourself alone as a means of clarifying your thoughts. I learned this technique from Jean Moroney who runs a business consulting business called Thinking Directions. She calls it thinking on paper and I've been using it almost every day for the last 20 years.

The Week in Review

I’d love to interview someone that works with animatronics. I interviewed Frank Ippolito of Thingergy, the company behind costumes and props for canons like Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, in Issue #26.

Chroma keying is colloquial called “green-screening”, but it’s pretty obvious that the background here is blue, not green. Unsurprisingly, it turns out there is no strict “best” option and there are tradeoffs between choices. Interestingly, blue screens predate green screens. I recommend watching behind-the-scenes chroma keying when you can.

Gross.

Postscript

My favorite bottle opener by JL Lawson was updated:

I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

Naturally, progress studies has a lot of overlap with industrial machines, and Jason’s popular writings include Why AC won the Electricity Wars, Instant stone (just add water!) on the history of concrete, and my personal favorite: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

Previous MachinePix interviews have touched on various important topics of progress studies: in issue #55 Brian Potter explained advances in different construction materials, and in issue #22 Simon Winchester walked through the history of how humans achieved increasing levels of precision from the first steam engine to gravitational-wave observatories; I’m looking forward to discussing with Jason a framework for understanding all the above in the context of human progress.

I’m also looking forward to a book on the history of industrial civilization that Jason is writing—you can get updates here.

The most popular post this week was a cassette loader (more about how it works here). Magnetic tape remains one of the most reliable ways to store data: it requires no power to store (in contrast, power cycling hard drives reduces their reliability), it can be spliced together when damaged, it lasts a long time (~30 years versus ~5 years for hard drives) and it’s really, really cheap. Tape technology is still being developed, and it’s the backbone of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive Storage. AWS even has an arcane product called Tape Gateway which virtualizes magnetic tape in the cloud by providing tape-level reliability guarantees through clever abstraction of various S3 products.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

This machine is advertised as suitable for cycling, wheelchair, roller ski, and skating.

I couldn’t identify this metal: guesses include zinc, lead, gallium, or one of their alloys like ZAMAK. Anyone know? Previous posts have featured machines for forming much harder metals.

Postscript

I had a chance to use analog night vision in the desert, and it was a very intense experience. It qualitatively more than doubled the number of stars in the night sky, a jump in visible stars comparable to moving from a city to the desert in the first place.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

While the implant in question was titanium, there is no strictly dominant material for orthopedic implants, and a lot of tradeoffs between material properties, biocompatibility, and cost—this makes sense when you think about it, because the inside of a body is a pretty hostile environment: it’s damp and filled with corrosive organic compounds.

The most surprising implant material to me was Vitamin E Infused Polyethylene. The vitamin E acts as an antioxidant to absorb free radicals released during the cross-linking of the polyethylene to improve survivability in the body—which makes me wonder about the unpleasant trial-and-error results that must have led to the vitamin E infusion.

Beyond material science, the fields of architected materials (materials whose properties are defined by both geometry and material) and metamaterials (engineered materials with properties that do not naturally occur) both feel like they hold a lot of potential for pushing orthopedic implants beyond “fix” applications into superhuman territories. Anyone want to bet on when the first mass-produced elective orthopedic implant will become available?

The most popular post this week was a truck tipper, which reminded me of the various rail dumpers that have made previous appearances.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you could run an entire account like @machinepix on only rail machines.

Modern phones with LIDAR and optical 3D sensors are a huge boon for scientists. Check out the LeafByte app for measuring leaf area, and the PlantNet app for identifying plants in the wild.

Different solar panel cleaners have been posted before. I wonder if we’ll ever achieve a materials breakthrough that makes dust less likely to adhere?

Postscript

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

This did give me an excuse to explore the history of automotive safety glass. Two facts that surprised me: laminated glass was used as early as 1919 (I always assumed lamination happened post-plastic era, but early safety glass was laminated with gelatin); and the modern polyvinyl butyral (PVB) lamination layer is actually between two glass layers, rather than outside the glass.

All that said, thank god for Backblaze—not a paid placement, it’s literally the best remote backup service I’ve used and it’s saving a lot of marginal headache for me right now.

The most popular post this week was a flying boat. Flying boats are not the same as floatplanes (although both are seaplanes): flying boats have a fuselage that also functions as a positively buoyant hull, allowing them to be much larger than float planes and much more useful as firefighting aircraft.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

Culver Props’ Instagram page has a lot of great videos on propeller fabrication. What’s amazing to me here is that wood remains one of the best materials to make these high speed structures with (Brian Potter talks about the advantages of mass timber for construction in Machinepix Weekly #55).

More companies should produce behind-the-scenes videos.

OVO Tech seems to be in competition with SANOVO for industrial egg dominance, but OVO Tech has a much better URL (egg-breakers.com). That said, I personally think SANOVO makes the most fascinating machine: the LONG EGG 6-32.

Postscript

Shang Chi was an amazing movie and you should go watch it—but I was disappointed by how the localization dumbed down some otherwise great Chinese metaphors. I’m sure the job of effectively localizing for your audience is non-trivial and there was an intentional decision here, but I’m definitely going to write some fan subs once the movie is available on streaming. Recently, Netflix’s Evangelion was accused of straightwashing its translation, but the “correct” translation is hotly debated based on nuances of grammar and culture.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a decadent bathtub. If you find yourself in Granges-Paccot, Switzerland, you can stop by the Auberge aux 4 Vents (“Four Winds Inn”) and ask for the Cupidon suite.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

This micromanipulator is fully mechanical. If you go down the rabbit hole of digitally-controlled micromanipulators, you can get down to 100nm movement resolution—or roughly 0.1% the width of a human hair.

Better views of the underground bin system here (with a different truck). There’s no garbage day in Amsterdam, you just take out some trash with you every time you step out.

It seems like the right flap makes an extraneous movement at the end; I wonder if it’s an accident or if it’s a “check” motion to ensure the folded t-shirt is within the dimensions of the bag.

Postscript

I can’t believe it took me this long to try this Taiwanese x New York cuisine. Given to me during a visit to the offices of The Prepared.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a butt-clenching aircraft situation. Many followers pointed out that 1) this was almost certainly an intentional stunt and 2) the rope around the pilot’s waist is probably worse than useless for safety. As a result I feel compelled to provide actual protocol for a power off stall recovery, complete with 90s educational video narrator voice.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

This was designed in partnership with Disney Imagineering to replace actual animals in theme parks. An admirable goal, but I can’t help draw the comparison to PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where real animals become luxury status symbols. Related, Disney Research publishes incredible work that has been featured on @machinepix multiple times.

This week has an unintentional nautical theme. Assuming median weight and length for a great white shark, and assuming its center of mass is in the middle of its length, this shark needs to breach with ~49 kilojoules of kinetic energy to make this jump—all generated from muscle.

The whole sequence is nuts. The trials also triggered a 3.9 magnitude earthquake.

Nothing quite as soothing as a CNC bender. Even more soothing: CNC footage set to trance music.

Postscript

Humans developed composites 1,600 years before steel (which first appeared in 1,800 BC).

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

Brian’s newsletter was particularly timely during lockdown with posts like “Lumber FAQ: Why wood has gotten so dang expensive”, but it as the progress studies pieces like “Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?” that got me hooked.

Anyways, Brian was kind enough to help me demystify some questions I’ve always had about construction—and as part of this construction-themed week, he’s stepped in as a guest-editor on the Week in Review of @machinepix posts below.

The most popular post this week was a unique floodgate:

“Flood control technology always makes me think of Holland, where they've spent hundreds of years figuring out how to prevent their country from flooding, and have become experts at it. This floodgate is apparently based on the the Hagestein weir and lock complex, which is also a visor-type floodgate.”

—BP

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

Interview with Brian Potter

I originally found your newsletter because it was featured in Substack’s What to Read—what made you decide to start writing about your experiences in construction?

So I used to work at a company called Katerra, which is mostly known now because of its massive bankruptcy [laughs]. But they were a construction startup with a really massive amount of funding from SoftBank, and they were coming in and saying “we're going to change the whole construction industry. It's incredibly inefficient, blah, blah, blah. But we're going to make buildings in factories the way we make everything else and not do them one at a time manually, which is a crazy 200 year old process.” And when I joined, I was thinking these guys have the proper theory of how to change the industry, and they have the money to do it.

But obviously it didn't work out. So I was like, okay, but why didn't it work out? And then as I started research, it's like, oh, there's been a lot of other efforts for a very similar idea: you know, really large industrialized buildings in factories, and none of those worked out either. What is it about this industry that is so resistant to these attempts to do things in a more mass produced, more efficient way. So I just started writing about trying to understand the industry kind of one little bit at a time and understand kind of how the parts fit together and how all the mechanisms and incentives work—and that became Construction Physics.

Construction, especially large commercial construction, sometimes feels like a blackbox with dozens of different parties. All these players—construction companies, contractors, subcontractors, engineers, etc—get thrown around. Can you help us understand the main players, and what your role was as a structural engineer?

How a building comes together is basically this: a real estate developer has an idea for a building, based on some belief in the market—home ownership is doing this, offices are doing this, demographics are doing this—and bet if they put a building here, it will sell. They get financing for it and then put a team together to build it.

There are two main players and a lot of sub players. One of the main players is the design team, which is led by the architect. The other is the construction team, which is led by the general contractor. The architect typically hires out the various specific designer roles, which are a bunch of different engineering disciplines: the structural engineer who designs the load bearing portion of the building, the mechanical engineer who designs the HVAC systems. There's a plumbing engineer, there's the electrical engineer, all that stuff—under the design team led by the architect. They put together the design documents for the building which are basically a list of what the building needs to be and instructions on how it goes together.

All those design documents are then given to the general contractor, who then goes and also hires their own little team of subs that are each going to do a specific task. So they'll hire somebody to just do the concrete or just run the wiring and kind of all that stuff. Sometimes there's some back and forth between the two teams. Sometimes it’s “you didn't show this” or “we’ve encountered these environmental conditions and thus we need to change this”. That's kind of how it roughly goes together.

Got it. When someone says construction company, I should think “general contractor”.

“Construction company” is almost always going to be somebody in the general contracting role, the leader of the team that does the building.

Architects almost always say that they're architects and engineers almost always say that they're engineers. Sometimes it gets a little mixed up because design-build companies that do both. And then sometimes developers are part of that and sometimes there's not. So there’s always a few exceptions and gray areas depending on the specific players.

I read a great piece in the New Yorker about Arup’s exceptional structural work. Which engineering or architectural firms are doing really exciting new work these days?

Arup’s great, but to be honest I don't follow the really high-end engineers and architects super closely. What I'm really most interested in is firms working on making the whole process more efficient.

The guys at the really, really high end are kind of the opposite of that, basically really pushing the envelope of stuff, which is in some ways orthogonal. Like Ferrari and Toyota, right? They're both car companies, the teams at Ferrari are really pushing certain envelopes in some ways, but not in the same ways that Toyota is with mass production. 

Are there any companies you can think of pushing the envelope on processes and efficiency?

Yea—This company called Equilibrium that is focused on mass timber. Mass timber hasn't been used to its full potential with modern construction, and it’s really interesting to see the work they’re doing with it.

For the audience, which is generally technical, but not necessarily in construction: what is mass timber?

Sure. So mass timber is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's timber elements that are very large. In the US we do a lot of wood construction, but a lot of it is what's known as light framed timber, which is just like two by fours, two by sixes combined in various ways.

Mass timber has different properties. The biggest difference from a code perspective is that mass timber has very different combustion properties. Basically in a fire it'll form a char layer on the outside, and that will protect the inside of the wood from being burned. And so it can actually last a lot longer in a fire. Light frame timber is just too small, you really can't really rely on its fire resistance too much. And because of that, you can build higher with mass timber—much bigger, more densely occupied structures than you can with light framed wood. You can build a skyscraper with mass timber in a way that the code would not allow you to, and you would not want to anyway, with light frame wood just based on the fire risk.

Possibly naive question, but you said skyscraper. “Skyscraper” makes me think of steel; what is the calculus between choosing mass timber and steel?

Mass timber has environmental properties that are really nice: it’s a carbon sink. The relative energy it takes to produce steel versus how much went into growing the wood is also very favorable towards mass timber.

Also, people really like being surrounded by wood. There’s a reason furniture in your house is mostly wood. Even cheap stuff, perhaps particle board or actual cardboard, has a wood veneer, right? Not a fake metal finish. People just really liked the look of it and then the feel of it. Architects are really enthusiastic about mass timber for that reason.

There are trade-offs to consider in engineering with wood versus steel, but it’s not obvious that steel is strictly better even for large structures, and we’re just starting to explore mass timber.

Are there canonical mass timber buildings that we can look at and appreciate?

There's not like a ton in the US, it's a little bit more popular in Europe. It's actually interesting because if you go to like an old building, 1920s, 1930s, a lot of times you can find these like really big, beautiful timber members. It got superseded by cheaper materials and ways of building. As for new ones, there’s the Catalyst Building, a mass timber university building in Spokane, and it's really neat.

There's this one called T3, in Minneapolis and then I think they built one in Atlanta as well. A lot of tech companies are building mass timber offices as well. It’s starting to become much more popular.

How about a personal favorite building or structure?

This is one I've mentioned before, and I've actually written a whole essay about it. There's this temple complex in Japan called Ise Jingu, and it qualifies as a mass timber building because it's made from these really big, enormous logs.

But what's really interesting is this tradition where every 20 years they tear down and build an exact copy of the buildings. And they've been doing it for like over a thousand years. So you have these buildings that look very  new, a brand new version of a 1,300 year old building that has existed continuously since the end of the Roman Empire, which is very neat to think about.

What are some common misconceptions about construction you often run into?

Technical people, but not necessarily in the construction world, often oversimplify the diagnosis of the problems in the construction industry—often I hear that we need to do this one thing, and that would solve the problem; but there’s this complex web of institutions and risk profiles and like logistics and even the physical size of things that all sort of interact in a way that makes it very difficult to improve on a process.

That's another thing: people think people are not actively trying to improve the way things are done; that construction is an industry that is content to just do things how they’ve always done it. But it's such a competitive industry that if you can come up with a reliable way of doing something more efficiently or in a way that saves money, people will be very very interested in that. It just turns out that it's very hard to do and the way to do it is not necessarily obvious. 

What’s the craziest story you’re allowed to share from your time in industry?

This one is from the first job I had, where they were building a parking garage for a hospital and they had started construction. But then it came to light that the surveyor had sited the building wrong and it literally didn't fit. We had frantically redesign the rest of the building around this part that had been put up because it had been surveyed wrong.

There was this one project where I was working for a company that made these concrete slabs. As part of the way that they work, they were slightly cambered up when they had been set. That's just kind of part of the way that this product worked. It’s explained in our drawings and everybody who specifies things knows that this happens. But this architect didn't know that this happened and the developer was very upset. They insisted that we try to remove this upward bow in these slabs.

What we ended up having to do was drop these 10,000 pounds weights of grout on top of the slabs to try to get them to come down a little bit. These slabs had more steel reinforcement in them than strictly necessary for production efficiency reasons. What we had to do was, while this was weighted down, we had to go under the slabs and cut the reinforcing steel. And so we had guys going under the slab, they were cutting it, and the whole slab would kind of thump down. I had to tell them in the field exactly what reinforcements that they could cut and where they had to cut it. Like the bomb defusal scene in a movie.

But it worked. It brought the upward bow down a little bit. I think the client ended up still not super thrilled, but it wasn't because of anything that we had done, we did our best. 

You mention a lot of fine details like camber in concrete slabs. Do you have fun tips for newbies on looking at buildings with a professional, critical eye? What do professionals look for that we may miss?

I like to see how much I can tell about the history of the building just based on what you can see from the outside. Structural systems or building systems kind of go in and out of style.A lot of times you can kind of get an idea of when it was built, just based on what they used to build it.

A good example is concrete. Now the things they use for parking garages are called double tees, which is a concrete slab and then two vertical webs. And that makes the floor of the parking garage. For a ten to fifteen year window in the sixties, it was very popular for everything. And so a lot of times you can see those things being used for things like factory walls. If you see a manufacturing building or something like that with concrete walls, but they have these weird little wings on the outside, it's because it was built with this precast system and you can basically pinpoint the date as to when it was built just on that.

There's a bunch of things like that. Nowadays brick veneer, especially for a single family home, is pretty much in a few spare spots because the labor to do it is so expensive. You typically see it on the front and not really on the sides, but as you go back, you can see how expensive labor was by how much brick is in a building and how ornate it is. The farther back you go, the more brick it is. Really old stuff from the twenties and thirties can have like this really beautiful, ornate masonry work that you never see today just because it's so expensive to kind of get that stuff.

I see a ton of startups trying to tackle construction now; are there any particular opportunities that you’re personally excited about?

Construction is really, really constrained by how far you can ship something efficiently in a single day. A lot of times you're limited to basically like a 300 to 500 mile radius and that has a lot of downstream effects. If you can only ship 500 miles away, the size of the market you can serve is limited, which limits how big your factory can be, which limits how efficient it can produce things. 

This isn’t necessarily directly related to construction, I'm really curious to see if breakthroughs in logistics, things like self-driving cars or like electric cars, can change the economics of logistics and expand the shipping radius. If that limit gets stretched out, I suspect that we'll have some downstream effects on the construction industry.

What was your favorite piece to write for Construction Physics?

The one that I wrote about Katerra was nice because there really just wasn't that much information available about what happened outside of the company. I wrote my perspective from having worked there. I ended up getting just like a ton of messages and feedback from people who had also worked there that basically said, “I'm so glad that somebody wrote down what it was like there, because so much of the reporting that you heard about it from outside just didn't reflect what it was like there at all.”

And now that it’s not a growing concern, it’s all ephemeral. All the information could have disappeared outside of people’s memories of it. So I'm glad there's something that describes what it was like there and what we were trying to do.

Any side projects you’re working on right now?

The Construction Physics newsletter takes most of my hobby time!

Any favorite books or books you’re reading now?

I read a lot of books just for the newsletter. So I recently read this interesting book, Neighborhood Defenders, which is basically the people that go to these zoning board meetings to protest against any sort of new housing or any sort of construction development. And it's a relatively small, specific group of people, but they have an outsized effect on what gets built in the country because these zoning boards, if you go and make a complaint to them, they're going to consider what you say even if it’s not sensical.

Just by going to these things and showing up and saying, “I’m worried about parking, I’m worried about the environment it's going to affect my views of the lake” or whatever, they really can end up shaping a lot of what gets built and really make it a lot harder to build like say a multi-family apartment development, which, ironically, is often much more environmentally efficient. The book is an interesting study of how this all works and who are the ones that show up to these meetings and what do we know? 

What’s your favorite simple (or not so simple) tool or hack that you think is under-appreciated?

I have a lot of issues with my joints. I've found that if you need a brace for a finger or thumb, by far the best thing to use is a roll of blue painter's tape. Just wrap it around your finger because it's the exact right thickness to brace it in a way that will allow you certain freedom of movement that works by far better than anything else.

The Week in Review

“I didn't know about this bridge, but it'll be the longest suspension bridge in the world when it's complete. Its main span is 2,400 feet longer than the Golden Gate Bridge's.”

—BP

“Most pools are made out of concrete. Myrtha's are interesting in that they make all theirs (even the permanent ones) out of stainless steel. I wonder how often these portable competition ones get re-used.”

—BP

“Bricklaying robots are super interesting! Bricklaying is maybe the simplest task that has resisted being mechanized (almost all brick and masonry is still set by hand). I wrote a whole article trying to work out why.”

—BP

Postscript

I learned that airline pilots are very opinionated about different commercial aircraft:

I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a very suggestive lamp by British artist Monsby. Believe it or not, it’s more subtle than it could have been: working names included phallamp and lampenis.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

A nifty design decision here: rather than engineering the speed and/or precision required to sort every sausage on the line as it passes ($$$$), the line continuously loops unsorted sausages for the delta robots.

Very cool use of cheap parts for the public good. The Litterbuggie website and Instagram have contact info if you’d like to get involved.

I’m not a hat guy, but in general I really like seeing people take crafts and disciplines to extremes. Lock & Co. Hatters hits that dopamine button for me. Some others off the top of my head are kanna woodworking and the CNC sculptures of Chris Bathgate.

Postscript

There’s a genre of zoology reporting I really enjoy which is roughly “this behavior we observed and developed a sophisticated hypothesis for is actually much dumber.”

This week, I got a laugh out of Goose flying upside down is simply showing off, say experts (also known as whiffling, for you bird enthusiasts)—which reminded me of Bats Crash Into Each Other All the Time, High-Speed Cameras Reveal. Growing up I remember learning that bats had advanced sonar-based sense-and-avoid capabilities for flying in the dark; it turns out they don’t, and it’s easier to evolve impact-resistance than sense-and-avoid capabilities 🤷🏻‍♂️

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was actually a comment on a shit-post in which an anonymous gentleman uses a grinder from Milwaukee’s flagship M18 FUEL line to clean up a burnt pizza:

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

Other balancing systems previously posted include a cable-driven robot, a crab-like robot, a high-tech cube, and a pendulum.

Other cool examples of huge displays include the floating head at the SLS Las Vegas and the waves at SMTown Coex in Seoul.

Gotta love a high-speed, high-precision, specialized line like this. I had always assumed these were produced as rounds and cut into slices, but this makes more sense.

This is fun and handy, but I’m still looking for the machine that extracts the root balls of giant trees (or are they uprooted using an entirely different process? Send me a note if you know).

Postscript

Somehow, I had never come across a Harbor Freight brick and mortar store until this week. I had always assumed they were a distributor and online-only brand. This one unfortunately did not have a gold-plated ratchet in stock.

Yes, I know there are better tools—but Harbor Freight has saved many a project for me in the past and will always have a place in my heart.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

• Twitter - 159.3K followers

• Instagram - 36.4K followers

• Linkedin - 4.4K followers

• TikTok - 3.0K followers

• Substack - 1.6K followers (thank you dear reader!)

• Facebook - 1.0K followers

• OnlyFans - 1 follower

Clearly I have a long way to go in some channels, but I’m optimistic. What have I learned this past year? Creating content regularly is hard. Every week, I’ve thought “I should schedule ahead more interviews”, and every week I procrastinate and desperately reach out to friends and colleagues to put together interviews last minute—and for that I am eternally grateful.

Another learning, and this is more intuitive than empirical: a post’s popularity is completely uncorrelated to how complex or impressive the machine is. People are more engaged with machines that make or interact with things they recognize, which is why I think egg machines consistently generate reliable engagement. Woe is me if I post anything related to the chicken though—people are a lot less excited whenever animal processing machines are posted 😅

In lieu of a weekly review, this special issue has the top ten most popular interviews below the fold, as reported by Substack’s analytics. If you have suggestions or ideas, don’t be shy—replies go straight to my inbox.

The most popular post this week was an extremely powerful cleaning laser. Laser cleaning videos go viral every once in a while, and Laserax has one of the best explainers on how it works.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Year in Review: Most Popular Interviews

Take these rankings with a grain of salt: subscriber count grew steadily over the past year, and these rankings aren’t normalized for how many subscribers I had at the time these were published. I’ve excerpted some of my favorite anecdotes.

10: Alfred Jones, Senior Director of mechanical engineering, Peloton

Alfred had a formal-looking Peloton-themed Zoom background when we started, but I convinced him to show me his office and his awesome collection of toys and kicks. He spoke eloquently about the unappreciated challenges of mechanical engineering at scale:

All of that is taken for granted, because users, the first and the millionth, kind of just expect it to work. I used to laugh that blood, sweat, and tears, and years of our lives, went into these projects, and people would just throw them to children and expect them to work. If you mess up, there’s a flood of bad Amazon reviews. It’s brutal.

9: Seamus Blackley, "Father of the Xbox"

Seamus wasted no time in spilling the tea on the chaos that was the first Xbox team. I’m honestly surprised it got made at all, given a series of comedic stumbles like, well:

The size of the Duke [first controller], and it’s, well, bulk, was so unmarketable in Japan that many people we spoke to thought it was a prank. They thought it was a sick joke insult, like an American, Texas, look-how-big-everything-is joke… I got stuff literally thrown at me at conferences.

8: Jeff Linnell, founder of Bot & Dolly

Has your tech demo ever accidentally discovered a building’s resonant frequency and almost caused a collapse? Jeff’s stories about pioneering robotics for creative industry work was filled with whimsical, inspiring, and “oh shit” moments:

We thought the challenge would be in creating this giant fiberglass sphere, what we found out a day before we were supposed to bolt this thing in, when you moved this thing around, the entire building would resonate in this really scary way. You have this two ton robot with a giant sphere on it vibrating the entire building. Taking down the Moscone Center would not be good.

7: David Möllerstedt, co-founder of Teenage Engineering

Look, I’ll square with you: I did the interview because I wanted to finagle early access to Playdate, the Panic x Teenage Engineering collab. Well, that didn’t work—but I did learn a lot about one of the coolest consumer electronic cos and funny stumbles along the way:

The prototype, when we stuck it on the wall [at Apple HQ], it fell apart. In the process of falling apart, it kept sending volume up commands to the OD-11. So the controller was in pieces, the speaker volume was at max, we were trapped in this small room. Someone had to dive for the power cable. At least we got to test it at full volume.

6: Carl Bass, former CEO of Autodesk

Carl is a canoe builder that found himself the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, having to occasionally call out Steve Jobs’s BS:

I remember when [Steve Jobs] was at Pixar, he preemptively called me to yell at me about something. At some point he said “Carl, listen to me, I’m your best customer”. I stopped him—I said “hold on, in what world are you my best customer? You’re cheap as hell, and you’re incredibly technically demanding. And you never give us public credit for anything!” As those who knew Steve well, it didn’t change his opinion at all. In his mind he continued to be our best customer. That said, in some ways he was great. He really pushed our software’s capabilities.

5: Frank Ippolito, founder of Thingergy, Inc.

Frank makes costumes for Star Wars (among others), which honestly sounds like a dream job… until you realize fans know canon better than you do, and are always keeping you on your toes:

I wouldn’t put this in a major fuckup category, but in the first season of The Mandalorian, the biker scouts, and they have Baby Yoda in the back, all the fans exploded because they had their knee pads upside down. We built the costumes, but we didn’t dress the scout troopers. It could have been an oversight, it could have been the design saying “hey it’s more comfortable this other way,” and honestly it kind of is. But everyone noticed.

4: Laura Kampf, Maker Extraordinaire

Speaking with Laura was really cool because her answer to “what do you work on” was “whatever I want”, and she’s inspired millions of people to get their hands dirty:

Being ok with being weird, different, really helped me find the right community and focus on the things that make me happy. I could have just copied the most popular designs or styles. Embracing the things about you, won’t necessarily bring you the biggest audience, but they will be the truest, the most meaningful.

3: Brian Ignaut, lead solar array designer at SpaceX

Brian is, without hyperbole, a Renaissance man. I tried my best to keep up as he explained how studying bugs and publishing math papers on Origami inspired him to design the most performant spacecraft solar panels in the world for SpaceX:

Imagine peanut brittle the thickness of paper in a paint can on a paint shaker. That’s launching space solar arrays: the array team makes the peanut brittle, the vehicle team makes the paint can, the rocket team makes the paint shaker.

2: Milo Werner, former Head of New Product Introduction, Tesla

Milo gave us a peek behind the curtains of the most popular EV company in the world, from crazy prototypes to chartered jumbo jets. Her favorite car? Her personal Ship-of-Theseus’d Model S:

At home I have a Model S with many, many miles and an uncountable number of prototype parts. That’s my favorite. My car along with many other employee cars were used to validate pre-production assemblies.

1: Dr. Steve Gass, inventor of SawStop

Finally, the most popular interview this past year was with the inventor of SawStop. Sorry, Tesla: I suppose electric supercars will never be as entertaining as putting a hot dog through a table saw 🤷🏻‍♂️🌭⚙️

The audience didn’t speak much English and I didn't speak any German, so we were trying to get these German woodworkers to come see the demo. The one guy we dragged over, he didn’t speak English so he didn’t have any idea what we were trying to show him. So we get the hot dog out, and he gets a confused look. We try to mime at him to watch carefully. My partner David pushes the hot dog through the saw and it cuts right through. The woodworker looked at us like we were insane and we couldn't explain, so we just smiled. Oh man the look he gave us.

Postscript

Converting a Shelby Cobra to an EV at Carl Bass’s shop:

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

What I thought would be just a conversation about product design turned into a long discussion of perfecting self and company. I won’t spoil the specifics, but Will is a very intense and thoughtful leader.

The most popular post this week was a fractal vise. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I thought it was modern design—but it turns out it’s almost a century old. Does anyone know why these designs fell out of favor? There’s a full restoration video by the excellent channel Hand Tool Rescue.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

Interview with Will Ahmed

This interview is actually part of a fun triptych, because I previously spoke to Chrissy about building the Apple Watch and Eric about building the Pebble.

What was the most interesting thing you learned from the Apple Watch conversation?

I'm put on the spot now. Apple has a reputation for amazing industrial design, very product driven teams—which is true—but the untold story is the armies of people whose jobs are just the details of operations and manufacturing. Which segues into my first question: when you launched WHOOP, Fitbit and Jawbone were in market; what was the driving differentiator for WHOOP that compelled you to start against these odds?

I was always interested in sports and exercise and measuring the human body. I was a college athlete who would overtrain, so I just got interested in this space through my own personal experience: I really wanted to measure and understand my own body as a college athlete. There wasn't anything on the market that made me feel like I could do that. Now, admittedly I started doing research in 2010 or so, so this was a little bit before the Nike FuelBand. The Fitbit would have been an early stage startup.

I actually met James Park, the CEO of Fitbit, at a recruiting fair my senior year of college. It was a big auditorium and he was doing the pitch for why we should join Fitbit. I didn't want to join Fitbit, but I was really interested in the company. It was me, and only three other people showed up. And so three people wanted a job and I wanted to start a company. I got to ask James a bunch of interesting questions, and I knew Fitbit was going to go on from there to be a big business, but it was a very different type of company than the one I was interested in starting. 

But back to your question: The key for WHOOP, early on—and it's probably still the key for WHOOP today—is that we wanted to be able to accurately measure the human body in the sense of deep physiological information. And we wanted to be able to tell you what to do with that information and give you prescriptive coaching. So that was really the framework for WHOOP, and I think it represents a lot of our differentiation today.

While other fitness bands have waned, WHOOP has managed to thrive—how do you stay ahead of the pack?

Well, we have stayed very focused. initially the technology was intended for the best athletes in the world, and then it was for serious fitness enthusiasts and then for recreational enthusiasts. And now it's starting to feel like it's for everyone. And because we were very focused, we made very specific decisions about the hardware, what it should do, and what it shouldn't do.WHOOP is amazing for all the things that it does as well as for all the things that it doesn't do. We don't have a screen, we don't have a microphone, we don’t have speakers. You can't call an Uber with your WHOOP strap.

But in terms of health monitoring, I think we’re really the best game in town. And we’re very focused on continuous health monitoring. So that gives us an advantage again, because we were so focused on what this thing needed to do. It became less important to have all these me-too features. I felt like so many wearables: Jawbone, Fitbit, Fuel Band, and in some ways, even the Apple Watch, were kind of building on each other and taking a lot of what the prior had done and continuing to do it. For WHOOP, we built our own path.

So it sounds like the WHOOP philosophy has stayed pretty consistent. Were there any times where it felt existentially challenging to stay dedicated to the philosophy?

Certainly in the years of 2012 to 2016, I think there were a lot of dissenting points of view with our vision. A lot of people were encouraging us to add step counting, to add a screen, to go into the mass market quickly, to pay athletes to wear our product. We were very stubborn about a lot of things and we kept coming back to our true purpose, which was “what do we need to measure? How do we make it really accurate? How do we tell you what to do?” That was our focus. And it was a really narrow but important guiding lens. I also believed that we needed to build the best product in the market.

You look at other companies that have come and unfortunately gone in the space, all of them at one point or another won distribution. Fitbit is one of the best distribution stories of the last 20 years. I mean, every year they were five-x-ing their unit volumes. That's very hard to do. Jawbone sold millions of units. The FuelBand sold millions of units. So at one point these were commercial successes from a distribution standpoint and even a sales standpoint, but they were product failures.

For the most part, a high percentage of people would wear the products and take them off. And a lot of our lens for building WHOOP was how to create technology that someone never took off for the rest of their life. And it was more important to us to get a smaller number of people to do that than it was to get a lot of people to buy our product. Again, being really focused on that helped us get to at least the stage where we're at today.

What’s your craziest experience from building WHOOP?

WHOOP as a business went through very hard times. It took us a long time to build the technology to be accurate. It took us a long time to get to market and really build a business model at various points. There were challenges raising capital because hardware is hard and there were a lot of wearables in the market at various points in time.

I mean the company probably had ten near-death experiences. There were a lot of times when the company persevered, because we had to or we would die. And I think that the great thing about having been through that and coming out the other side is it puts in perspective for you the spectrum of problems that you can have.

I think one key to managing a business or leading a company is to have a fairly steady hand. And if you've been through a lot of challenging stuff and come out the other side, it in turn helps you become a leader.

It’s exceptional to see the founder of a company right out of college as the CEO a decade later. What were some of the toughest unforced errors that you made building WHOOP you would warn your past self about? What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?

Such a great question. I think the first thing for any entrepreneur, especially a young, first-time founder is to separate the performance of the business from your own performance. Those are two independent things. The nature of building a company from scratch or doing things never done before is that there are going to be real issues and challenges that come up. You don't want to feel like if the business has a bad day, you're failing, and if the business had a good day, you're winning—otherwise you're living on a roller coaster. That's totally unproductive. Plus you don't want your self-identity to be completely tied to this business because that's not particularly helpful either.

So one major step for me was learning to separate those two things and realizing that WHOOP could have a good day or a bad day independent of my own performance. In fact, I could just focus on getting a little bit better every single day as a leader or a manager or an entrepreneur. That in turn was gonna help me grow into being the CEO of what is now a 500-person organization.I would say that's one very big thing. 

Another key theme is learning at various stages of a company’s development the degree to which you're an individual contributor versus a manager. Somewhere around 25 to 50 people as an organization, it really starts to tilt towards being more of a manager. When you're in the earliest stages, you can stay up all night coding. You can fly around the world, meeting with people and raising capital or recruiting people or whatever. You can live a somewhat crazier lifestyle of being an entrepreneur. And you can also think about the business’ output being somewhat similar to your individual output.

But when you then start employing a large number of people on the team, like 25 to 50, the CEO job starts tilting towards being a manager. One hundred and up, to me, it's where most of your outputs should be as a manager. Most of the company's output is going to come from the entire team and you need to recognize the role that you're playing as a manager. And you need to make sure you’re thinking about your role appropriately on that continuum of individual contributor versus manager.

Another interesting thing that I think happens for founders is they have to decide what kind of culture they're trying to create. Do you want to be a company that moves really fast even if it means the company is at risk of creating bugs and mistakes? Do you want to be a company that has an extremely high level of control in which case you've got a slower decision making process, but you're able to make a lot of those decisions? How many checks and balances do you need in your business? What types of people are you looking to recruit? Are they more creative or are they more technical? All the above?

You have to start actually thinking very intentionally about these things because the culture is how people make decisions when you're not around. Culture is what scales, and you really don't scale as an individual. So the culture you create defines your organization. And it's why you see a lot of companies at some point have these cracks related to culture. Less so their business model or their brand, but really just the core culture of the organization. So that's just another area that as a founder, you have to pay a lot of attention to. 

Speaking of culture, you’ve clearly thought a lot about the impression you make as a CEO. What are some of the key pieces on the wall behind you?

There's a sketch of one of the first WHOOP straps ever, which was a bit of a leap for us because we thought the industrial design of the hardware was going to be pretty critical. And still today it has a very unique industrial design. It's mostly material. It doesn't have a watch base or a screen. It also has a modular charger, so you can charge WHOOP without ever taking it off your body. All of those things we designed in 2013 or 2014. And they were really first of their kind in the wearable space. And the fact that today, seven or eight years later, we have a very similar design—albeit smaller and more effective—speaks to the genius of that original design.

Another thing I've got behind me is a paddle that was gifted to me by the Navy SEALs. We do a lot of work with the SEALs—we’ve partnered with the SEAL Future Foundation. They were gracious and sent me the paddle that you get when you become a Navy SEAL. The paddle is an inexpensive object that I think speaks to the resourcefulness and grittiness that goes along with that culture.

What’s another product you really admire, or can’t live without? Other than work-related things.

Well absent this call, I was going to say AirPods because it was a very unique take on the headphone market. And I think it's one of the best products Apple's developed in the last 10 years. So I'll compliment the AirPods for half a second.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about brands and gravitating to brands. You know, I think good products are already pretty romanticized in the tech world. I think good branding isn't. It used to be sort of an afterthought in the venture capital world and in the technology world. And there's some reason for that—building a brand is more expensive and it takes time.

And pretty much everything in technology, especially in venture capital is about doing things fast and as efficiently as possible. So in many ways, brand building is sort of the antithesis of going fast and and being efficient.

To clarify, by “brand” you mean the culture right? Not just a design language or brand identity?

All of it. What does it mean when you see a Nike swoosh or Supreme backpack? You take a t-shirt and you put Supreme on it—and all of a sudden the t-shirt is worth $150. That's a pretty fascinating phenomenon. So branding to me is one of the most underrated things in technology. I think a lot of technology businesses have identities but don't necessarily have brands. Or their brands you could argue are a weak spot for them as an organization. You know, imagine Facebook came out with a refrigerator—what would you expect that refrigerator could do just based on the brand that you associate with Facebook? You'd kind of think it's tracking everything about what you eat and selling your information. hat's a fairly negative connotation that you would have with a big technology company coming into a new market.

It's just an interesting consideration in many ways. At WHOOP, we've thought about this since the early days of the company and we've tried to grow WHOOP to be a brand and to make health monitoring aspirational. If you wear something on your body 24/7, I think that says a lot about who you are and your identity. We want that to come across as being a very positive connotation. So for us working in high performance sports, working with elite athletes, working with researchers and doctors and Fortune 500 CEOs, they’re all contributing to making WHOOP a brand that is tied to performance.

So what are the brands you really admire?

There are brands that I feel do a really good job of being a brand. Nike is one of the best examples where all they have to do is put a swoosh on something and all of a sudden it has an identity and that's pretty amazing. Or look at a company like Red Bull and what they've been able to do. Outside of being an energy drink, they're pushing the envelope with action sports and performance and research.

I look at what fashion brands like the LVMHs of the world have done, and it's really hard. It's really impressive that they can create this whole identity with what they produce. I find it all fascinating and I think it's probably not that well understood in technology.

Have you heard of B Magazine?

No, what is that?

I’ll send it to to you—every issue they deep dive into a brand’s history and design and culture.

That's very cool. The last thing I'll add is that it's very popular in technology to talk about moats and defensibility, and that's important. Why I think it's silly that brand is so ignored is because brand is a clear, clear moat. If you can actually develop a brand around a specific market, it becomes a huge part of defensibility.

In some of your other interviews, you talk about reading 500 medical papers in college to understand how to be a better athlete—what opportunities are you excited about for personal health, given how technology has progressed?

Well, the potential of health monitoring is to dramatically increase human life span and meaningfully reduce healthcare costs. I’ll speak for WHOOP: WHOOP is able to tell you the 2, 3, 4 things that you need to change about your lifestyle or your behavior to be healthier and to improve. And so if you can have people making these meaningful lifestyle shifts and doing that at the age of 30 or 40 or 50, It can actually help them live years longer.

There is a lot of research showing that if you can keep your heart rate variability increasing or steady over time, you're going to increase your lifespan. One of the core things that we measure is heart rate variability. And one of the core things that we've been proving for people who've been on WHOOP for a year is heart rate variability. If you've been on WHOOP for twelve months, you have higher heart rate variability. You have a lower resting heart rate, you're getting more sleep and it's higher quality sleep. So these are the types of things that contribute to human lifespan.

We also want to dramatically change healthcare. The healthcare system is screwed up because it's very much centered on curative costs. Curative costs are expensive. Preventative costs are far less expensive. The promise of wearable technology is that it can tell you you're at risk for cardiovascular disease before you get cardiovascular disease. Or you're going to have a heart attack in a year, or you're about to have a heart attack, and you should go see a doctor. It can be a predictive tool. Most people are dramatically underestimating the potential of wearable technology and health monitors, because V1 of wearables was kind of underwhelming. And I don't think people realize how dramatically it's going to change the whole healthcare system. 

Any side projects you’re working on right now?

I definitely have some things I tinker with. I still play a number of sports. I've gotten into playing competitive speed chess online. In my free time I'll be playing three minute blitz chess, which is highly entertaining and pretty stimulating. I think it's probably my body craving the attention or decision-making rush if you will.

I am generally fascinated by design and of late architecture. I'm involved in a couple different design projects,  some related to WHOOP, some in my personal life.

Any favorite books or books you’re reading now?

A great book as it relates to business and building a business is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, which is about creating Nike. What I liked so much about the book is he spends probably two-thirds of the book writing about the early stages of the company. Before it was even called Nike, it was called Blue Ribbon Sports and they were obsessed with trying to create a shoe that could help runners run faster. Their identity was in performance. And anyway, it reminded me of building WHOOP and our obsession early on with performance.

What’s your favorite simple (or not so simple) tool or hack that you think is under-appreciated?

I've got two: the first is learning how to meditate. I learned how to meditate about seven years ago. I do transcendental meditation, where you are effectively repeating a mantra for 20 minutes, 22 minutes to be exact. You can do it once or twice a day. That’s really changed my life and it made me a much better leader, husband, son, friend, et cetera. I think meditating gives you this third person perspective to look at yourself throughout the day, not just while you're meditating, but really throughout the day. It lets you contemplate how you're performing or what you're saying and to operate in a less reactive way. It helps prevent being the worst version of being an entrepreneur, where you're saying things you didn't mean to say and getting angry when you shouldn't have gotten angry. I think meditation is so powerful in helping me stay in control of myself.

The second one, which is a little more fun, is cold showers. I started taking cold showers maybe two years ago, and there is a bit of a tie here to meditation, but more related to breathing. The only way you can do cold showers and sort of deal with the cold effectively is by learning how to breathe properly. I kind of got to know the Wim Hof guys. I never got too deeply into the Wim Hof breathing, but their whole philosophy on cold really resonated for me. And so now 100% of my showers are cold. 

Better for the environment too.

Yeah. It changes your life a little bit too. I think you want to do things that naturally make you happy in life. Yeah. Cold is one of those for me.

The Week in Review

If you like technology rabbit holes (which I assume you do, if you’ve read this far), there’s a great piece on the aerodynamics and design constraints of shuttlecocks.

Willow Creative has published a lot of great build logs. Seeing this reminded me of Star Wars prop and costume maker Frank Ippolito’s interview in MachinePix Weekly #26, where he notes that the best costumes often come from diehard fans.

Wing-in-ground (or simply ground-effect) vehicles have made experimental appearances throughout history, but I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised to learn that AirFish has been manufacturing and flying them.

Postscript

I’ve been impatiently waiting to try a new pasta shape called Cascatelli, but it’s been sold out everywhere. I’ve been told the texture is very similar to Taiwanese “Q”.

I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

Whoop’s story is fascinating: when it was founded in 2012, it entered a market with Fitbit, Jawbone, and Nike Fuel—and two years later Apple announced the Watch. While other fitness bands and smart watches have since been shuttered (Eric Migicovsky on Pebble’s rise and fall, issue #47) in the face of Apple (Chrissy Meyer on building the Apple Watch, issue #4), Whoop has not only survived but thrived—and I’ll be discussing why and how with Will next week.

Helicopters made back-to-back most popular posts: this week, a Hughes 369D makes for a stressful commute to work for some lineworkers.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

Don’t be a dumb city boy like me and interchangeably use silage and hay, or hay and straw—farmers (and their animals!) will judge you.

Some previous fastener-related posts include a bolt thread roller and a magnetic nail packaging line.

Schlauchpflegeanlage literally means “hose care system”. Why does German have such long words? I did some digging and it turns out German grammar does not allow for noun clusters, so compound words (the long German words) are used instead. The longest? Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft is the Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam.

Postscript

This week, I found the max pizza capacity of an ND Miata’s trunk: 12. Thanks for the ride Emily.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a nail-biting video of a helicopter ejecting its crew through the space its main rotor blades occupied just seconds (milliseconds?) before.

I struggled to identify the helicopter in the video: the only operational helicopter with ejection seats is the Russian Ka-50 “Black Shark”, which sports a distinctive coaxial rotor system that is glaringly absent from the video. Luckily, some clever followers pointed out it was likely a Sikorsky S-72 Rotor Systems Research Aircraft, a strange mutt which could fly like a fixed wing without rotors or like a helicopter with rotors—and had ejection seats—along with a distinctive five-blade main rotor and high engine mounts—visible in the video. Thank you followers!

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

Heavy transport systems have been featured in previous issues, and they never fail to boggle the mind. From a friend and SpaceX engineer: Starships are so large that their manufacturing and transport pose unique constraints for manufacturing and transport locations. Also, Starship is both the name of the second stage or the first and second stage together—the first stage alone is called the Super Heavy. Internally, the first stage was also called the BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) and the second stage was also called the BFS (Big Fucking Ship).

This video is even cooler with LoFi beats overlaid, which reminds me of my favorite trance DJ and industrial automation channel: INDUSTRIAL JP

This is great when trees are relatively young. Otherwise, transporting a tree is much harder.

You can actually buy tiny screened shirts—and other tiny things—from the creator’s fantastically whimsical Etsy store.

I had to check and double check this wasn’t CGI. The sculptor’s DJ equipment is even more unsettling. Yikes.

Postscript

My friend Maryanna invited me to her office, which also happens to be an amazing collection of space paraphernalia. I catalogued some of my favorite parts in a Twitter thread:

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

Eric shares his hard-learned lessons in building from zero to millions in sales and selling the company to Fitbit; we also talk about what’s different now for electronics startups (hint: a lot, and it’s great!) Still have a Pebble? Eric pointed me to Rebble—a community of hackers working to provide continuing support for Pebble watches.

In the spirt of watches, the most popular post this week was a mystery dial watch movement by Konstantin Chaykin. It’s exciting to see contemporary horologists experiment with modern materials and manufacturing techniques, rather than leaning on heritage. How does it work? I’ll let you Google it.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

Interview with Eric Migicovsky

When you started Pebble in 2008, it wasn’t obvious at all that smart watches would be a thing. What made you take on the challenge?

I wasn't building it because I thought smartwatches would be a thing. I built it because I really wanted it, I thought it would be a pretty damn cool gadget.

And I looked around at other smart watches. I mean, there weren't really smartwatches—I think Sony Ericsson made an analog watch that had a 10 character alphanumeric display? And it was like 350 bucks. And I said, well, I don't have 350 bucks—so I decided to make one instead.

What was the hardest part about designing a smart watch then, before there was any precedents for these devices?

I think we were super naive. We didn't know how to build products. We’d never worked in a consumer electronics company. So we just kind of walked in and just started doing it without really knowing what we were getting ourselves into. The first version was just built with an Arduino, and I took the screen off of an old Nokia 310. You remember that? One of the candy bar Nokias.

We got pretty far. We got to the point where it was actually connecting to a smartphone and receiving like the time and messages. But it wasn't a company, it wasn’t a product. It was just a little hacked together device. I had a feeling that it would become a company, but we didn't design it with a company in mind. And so, you know, looking back, we made tons of really elementary mistakes. I think, would we have designed the same product or would we have gotten to the same level if we had tried to treat it like a company? I don’t know! I think a lot of the time we just  made it because we were having fun and it felt like a really cool gadget. It took five years before we launched on Kickstarter. 

What’s your craziest experience from designing and building the first Pebble?

So after we launched on Kickstarter, we had like a real product on our hands. One that we tried to design for manufacturing and actually took away to scaling. I was just talking about this the other day: one of the craziest experiences we had was just getting on a plane and flying to Shenzhen. We started meeting with factories in 2012, and it wasn’t what I expected it to be at all. Shenzhen is a fascinating city for electronics.

The only stop on the trip that felt like the stereotype of a factory was this packaging factory, where they make pulp tray inserts for shipping boxes. It was in the middle of nowhere, a massive industrial facility. There was like a 50 foot tall press machine that was compressing a slurry of pulp fiber into those brown inserts. And that was pretty cool, but Shenzhen overall, and realizing how electronics actually get designed and manufactured, was a crazy experience. Especially for us, since we’d never made consumer electronics before.

Apple Watch was announced in 2014, and it must have been a tough competitor for Pebble. How did things change for Pebble after they entered the market?

Well, it's funny actually, even before they walked into the room, that was the first thing on everyone's lips. So by the time they announced it, it actually felt kind of relieving because there's only so many things you can answer against an unknown, ill-defined product. Like before it was announced it could be anything. And then after it was announced and had a price and had specs and facts.

Obviously Pebble's not around today. I wouldn't say that it's not around because of the Apple Watch. If we were stack ranking the list of reasons why pebble doesn't exist right now, the Apple Watch would probably be fourth or fifth on the list.

If not the Apple Watch, what are the top three reasons Pebble no longer exists?

I think that the main one was  we didn't really have a firm vision for the future. We kind of stumbled into making smartwatches with our 2012 campaign, but we didn't have a multi-year vision for where we were taking wearable computing.

Or at least I didn't really define it. We just kind of kept building products on a six to twelve month cadence and coming up with a new watch every 12 months. That's not a recipe for building a company. That's just how you build products. This worked for a while. When it stopped working, we didn't really know what to do. Our normal approach, which was to make more watches, wasn't working. I didn't have the kind of defined vision that could lead a company through a year of shitty sales and not hitting our forecasts and not having, you know, having a bit too much inventory to cover the cash.

It sounds like there were a few hard learned lessons at Pebble. Looking back, what did you learn the hard way you wish you’d known going in?

The thing that can be most helpful for other hardware founders is to understand early on the business model that your company is using and all the trade offs. In our case, we were making money selling hardware one-time. We also had services that we would include with this, and we had software that we were continually publishing for the watch—but the business model was such that we had to come out with a new product and convince people to buy it again in order to make more money and. Looking back, I think that I didn't recognize that early enough, or how important the margin structure was, or how much it would cost to maintain the software team that was necessary to kind of compete and build a beautiful platform.

There's tons of different business models hardware companies can take on, and we just chose one where we sold the watch for $150-$200 and kind of followed the rule of threes: a third of it is the BOM cost, a third of it goes to distribution, and a third of it is hopefully profitable. If I were doing it again, I would think, you know, what other business models are potentially accessible for a product like that? Is there a subscription component? Should we have charged more? Should we have potentially not gotten into as many channels? We launched in retail, we launched in Best Buy; should we have just kept it as a B2C product and kept more of the margin for ourselves and sold less units? I don't think I really had the foresight or the ability to understand that there were choices around the business that I could have made earlier. I was very focused on building the watch.

Since Pebble’s sale to Fitbit, you’ve been a partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator. What’s changed for hardware startups since you started Pebble?

Man, it is so much easier to start a company now than it was 15 years ago. I’m kind of like the old guys sitting on this lawn talking to the young whippersnappers. Everything is incredibly exciting—software companies have enjoyed services like AWS for the last 15 years, but hardware companies are finally getting the rails to move much faster.

Look at a company like Wyze. They're using hardware that's generally made in China. ODM by various factories and they go and they talk to manufacturers and they talk about the specs and they don't have to spend years in any kind of product development. They kind of look at what's available out there, put it together, build software that attaches services and pull these devices together. And instead of having to have a full-blown ID team and a giant EPM production management team, they outsource a lot. And I think that that's kind of the prototype of fast moving new product development companies. You don't need everyone in-house. You don't need to design everything yourself. You can use different platforms.

Another good example would be the ESP32. That thing's amazing. You can basically start an entire company just by writing software that works on an ESP and break out board. You just have to find the right business application or the right problem to solve. I think that story has now been played out to great success. Dropcam was kind of an early example of that, the ODM model.

It just seems like companies can now move much faster. Hardware companies have always thought of themselves as different from software companies because they have this added complexity of having to spin boards and do prototype runs, that kind of thing. When in reality, like the hardware startup exists for the same reason as a software company, it's to solve a problem. And I think hardware companies, hardware founders now, can spend less time worrying about the nitty gritty bits of hardware and focus on asking “am I solving a real problem for users?”

What’s the next format of consumer electronics that you’re excited about?

I continually think that AirPods and similar are some of the best new gadgets in the last five years. For me, a successful product is one that you use on a regular basis that kind of becomes part of your life, that you rely on, that just kind of blends into your life. And AirPods didn't exist five years ago. We didn't carry around as many  headphones in the same way that we do now. Probably the success of video conferencing over the last year has been because people have these headphones in their pockets. Hopefully in the future, people will take advantage of this and maybe build more interesting software applications because this piece of hardware is now sitting in our pocket.

Is there a specific product you really admire right now?

I got a LIDAR based vacuum cleaner recently, and I had one of the dumb non-LIDAR vacuum cleaners. And it's amazing how much better the LIDAR vacuum cleaner is. Which is crazy because like how much were sick LIDARs five or ten years ago? They must've been tens of thousands of dollars.

And now my $200 vacuum cleaner has one. I don't think the impact of $20 LIDARs has been felt yet. I felt like there are a lot more things that can benefit from a high resolution 2D, 3D rangefinder.

What product would you love to see someone create? It doesn't even have to be a good business, just something you’re like “man, I just wish this was real.”

Did you see the demo for that Google portal screen that used some sort of 3D display such that you could just sit in it, the other person could sit anywhere else in the world, and it just felt like the other person was across from you. That would be pretty darn cool.

Zoom and everything is nice, but just now that I'm getting back to going out for lunch with people and it's amazing how much do you lose over the kind of crappy connections that we have. So I think something like that where you could actually feel like you were sitting across from someone at the table, that would be pretty cool. My camera placement is about a foot, half a foot above where the eyes are. The eye contact thing is really off-putting. 

Any side projects you’re working on right now?

I started a new company called Beeper! I also just had a kid, just a little kid and he is taking up a fair amount of time. He'll need some cool gadgets at some point, but he is not making anything yet except for messes.

Any favorite books or books you’re reading now?

The new Project Hail Mary book by the guy who wrote the Martian. It's pretty good. I read his second book, which was definitely not as good as his first one—but this new one he definitely just took the Martian  and changed the plot a little bit, but it's quite good. A page turner.

What’s your favorite simple (or not so simple) tool or hack that you think is under-appreciated?

My hack last year was getting a desktop computer. I’ve been using MacBooks and laptops for the last ten years. Holy crap, for $900, I bought an amazing computer and I can't imagine using a laptop anymore. It’s this infinitely powerful 64 GB RAM machine and I just don’t worry about computing anymore. Any number of tabs, whatever.

The Week in Review

This is a lot faster than some precision demolitions that I’ve previously posted.

I always thought unloading bulk carriers would be more sophisticated than just scooping it out; maybe because I’ve posted trains with clever unloading systems.

Oh boy, a lot of drama around this one. I guess I should have specified that the chicken was already dead before it went into the machine. The only other post I recall with this much drama was the crab processor.

Postscript

My coworker Lee shipped a new website for our company, Root Ventures. See if you can find all the Easter eggs.

I’ll also be guest-editing next week’s issue of The Prepared, so give it a look if you want more means to procrastinate.

I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

Eric is now a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, and I’m excited to discuss how consumer hardware startup opportunities have evolved over the last decade.

The most popular post this week *by far* was a cannabis joint filler by lbs. Distribution. One follower commented that knockboxes were old hat and posted something even more sophisticated.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

My eyes have been opened to the weird and wonderful world of HDD reamer design.

This post got me wondering how large chain trenchers get. The answer? 35 feet. Bucket wheel trenchers, on the other hand, can get preposterously large.

Postscript

I learned the hard way this week that plumbing fittings come in NPT (National Pipe Thread) and compression thread, and NPT is not compatible with compression thread. There are also BSPS or BSPT (British Standard Pipe Straight or Tapered) and UNS (National Unified Special), which is sometimes compatible with compression. Yikes.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a flatbed truck transporting sharks. This was filmed near Baltimore, so many assumed this on behalf of the National Aquarium. In a surprising twist, a spokesperson for the National Aquarium said “the animals were not headed to or from the National Aquarium and we did not have any involvement in the transport”—so who was trucking sharks?!

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

The coarse blue material used in masks that was in short supply at the start of the pandemic is called “melt-blown extrusion,” and there aren’t many machines that can make it.

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a “synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene”—but you probably know it as Teflon™. If you’ve ever done plumbing or pneumatic work, you also know that PTFE tape is a godsend.

xkcd once said that subcultures are nested fractally, and RC is no exception. Did you know the fastest RC glider reached 392 mph?

God bless practical effects.

Postscript

Uber’s helipad in SF with Sutro Tower in the background.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane

The most popular post this week was a popsicle extrusion machine. Ice cream machines have been widely featured in many previous popular posts.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

The Week in Review

I actually really liked this machine—including the satisfying sound it makes—but disappointingly not many of you shared the sentiment. It was this week’s worst performing post 🥺

I went crazy trying to identify this helicopter. It turned out to be a Leonardo Lynx, but with a configuration of side windows and landing gear that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. A previous post shows a modernized Lynx executing an insane ship landing.

This locomotive was previously posted under the SM48 name; the original designation was the TEM2 (and the locomotive in this post is marked TEM2).

I should have clarified that the tractor is made by John Deere—the harvesting system is the RoboMax.

Postscript

In NYC I noticed many ambulances were built on Ford Super Duties instead of vans. I wonder what the extra torque and power is used for? Or perhaps the supply chain for truck-based ambulances is just more robust? An ambulance crash test was featured in a previous post.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane