Tris and Robin introduce themselves and share tips for writing podcasts, blogs, videos and how to survive inside a creative brain.

📖 CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Introductions
00:01:27 Why are we here & defining “decapsulate”
00:05:04 Podcasts are great!
00:11:15 From Podcasting to blogging
00:16:20 Wait, what is this podcast all about?
00:24:40 Blogging II: Electric boogaloo
00:38:40 Writing distractions
00:53:40 Bottom-up thinking
01:08:00 Decapsulate upload schedule discussion
01:13:30 Conclusion

🔗 LINKS
Ours

https://robinwinslow.uk
https://noboilerplate.org
https://lostterminal.com
https://modemprometheus.com
https://phosphenecatalogue.com

External

https://www.relay.fm/cortex
https://www.youtube.com/@CGPGrey
https://www.nightvalepresents.com/startwiththis
https://pluralistic.net/

🧑 CREDITS
Decapsulate is a NAMTAO Production (namtao.com)
It is hosted by:

Tristram Oaten (https://mastodon.social/@0atman)
Robin Winslow (https://union.place/@nottrobin)

This work is BrainMade (https://brainmade.org)
Transcript
[00:00:00] Teaser 1[00:00:00] Introductions
Tris: I guess I’ll go first. Hi folks, my name is Tris. I’m a podcaster and video producer, I’m a musician. In fact, I started out doing anything creative or in public by being a musician. My first career was as a web developer, and I did production on the side for 15 years, but in 2022 I accidentally became entirely self employed thanks to the surprising success of my YouTube channel, No Boilerplate. I am here with my friend Robin. Hi Robin.
Robin: Hi
Tris: Tell the listeners about yourself.
Robin: I’m Tris’s friend
I’m nowhere near as impressive in my output as Tris. I am a father. I’ve always wanted to be a father and I’m very proud of, being a father to my children. I’m a big fan of openness and transparency and open source. I’ve been a web developer and team leader for about 18 years. I worked for Canonical for 10 years, I worked with what is now our mutual friend, and that’s how I got introduced to Tris, and then Tris got me a job at Canonical, we worked together there for a bit, and you know, we’ve known each other ever since,
I have a lot of thoughts about how to solve technical problems, as well as, How to solve other problems, and I’m a little bit obsessed with politics.
[00:01:10] Why are we here & defining decapsulate
Tris: we are here because I love talking about tech. I especially love talking about tech with you, and there are some parts of my, video audio creation writer world that I’d love for other people to get a little insight into.
And I found that speaking with. You is a great foil occasionally, although that is a backhanded compliment. But certainly you’re very good at asking difficult questions that I appreciate you asking. “ Appreciate“ in, like, scare quotes.
Robin: I feel like I do sort of challenge you in a way that I, I’m surprised you’re okay with. I often feel a bit bad about it
afterwards.
Tris: You’re right. That’s probably the perfect interviewer, or, host attitude.
Robin: I feel like your interpretation of
decapsulate was different than mine. When you
first said it, I thought it sounded like a great name. And,
Tris: Oh no.
Robin: no, no, no. I think it’s good. I think this was
interesting.
It was interesting that you related it more to software
than I did,
Tris: Yes, because encapsulation means bringing everything inside an interface of some sort and bringing along the things you
need inside that
to work, maybe through internal data and internal functions or something like
that. How did you interpret it?
Robin: Well, I think, I suppose I think that decapsulate is maybe a synonym for unpack
Tris: I really like that word unpack.
Robin: I do think that it was, it’d be very interesting to talk about why we identify with unpacking things.
Because I think we do, I think lately I’ve started to feel more
like I’ve noticed more that people around me are not as interested
in getting to the details, talking about the details of stuff as I am. I have to be aware of that because particularly in work, there’s a lot of things where I’m like, if we were to think seriously about this problem, then we would define the basis of what we’re trying to achieve.
And then we would work out what flows from there. I always want to delve into the fine details of designing the solution clearly in a way that other people, are often quite frustrated by.
The thing that people don’t seem that interested in is more like the focus. I tend to want to look at things from many angles. I think that you aren’t, you haven’t really discovered the truth until you’ve looked at it from many angles. And I think also, discovering the truth is really important. A lot of people aren’t necessarily on the same page as me in all those ways.
They aren’t necessarily interested in the truth. seeing things from a few angles and making sure they’ve found the truth at the heart of it. Do you know what I mean?
Tris: Yes, it’s one of the reasons I really like talking with you, wise people are full of doubt and fools are so certain, and you’re really uncertain you’re not persuaded as easily as I am of something, there’ll be many cases where I will state something I know you agree with.
I’ll state an opinion or state some facts about the internet or technology or society or whatever and I will state it in a way that is not buttoned up and watertight and you will disagree with me and argue with me, which is confusing for me, well it was until I got used to it, and we’ll
Go round a little bit and I’ll be very, very confused because you’ll be arguing Against
something I thought you really believed in and I might eventually say don’t you agree with me and you say yes I do but not the way you said it like you did not present a good argument
Robin: This isn’t a very charitable presentation.
Tris: No, it is this is how I would like to be this is a very aspirational way of doing things Annoying perhaps but when we’re talking about important topics It’s important to have the facts right and the take right? You can’t just say something that is too simple or oversimplified. Um, and this is because you are trying to find the truth, which makes you a great podcast host.
Robin: well, we’ll see, see
[00:04:47] Podcasts are great
Tris: podcasts, I think, are my favorite thing. To write and to produce because audio is such a personal medium. I just want to do more and more, which is why we’re here today. Thank you, Robin, for enabling my addiction.
Robin: Is this the first podcast where you’re
talking as you,
Tris: it is. And I’m terrified because I’m usually no good without a script.
Robin: I think you’re doing fantastically well, you know, your voice is crisp and polished and your explanations are fluid. I think you’re going to, listen back to it and discover that you absolutely don’t need a
script. This is my favorite form of podcast and I found it quite interesting because I remember, the party we had on Saturday, your birthday.
So happy birthday again.
Tris: Thank you so much. I am 38, if you can believe it.
Robin: Your friend, who I won’t name because they haven’t agreed to it, said, are you planning on doing any podcasts or something like that to you? And because they. Understand a podcast to be what I also understand a podcast to be, which is people talking, usually a conversation, nonfiction,
but when I backed her up in saying this was also my understanding of podcasts somebody corrected me and said, the very oldest podcasts weren’t that at all. The very oldest podcasts were. More like works of fiction ongoing serial dramas and stuff like
that. Which I realized,
Tris: am not sure that either, point is correct. I think podcasts have always been just like books, fiction and nonfiction.
Robin: right. Quite possibly there presumably was a first podcast. It would be quite
interesting to know what that was.
Tris: It would be. I’ve never even thought about that.
Robin: typey, typey, typey,
Tris: typey, sounds of, uh, mechanical keyboard clicking,
Robin: Oh yeah, your keyboard I don’t have a keyboard like yours. This is why you have a keyboard like yours
Tris: interesting.
It looks like the first podcast came on tape and was a 1989, radio program distributed on cassettes. That does feel like how, podcasts are distributed, except we’ve got MP3s nowadays.
Robin: Yeah. Wow.
Oh, that’s really cool.
Tris: prefer podcasts, not just because I’m a kind of an audio person. I started out my creative career. So to speak was that I’ve always loved music and so audio is very natural for me two years ago my astonishing and terrifying on YouTube made me a Reluctant video producer, but the format is garbage I suppose it’s YouTube’s fault really The whole process is much less friendly much more superficial.
Robin: Is it less
empowering?
Tris: Yeah, you can’t edit what you’ve uploaded. Subscribers won’t necessarily see your videos. The story of YouTube is a story of Lower and lower empowerment for the people creating and watching it.
But I will accept their money. And the enormous reach, that the platform, has given me, No complaints there, of course. It is a garbage platform, however. But I think you have to have a garbage platform to accept the benefits of a garbage platform, which is they will put your content in front of people who want to see it.
Whereas with a podcast, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got an RSS feed, and that’s it.
Robin: But you can have huge success with it. Obviously people have,
Tris: You certainly can. It’s much more word of mouth, which seems much nicer if you recommend a podcast to your friend That’s the only way it can work.
Robin: Yeah. I love podcasts for that reason. I think what you were saying about audio versus video is that you feel like the amount of depth of control that you get and, it’s this really rich format. And I feel like that, that also goes with the control you have in, understanding your software and being a geek that likes, likes to configure things.
And that’s also the other real strength of podcasts because they have resisted, the enshittification of all these other mediums. Podcasts are a standout success the world over. And they are not under anyone’s control.
Tris: Yeah,
Robin: And it’s quite amazing. Like in the modern world where everything is monopolized, it is really quite astonishing that
podcasts exist
Tris: Yes, it’s wonderful as our dark forces at work to stop that you’ve heard of audible originals
Robin: I don’t know that I have.
Tris: It is a marketing thing that Amazon do, where they say we’ve paid a huge amount of money to these celebrities and they’re making an Audible original podcast. What that means is an exclusive podcast because they want to make the walls of their ward garden higher.
Robin: Absolutely.
Tris: Same with Apple and the same with Spotify.
Spotify are the last of the game, but there are, Spotify exclusives. And they are not on any other platform.
Robin: The most famous Spotify exclusive for a while was Joe
Rogan.
But it failed. Joe Rogan published exclusively for Spotify for, I don’t know, like a year or something. And then, didn’t renew.
It wasn’t working. The interesting thing about those stories is yes, they are all trying to do it. Every one of these monopolies wants to steal podcasting and put it in a walled garden. But none of them are particularly successful. Like, I hadn’t really heard of Audible Originals.
I’m probably an anomaly. I automatically knee jerk react against using Amazon products and stuff like that. So, I’m not representative of most people, it’s clearly not succeeding in monopolizing anything,
I don’t think.
Tris: It’s wonderfully democratic. And I think we have, to shout out, Aaron Schwartz, the creator of RSS, the late and great. Aaron Schwartz for making such a, an incredible simple system that just spread like wildfire before anyone could lock it down. think the huge success of RSS really helped get ahead of these corporations.
Robin: absolutely, yeah, oh Aaron Schwartz, I’m always so sad, it’s such a generational thing, isn’t it? It really ages me. It kind of like I’m I mean ages in the sense of like you can tell my age by the fact that I’m so triggered by the name Aaron Schwartz because it was such a thing of our
generation.
Tris: Yeah,
Robin: which probably means a lot of the
listeners might not know what we’re talking
Tris: In one of my videos where I mentioned RSS, I put a half second slide with a whole bunch of texts being very angry, not super angry, but like telling people to go find out what happened and don’t forget.
the Wikipedia page for Aaron Schwartz tells you everything you need to know. A real shame,
[00:11:02] From Podcasting to Blogging
Robin: You were talking about your enthusiasm for podcasting. I think I have always had a fascination and an enthusiasm for writing,
but I’ve never really managed to Properly inhabit it. I’ve always been so like, something. So scared of it or something. Maybe it’s too big for me. And I’ve always procrastinated So I do have a blog where I’ve published, hundreds of articles, over many years, but that amounts to like a few a year and that is pathetic output. And I wouldn’t say any of them are particularly impressive works people are welcome to check it out.
I am very much looking forward to exploring. How I could engage myself with, my genuine interests having better output, a better connection between what I’d really like to say, or do, or what I’d enjoy expressing and, actually noting it down somewhere making an impact.
I think the fact that you’re so prolific at that. I really appreciate it because it’s I think if I could learn any, like a fraction of what you do, I think I would really,
it would make a big difference to
Tris: Well, It is a lot easier writing fiction than it is writing nonfiction. I think that there are some components, some building blocks of fiction and nonfiction that are, different. I write both, nonfiction videos and fiction podcasts and when I sit down to write my 400.
Words every morning for lost terminal. Those words just flow out of my fingers because I don’t have to look anything up. I’m inventing it completely whole cloth. The world is completely up to me. You know, it’s still our world, but it’s set in the future, so there are some physical constraints.
I’m able to just write things, whatever the characters say, it all comes from creative writing. Whereas when I’m writing a script for a video, there’s a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of checking of figures, copying of code, making sure that I’m right, and getting all of the little details right.
In non fiction, that slows you down, compare Stephen King’s output to the output of somebody writing in the non fiction space.
Robin: Some people write business books incredibly fast. Don’t
they?
Tris: but
Robin: you’ve got Cory Doctorow, who is worth bringing up because he’s very much in the
space around Aaron Schwartz
And also, you know, we’ve referenced enshittification but he publishes new articles. Daily, basically, as far as I’m aware I feel like there is a way to do nonfiction, which is where if you tell it as a story, even though it’s nonfiction, if you can figure out how to tell a story. That doesn’t make, possibly false claims.
It only talks about, themes that you already know to be true. I think it’s possible, especially as you get older, you get more experienced and you have, you are a genuine expert in things. It is perfectly possible, to stay within the space where the truths you hold are truths.
You don’t need to spend a lot of time finding sources
for them.
Does that make
sense?
Tris: I think you might have changed my mind. I’m not familiar with writing non fiction as much as I am familiar with writing fiction. Perhaps this unfamiliarity
Robin: Hmm.
Tris: It means that I’ve not figured out, because you’re right, Corey writes so much stuff
constantly.
So perhaps the problem is between my keyboard and my chair.
Robin: I think that’s partly because Corey is probably first a storyteller
Tris: Yes.
Robin: I’ve never really done fiction. I fall into exactly what you’re saying. I start to try to write and I’m getting better at it, but it used to be the case.
And it still is to some extent that I would start to try and write a thesis effectively about, something that I thought was really true and really important. Then I would second guess myself on every, few words and I would have to go off and find verifiable sources draw them together and then reword and made sure that I’d chosen the exact accurate word.
describe the reality that I’ve now, spent the last half hour researching. And it’s you’re right. It’s actually impossible to produce a whole article that way. There’s no time. But I think I’ve got better. I’ve very slowly over many years honed my ability to lean into the story a little bit more and let go of the anxiety about accuracy,
Tris: I think my detractors would say that’s how I write my videos, not worrying too much about accuracy. And they are not wrong in many instances.
You’re here listening to my opinion about these languages or whatever. That only takes you so far. And I’m learning more to do due diligence.
Robin: Your videos are well sourced, and you do the errata thing as well, which is very responsible, they are broadly, like, very reliable and good sources of information, but they are also highly opinionated, and so what you’re doing primarily is you’re saying, from my experience, this is my opinion. And so the main story you’re telling is not one that is highly sourced. That bit, the this is my experienced opinion, doesn’t need sources. And that’s why you can, produce a very good video pretty
quickly.
Tris: Yeah, think you’re exactly right.
Robin: That’s fascinating. Hopefully, through this, I can find my voice a little bit.
[00:16:04] What is this podcast all about
Tris: What is this podcast all about? What can the listeners expect from you and I?
Robin: Yeah, when you, pitched this to me. I don’t know if you pitched it. I think you were like, let’s do a podcast. And I was like, hell yes. But, but what I imagined is that, we would get to talk about all of the things that we argue about, argue is a strong word that we talk about in real life, which I always find really fascinating.
I think the way that we, the way that we refine, what’s the correct, understanding of a particular topic. It’s just really fun. I’ve always really enjoyed it with you. And I think that’s, what I immediately knew that we would be doing in a podcast like this. And that’s the sort of way that I’ve always wanted to express myself to the world.
As this is my truth of how I understand things, that’s the thing that I want to share.
Tris: right there are enough podcasts in the world of two bros agreeing with each other and not challenging each other enough. Just a lot of agreements like The listener probably agrees with them, they probably agree with each other, and it’s just a lot of quite surface level stuff.
Whereas, when you and I talk, I find that we disagree a lot about things we generally agree about, and doing that allows us to get to the heart of things, get to the centre of things, decapsulate it, perhaps. We should just, talk to the Oxford Dictionary, see if they can just, like, get this word in.
I’m sure they’ll listen to us.
Robin: So that’s very interesting. You’re sort of drawing out a kind of USP there, a sort of unique selling point, of our podcast, which is about, a confrontation, like a little more confrontational, not aggressive confrontation, but a little more, back and forth, a little more challenging.
than you tend to hear, which is interesting. And I’d be interested to see if we can do it completely civilly, because I do think it’s important to do it completely civilly.
Tris: Yes, I think that is a feature of both our personalities that is very good. We, we can have arguments or discussions about the topic, not about you and me. It’s unpacking the topic. You have to have two sides pulling the threads to figure out what is going on on the inside.
I don’t want to make the middle ground fallacy where, someone says one thing, someone says the other, probably the middle ground is the same. I know that is not the case. We argue to unamity quite a lot, where you and I finally get on the same page, we figured out a clear, correct definition of what we’re talking about.
Robin: Yes, that’s right. And that’s what I’m always wanting to do with other people, but I so often find other, I’m not able to find the wavelength with the other person where we can reach that conclusion. It’s always that, we either just drift further and further apart, or they just don’t have the patience to take the time
to reach the conclusion.
Tris: and our listeners are going to have a huge advantage over us, in that I’m going to be able to edit out all of the and miscommunications, so they get quite a clean version, rather than two people trying to match their parities and get on the same page.
I very often find in conversation where it’s I’m talking to someone, I know we’re misunderstanding each other. I just want to get to the point where we’re both talking about the same thing. And that’s what the listeners will be able to get. It sounds really great, I wish we could have that for real life.
Robin: Yeah. I think you and I are pretty good at it. I think we’re both interested finding that, that place. And we naturally, as you say, are not doing, we’re not trying to do ad hominem attacks, right? I think that’s really crucial.
I think that’s really crucial. I think that’s really in between people in life. Um, people are jumping to this, these ad hominems. They want to, oh, the fact that you have that crazy opinion that I couldn’t possibly agree with means that you are, some kind of messed up monster,
Tris: Right,
Robin: and once you’re there, there’s no resolution, I don’t think, probably. But,
Tris: I also think that this kind of, this kind of discussion, although it, I worry that it sounds like we’re going to talking about a lot of highbrow, theoretical, sociological, political stuff, but I think this way of approaching deciding a programming package to use, just as useful for incredibly concrete questions.
Because the secret of extremely concrete questions is that they’re not concrete. We, as programmers, we have to, at the start of a project, choose various technologies to use. Are we going to use WordPress? Are we going to use Ruby on Rails? Are we going to Just get a square space, a site for this, which, which is the right way to go.
Are we going to have a completely bespoke thing or are we going to do whatever? And in those discussions, though perhaps to the unassuming listener, they might think, just going to talk about the positives and negatives. Of course, that is not what happens.
Dave, Dave who has only ever used Ruby on Rails, of course wants to use Ruby on Rails. Alice, who’s only ever used Squarespace, only wants to use Squarespace. Like we all bring our biases to the table. So this way of talking, we plan to talk about concrete web technologies or organization methodologies and as well as perhaps some more, psychology, politics or, other
topics like that.
Robin: To me, this is, really central to good engineering. I look at the software industry in my bias, and I see all of these people who believe themselves to be perfectly rational, haven’t realized or confronted Their own bias.
They haven’t inspected it. They haven’t considered the idea that they have bias. And they think that there is a perfectly rational meritocratic space where they’re holding on these discussions and coming to these great solutions. But in fact, there’s a class of engineers who, who have amplified voices in the room and other classes of engineers who don’t.
And almost always what happens is that somebody confidently states truth from their perspective and, a vast majority of people who probably somewhat disagree with them don’t have the metal or the, or the power or whatever in the room to say so. And that’s how most engineering decisions are made in my view. So you’re not doing that, everybody thinks they’re doing this rational balancing of pros and cons exercise and they just don’t. aren’t most of the time. And I’ve tried very, very hard in my job and in my practice of software engineering to, really think about the social patterns that enable, that proper expression of the pros and cons all of the possible angles from which Ruby on Rails might be a better choice and the nuance and the different ways in which those strengths might be presented and the fact that each of those weights are very fuzzy, qualitative, quite likely unquantifiable statements that require an empathetic space where you can properly try and inhabit it. What sort of a user is doing this? What are they? What are they going to feel like? Why would they think that the optimization of this particular interface is actually going to make their lives that just feel that bit easier than the optimization of performance over there, right? Like it’s always this fuzzy, difficult space to try and unpick those.
But if you can reach a place of empathy and hearing all those points of view, you can, in my view, make the right choice. Do you know what I mean?
Tris: Yes, absolutely.
The assumptions came first. And the evidence was inconsequential. I think this is something that is common to the human condition, is that this is my experience of the world, and you trust it by default.
Your gut instinct just, you know, Drives you around the world and occasionally your brain, you know, your higher brain wakes up and Thinks about things a little bit and wonders about the nature of the self sleep we all have the, this initial reaction.
And then we seek evidence to confirm the initial reaction. And it’s something that I’m trying to work on quite a lot. I’m only really becoming aware of it recently.
Robin: Yeah. And one of the ways you’re trying to work on it is by, um, having a obstinate and annoying sort of devil’s advocate that you talk
to
weekly on
Tris: it.
Really, I think probably this is, like therapy. So I appreciate, I appreciate that Robin, and obviously your check is in the mail, um, as they say. Therapy is very expensive, I, I appreciate.
Robin: Oh no, no, my, my services are free actually.
Tris: Well, that’s
jolly
good.
Robin: I don’t charge
[00:24:26] Blogging
Tris: so you’ve talked a bit about your love of writing and readers who go to your,
blog, robinwinslow. uk, you’re welcome,
just give me those advertising dollars after the show, thanks, we’ll see, dozens, hundreds are there?
How much have you written, Robin? I’m scrolling through now, and it is astonishing,
Robin: It’s probably hundreds, but it’s such a low, speed of output. It’s over a very long time. And they jump all over the place. I probably should, uh, go through and Find the ones that I am most proud of and surface them up. That would be quite helpful.
Tris: yeah, like on YouTube, when you’re a channel admin, you can feature one video for new viewers to show on the channel page. And you can show a separate video for returning viewers. You don’t have to do this, I’m just telling you for interest. Here’s the one you show to new people.
What is this all about? Why should I care? And the returning one can be a bit quirkier, which is quite interesting. Again, I don’t know if that is possible on your, static site generator. What I wanted to talk to you about is that you said you find it difficult to maintain focus
when writing.
I sympathize. Happens to me all the time. And also I
note that it’s been a while since you’ve
written anything on the blog.
Robin: Hmm.
Tris: they
linked? What’s been going on there? Maybe I can help.
Robin: It certainly is linked. I have a lot of things. I’ve always been overflowing with ideas of what I could write.
But the only things I’ve ever successfully written have been written in one
sitting. I don’t think I’ve ever really Successfully written something and then come back and edit it the next day
or the next week
Tris: Oh, that is an ADHD mood, isn’t it?
Robin: yeah.
So either I write it and I publish it or I write it and it goes in a back drawer forever. I don’t know that I mind only writing and publishing stuff in one sitting. Actually some of the people I really respect are people who seem to just throw thought pieces up, immediately.
Every, they’ll have a thought on a day and just throw it up. I think I’d quite like that, I’d to be able to just be like, okay, here’s the thought, publish, done. I’d probably also like
an outlet where I’m crafting significant works of writing. I think the thing that I’ve always felt would really help me there was like a writing, group. Or like buddies, like somebody who somewhere where I’d feel something of a commitment to this community to be doing my work and helping them with their work. And I thought that would help me.
Tris: I think so. It’s not November yet, but you know about NaNoWriMo.
Robin: I do. How is it a community? I know it is
a sort
of community but it feels, personal.
Tris: Yes,
that’s the joy and horror of writing, is that you sit in front of the page, and it’s just you and the page. Doesn’t matter, with your loving family around, with all your friends, with people online telling you to, get those 1600
words a day for NaNoWriMo. Like, when you sit down, it’s you versus yourself, I suppose. Um, is writing a mental health condition.
I, oh dear.
Robin: I’ve always felt one of the good things about writing, is it helps me anchor myself. I think if I did it more,
I would have more confidence. You’re always saying how I’m.
Second guessing my own opinions and stuff like that, and I do, I come in with skepticism about my own position all of the time, and I think that’s actually been quite a limiting, instinct that I have, because to be able to make impact you have to have confidence in something.
You have to believe in, you have to, you have to be able to stay on a track, because you believe in yourself, when I write stuff, it helps to make it clear that is my opinion, if I could then, publish it and have, people notice and maybe even be interested or agree.
That would help me feel like my thoughts were worth something. I think
Tris: yeah.
So I think the NaNoWriMo forums and movement, tries to bring in a little bit of that. Because you’ve got encouragement, which is nice on one side, but can be a double edged sword. And you’ve also got. Accountability, and I think it is the accountability that really works for me because I never do anything unless I’m accountable for it.
I think this is a big ADHD mood, let me know what you think. The deadline doesn’t matter until it’s in my face and I either put pen to paper virtually now or I am going to fail. So I’m suddenly accountable. I’m not accountable yesterday, but I was accountable today because the deadline is midnight.
It happens a lot with university students, but it continues through life with people with ADHD. Certainly it happened with me. Though I have completed NaNoWriMo once, Oh, I, it’s 1600 a lot. I don’t do that for anything. I do 400 a day for Lost Terminal.
It makes you accountable because you’ve got this deadline every single day. It’s granular, it taught me there are granular deadlines. I’ve got to do 600
words today. It
doesn’t matter about tomorrow. it doesn’t matter what I did yesterday.
Just keep on going. That taught me a very important
lesson. I
wonder if it would be a useful framework for you to think about.
Robin: I think it would be useful. The other thing I struggle with is, creating space in my day to
sit down and do this stuff.
Tris: You’re
Robin: know.
Tris: fair enough.
Robin: You say that. But if you want space for anything, you have to create it. I don’t think that’s necessarily
different. Yes,
It probably needs to be done a bit more deliberately when you
are a father, when you have significant demands on your time. But ultimately it’s true anyway, I think, and you’re very good at it. You have the things that you want to do and you make sure that you’ve scheduled them in and you’ve created the space I need to do the same. I don’t know that, I guess I wouldn’t even know whether once I sit down and say, okay, now I’ve got an hour to do some writing.
Whether I would succeed because I’ve never done that.
Tris: A quote by Neil Gaiman, he says to be a writer is very simple. You sit down and put one word in front of the other until it is done. It is that simple and that hard. And that is how I think about writing.
I never found timeboxing working for me. I’m trying to put tasks into my day and schedule them by hour or blocks it’s not really working. What does work for me with writing, is a word count limit per day.
I schedule that, between seven and nine is my writing time. That is a legacy from when I worked the programming mines every day as a salaried programmer, because I had to do all my writing before work. That is the best time for me, because after work, I’m too tired, and even if I’m not tired, my brain is full of the things it, during the day, it’s full of sprint planning meetings, encapsulated objects, networking, and all kinds of nonsense, what I want to do is wind down, I don’t want to be creative, I can’t be creative, I’m most creative, after I’ve woken up, which is this slot.
And so I have the slot where I sit in front of my machine and I have this small, really small, 400 words it’s a page for this 400 words to do and that is the only way I could do things. Lost Terminal the first season was not like this. It was exactly as you’ve described. I have to publish it in one sitting.
Or I have to write it and finish it in one sitting. So that’s how I wrote the first episode, in a fugue state, after I’d listened to, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor’s podcast, Start With This. I got about five episodes in, and I was like, oh my god, I have to make something. And it was really inspiring.
I’ll put the link in the show notes. It’s really fantastic. We certainly must talk about Start With This at another point. I’m going to make a note of that, Start With This. I just, in a fugue state, wrote the whole first episode. And then I did the same for the second episode and the third.
I had to do things all in one sitting. The first season is really short for that reason. Once the first season took off. I had some patrons, people were giving me really great feedback. Only like five, this wasn’t a wild success right off the bat.
That was four years ago and I have about 250 patrons now, which is wonderful, but the progress is linear. There was never an explosion and it was quite slow and methodical, which at the time felt disheartening. You can’t look into the future at your possible success because that doesn’t really exist yet.
And, so Season 2, I learned to be a real
writer and started taking one week to write an episode. Split over 400 words a day. That really worked for me. I don’t know if that helps you.
Robin: I think it would help. I think you’re right. Being like, this is my word limit. And I’m more
likely to do,
what I
naturally do, which is decide That I, haven’t finished yet and steal moments here and there to do the thing. So that might work.
I also, like your idea of doing it before work in the morning, although sometimes I’m inspired by things during the day that make me want to, write stuff.
Tris: The way I think about when to write, I don’t know if you’ve thought about the best time for you, but the best time for me is morning. I think me and Salvador Dali think the same on this regard, is that I, and maybe this is why it might be different for you, is that I’m writing fiction.
I am creating out of nothing, out of just my brain, everything that happens. I don’t have to do any research. I don’t have to, look up anything.
At least not for the creation part of it. It’s not synthesis. It’s pure fiction, pure creation. Dali found himself most creative When he just woke up he would sit in a chair with a bunch of keys in his hand over a metal plate and have a nap, just as his eyes close and he goes into that nap, he drops the keys, you know, sleeping, so his hand opens and he drops the keys in his sleep, crashes into the metal plate and wakes him up, then he goes to the easel and starts painting.
Dali’s amazing, we’ve actually got a Dali print in my parents house that my mum dumpster dived from a
skip in the area that Dali lived. Someone was just demolishing a house and mum was going, walking past it, looked in and was like, oh, there’s a signed print of Dali in here that the builders have thrown out.
I guess I’ll have that. So there we go. Now she has a signed Dali
print. When I
wake up, I feel like I’m focused because I’ve not yet read Hacker News, I’ve not yet read Reddit, I’ve not yet watched any YouTube
videos, my mind is as fresh as it’s gonna
be.
Robin: I think it could work. The problem is I don’t go to bed early enough. I think if I went to bed early, then getting up early would be much more of an option.
Tris: Did you find that things settled down a bit with ADHD meds? Do you mind
talking about that?
Robin: Oh, no, I don’t mind talking about it at all.
I’ve definitely been on the meds and stayed up
very, very late. To start with, I felt kind of wired into the evening.
So I thought the meds were still doing something
and that’s not true anymore. Now I’m really exhausted by 10 at night. I basically think that the sleep thing and the meds are not exactly related. I had a more organized day, but nonetheless I get into the evening and there’s something that’s keeping me up.
they call it revenge bedtime procrastination. Yes. So I’m trying to get revenge on the world or myself or something. That feels very accurate to me. It’s also a shame
and fear thing for some reason. Lately, like last week or so, I feel on top of it.
Tris: Aw.
Robin: The meds are fantastic, and knew that most recently because I’d run out, and had four or five days without any. Got my 70, which is the high dose I’ve gone on to. And then I took it and the difference between that day and the previous day was so stark, so stark,
Tris: Hey, are we, 70mg elvanse buddies?
Robin: we are, we’re exactly that.
Yes.
Tris: Aw. That’s nice. Yeah. That’s the level that worked for me as well. When I don’t take, I do intentionally not take them now and then. Very often at a lazy Saturday. day or a lazy Sunday or sometimes both,
Just to kind of reset and check,
do I still need to take these?
And it is very obvious that I do because I’m like. Oh No, this is what
it was like. No, no, no, no, no. I can’t go back. This is no good. I need the good
brain chemicals.
Robin: My wife’s been encouraging me to see what kind of services there are for more like ADHD counseling,
Because obviously there’s two different ways that you can tackle ADHD.
You can have the
medication and you can have, more like management techniques, ideally you’re doing both, but I don’t know all that much about the management techniques side. Like I definitely know some things and I’ve obviously got my own coping mechanisms that I had. before anyway. And I think quite a lot of those are quite helpful and I’ve got quite a lot of techniques, but, I still think there could be a hell of a lot more to learn. And I, think that would be good for me. So that’s another thing I’m going to be exploring
Tris: oh, interesting.
Robin: know when exactly.
Tris: I’ve never, explored that avenue because luckily for me, I just needed the meds and then my existing coping mechanisms were working a little better I’m building all my own and I think about this all the time I’ve got a little bit more space to optimize my systems.
I don’t have a family and a full time job. I’m just living the dream of a writer who can closet myself somewhere and keep on writing some of my writing is, to myself, about thinking about how my systems should work. When you have,
Those sessions, I would love to talk to
you about it in a future episode.
Talking about mechanisms for being productive seems completely on topic for what I imagine this show to be.
Robin: Absolutely. No, of course I will be very happy
to talk about that. I don’t know if they’re
productivity. I I see them as more.
Macro psychological things than productivity itself. Over time, I have learned that,
Possibly the biggest value that I can produce is in, confidently communicating my attitude to certain problems.
I can see places where. things need solving and where a completely different way of thinking about the way to solve that or a well targeted best practice or a, process flow change, would make a big difference. Fortunately, I seem to be in a job where there’s a lot of opportunity for those sorts of things, and they’re incredibly valuable.
That means that, what’s required of me is not extended periods of focused, hard work. Instead, it leans into this meandering, Exploratory process that I think I have which means that I can see these opportunities and make good suggestions for them So that works quite well for me
Tris: Excellent, yeah. I look forward to talking about that at some point in the future.
[00:38:30] Writing Disctractions
Tris: I would like to talk, if I may, about writing distractions. You mentioned that it’s very easy to get knocked out of the flow when you go and research something. Now, you’re predominantly doing non
fiction and I’m predominantly doing fiction, so I’ve got a lot more that I
can just get into the flow
and forget about because it’s all invented.
But it must be much more difficult with non fiction.
Robin: Yeah, exactly. So that does happen to me all the time. I think what happens is
I’ll start writing where I’ve had some confidence, like I started
with some confidence about, this is my
position and this is what I want to say. And then as I’m writing it, I sort of realized that something that I’m claiming is not necessarily self evident, right?
Um,
and so then I need to immediately, I start trying to work out how to shore up my argument. Either I rephrase and rephrase and rephrase a few times. Or I go off and I start trying to read something to just make sure I’m like, oh yes, actually there’s this whole discipline here and maybe I didn’t explore that properly and it’s actually very relevant here.
So I suppose I’m thinking, always when I’m writing, I’m thinking of criticism of my writing. So I’m anticipating what people might, how people might come and tear down what I’m trying to say. And so then I realized that there’s this whole thing that needs to be read or researched or I need to go find all these links and I go off and I do that.
And that tends to then, as soon as I’m off surfing the web,
Tris: Oh yeah, um, yeah, I get lost. I fall off the wave,
I cannot imagine how people write inside a web browser. Like people who are writing directly into Google Docs, say, that means you have a web browser open. A tab is just a click away. I personally could not survive that environment. The way I write is by deleting everything. I even remove the browser on my machine, a topic for another time, but when I am in the writing mode, I don’t even have a browser installed.
You can do this with multiple user accounts or different devices, but I’m on NixOS, so I can do all kinds of weird stuff. And, because I just don’t trust myself. But there are places, even in fiction, just like with your, that you, just like in, in nonfiction, there are places where I have to be right about
things.
Historical things need to be correct, dates need to be correct, and even
what you’ve mentioned about arguments and wanting to be correct, and presenting things correctly,
that of course happens in fiction as well, especially in science fiction, which is where I’m mostly writing in
lost terminal.
Robin: That did occur to me when you were saying earlier that because you’re writing fiction, you didn’t need to check stuff or something like that. You were saying that you didn’t get interrupted so often. I was thinking about the fact
that you’ve obviously come to our shared chat group and with things like, I was thinking of writing about this, what’s a good example of a sort of technology or something.
Cause obviously you do need to do research for that. There’s a lot of research that goes into credible fiction as well.
Tris: I’m glad you brought up our Telegram group. I would never have started that conversation in the morning. For me, mornings are on Do Not Disturb mode. And for huge sections of the morning, as I said, I don’t even have a web browser available. One of the reasons that I’ve standardized on Telegram other platforms would work if they had this one feature.
Scheduled messages. It is vital for me to be able to have a thought in the morning, let’s say 7. 30, and maybe I need to send a message to you about, oh, are we still on for the recording of of the podcast, later on. But if I send that to you, you might reply and ask me questions, and then I’m in a conversation.
So what I do, I think this is the first time I’m telling you this, What I do is I schedule a message for like 11. 30 or 12 o’clock or something like that, if that makes sense for the message, with my question. And so it’s captured, it’s going to send, and as far as my brain is concerned, I’ve already asked you the question, and it’s out of my mind.
And then, I go back to writing, and I’m not distracted by your answer. Because even if I’m on Do Not Disturb, I might see your message and I might have a quick little look, which is risky. Having a glance at a browser or a messenger, super risky. So, scheduled messages, and indeed email, which works nicely because it’s, it doesn’t notify you.
If you turn off notifications, which you should do, it’s just a very asynchronous thing, I can move things along, but this is, I have a generalized solution for this that I think might work for you and maybe it might work for our listeners. The generalized case is to have modes of, modes of working, modes of thinking, modes of operating.
And those modes progress throughout the day. And they always happen the same. For my day, I’ve got about five modes separated about linearly throughout the day. A writing mode, a research mode, a bit more of an online research mode, and then a discussion mode, and then at the end of the day I’ve got a sort of a relaxing gaming, or socializing mode.
And what I do. Is I push tasks to a future mode. I’m gonna stop calling them modes. These are contexts, because I’m using the GTD terminology here, the contexts, so research tasks when I’m writing, I need to know this date, I need to know this time. I need to know this fact.
And if I open a browser. I’m done or I could be done because Wikipedia is fascinating and I can always lie to myself and say, I’m looking up networking protocols from 1976. That’s actually on topic for what I’m doing, but it’s not really. It’s very easy to lie to ourselves about things that are tangentially related.
So what I do is I make a new task for myself, write down what I’m going to do, look up this date, look up whatever, and then I tag it with. The future context I want to pick it up in. Now you’ll note that this is very similar to sending a scheduled message that, that then runs at a certain time. This is that, but for me.
So my first two modes are the chamber, which is where the writing happens. It’s a very fancy name because I’m a very fancy person. And the second mode is called library, which is where research happens. Research but no chatting, no browser, or rather no general purpose browser. I use a separate browser that doesn’t have YouTube logged in, it’s got everything blocked, that sort of thing.
If I’m writing
something,
and I
need to think of something, I write in a
little to do, and I tag it, library, and then I
keep writing, I keep the flow
going. That
generalized case works for my whole
day.
Robin: There are things about your process that I’m, that I’ll find very useful. And in fact, I think you might’ve been the person that really introduced me properly to the concept of scheduled messages.
And I have made, I have made, significant use of
scheduled messages since I realized how powerful they could be because they are in more and more places.
I can schedule emails in Outlook. I can schedule,
um, I can
schedule messages in
Slack. In, for work, and it’s really the scheduled messages in Slack that I’ve used
most.
Robin: And I do use them in that very way, I know I want to say this thing to this person, but I don’t want to say it now because it will start this whole conversation and I don’t want to, now’s not the time for the conversation.
So I definitely do that. I think there’s a big difference between you and me broadly in this kind of regimented organizational space because I’m,
I don’t think I can be organized in that way. I think I will always immediately react against it. I need to have a lot of techniques that are at my disposal that I’m practiced enough to be good at so that any moment I can work out how to use them dynamically to manage myself better. But I can’t, I don’t think, say, Okay, I’m going to have this designed context, and I’m going to switch into that context, and now I’m in that context, and I’m going to stay there. And now I’m moving into this other context, and now I’m going to stay there. I don’t think I can do that. That’s not going to work for me.
Tris: Fair enough. It’s a very weird way of, working and I’m still learning how to make it work for me. But, so you, you need to solve the problem then of what happens when
you run out of time. You
said earlier that you can, you tend to only be able to publish
stuff that you write and finish in
one sitting.
But that is incompatible with being, with regular writing, it seems to me. Is that something you want to improve?
Robin: I think I need to figure out how to
not just do that.
I need to, I think the structure of my life
is such, I think that the bit that’s harder to change
and possibly impossible to
change is the fact that I’m
unpredictable and my day is unpredictable.
Tris: Yes.
Robin: And so I think therefore I need mechanisms that accommodate for that.
And so writing wise as well, I need to somehow find a hook that allows me to. Pick up to continue a thread over, over a couple of sittings, which makes more sense to the way that I think generally, because I am a big fan of asynchronicity. I just need a thing to pull me back into it.
That’s what’s missing. What happens is I have a thought and I’m very enthusiastic about this idea.
Tris: Yes.
Robin: And then I. I get started on it, something happens, and I drift off, and I’ve completely lost the thread. In the emotional sense, I’ve completely lost the thread of that obsession,
And now it’s gone.
And all I need is something that keeps a line back to that thought, that topic, that,
That obsession.
Tris: This happens in discussion. I dream of some imaginary system that keeps track of all the subjects in a discussion with friends. Because you sort of get forked off on one topic and then maybe you’ll come back to the first topic or maybe you’ll fork to a third topic and it spreads out like a tree and I might be very excited by number two and I’ve got a reply to number two and I want to add to the conversation and I’m thinking about it.
But then, oh no, the conversation is forked to subject
three. And I’m also excited by that and I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say for subject two.
Uh, sorry, your description gave me PTSD because this is how it’s like in every conversation I’m
in. The answer, I think, maybe for both of us might be note taking or outlining
Robin: When you’re talking about it with the conversations, I think note taking is that is very powerful. And I do, I’ve,
When you and I were having a
conversation live in, in, in Meatspace,
In London, you got out your, is it a remarkable? I’m not quite sure.
Tris: is, yep, best tablet. Right. Exactly.
Robin: And you were taking notes and, I, I knew immediately why you were doing it and I think it worked very well and I would like to do something similar and that’s very helpful,
but that doesn’t
exactly work for the writing
thing. I don’t think, because obviously the notes are already there, because
they are the, what I wrote,
but I don’t quite know how to yeah, attach myself back to the thing. If I had a,
if I had a partner, this is why I feel like I need other people.
Because if I had somebody else, that, that cared about it, then I would immediately, that, that would draw me back into it, and then I’d have no trouble.
Tris: Like pair programming. It’s much more focused when you’re working with a pair
Robin: Exactly. Yes. All of the ways in which I have thought about good ways to program It’s
funny, isn’t it?
I now realize are, me
trying to design coping strategies for my ADHD. And I think a lot of the software industry is, I think there’s so many things, even to the point of the features that get implemented in devices, things like dark mode and not just that, there was another big one that I was thinking of recently.
Tris: Like collapsing a sidebar maybe get that out of my I
Robin: maybe, yeah, like I feel like there’s a, it was quite clear to me when I thought about a couple of different features that I’ve forgotten, but if they come back to me I’ll mention them, but that they were designed from quite a specific sort of psychological experience. Do you see what I mean?
Tris: I do this there is a point in devin price’s book unmasking autism that I think applies to
ADHD as well as autism he says very confidently and matter of
factly that the internet was created By and for autistic
people.
Robin: Yes.
Tris: And though that is a large sweeping statement, I can see what he’s saying there.
Robin: Yes. And it’s interesting that is denobias. And it means that we’ve built a global system that isn’t designed for everybody.
Tris: Possibly. I think there is a larger term for it. discussion about whether affordances for people with autism and disabilities actually often benefit everyone. Like ramps are great for everyone, not just for people in wheelchairs. I think it’s, that’s how I think about
the affordances for people with autism and ADHD, because if you can hide the
sidebar, then that’s great for people with ADHD who’d be distracted by it, especially if there’s like notifications and stuff in there.
But actually, Even if you don’t have ADHD you
might want to hide the sidebar for numerous reasons,
Robin: So that’s absolutely true. And I don’t want to also minimize the fact that there is a lot that’s not accessible or in tech all
over the
place. And it’s horrible. And I discovered
recently something that I hadn’t Even
thought of. I just saw this thing on
mastodon of somebody complaining about captures and about how,
Captures are broadly not compatible with the screen reader.
And so If you’re blind, and you encounter like anything where you encounter a capture, you’re just suddenly stuck. A lot of the time. And that was something that’s such a huge thing that I hadn’t occurred to me. I’m sure there are accessible ways to deal with that and they must have been implemented, but
Tris: Yes, very often you’ll find a capture has a speak button. I have
a play button that where you can hear the capture, but I agree, not every one and maybe not most of them.
Robin: Exactly. I have no idea the proportion. I only discovered this morning, so I haven’t looked into it. But,
but yeah, No. So I don’t want to minimize
that. That’s
absolutely true. And I’m not claiming that,
Neurodivergent people. Are broadly accommodated well by, the web in any sense. But I do think if you look at it and you look at some of those features, it’s not that they don’t help everybody. They do, but by spending effort there, you’re all, there’s always an opportunity cost, right?
You’re always not spending effort somewhere else. And so the sum of all of the places where you’ve chosen to spend effort represents a huge opportunity cost of stuff that you haven’t therefore spent effort
on. And I feel a bit like that might well be the case That software broadly, even in the things that we design, that have been quite, that we all think are a good thing, is skewed quite significantly towards a particular sort of person that’s overrepresented within The software industry. And I find that quite fascinating. And I also feel I’ve come to these conclusions about really good ways to run teams and all this kind of thing, and I think they’re really effective. And I haven’t seen any evidence that’s not true. I think my ideas are quite good ones, but they almost certainly are a lot more biased than I realized. Towards the fact that I’m trying to accommodate for my own psychological habits and assuming that they are general. When they’re probably not as general as I think they are.
Tris: I think that’s a very good introspection. Maybe I think
that, designing things for autistic people would benefit everyone because I am autistic. Yes, how would I know? How would I know otherwise? I,
Robin: so I don’t know what you do about that. It’s trying to have a good diversity within the
community, isn’t it? Ideally demographically, everybody would be represented Roughly equally within equally to like their proportion in society, or something like that.
I’m not quite sure but it’s an example of of how that how that lands.
[00:53:23] Bottom-up Thinking
Tris: I think what this podcast is going to be is a large, wide discussion of our interests, which includes, but not limited to tech, internet, the tools that you would use in a. digital information world to project management to do Note taking that sort of thing.
I’m certainly very interested in those and as well as Things that are tangentially related to our lives. I’ve got videos on non standard sleep systems non standard learning methods DIY computing I’ve got a lot of thoughts about AI and art and that sort of thing. But that’s only looking backwards at what I’ve talked about before.
I imagine way more scope for us to talk about the many different layers of things that I’m interested in. I’m also excited for the other 50%, which is your contribution, what you’re interested in.
Robin: Yeah, exactly. So I think that’s a great summary. I think that is exactly what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to focus on the things we’re interested in, and we’re both interested in, understanding and defining those things that we care about as truthfully as we can, together, right? And that’s what this is about.
I realized as you were talking about those different systems, like the way that it’s coding and the way that people might try and organize their lives. When we’re talking about all of those topics, for me, I suppose, one way or another, I always think about them as socio technical systems.
As in, I always think about all these things as like an interaction between. Atomic actors, and I sort of graph them in my head and try and see all the ways in which they subtly pull on each other, and that sort of thing. I’m interested in any space where I can.
Do that sort of interrelational analysis. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know if that’s helpful, I think in technical systems, this is obvious because these interactions are explicit And then when it comes to organizational systems, it’s the same for me because there’s all these different instincts that are pulling the self in different directions.
And then you’ve got all these different techniques that interact with each other and have feedback mechanisms. And it’s the same in politics. It’s the same in groups of, how humans choose to group themselves in the world. My Master’s was Interactive Systems Design, and I think it must have been somewhere around the time I did my Master’s that I started to use this as a pattern for interpreting the world at large, and now I just enjoy seeing all sorts of things in the world as some version of these systems.
Sociotechnical systems.
Tris: I didn’t know that was your master’s, that’s very interesting. I wonder if maybe we could summarize our different approaches to things. I wonder if we could summarize our approaches to unpacking these topics as a little more top down and a little more bottom up, where I’m, I look at things very much from the bottom up.
Would that be a good ? Rule of thumb?
Robin: I think I do, look at things top down. As in, I see, I think I prefer to draw things down to It’s difficult to say exactly what top down and what bottom up mean. But I think for me, I see things as having certain foundational properties. That then influence the shape of everything around them.
And I’m always trying to draw out those foundational properties so that we can better understand how everything else is oriented by those.
Tris: There is something to be said for the bottom up approach of getting all your ducks in a row, getting all of the data discovered. rather than a top down approach. This was something that I, researched and talked about in my autism video. I’m sure the listeners probably know that I’m autistic.
You certainly do. And I think all my friends certainly do. The behavioral patterns that we see in people with autism are varied and sometimes contradictory. But
a very common trait is bottom up thinking. And I got this from the book, Unmasking Autism, by Dr. Devon Price, I highly recommend it, if you haven’t read it already,
Robin: I haven’t read it.
Tris: Half of my video’s research was inspired by the revelations in that book, I thought I knew everything about my condition, and then, Devon was like, here’s all the things.
A bottom up approach to life was inspired by, by unmasking autism. Devon was really nice and ruined my life because I was ready to publish, I was gonna do it on Monday. He replied to my inquiry email on Friday saying, Sorry I missed your email, I hardly ever use email.
Yes, I’d be delighted for you to feature my book. Here is a PDF, please don’t share it. I hadn’t based any of my video on any of his work, though I had heard of his book.
Obviously, I’d emailed him. Anyway, I read it over the weekend, and after the first chapter, I was like, oh no, I have to rewrite my entire video because this is so good. The first chapter of information was so amazing. So I rewrote my video on Saturday, and then that Saturday evening, I read chapter two.
And I was like, oh no, I have to rewrite my video again. And so Sunday I rewrote it again, but I’d learned my lesson, I finished the book. And so then over the next two weeks, there was so much more to learn and so much more detail, like, it’s all very well writing about programming, making a video about programming.
Here’s this cool feature of the language, x, y, z, and you can just look up this information, find it, and it’s good. Even if you can’t find the information online, even if it’s completely novel, you can test out your idea with programming. You can write a program and run it,
and it’ll either work or it won’t.
And so you’ve got a lot of confidence when writing about
programming, whereas with any mental health condition, absolute nightmare.
So this bottom up approach
really, really, came from, came from that.
Robin: Yeah. But I’m not sure that that’s necessarily the same thing as what I’m talking about. I think it’s related
Tris: Oh, yeah,
Robin: obviously,
there’s a lot of overlap
between autism and ADHD but I identify with
the ADHD
part and I don’t think I identify with the Autism side of things, particularly, and I don’t think I particularly identify with the bottom up ness because I think a lot of my structures of
thinking are also top down.
Tris: That’s a very good way of looking at it. Whereas I am autistic and I cannot see things from the top down. a A blessing and a curse in many ways. Ideally you would use both, which you do a lot better than I. So I’m looking forward to hearing, as we all, as ever when talking to you, I’m looking forward to hearing your take on things, your opinion, or looking forward to the conversation that will bring out a better understanding of the topic
Robin: Yeah, I can’t help thinking though that’s not, that can’t be a perfect description because in a lot of ways, a bottom up approach that you’re describing sounds like it’s much more decomposed and there’s lots more Pieces that are free floating and mine sounds much more anchored because I’m talking about there being foundational things that lead to everything else, but in the way we actually live our lives, it’s the opposite.
You’re much better at having. Structure and, routine and, organizational first principles that you actually adhere to. And I am all over the place and quite unstructured and quite, quite chaotic. I feel like in a way that can’t be the, I think it’s one of those things where like you try and describe it this way, but it’s only looks that way from a particular angle.
Yeah,
if you looked at it from a different angle, it wouldn’t necessarily take that shape. So yeah.
Tris: I agreed, I was just trying to make something similar, something simple for the listeners. In fact, I think I’ve done you a disservice with it. I’m going to redefine my, my, my rule of thumb, my generalization of us, whereas you do top down and bottom up and I only do bottom up. I think that might be as fairer.
Robin: This is the thing I’m saying that the assumption that you only do bottom up, wouldn’t explain how good you are at, having clear goals and ethical rules and principles that allow you to be incredibly powerful in how you approach life.
Tris: I think it’s, I suppose these, as you say, top down and bottom up don’t really mean anything until we start to define them. And for me. A, writing a book is a top down goal, whereas the habit of sitting and writing 400 words a day is a bottom up habit. So I see these, the things that I’m good at are because of this.
bottom up way of thinking. If I do this small, low level action and I craft it well enough, then I can build upon it and eventually get to the top, which is where the goal sits, which is me, say, publishing a book.
Robin: But for that particular example, I think that’s just objectively the better approach. If you can’t write, you can’t write a book by being like, okay, I’m going to write a book now. You have to do the thing you’re talking about. It’s the only way that works.
Tris: You would not believe how many people think that you can write a book that way, and indeed would recommend sitting and letting the muses take you and when you’re bored, stand up and go outside. And then when the muses take you again, go down and do it. I mean, it’s a perfectly reasonable way to do it if it works for you, but I think that only bottom up things work.
And I, That is because I have only tried bottom up things. It is my, one of my biases is that because I think in autistic way, I have only been able to succeed with autistic thinking and autistic actions and therefore the only things that work for me are autistic ways of doing things, which is very easy for me to decide.
Look, I made a YouTube channel by doing all of these Bottom up, autistic decisions, or behaviours, or whatever. And I did the same with this, and with that, and whatever. But again, there’s no reason for that. They’ve worked for me, and they might work for others. In fact, I think probably. As you say, a lot of things should be bottom up, but the curse of somebody who has autistic traits is that a lot of things should be top down as well.
And if you can’t access that way of thinking as easily, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage.
Robin: Yes. Yeah. Fair enough. I’m very interested actually at some point, probably not right now in drawing out how much of those things are much more are common to humans, much more broadly than autism. Because it seems to me that the, what I see in you is a lot of very well refined techniques that you need Because you have a particular need of them, which other people might not need quite so keenly.
But nonetheless, they are the, for most people, they are the more efficient approach. That’s my belief when it comes to something like that. If you want to be a writer, you have to write 10, 000 words a day. Not maybe 10, 000, you have to write X number of words a day.
Keep doing that. You will build up and you will turn into something. That thing that, Wow, that was a great quote I heard. I don’t remember, but it was like something about how, every project, every really impressive goal, achievement that anyone has ever has only looks like a really impressive achievement when viewed from a distance.
When viewed up close, it is a thousand tiny things that on their own are not impressive. And, I think that’s just broadly true. And the idea that, it can be created because you intend because you have this strong commitment to this vision to create this huge thing.
is basically an illusion in people at large, not just in autistic people. Do you know what I mean? But I don’t know how much that’s true, but that’s where I am at the moment.
Tris: I agree. The one of the, when writing about mental health, like I have done for my ADHD and my autism videos, and I hope I will do more in the future, one of the common concerns, or pieces of feedback, is these behaviours that you’re describing and are saying are either ADHD or autism or, some other label, they’re things, they’re behaviours that humans just can do.
You’re not, it’s, you’re not flying, you’re not, walking through walls, you’re not doing things that other people can’t do. But The reason that we categorise them in these umbrellas of behaviours, is if they all happen at the same time, or a lot of them are happening, and they’re happening a lot more than usual, we’ve got, what we’ve got here could be this thing that we name autism, or whatever. Yeah, it’s, I forget what that is exactly called, but in my autism video I called it the constellation of behaviours, like one or two stars, like whatever, who knows what’s going on, but. If you get, a whole cluster of them, they might have a shape you recognise, and then you give that shape a name, and there you go.
I’m very pleased with that metaphor, for autism. I had a, I came up with it when trying to describe it to my dad. I was just, riffing and trying to explain what autism was to this, gent who definitely had autism. And was telling me that all these behaviours were normal because he’d done them his entire life.
Robin: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a really great description as well. I do really think it’s incredibly important for people Not to when it comes to mental health labels, neurodivergent,
effectively, for people not to take them as.
A single thing and a bucket and an obvious, a well defined and inflexible description that you can necessarily know exactly what it is, that it’s always a, a slight, skewing of the very normal human experience and all of the individual behaviors are. Also that and so when there’s a collection of them that together, land together in a particular way and to a particular level, then we can try and give them a label and that’s helpful because it is useful to say, Oh, you’re this kind of thing.
thing, and I’m also this thing, that’s nice. And that, and there’s lots of ways in which you can then have, target appropriate techniques at people that have that collection of characteristics, but they’re not, they’re not something that’ll, that, that, that means you can strongly separate, and I think that’s in the whole, whole of mental health, that, that is true. And that’s super important. And I think so many of the conditions, like extreme conditions, things that people assume they, they go nowhere near, Schizophrenia, right? Psychopathy. People think that they are, like, a completely different class of a person that is, wholly removed from their experience of the world.
And I think it is at all. I think they’re, certain parts of characteristics that you understand just being pushed to, just being more extreme in that person than in you, right? And the way you put it, I think is brilliant.
Tris: Thank you so much.
[01:07:42] How often?
Tris: robin? How often are we going to record? How often should a podcast like this Be published.
Robin: I, I’d like to say, show me that it matters,
Tris: Hmm.
Robin: because I have podcasts that, Publish multiple times a week that I listen to and podcasts that publish once or twice a month. And I would love it if the ones that publish once or twice a month published more often, but I’ve never considered not listening to them just because they publish infrequently.
Tris: I agree. I’m of the same mind. Although I don’t believe I subscribe to anything that is more often than a week, mostly because I don’t tend to listen to a lot of non fiction. I only listen to perhaps, two or three, three or four. Most of my listening is fiction, sci fi or fantasy or something like that.
Robin: I think maybe to start with, we should aim for monthly. Because I think to start with, it’s going to be very inefficient. You’re the one that I seems to have mostly taken on the burden of actually trying to cut all our ramblings down into something interesting and palatable.
And I think that, that sounds like a really daunting and mammoth task, and I certainly wouldn’t want to put you under any pressure to do that any quicker than it, than it takes. I think maybe we can target fortnightly as like a pipe dream. If we get all our processes really efficient and we get really practiced at recording, usable stuff most of the time, then I think.
Then I think fortnightly might be realistic, but I would say to start with, let’s not assume that we can do anything quicker than a month.
Tris: Yes, I would rather have a very high quality thing once a month than something more, reactionary or less well put together, thought out, researched, something like that.
Robin: Okay, we’ll aim to publish monthly, although I don’t think the monthly is a strict requirement. We’ll do it when it’s ready,
Tris: Hmm. I think that is fair. I should perhaps contrast with some existing schedules that I have in my life. So Lost Terminal, my science fiction. Podcast comes out every week, comes out on Monday, and because that is just me, it’s quite manageable. I’m not beholden to an editor, I’m not beholden to a collaborator, like there’s no adverts, it’s just me putting out 15 minutes of fiction every week.
So that’s how I can do it every week. The Phosphene catalog comes out every two weeks. Season 2 is hopefully going to be coming out on Halloween. And that is mostly pre recorded. I record with our mutual friend Wolfie, and, though that requires a bit more editing and perhaps a little more pickups and so forth, two weeks works very well there.
Modem Prometheus comes out every full moon, which is a nightmare because the moon drifts through the month and occasionally collides with other things like the weekly and fortnightly projects. And no boilerplate is, Monthly ish, since RSI, I’ve relaxed a little bit about it, but I certainly, I’m hoping to have one in August.
Robin: It used, when it first started, it felt, it was probably more like fortnightly, wasn’t it?
Tris: As soon as that first video, that first Rust video blew up and ruined my email inbox with a thousand comments overnight, I was like, okay, what do I need, what can I do here? I need to make another video, and so I said, right, I’ll do it every two weeks.
And then I have the classic YouTuber burnout. And now I do it about every month, but it’s movable feast, so it’s approximately every month, but I don’t hurt myself trying to publish on a certain day, not knowing in advance what could be happening that week.
Robin: And have you got any impression that the different publishing schedules between those different productions makes any difference? Has any impact on? The audience.
Tris: They might not, you know. The audience, I think, were you to ask them. Your listeners, your viewers. They would always want more. That’s perfectly reasonable. I want, I would like to watch more of the things that I like as well. So they can’t be trusted to ask that question. And I don’t think, people didn’t unsubscribe when I went down from every two weeks to, every month.
Things have been going from strength to strength. In fact, I think the quality of my output Has been getting higher and I now do longer videos like my ADHD video was 19 minutes long. It nearly killed me but I was able to do that. I couldn’t have done that in just a quick two week turnaround.
Robin: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think that a month is enough. I suppose the danger would be if it felt like it had dried up, right? If somebody thought, Oh, I don’t even know if this person’s like publishing anymore. That would then be bad. Then you’d probably lose subscribers.
But I think as long as you’re clearly still pushing content out.
Tris: Yes, uh, and typically a lot of podcatchers, which is what a podcast client is called, they tend to have like an automated little badge when you’re looking down, perhaps in search results or in the main page of a feed, they’ll say that the title, the author, a little description, you know, whatever, the logo, but also the podcatcher itself might how regular the podcast is.
Robin: Okay, I don’t think we want to have a really strict schedule. We want to try and release it when it’s ready. But I think we do also want to try and make it regular ish. So we don’t want like the next gap to be more than like 50 to 150 percent of the previous gap.
Tris: Yes, I think we could aim for monthly, with a date that we commit to, at the very least in private, between
ourselves.
Robin: Yeah, exactly. Cool. Okay. That sounds good to me.
[01:13:14] Conclusion
Tris: I’m having a really great time, as I always do, chatting with you, Robin. And thank you very much for your time here. This sort of discussion of tech and art and that sort of thing
I wouldn’t usually talk about this sort of thing, day to day. Usually I would, stay in my house all day, every day, just writing, and producing and, being a digital hermit.
So it’s a great pleasure.
Robin: I’m really enjoying it too. I’ve always wanted to, have more of these sorts of discussions. And, there’s very little opportunity in, normal life. So thank you so much for, suggesting the podcast. And I think it’s, I think it’s going well. I really enjoyed it.
Tris: Pleasure. Pleasure. I will talk to you next
week. We’ll do some more taping. And I suppose our listeners will hear from us. In a month.

Ver todos los episodios