The Other Stuff Podcast

A show where we surf the internet with our friends. Hosted by @internetVin 🛜

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel is an engineer, woodworker, and YouTuber who runs the most-viewed woodworking channel on YouTube. He was an early employee at Research In Motion, assigned employee number 13. Yacine (@yacineMTB) is an engineer and artist, formerly at X and Stripe. Both of them are tinkerers, explorers, and builders in their own right. They poke at the world, build and test things for themselves, and develop their own understanding.

In this conversation, we traced a single thread through Matthias’s entire life: what happens when you grow up in a place where the only way to have something is to make it yourself, and then never stop. We started in Northern Ontario, in his dad’s workshop on a gravel road where the nearest store was an hour away, and followed that instinct through his first encounters with computers, a Bic-pen dot matrix printer on a Commodore 64, two brothers with two machines in a basement heated by a wood stove, lock picking in the Waterloo service tunnels, and what it means to be a nerd.

Matthias and Yacine went back and forth on simplicity vs. ease, what LLMs change about the relationship between understanding and building, and why the probability of code getting reused is inverse to the effort you spend making it reusable. Matthias walked through building the DigiSync barcode reader for the motion picture industry, writing almost all the firmware for RIM’s first wireless modem in DSP assembly, watching BlackBerry’s network traffic flip on 9/11, and what it was like to work alongside Mike Lazaridis. He explained why he left BlackBerry while sales were at their peak and how a bandwidth constraint accidentally made his first viral YouTube video.

This is a conversation about constraints that become capability, capability that becomes independence, and independence that becomes something you pass on.

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

The Other Stuff #34 – Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

— Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro
00:02:25 ElectroBoom and Styropyro
00:09:55 Potato Guns and Air Guns
00:23:34 Growing Up in Northern Ontario
00:37:16 First Computers and the Bic Pen Printer
00:43:22 Markus Wendel and the Basement
01:00:19 University of Waterloo
01:03:37 Service Tunnels and Lock Picking
01:10:07 What Is a Nerd?
01:11:34 LLMs and Simplicity vs. Ease
01:31:19 How RIM Started
01:44:01 Building the Wireless Modem
01:58:43 Reusability and Optionality
02:14:13 The BlackBerry Pager
02:33:50 BlackBerry and 9/11
02:48:13 Lazaridis and Balsillie
03:05:28 The YouTube Channel
03:26:01 The Capacitance Sensor
03:42:41 Passing It On

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/Qmy7IlOVqG

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel on the origin story of his YouTube channel, website, and body of work known as "woodgears dot ca."

"It wasn't about YouTube at all originally, but I built some of these things like the marble machines that I shared on this website. And I put a sound sample on there. And I was like, I wanna put video on here..."

"Why did you call it 'woodgears'? Because that domain was available.

But why 'woodgears'?

Because I was into the mechanical type of things, to make gears out of wood. The banner is some wooden gears I had made even before I thought of the website.

I just photographed some gears on a table that I'd made, and that became the banner."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco: How Crowds Form, Why Narratives Move People, The Magic of Scenes | The Other Stuff #26

https://t.co/l4UKFNBMQI

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco (@Alex_Danco) riffs on what the early stage of a startup is actually for.

"The only point when you're at that stage is figuring out what you want to do. And the way you figure out what you want to do is by learning what really gets you off when you give it as a gift. That's how you figure it out."

"Tobi realized he wanted to do Shopify when he built this thing for himself for making online stores. He showed it to other people and they were like, this is really nice, but this will never work in the real world for all these reasons. And he's like, I don't care about what the real world wants. This is what I want to give. You can come to my island and have my thing, but you have to come to me. It's my terms. It's just what I want to do."

"The whole point of this early stage is figuring out what you want to give. If you can find what your gift is, you can give it over and over and over again. And that's how you create a body of work that does something."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco: How Crowds Form, Why Narratives Move People, The Magic of Scenes | The Other Stuff #26

https://t.co/2wIzy7FD0E

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco (@Alex_Danco) riffing on why demo days actually work, and why it has nothing to do with the demos.

"Why do demo days work? The reason why demo days work is because demo days are a form of gift exchange. Demo days are when information is actually exchanged, because demo days are when people listen. The reason people are listening is because you're giving gifts to each other of the demos. People really, really want to go to places where there's signal."

"What is a high signal environment? It's not an environment where there's a lot of signal. It's an environment where people are receptive. So if you want to create the conditions where people are receptive, then the signal will be found."

"You go to a demo and probably you didn't learn something from the person demoing. You learn something from the person sitting next to you. But the demo mattered, because the demo got you listening in the first place."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/xmnpGXVG99

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel riffing with Yacine (@yacineMTB) on the leadership trait that let Mike Lazaridis lead engineers at RIM.

"Mike was more of a hardware guy, but he understood nuts and bolts. He used to do the design work himself. What makes people like Mike special is he's got the technological background, so he can talk the talk. He can inspire the engineers. He's not some guy who doesn't know what he's talking about."

"He's got the audacity and the confidence, which is a big factor to get the deals, to inspire other people. The reality distortion field."

"One of the bottlenecks to engineering companies is motivating engineers who are very smart. When they think about things from first principles, you can follow their reasoning, and they also respect your own ability to reason through things. They're actually partaking in the process of engineering."

"Sometimes when you take crazy technical risks, you end up motivating engineers, because you motivate that bone that says, hey, this would be a really cool thing to brag about. It's almost like a stunt. Taking an order and a deposit for a product we had no idea how to build. It's like, are you crazy?"

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco: How Crowds Form, Why Narratives Move People, The Magic of Scenes | The Other Stuff #26

https://t.co/B7YrHtyYpZ

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Alex Danco (@Alex_Danco) on how to be good at anything.

"The highest compression idea I can offer anybody for being good at anything is: be really generous."

"One man asks the other, 'Where have you stored your grain?' He says, 'I store my grain in the belly of my brother.' It's not literal storage, but it's actually the realest kind of storage."

"You could take your money and turn it into gold. Or you could turn it into champagne with your friends, toasting one of their wins. That's a different way of storing wealth. We will continuously do this for each other."

"People are, on some level, defined by what they give away without being asked."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/jaT6iCWRiB

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel, one of the early employees at RIM, on why he walked away at peak sales.

"RIM got a bit cocky. When the iPhone came out, RIM didn't take that very seriously. There were so many products that came out by bigger companies that just went nowhere. They kinda felt this was just part of the pattern."

"There's only two companies that could kill us. They have to be fast-moving and billion-dollar companies. There's only two companies that fit that bill: Google and Apple. And the only two guys who could, are doing it. Both doing it."

"RIM wanted to be one of those MENS club guys. Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens. Careful what you wish for. Look at those guys now. Do they make mobiles? None of them. I didn't have the vision. I just didn't like it. I just felt it wasn't the right fit for me anymore."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/vyGJhXa4Sq

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Yacine (@yacineMTB) on why simplicity beats ease, and why understanding fundamentals is what gives you optionality.

"People prefer ease over simplicity, but simplicity is what gives you optionality in the future. You can project further in the future of what's possible only when you fully understand."

"Because coding has gotten so easy now, I don't use any frameworks, or I use as little frameworks as I possibly can. If I ever need something, I can just program it myself. That way I fundamentally understand how it works because I was the person who designed it. I know about all the quirks and the edge cases I need to manage."

"You can ask the LLM to go pull the framework, find the specific function you want, add only that function, and then read it and add it to your code base. So you don't have to take on other people's tech debt into your own software."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/pTme0jJLyK

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel on how he pranked his residence floor at the University of Waterloo, instilling a rumour that he had a master key for all rooms.

"The master key at some point had gotten out of hand and a lot of people copied it. The university knew these had gotten out of hand, so anything that was important was secured with Medeco locks. The first time I saw a Medeco lock I thought, 'Wow, this is made for picking because it's got such a wide slot for your lockpicks'. But I never got a Medeco lock open."

"At some point in third year, there's three of us who liked it more quiet and a bunch of rowdy people on the floor. They're out partying for Oktoberfest and my friend Keith says, 'Let's go in and grab something from each of their rooms'."

"We knew we couldn't pick those locks, but I had a Delta device to open those doors anyways, which worked on all but one of those guys's doors."

"Wait, so you robbed them? No, we took a personal item out of each of their rooms and put them in the lounge, so they knew that we'd been in there. Which made them believe that we had a master key, which we did not. But we didn't do anything to try to dispel that rumour. So they were freaked out."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/pTme0jJLyK

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel on the night he picked his way into the service tunnels under the University of Waterloo, a system that, until then, only existed in rumour.

"These service tunnels only existed in myth because there was no web yet at the time. I had thought of this technique for picking locks, so I tried it in the V1 residence, which was connected to the tunnel system.

We get to this grid, and I was just like, holy crap. It just goes on and on and on. But there's a locked door, and it felt like forever. My friends are watching me, and I was like, just open, damn it, open up. And eventually I got it open.

I had been planning to spend the entire night in the tunnels. At some point we panicked and exited through one of the engineering buildings. So then we're wearing T-shirts in the middle of winter, standing outside, and we had to walk back to our residence."

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34

https://t.co/pTme0jJLyK

[The Other Stuff Podcast @OtherStuffPod]

Matthias Wandel on the first device that resembled a BlackBerry, back when pagers weren't supposed to have operating systems.

"The first thing I worked on that resembled what's now known as the BlackBerry was the interactive pager 950. The bar of soap, one with a wide keyboard. There's a guy we hired, Victor Kulikauskas, and at the time we were writing an operating system for a pager. And Victor's like, 'But pagers don't have operating systems!'

There were decisions made early on that became the wrong decisions later on. As you approach something like an iPhone, which we never quite got to, the operating system matters. So we went from a two-way pager to approaching smartphones. The decisions that were right for a two-way pager became the wrong decisions later on.

People pointed out, you made the wrong call. And I said, yes, but if we'd done this the way you think it ought to be done, we wouldn't have built the thing we did, and we wouldn't be where we are now."