The Other Stuff Podcast

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

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

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."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

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."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

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."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtu.be/qb2SGek8lS8?si…

Matthias Wandel on watching September 11 unfold through Mobitext base station logs. "I built this thing. A 700MHz rackmount server with four Mobitext modems attached, so I could listen to the base stations surrounding it. Plotting traffic density, just to see what's going on. Up until the planes hit, the traffic was mostly downlink. People receiving their emails. As soon as the planes hit, it flipped. A lot of people sent their last message on it. The cell phones became useless on 9/11. If you're sending a message like honey, I'm okay, you're not tying up the channel. It wasn't that the system was so superior. It's just in this scenario, it was the right system."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

Matthias Wandel shares a story of how Jim Balsillie of RIM planned to buy Waterloo Maple. "Jim had this plan of buying Waterloo Maple. The guys that made the Maple math software. They could do like, symbolic math. And I was like, why would we want to do that? We already pushed all the good people out of that company. I'm going to talk to Jim about this, and it was rather poorly timed. I said, 'this buying Waterloo Maple thing, you know, it's a stupid idea because it sounds like one.' Those are the words I used, and he exploded at me."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

Matthias Wandel shares the story of how he started working at Research in Motion (RIM). "I was graduating and looking for a job, and there was this little company, and they were looking for somebody who had experience at either Microsoft or Borland and some experience with lasers. Those were the two bullet points. It's like, oh, I'm going to get that one. It was the most interesting job ad that I looked at. And so I did not wear a suit for that interview because I'm just going to go in there and nail it, and I did."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

internetVin (@internetvin) asks Yacine (@yacineMTB) and Matthias Wandel how they are using LLMs. "For programming a lot. It's just made it more fun. It's just, you're still thinking computationally. And that's the fun part is still thinking about how to solve the problem." "Just in the past year, it used to be you get an LLM to do something and you could only get so far because now it's starting to forget what I told it in the first place. I'm losing context. But the LLMs have gotten, in the past year, so much better about essentially distilling past context so it remembers the important bits." "It's taken a lot of discipline for me to make sure that every single thing it does I understand, because I feel like if I lose the understanding of what is actually happening, I lose the ability to figure out what the next step is."

Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

Yacine (@yacineMTB) and Matthias Wandel define what it means to be a nerd. "It's somebody who, on their own, just loves to play with the technology. Who writes programs just for the heck of it. Nerds will push really far, a lot further than the average person would, to satisfy an interest." "They just want see if they can do it. Being able to solve the problem is a quest to find out if they can solve the problem. The end isn't actually the goal. It's like, can I figure this out?" "Today, I feel like writing a computer game, you can just load up an LLM and ask it to write the game for you. It's not impressive anymore. What is impressive is doing something that's actually difficult. Something that's constrained, if you do it with artificial constraints or even actual real constraints, it's a lot more impressive."

@yacineMTB Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out | The Other Stuff #34 youtube.com/watch?v=qb2SGe…

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

Live with Matthias Wandel (woodgears.ca) & Yacine (@yacineMTB) x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

The Other Stuff #34 — Matthias Wandel Tomorrow April 16th