ken

On a quest to make better products at a better price

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Creating really is the process of self-discovery. Building Palindrome, I’ve unearthed and rebuilt so many assumptions and mental models

[ken @Kenmabraham]

@internetvin I built something to give multiple tags to a transactions, not just what, why, where, who -

Built a local MCP and just chat with Claude - I use the data to track of habits, how often I explore etc.

It’s kinda a way for me to journal while tracking my $

[ken @Kenmabraham]

@steven_yuen @_one334 Insane how he treats you to a couch but treated me like peasant

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Berczy park opened in 1980 :)

[xenoglossy 🪐 @Sorcerer0fEld]

Toronto has only ever gotten better

[Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 @EricDLombardi]

Ontario's government has spent $500 million on ads since coming into power.

That's enough money to have DOUBLED the number of MRI machines.

They're literally spending your money to tell you things are working – even when you know that they're not.

[ken @Kenmabraham]

One of my favourite episodes

[The Other Stuff @OtherStuffShow]

Reece Martin (@RM_Transit) is a writer, systems thinker, and investigator who spent a decade documenting public transit systems around the world, building one of the deepest bodies of work anywhere on how cities move.

We quickly learn that his YouTube channel was never really about transit. It was an investigation into how society works, told through the infrastructure everyone uses and almost no one stops to look at. Transportation lines become a table of contents for places themselves. We trace how Reece learned to see this way, from riding the New York subway alone at the age of 12, to wandering Tokyo at 2AM as a teenager, to the Urban Toronto forums and the foamers who film city buses for fun, to reading whole cities in Google Maps with the labels off.

Reece explains why he decided to close the channel. Part of it is discipline: it’s a chapter, and it needs to end to be a cohesive whole. The rest is harder. After ten years of seeing what a subway can be, the daily ride home wears on him, and the change he believes in is decades away, so he’d rather give his time to problems where the feedback comes faster. From there the conversation opens up into EVs, autonomy, Waymo, AI, and the quiet awe of building things bigger than human scale, the kind of infrastructure that touches millions of lives long after the people who made it are gone. The same instinct, pointed at a new set of systems.

This is a conversation about what infrastructure quietly reveals about society, how you can use any subject as a lens to understand everything else, when to walk away from something you love, and why caring about a thing might be the highest-leverage move you can make.

The Other Stuff is hosted by @internetvin, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New.

—

Timestamps

00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:38 RMTransit and Documenting Transit Systems
00:10:21 Urban Toronto and Forums
00:19:52 Foamers & Paying Attention
00:26:50 Langley & the NYC Subway at 12
00:31:30 Tokyo at 2AM & Osaka
00:38:30 Singapore: If Apple Made a Subway
00:48:15 Platform Doors & Toronto vs the World
00:52:22 Chengdu Builds, Toronto Stalls
01:02:24 The Google Maps Method
01:11:52 Putting a Period on the Channel
01:25:59 Filmmaking, Writing, & 50 Terabytes
01:39:23 EVs & Battery Chemistry
01:41:44 A Robot Dressed as a Car
01:51:05 Waymo & the End of Owning a Car
01:58:28 Zonal Architecture & Cars as Phones
02:04:21 Autonomy Rewrites the Roads
02:13:21 AI Will Design the Systems
02:18:20 Humans Seek Entropy, Machines Seek Order
02:20:53 Caring Is the Highest Leverage

[ken @Kenmabraham]

This game was depression

[The Other Stuff @OtherStuffShow]

@RM_Transit Reece Martin: Transportation as a Way of Seeing | The Other Stuff #35

https://t.co/4HImavow7Y

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Just so yall know, we found all 51 in one day, ~3.5 hours

[ken @Kenmabraham]

The Great Beaver Quest is the sickest thing Toronto has done in a minute

51 Beavers painted by different artists for each country playing in fifa (+some bonus ones). Sick way to explore your city

[ken @Kenmabraham]

It’s crazy how much of what
you believe as a human translates into a product

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Supply-chain agents are the future, and one of the most exciting things to work on rn

For all the vendors not on ASN or EDI, you can now have something even better.

IMO this like 100x more interesting an consumer focused agents

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Spurs vs OKC is excellence at it's finest

[ken @Kenmabraham]

Seats in, big milestone.
Next stop out the shed 🫡

[ken @Kenmabraham]

I am back in the shed

[ken @Kenmabraham]

This is such a strange way to look at life, Drake just dropped why are you so pressed

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[internetVin @internetvin]

I don't know how to explain it, man. I just don't know how to explain it. It's just my instincts.

I guess because I grew up here, there's just something in my bones where I can just tell when something's in the air. But man, I'm telling you, this summer in Toronto is going to be fucking crazy.

[ken @Kenmabraham]

@daniilShrst The beauty of building, undoing and redoing stuff bc you realize you missed something. Looks the same, but it works different now.

(I forgot like 10 different modules for a functioning car) :/

[ken @Kenmabraham]

I am back in the shed

[ken @Kenmabraham]

I hate @obsdmd, pages as an atomic unit is inherently inferior to blocks as an atomic unit

[internetVin @internetvin]

Really want to take @OtherStuffPod to the next level but to do that need sponsors / partners. There’s a lot of v interesting projects in the works. If you’re interested would love to chat. We’re really good at story, media and strategy, can figure out something compelling!!!!!

[ken @Kenmabraham]

As I get older, with every step I take, it becomes even more important to show love to my parents.

It’s such a privilege to be raised by immigrants who risked it all for us