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

**internetVin** (0:14)
It's cool how certain things in life function as specific gateways into a broader understanding of things. Reece Martin is a video creator and a writer who travels the world analyzing public transit systems to explain how cities work. He uses infrastructure as a lens to read a place, its politics, its priorities, and the distance between what it says it wants and what it actually builds. But to me, he is more of a proof of concept for a way to live. His first video is just like him pointing a camera on the Lake Shore West GO Longbran station. I saw this video and I could see somebody that was about to take a step into some kind of direction. There's something really inspiring about this conversation to me because of the inherent permission structures that are in the subtext of this conversation. This idea that you could just kind of be on a forum, be reading things about public infrastructure, and you get kind of into it, you get curious about it, and that's enough for you to think about it non-stop, to work on it for 10 years, to make thousands of videos about public transportation systems, and then he decided to move on. I think Anthony Bourdain did something similar. It's a show about food, but really, that's just a gateway into understanding many more things about what it means to be human.
I like people like this. I like people that go really deep into things. I see someone do that and I think, okay, yeah, maybe I could do that too. I like to see how far I can push it. Can I get to the end of something?
I feel like you learn a lot of, it seems like you learn a lot of things by going super deep into something.

**Reece Martin** (2:09)
100%.

**internetVin** (2:11)
And I think you also learn a lot of unexpected things. And perhaps things maybe that are like seemingly obvious in hindsight.
I think it's interesting that you went so deep on this transit thing.

**Reece Martin** (2:29)
It is interesting. There are drawbacks to going so deep on something for sure.

**internetVin** (2:33)
Right. But before we get to the drawbacks, I just want to understand your research into this whole transit project. How did this happen? How did it start? So one of the things I found very interesting was the first video that you posted. If we can see that.
It's interesting, because it's like, it's almost like this cinematic video in context of like, what ends up happening. Like, I watch this.

**Reece Martin** (3:05)
Shit. This is a deep cut for sure.

**internetVin** (3:08)
Yeah. Okay. So wait, can we go audio too? So you're like breathing and then just like, I actually really like this.

**Reece Martin** (3:17)
Well, the thing that was really-

**internetVin** (3:19)
Wait, hon, we gotta watch it.
Do you hold the camera here? I don't know if this framing is intentional or not, but you use it a lot. This kind of framing where there's a... Maybe it's a common framing, I don't know.

**Reece Martin** (3:48)
No, it's definitely intentional.

**internetVin** (3:50)
Okay, so what I like about this video, I really, really, really like this video, like a lot.

**Reece Martin** (3:56)
I'm impressed.

**internetVin** (3:57)
This is my favorite video that you've done.
And the reason why is because it's posted like nine years ago. You're not saying anything. It feels like a test.

**Reece Martin** (4:09)
It is a test.

**internetVin** (4:10)
Yeah, it feels almost like a spiritual camera test. And then what's interesting to me about it is like, it's funny because what happens after this?
It's almost like you're thinking like, should I go deep into trains?

**Reece Martin** (4:29)
It's a good point in retrospective, for sure.

**internetVin** (4:31)
Yeah.

**Reece Martin** (4:32)
It escalated slightly from this.

**internetVin** (4:38)
Yeah.
Wow. And then you really start. So what was happening here? Like when you look at the, like what is the story of how you got started with all of this?

**Reece Martin** (4:51)
I was in university and at that time, there wasn't like visual documentation of a lot of these places that wasn't like 480p and incredibly shaky. And it's funny because watching this in retrospect, I'm like, dude, relax, hold the cameras stable.
But at this time, this was kind of like the nicest footage I could find online of these things. Most people that filmed this stuff were like crazy enthusiasts. And I was just kind of interested in stuff that was going on. And so, you know, I went and recorded these various things.
And initially, I just uploaded them and let them sit there and didn't really pay much attention to it. But then I noticed that they did get, at the time, what felt like a lot of views. And I mean, it is a lot of views when you reflect on it, because it's like 200 subs getting a thousand views is actually pretty good in my opinion, in retrospect. And so, yeah, I just kind of progressed through and I was very interested in this topic. I was super, super busy with school, but I was like, oh, the weekends, I could have partied or whatever, but I was like, oh no, this train thing is really important. I have to document all this stuff. And it's sort of, it's an interesting area because there's so much technical depth and so much interesting culture and cities and stuff in transportation. And yet it's very poorly documented and people don't actually understand it very well. And it's like we spent billions of dollars on this stuff and nobody really thinks much about it. And so I just started uploading more and more regularly as I was in school. And then COVID came around and I had a pretty boring tech job set up because I had done computer science in school and I decided that this would be more interesting. My wife's also a computer science person and she got a much more interesting tech job as well. So I was like, okay, well, inadequacy. So I need to do something interesting. So I decided to do the YouTube thing and just kind of went vertical. And I mean, as far as this is a niche, niche and yeah, I did it for about six years after that. And I kind of like covered almost everything I think you could want to cover in this topic. Like I feel like I have scraped the absolute bottom of the barrel. I have learned about the public transportation systems of like every country in the world.