Tris and Robin continue comparing desk ergonomics, with Tris describing his setup, but quickly switches to discussing the VALUE of ergonomics itself, and suggests Powerlifting. We both discuss our mental writing tools, and the benefits of habit chaining, and end with a bonus segment on what the heck happened to port 23 this year.

📖 CHAPTERS

• 00:00:00 - Ergonomics update
• 00:25:50 - Writing tools
• 01:05:21 - THE EMAIL CARTEL
• 01:27:30 - What happened to Telnet? (free patreon segment)

🔗 LINKS

Ours

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

🔗 EXTERNAL

• https://www.labs.greynoise.io/grimoire/2026-02-10-telnet-falls-silent/

🧑 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

Tris: [00:00:00] So before we get started, uh, my apologies, I have a cold. Uh, I took a train last weekend to see my parents and like any public transport, it’s a, a lovely hive of, uh, of, of bacteria and viruses. Um, but it’s fine. Uh, my apologies if I’m sounding a bit bunged up, a bit sniffly. Hopefully I’ll, uh, edit out all of the coughing.

That’ll be fun. Right. Follow-up. Follow-up. Last time we talked about your workspace and the optimizations you’ve made, Robin, and the… We had a bit of… We had a few questions about what my workspace is. Um, and I realized I didn’t, I didn’t mention it. Um, I just kind of negged your

Robin: workspace. The implication being that yours is 1,000 times better, but without putting, you know, your money where your mouth is.

Yeah.

Tris: At, at least. Surely at least 1,000 times better. At least 1,000. So I’ll… Well, I have… I’ve, I’ve been through a lot of ergonomic, uh, tweaks and ch- and optimizations over the course of my life, um, which I blame on two things. One, programmers get paid too much, so we have to waste them on stupid things like this.

And the second thing is that I’ve always tried to- Uh, I’ve always been a bit afraid of RSI, um, so I wanted to, like, s- solve that before it happened. But I think mostly it’s sort of quite trendy, trendy stuff. Um, of course, the joke was on me. A few years ago, I did get RSI in a catastrophic way. So, uh, my desk setup, I don’t have the world’s most perfect keyboard, the Apple, the Apple keyboard.

I’m so sorry. I, I’ve got a split-

Robin: Well, something for the future.

Tris: I can save up for it, perhaps.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: I’ve got a, a split ergonomic keyboard. I’m a big fan of split keyboards because, uh, you take the left side of the keyboard and the right-handed side, and you move them apart, and you’re no longer kind of hunched over this one plank of, uh, of keys.

Um, and, uh, the one I’ve got at the moment is by a company called Mo, uh, Mo Ergo. It’s called the, uh, the Go60, which is, uh, Bluetooth and has built-in touchpads, which is quite a novelty. For years before this, this is– I only got them, I only got this, uh, perhaps in January, uh, for, uh, just, just a month ago. Uh, for years, I loved ZSA keyboards.

Um, I’ve had every one they’ve ever made. The Voyager, I think, is the, uh, is the, the, the perfect, perfect keyboard. These are all very expensive. I don’t necessarily recommend them for everyone, but they are quite fun. Uh, in between those two halves of the keyboard, I’ve got a little music keyboard, um, a little music piano, two-octave, half-size key piano because I spend a lot of my time composing and a lot of my time playing music.

And, uh, above that, I’ve got a large 4K screen LG. Not sure what the size is, but, like, the larger the better as far as I’m concerned. Um, and below it, I’ve got the Raspberry Pi, uh, display as a secondary monitor. And this is all sitting on a standing desk because before I did powerlifting, I– Standing was the only, only way that stopped my back constantly getting injured due to slouching and posture stuff.

Robin: Hey, can I, can I ask?

Tris: Please.

Robin: Do you feel like… I know I said that I wasn’t interested in powerlifting. Um- But I am-

Tris: Great …

Robin: um, to some extent.

Tris: Um,

Robin: I am to this, to, to this degree. Um- Would you suggest therefore that powerlifting is a much more significant improvement than standing desks? And does that mean that you wouldn’t, like you’re less…

Like you feel the need for a standing desk less keenly if you’ve got your exercise routine down? Do you know what I mean?

Tris: I do. Uh, and the, the answer is absolutely yes. Um, I, in January, uh, a month ago, I, I put out my lat- latest video, which is powerlifting for programmers or h- hack your brain with powerlifting.

And one of the, one of the insights that I said that I’d received in, in that, in that video is that strength is better than ergonomics. Like it’s better not to require the compromised, the, the compromises and affordances. It is better to just be strong and not need them.

Robin: Because I feel like, you know, you say you’ve gotta be hunched over this like central thing.

I feel like I’ve always, um, I suppose in a way taken a little bit of pride in the fact that I can sit in a cafe, I can sit on the sofa in someone’s house. I can, you know, I just carry my laptop around. I’m not expecting my laptop to be any particularly special laptop. It’s just the one that I have available.

Um, I can just use the keyboard that I’m, that I’m given. And, and-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: to some extent, [00:05:00] the, the, the fact that I’m rather than buying the things that will adjust my environment to what I feel I need, I’m, um, I’m saying, “No, I’m not gonna let myself do that.” I’m going to train myself to continually adjust to whatever it is that, that my, that my tech requires me to do so I can just do my work in any, in any scenario, in any context, um, feels a little bit similar to what you’re saying about strength.

Tris: You’re absolutely right. It is much better to be able to sit on a train for four hours with a laptop and type comfortably and use the machine in whatever way you like, which is a novel thing for me. I didn’t used to be able to do that. Um, it is much better to, to do that than What happened to me about a year or two ago where I could no longer type on a laptop because my, my hands were just so painful and I had to rest them for long periods of time.

Strength is much better than that, but you’re a lot more active than I. Um, you’ve, you’ve got a young family, so you’re like wrangling, been wrangling kids for years and I, I feel like you are more, uh, more active. Do you do any sports, Robin, that I, I don’t know about?

Robin: Well, I did tennis, um, for a while.

Tris: Right.

Robin: I’m not the most sporty person in the world at all. Mm. Um, I am, but instead I’m, I’m just fidgety. Um, like I, you know, I think, I think a lot of your problems come from sitting still in one aspect and doing a repetitive- Yeah … action like typing or whatever, and I think I’ve just like, part of my problem in life is that I’m not able to do that.

Tris: Yes.

Robin: You know? Um, so I m- so I move around a lot. Um, and now I do a lot of running. Um, yeah. Now I do a lot of running and I’d love to play more tennis and I’d love to find a sport that I can get into, but I haven’t been super sporty. I’m probably more fit now than I’ve been at any point in my, like, 20s or 30s, I feel like

Tris: Right.

I think probably that active, the, the, the fact that you’re just fidgety and active and, and, like, on the move all the time, that’s, that’s gotta help a lot because I– what really triggered my RSI, like, that opened the floodgates, was when I became self-employed and started typing for 16 hours a day. Like, I, I didn’t need to go anywhere, I didn’t need to do anything, and I could just do whatever I wanted.

But of course, that, that monkey’s paw, uh, be careful what you wish for, you know? It’s like, “Oh, great, you can, you can sit at a desk for 16 hours a day just like you’ve always wanted. Isn’t that great? Please enjoy,” says, you know, fate or whatever, or the genie. Uh, and of course, that caused me a lot of problems.

The, the book that, uh, that one of the two books that I drew as my primary source for the powerlifting video, video is called Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe. Although the guy is extremely controversial, the, the book is an amazing textbook. You just have to, like, do the death of the author thing and separate things out.

In it, he says three things, and I’ve got– I highlighted them down, so I would just read, read them from my highlights. Go

Robin: on. I don’t know if you can mention that he’s controversial without explaining why. I’m too curious.

Tris: Oh, he’s just, uh, a bit of a, a… Like, uh, he sounds like a very mean person. Um, like, he, he, he’s, he, he was a little bit misogynistic in the book, and on his podcast, he’s by far worse.

Robin: Right. So, I mean, I think that’s important to say because you’re basically saying, like, obviously there are-

Tris: True …

Robin: there are scientists who have fabricated studies, and if they wrote books and then you were trying to say that book is good even though they fabricated that study, I think everyone would be quite right to say, “Well, hold on a minute.

Is that not then based on, like, a fundamental dishonesty in their scientific method, and therefore I shouldn’t listen to a single thing they say?“

Tris: Gotcha. Yeah.

Robin: Um, whereas if instead it’s a character flaw and that has very little to do with the theory of their life’s work, right? Then it’s easier to then believe that, that their life’s work has value despite the fact that they’re a dick

Tris: Got it.

Yes, that, that’s a, that’s a very good thing. I, I must make sure that, make sure I, uh, I make it clear that that is the side. Like, character flaw is a very good expression that I’m gonna use. It’s-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: like the, the actual… Like, he worked with, with doctors and professionals and, like, he’s a trainer, a professional trainer who has trained Olympians.

Like, the actual data is great. Like, the, that’s why everyone loves the book. Right. The second book that I based my, that I, like, drew primary sources from is Casey Johnston’s book, uh, of last year or the year before, Physical Education, where Casey, Casey Johnston, um, wrote for Vice, I think. She’s a, uh, a writer, a reporter.

Um, and like 10 years ago she started power lifting and then, like, it changed her life, and the book is her memoirs. In that book, she cautiously recommends Starting [00:10:00] Strength. And reading between the lines, sh- it’s the same, it’s the same problem. It’s like, this book is so good, just don’t necessarily listen to the podcast of its author.

Robin: Yeah. Uh, it’s a l- I think there’s quite a lot of people where the, the, the, the sort of core of their academic discipline interest Like they say something really, really transformative and, and, and really valuable. And then as s- uh, uh, and then they also want to have opinions a bit outside of that, and then you have to just be very clear that you’re not gonna listen to any of their opinions, like as soon as they stray from their core domain.

Do you know what I mean?

Tris: I, I do, but like tread very carefully, Robin. We are literally right now on a podcast, and we wouldn’t be here without the success of my, uh, YouTube channel, which is basically programming and other stuff. But then I sort of got out of my pram and I went out talking about politics and, and all kinds of stuff.

Robin: Absolutely. No- So

Tris: I, I hope I don’t go down

Robin: that road. Well, right. I mean, I think, I think, I think… But, but whether that’s true of you, I mean, I’m not saying that’s true of everybody. I think it’s not. I think there are people who, who have said a great thing in one domain, they’ve migrated it into another, you know, they’ve, they’ve found related things and, and, and that was great too, and then they’ve done other things that are absolutely great, et cetera.

And there are other people who have tried to comment in another area and it’s like, “Mm, just shut up. You don’t know.” Like … And so it’s, it’s for society and posterity to decide which one you are or which one I am.

Tris: Yes, exactly. Um- Yeah … and the less we talk about Jordan Peterson,

Robin: the better. Right. I mean, yes, I feel like he was the-

the shadow in the room, wasn’t he?

Tris: Perfect. Yes, absolutely. So in Starting Strength, uh, the author says three things. One, physical strength is the most important thing in life. I mean, I think if you were a weightlifting trainer you might say that. Two, the reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

And three, exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem, it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems. And there’s like a million, like, good quotes like this in the, in the book, and Casey Johnston’s book has got, uh, has got loads and loads of inspirational stuff in as well.

And I just realized that As you said, wouldn’t it better, wouldn’t it be better just to, just to not have these, uh, to require these ergonomic crutches? And unlike when there’s actually like a, a physical injury or disability that can’t go away and has to be managed, i- in my case, what luck, the exercise completely solved it for me, both my back posture problems and my hands and arm RSI problems.

It’s been nothing short of a miracle.

Robin: And does that mean that you were, you know, you were spending quite a lot of money on various different equipment to try and solve something which you now feel is solved much more cheaply i- in a way that makes you more flexible to, to using different, different setups through power lifting basically?

Tris: Oh, abs- absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, there is no gym subscription that is more expensive than a physiotherapist or an ergonomic keyboard. Uh, like it was like shockingly cheap how like the, the… A, a gym always seems like something that’s very expensive, but I was doing weekly physiotherapy in 2022, 2023, which wasn’t working but still cost 100 pounds per session.

It was, it was terrible. It was, it was, it was, uh, it was a nightmare. I mean, maybe it stopped me getting worse and was a miracle, but, but it wasn’t getting, it wasn’t making me any better. Yeah.

Robin: Well, but I, I, you see, you said this to me before this, this thing about the gym subscription, and I really react against that because I do think gyms are a massive rip-off.

I think that they, um, they charge you a large amount of money, um, based on the theory that most of those people are not gonna go to the gym anywhere near as much as they think they will.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: And, and so I would prefer to find ways to le– I mean, I think there’s a whole load of exercise. This is the thing about power lifting for me.

I mean, I don’t know much about it, but, um, it seems like you need a high enough ceiling that you can, that you can lift the weights up above your head with straight arms, and you need a strong enough floor that you can put these weights down, and you need to have potentially like a cage or something, right?

Like, so there’s, there’s some equipment there that’s needed, and particularly there’s a sort of building that’s needed, which is… which makes it a bit tough. But I would generally-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: fi- I mean, this is what I’ve done. Like, I used to be a member of David Lloyd. Soon as it was clear that life was gonna get a bit more expensive, I canceled the subscription to David Lloyd, which is very expensive.

Um, obviously I could get a cheaper gym, but I don’t really see the point. I go [00:15:00] running. I can go running in nature, and I’m at least as fit as I was when I had the gym subscription. Um, and so it would be nice if there were, you know, lots of… And there’s things like Parkrun, right? I mean, Parkrun’s great. Um-

Tris: Hmm

Robin: and I think there, there might be other, uh, different sorts of exercise that you can do more kind of socially or more at home. Like, I suppose i- in a way, press-ups are almost like a sort, like, like a bit similar to a sort of weightlifting, right? Like, I don’t know. I just, I just feel like- Yes … it would be nice if there were ways that worked perfectly fine that didn’t require one to pay for a, a subscription to a building, you know, to be allowed to enter a building where they’ve bought some equipment, but broadly speaking, like, you know.

Tris: Yes. I, I, I was of this, I, I was of this opinion, um, in 2020 when I bought my own powerlifting equipment. Like, it was my lockdown project. Like, I, I desperately put the order in as we were getting told to work from home. Uh, like all the, all the stars aligned. And powerlifting equipment is, is too big for a normal residential home.

The, the bar is seven foot and weighs 20 kilos. It’s, it’s a very weird, unwieldy thing. I could almost not get it up my stairs. You know, I have to like get around the corner. Um- Yeah … and I, I realized when I tried powerlifting again last year, ’cause I, I gave it up after a couple of years working from home because I, I kept injuring myself.

Spoiler, it’s because I didn’t do any research or get a personal trainer, and I hadn’t read “Starting Strength,” which tells you the, the exact technique And this time round, going to a gym is f- I– is for powerlifting. I think it, it’s one of the few activities that makes sense. Like a lot of other activities you can, you can kind of do better outside a gym.

I, I’m, I’m with you on parkrun. Like I love a parkrun. We, uh, Lucy and I, my wife, we’ve got a local parkrun every, every Saturday, just a, just a 5K, uh, at our local park, and it’s lovely.

Robin: I think they all are. I think every parkrun is basically 9:00 AM on a Saturday.

Tris: Oh, nice.

Robin: I think.

Tris: Yeah, yeah. Yes, of course they are.

Yeah. That, that’s, that’s terrific. And like which would you rather… Well, which would I rather do? Run around a beautiful park in nature or run on a treadmill? Uh, like it, it just seems no contest. And a lot of- Yeah … a lot of the weight machines in the gym seem similar to, to that as well. Like I can just get some dumbbells or maybe some dip bars maybe.

Like the, the equipment doesn’t seem too bad. Whereas with powerlifting, I now realize- Yeah … as you said, the floor must be reinforced, and you must be comfortable with eventually failing a lift and smashing over 100 kilos onto the floor. I have nowhere in my house I would be comfortable doing that, and I don’t have an outside space that is suitable either.

Robin: No, I can see this. I can see that the, the fundamentally the, the thing that is actually expensive and, and actually makes the gym a special space that, that it’s a privilege to have access to therefore or, or, you know, it’s, it’s at least justifies the, the entrance fee-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: is basically the power lifting part.

That, that, that makes sense to me.

Tris: Yeah. I think in, in Casey, either Casey’s book or i- in, in, uh, f- uh, Physical Education or Starting Strength, or perhaps both, they say that power lifting, specialist power lifting gyms tend to be really cheap because they, like, rent a garage, buy three sets of, of barbell weights and cages, and then the, and then nothing ever breaks.

Like, you, you can’t break a seven-foot piece of steel that has been designed to lift, to hold hundreds of kilos. Like, it, it just never breaks. Yeah. Whereas a traditional high street gym has lots of machines with moving parts that are on long con- uh, long maintenance contracts.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: Those are very expensive.

Robin: And also, um, that garage you spoke about just has a concrete floor- Yeah … that’s already, like, not very pretty. Yes. So, like, it doesn’t matter if you smash all your weights into it thousands of times.

Tris: Exactly. Like, the, the only consumable is, like, uh, like some rubber mats maybe, uh, and I guess maybe some speakers when you’re, you’re blasting out death metal, like, c- at a high volume, that those probably would break after a while.

Uh-

Robin: After you smash weights into them a couple of times. Yeah.

Tris: Yeah, maybe. But the… So the, the, the thesis in my, in my video, um, is that there’s, like, a continuum. You know I love a continuum. There’s a continuum between gentle exercise that you must do more frequently, and [00:20:00] strenuous exercise that you shouldn’t do more frequently, and indeed don’t need to.

And I, I discovered this, the difference between, like, weight-lifting dumbbells, which I had to do every day, and power lifting, which I just do three times a week for 15 minutes each at present, was wonderful. Like, I, I, I didn’t have to do enormous… You know, I didn’t, didn’t have to take a lot of time out of my day and, uh, and the, the, the effort-reward ratio was really working for me.

It felt like a cheat code. And-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: because all of these exercises fix my RSI. Doing yoga every day fixes my RSI. Doing weights every day fixes my RSI. Like, but I, I don’t wanna do them every day. And so- Yeah … finding something that I didn’t need to do every day, indeed. I’ve… I’m, so I’m, I’m, I’m sick this week.

You can probably hear that I’ve got a cold. Uh, so I’ve, I only went to the gym on Monday, and it is now Friday, so I’ve missed two sessions. My RSI has not returned. Like, it takes about two weeks to return. It’s because of the strenuous heavy weights. There, there, there must be something about the body’s, like- Uh, building itself up to beat that challenge that you sort of, you, you over-train for sitting at a desk.

I think that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the way to think about it, is I’m dramatically over-trained.

Robin: Yeah. Oh, that’s, that’s very interesting. Yeah. But the amount of time you spend on exercise is, is about, um… I don’t actually spend this long, at least not recently, but three times 15 minutes to me is a relatively good week, and I feel like that’s easily enough of running, right?

Like, so I– what I try to do is I try to… Because, um, exercise is good for ADHD medication.

Tris: Mm.

Robin: Um, in an ideal day, and I tend to just do this when I, on the days I don’t have the kids, I got the, I got my kids half the time. So, um, on, on the days I don’t have the kids, I will try to wake up, let’s say 8:00, take my meds, throw on my gym stuff, go for a run.

It’s usually 15, 20 minutes, and then I come back, shower, and then I start work. Um, and if I manage to do that three times a week, that’s a really good week. Wow. You know? And, and it feels, and, and it feels like it keeps me pretty fit, and it’s like, you know, it’s, um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s the right amount.

Tris: That’s fantastic. Yeah. Uh, well, as I, as, as you know, running, running would not help my, my, my RSI in my wrists, but I, I- No, no … I, I, I see, I see what you mean. Like running’s a great… Casey talks a lot about running in her book. Like as, as a woman, she’s told, like women are told to like exercise a lot, you know, keep the calories low, that sort of thing.

So she, she contrasts-

Robin: Mm …

Tris: running, uh, which is like you can see that she, she’s been maligned, uh, by running and running has been a, like a, a negative thing in her life. Uh, it- but it isn’t, it is not, you know? Right. Running sh- or some sort of cardio should be part of, uh, like your heart is pretty good. Like my muscles are all very good in my arms, but like the heart is kind of a prerequisite there.

Robin: Yeah, I guess that’s the theory I’m working on. I mean, I, I, I haven’t read the books you’ve read and I, I haven’t focused on the academic background of, of much of the exercise. The main thing that I’ve heard repeated over and over again, to the extent that I believe it without necessarily having done my own- Hmm

um, my own study

Tris: Cool, cool …

Robin: is, um, is that basically the, the, the first most important thing for your health is that you raise your heart rate a, a, a bunch of times. Yeah. Right? Um, and that, that, that leads to a healthy heart and it leads to, you know… And so I ba- basically, I suppose that’s what I’m trying to achieve.

But then as you say, I am not struggling with RSI, so, um, the specific things you need for that, and I can, I can totally see that running is, um Not necessarily helpful for that. I mean, I definitely do also. I have dumbbells. Like I, I have back problems, um, sometimes like my, like my lower back can hurt quite easily.

Right. I don’t think running helps my lower back. In general, I suppose I kind of agree with you, like running is for fitness, heart, heart strength. Um, it doesn’t really help your joints, any of your joints at all, right? Like, you know. Um-

Tris: Yeah. Ankles, I suppose, but maybe like legs a bit. I don’t know. I think, I think those

Robin: things can get destroyed by running- Oh, right

Tris: actually. Yes, of course. Um, it’s like

Robin: a lot of, a lot of impact, you know, over and over again, like small impacts.

Tris: Ah, hence the elliptical machine. And that

Robin: can be quite bad for you.

Tris: Right.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: Yeah, I was, I was astonished. Like once you, once you start to like start lifting weights that are similar to your body weight, uh, like your heart rate goes through the roof.

Like your body goes into like this primal, like I am lifting, uh, a fallen comrade off the battlefield mode. You know, [00:25:00] like, like I’m, I’m just gonna lift this car. I- like it’s such a heavy weight. For me it was about 80 kilos that this started. Like my heart rate would go up to running levels as I was under the bar pushing this insanely- Yeah

heavy weight. Like it was so weird, my feet feeling like I’d suddenly doubled in weight. I was like, “Oh, this is … Like my feet don’t usually feel like this.” Like pressing into the floor like, like some kind of Hulk monster.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: So very … I, I, I, uh, certainly I … It’s obviously been transformative for me for my back and for my, uh, my, my arms, but I, I think probably other options are available if

but you just have to do them a bit more. I’m a huge fan of yoga. If you have a body and a floor, you can do yoga, which is always lovely. You don’t have to do anything.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah.

Tris: So in October of last year, October 2025, I was a guest on the WB40 podcast hosted by my friend Lisa and her friend Matt. And I talked, we talked about quite a lot of, uh, like productivity, writing, um, crea- like a few

quite a lot of stuff that we, we’ve covered here on this, uh, on, on this podcast. But there was a question that we didn’t get a chance to properly answer, and I love it, and I want to talk to you about it, Robin. Cool. And that question is, what are your tools for writing?

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: I’ll, I’ll start because I, obviously I’ve thought about this question a lot.

And for me, the tools aren’t like physical, like a laptop or a keyboard, even though I’ve got all these fancy keyboards and stuff. My tools are all mental. Like my morning writing habit- Mm-hmm … is to sit down with a cup of ginger tea with the lights at a certain level and sit on a … I’ve got a coffee table in front of a small screen that I sit on the floor, and that routine I think is the most important tool I have for writing.

The rest is just typing.

Robin: So- So where did this question come from? Because I’m– I, as soon as you asked it, I w- I, I felt curious about what you meant by tools, and I don’t know why we– If you don’t mean physical tools, why are we calling them that? Why aren’t we saying what’s your, what are your-

Tris: Habits maybe

Robin: supportive-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: habits? Right, exactly. Well- Or something like that.

Tris: So on the, on the show, on WB40, I– the, I think that was very much the expectation, uh, when, uh, either Lisa or Matt asked me the question, “What are my tools?” But In that moment, I realized that my tools, the most important tools for me weren’t the digital tools, though you better believe me and my 80 Obsidian plugins are working hard on that.

But it was more interesting and more, like, fundamental, these, these real world physical tools or, or states of mind physical, uh, these states of mind tools were more important for me. So although Lisa talked about her own writing tools, digital tools, and Matt talked about his, I talked about these mental tools, which I think are-

Robin: Yeah

Tris: more interesting. Uh, I-

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: I wonder-

Robin: They’re like, um- Yeah … yeah, like patterns for… ’Cause, ’cause I think that’s, you know, that’s absolutely what I need. Like, I don’t think, I don’t think I need tools. Um, there are some tools that help, but they, but they’re downstream, right? Like-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: it’d be quite helpful, um…

I mean, I think on a previous, um, episode, I spoke about how important it was, like, how much of a boon it is for Obsidian, for example, that it has a good mobile app.

Tris: Yes.

Robin: And then the extent to which dig- the, um, the Digital Garden plugin-

Tris: Yeah … is

Robin: that what it’s called? Yes. Digital

Tris: Garden? Yes. Yeah. Yes, it is.

Robin: Um, you know, if that helps Obsidian convert directly onto publishing on my website, then that is potentially a re- also a really important tool because I want to be able to write where I have the inspiration and, and that’s the… So it’s like you’ve, you understand, um, the attitude that you have to writing, the supportive attitude that you need to have to writing, and then you work out what tool enables it.

But the tool is very much downstream of that, of, of, of that, um, super essential higher level exercise of figuring out What, um, like, like what attitudes you need to, you need to be successful

Tris: Yeah, absolutely. You can buy yourself a MacBook Pro M4, buy Scrivener. You can [00:30:00] buy publishing tools. You know, you can like spend thousands and thousands of pounds on this, a physical tool.

And if you never sit down to write in the morning because you haven’t sorted that out, it will be entirely wasted because it’s, as you say, downstream of the habits and the mental tools.

Robin: Yes, and I have not sorted that out.

Tris: Well, it’s, it’s the hardest thing, the absolute hardest thing. Every day, uh, who said this?

Neil Gaiman, I think. Um, writing is, uh, is simply a matter of putting one word in front of another. It’s that easy and it’s that hard. I think about this- Yeah … every day because I sit in front of the, uh, the– my, my 400 words for Lost Terminal that I must do every morning. I have other word counts for other projects, but it’s– that’s the first one I do.

It’s the earliest one. I get up at 6:00 and, and do that. And it’s so- Yeah … hard to start. I think it was Hemingway who said that all you have– all he had to do was write one true sentence to break that, break the ice or just write, write- Yeah … one true sentence. One, one… Even if it’s fiction, it’s a true sentence about the fiction that you’re writing, and then he was off.

Robin: Yeah. I mean, you maybe you could call it like one impactful or something like that, um, sentence. Uh, sure. No, I know what you mean. I, I think, I

Tris: think

Robin: true- He called it- … is a very great thing …

Tris: he called it true. I’m gonna call it true.

Robin: Oh, no, I know. I know. I’m just, um, uh, yeah, I, I– the fee- I understand the feeling.

Yeah, yeah. And I, and I completely know what he means. I think I- This is the difference. So you know how I was saying that, like, I’ve never had the habit, like, when we’re talking about, um, about ergonomic tools-

Tris: Yeah …

Robin: um, and the way that I’m, like, always on the move.

Tris: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Um, you know, I mean, I haven’t got RSI.

Tris: Oh, yep.

Robin: The flip side of that is that I don’t sit and actually do significant projects, right?

Tris: Ah.

Robin: Um, and I– And so that’s, that’s what I struggle with. And, and what I’ve always wanted really was to, I suppose, to have the space somehow in my life for, um, interesting writing that people would be interested in being emergent.

As in I go through my life solving other problems, thinking about other things, having conversations with people, whatever, and a thing occurs to me, “Oh, right, well, actually, this is a really important point to make,” I immediately extract that, get it down, send it out. Um, and, and it, and, and it’s an emergent property of the fact that I’ve arrived at that place in that moment, and I’ve noticed that, and then I’ve sort of like, you know…

And there are people who write in that way. I mean, you know, there are people who publish, um, multiple times a day because they’ve had in- inspired moments, um, and these are just like, you know, two or three paragraph updates or whatever, and they’ve, and they’ve somehow got a process that allows them to do it very quickly.

Tris: Right.

Robin: Um, and I don’t… You know, I’ve never, ever, I’ve never really managed to do that. Well, except that the, you know, the, the posts I have published are kind of, kind of, sort of, of that character in that I have found a moment where I’ve managed to start. But, but it’s– But they’ve clearly been so infrequent.

But that’s kind of the way that I’d like to write. Like, I don’t, I don’t feel like I want to sit down at 8:00 in the morning religiously, do an hour of writing, because that to me feels already artificial. Does that make sense?

Tris: Uh, it makes sense. I, I disagree, but I understand why you, you think so.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: There is a– I forget who said this When inspiration strikes, it better find me working. I, I, I need to find all of these– track down who said all of these-

Robin: That, that is a good quote.

Tris: Yes. Yeah. I’m sorry. Um, that, that’s how I feel about this, this hour that I’ve blocked off in the morning, is I, I can do anything I like as long as it’s writing.

And I don’t allow myself to do other things. And this is very constraining and very painful, and my ADHD hates it, and the, uh, instant gratification monkey that lives in my brain doesn’t like it either. But the– I’m a better person for putting in this effort, uh, over six years now. I, I, I started this when I– this habit when I started Lost Terminal, which I had to, I had to write before my day job.

So I had to get up an hour early, put in the work, and then go to work, uh, at, at my day job. And I had no other option. In the evening, I was very tired and [00:35:00] didn’t want to do anything other than maybe play games or talk to my friends. And so this was the only time I discovered I could do it, and so it’s extremely precious.

And now I’m extremely fortunate that I, that I don’t have a day job, and I can spend all of my time writing. But it’s a challenge every single day. It’s, it’s miserable. Um, I don’t think writer’s block exists. It’s a manifestation of the privilege of a writer in that you’ve got time and space to quietly think about this thing, and you can’t think of the words or think of the scenes or get the facts straight, and you can’t, you can’t start.

I mean, that’s, that– To be in that position is quite privileged. Like, if you were, if you were writing for a newspaper, the editor would be screaming at you. Uh, y- but then you wouldn’t get writer’s block. You would just write badly or learn to write under that pressure. Uh, I, I, I also think writer’s block sometimes is caused by reader’s block, which is where you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve written too much, and the– it, it’s time to recharge by reading.

Um, I, I don’t know if that’s necessarily particularly relevant. Um, let me go back to, uh, uh, the prev-previous topic. Did you say you get up at 8:00 in the morning, Robert, uh, and go for a run?

Robin: Sometimes. When I have the kids, I’ve just recently developed a habit, and I’m getting better at waking up at 7:00.

Tris: Right.

Robin: And then when I’m without the kids, I take the opportunity to try to lie in, but I’m probably up by 8:00. Yeah.

Tris: That was me before I, uh, had my… was prescribed my ADHD meds. Um, and then as an experiment, I thought, “Well, I’ve got these, these strong stimulants that will wake me up and keep me awake.” So I, I don’t nec- necessarily, uh, think this would work for you, but I say just for interest.

The… I– When I, I set my alarm. I’ve always been a late sleeper. On your schedule, I think, like, uh, 8:00 would be… Getting up at 8:00 would be a remarkable, uh, achievement for me. Um, and I would stay up late. Um, and I decided to try setting an alarm for s- 6:00 in the morning And having some water and my meds on my nightstand, taking them every day at, at 6:00, and then just go back to bed, close my eyes, and just doze for a little bit.

But I’ve just taken strong stimulants. Within 10, 15, 20 minutes, those would be working, and I would be unable to sleep. So I would, I would have this chemical reinforcement that it is time to get up. Within, like, a week or two of doing that, I fully reset my sleeping schedule, and now I’m a morning person. I don’t think I’m naturally a morning person, but I, I decided to try it because I wanted to put-

Robin: Well, I’ve sort of done a, I’ve done a version of the same thing.

You have. I mean, I, it, it’s, it’s less extreme, but I, I’m, I wake up earlier than I did. I enjoy the, the time that I get in the morning before starting work. I don’t know that I’m gonna be waking up at 6:00. Um, I think to do that I would need to, um… It means you gotta go to bed really early. So I’d need that to fit into my life.

Like, I’d need to… It’s not just me that, that needs me to go to bed late. Um, there are other things in my life that-

Tris: Right …

Robin: it would be difficult to have a really early bedtime. Um-

Tris: You’re right. I was exact- The reason that I wanted to do this is to synchronize with Lucy’s schedule, because she is early to bed, early to rise, and I’ve never been that.

And it’s, it, it was annoying because I was, like, not seeing her for large chunks of the evening and morning ’cause we, we wouldn’t overlap. Yeah. So yes, you’re right. That- Exactly … that’s true. You should do the schedule that, like, fits with, with your life. That, that, that’s, that’s very reasonable.

Robin: Yeah. But, but nonetheless, I mean, I think the waking up early, it’s just that, I mean, I was wondering whether, um…

I think basically I, I f- I feel the way that my writing… Like, I think, ’cause I, I started to do the digital gardening thing.

Tris: Hmm.

Robin: Um, and it is really nice. Um, the… I need to work out the tech a little bit because I, um, I want to have it published from my phone. I don’t know the extent to which that’s possible.

Tris: Yeah, easy.

Robin: Um, even on, even on my laptop, you know, it’s like it’s, i- it’s a lit- It’s still a little too, um, manual, the publishing for me. So I need to tweak it and figure out how to make it less so. But, um- But anyway, uh, it’s in theory is like I just, um, I have an area of my Obsidian vault, which I know is, um, public, and [00:40:00] I just go and tweak it, add a bit here, add a bit there.

And to me, that’s very similar to kind of journaling basically, and that’s kind of what I want to start to think of it more like. Mm-hmm. I want to think of it more like journaling. And, um, and, and I think journaling for me is most likely to be an evening activity rather than a morning activity.

Tris: Cool.

Robin: But I haven’t, haven’t managed to build any kind of routine that actually successfully does it, so I can’t say yet.

Tris: Right. Yeah. It, I think that it doesn’t matter when that, that, that happens for me, it’s in the morning. For you, it could be in the evening. You just need a little, a little slice. I, I forget again who said this, but the, the write- the, the… If you were to like, look at a writer, like observe them for their whole day and look at a, a regular person, uh, who is not a writer just with like a day job or whatever, their days like might look almost identical.

The writer, uh, wakes up, has breakfast. The writer might have a day job, might work at a cafe, might work at an office, whatever, to support their writing because capitalism is terrible, and they, they go to see friends in the evening and they go out to- on the town and in… They might go visiting places at the weekend.

But the writer every day for a set period of time, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour, sits down and writes. That’s the only difference. I forget who said this, but like it’s, it’s, it’s marvelous. Like you just have to find that little slice and boom, you’re a writer. Like George R.R. Martin doesn’t write all day every day.

Nobody can. You’d get RSI. Like he just, he like has food, has drinks-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: chats with his friends, like he has a life.

Robin: I mean, the worst example in the world because he’s like famously the slowest writer ever.

Tris: Yes, that’s true.

Robin: Um, by the way, I discovered, um, in a previous conversation along similar lines, um, I was talking about how amazingly prolific Cory Doctorow is.

In a recent podcast- Oh … um, possibly this week, he explained why that is, which is because he’s got chronic pain syndrome. Like he’s got, you know… A- and, and being entirely absorbed in a task is a thing that takes his mind off the pain. So the o- so the reason why he’s so productive, and he says this very explicitly, is because he’s…

It’s, it’s, it’s the thing that he’s found that helps him escape from the pain.

Tris: Oh, that’s so sad. I did know he had chronic pain. I know. It, it’s back pain, isn’t it? He… Years ago, he, he, he blogged, uh, about the topic and said that daily swimming for one hour is the only habit that, that helps him manage it.

And that’s, that’s, that’s- Mm … that’s a hell of a thing.

Robin: I suppose he should listen to your power lifting video in case it’s any use

Tris: I bet he’s thought of it. I

Robin: bet he has.

Tris: Like, you try everything, right? If you had chronic pain, you’d try damn anything.

Robin: Yeah,

Tris: true. True

Robin: Um, but yeah, I mean, I, I just… You’re absolutely right.

If I just unlocked the habit. I mean, I’ve unlocked plenty of habits recently. Like I go running relatively regularly. Um, that was something that I, I, I never thought I’d really be able to manage to do. Um, I’m starting to get the, you know, actually be quite organized with getting the kids to school on time.

Um, there’s a lot of- Good … general improvement and organization in my life, and I think, um, as soon as I built in even, let’s say, 20 minutes of writing as a daily schedule, um, suddenly that would make… You know, I’d, I’d, I’d suddenly be publishing a lot, and that would make, make a big difference.

Tris: You’d be a writer.

Robin: And that could be fun.

Tris: Yeah. Yeah. It’d be lovely. Like 20 minutes a day, that’s a writer, for sure. Yeah. Some, some days that’s all, that’s all I can, that’s all I can manage. And some days I just, I can’t do it at all, and I, I’ve, I, I write zero words, and then the hour is up, and I’ve found that if I, if I keep trying, it never works.

Like I, I get, you know, more, more, more, more and more frustrated, more and more tired.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: And I, I just say- Yeah … “Well, look, if I’ve not done it by 10, we’ve just got to give up.” Like it’s a, it’s a hard limit, and I go to the gym. Like I have that as a, as like a circuit breaker. Yeah. And then I get back on track because I went to the gym, and I, I wanted to go to the gym.

That was in my schedule. And I, and I’m now back on track, and maybe the next slot of writing, maybe it’s a No Boilerplate script or whatever, I can then start that on time rather than pushing the- Yeah … entire schedule.

Robin: Well, this is the thing that unlocked the running for me, which was like the, the, the reason why I never managed to build a regular exercise routine-

Tris: Yeah

Robin: is because to be able to do it, like it was like it was always a target, and it was a target that carried this like judgment within it, right? It was like you have to be able to do… And everyone always recommends that you set yourself these targets that you, that, so that you feel like a drive, you feel pushed, you feel like you’ve got to meet them, et cetera.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: And I’ve never responded well to that sort of like, um, being measured, I suppose. Being like, um, you know, having to prove yourself against the measure or [00:45:00] whatever. Like, I think I kind of al- I almost react against that.

Tris: Mm.

Robin: Um, and so that always stopped me. Like, I’d always like… I’d, I’d, I’d, I’d, I… It’s like I’d, I’d fail before I’d even started in my mind, right?

Because I’d be like, “Oh, I’m never gonna meet the whatever. I’m never… The expectation. Ugh, there’s no point trying.” And then I, I think it was probably through listening to videos about atomic habits or something like that, but I, I just, I just started to be like, well, if you think about it as building, then any time I step outside the house with running shoes on is an improvement and something I should be proud of.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: And at that point, even if I go step one meter away from my front door and back into the house That’s improvement and something to be proud of.

Tris: That’s right.

Robin: If I just go for a walk to the end of the road and back, that’s better than sta- having stepped outside my house. So I now had no pressure to run.

Like, I used to feel like if I went for a run and I s- and I walked at any point of it, then actually I’d kind of failed, right?

Tris: Right.

Robin: But if you can flip that round and be like, you know, I actually managed to jog for, like, 100 meters, right? Mm-hmm. And, and, and so then the only challenge is getting your running shoes on and having allocated, like, 10 minutes, right?

Yes. And as soon as you’ve done that, you’re making improvement.

Tris: In Casey’s book, uh, she, she describes a, a person or a friend or someone, someone she talked to who would book the taxi to the gym the night before Because- Yeah … by the time it was, by the time she was feeling lazy in the morning and was like, “Oh, I’m gonna, I, I’m gonna skip,” the taxi’s booked.

Like, you can’t cancel it. Like, it’s too late. By the time she woke up, she was like, “Oh, I don’t feel it, but the taxi’s coming.” And so actually for her, you know, you said is if, if you get, if you get the shoes on, you’re, you’re off. For her, it was if she gets in the taxi, she’s off.

Robin: Yeah. Well, or you book it beforehand.

I mean, that contract setting. I- Yeah … I use meetings. To be honest, I abuse other people’s time- … to set contracts for myself by booking meetings with them, and that’s how I get work done.

Tris: So you’re the problem, right?

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: I see. It’s a, it’s, it’s called Odyssean pact. Uh, I’m sure you know that, but I wanna make sure our listeners know the coolest name in the world.

Uh, uh, Odysseus, uh, wanted to hear the beautiful siren song but without, uh, being lured to his death, uh, by drowning, so he asked his crew to tie him to the mast while they all had wax in their ears. Uh, he wanted to ensure against future bad behavior he knew he would make by making a framework today to stop that, an Odyssean pact.

Uh, I, I think all of my habits are Odyssean pacts.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: I can’t trust myself.

Robin: Yeah. And once you, once you realize that, because I think that a lot of the, um, a lot of the philosophy of self-improvement is based on this idea that we’re some kind of perfect thing.

Tris: Mm.

Robin: And I feel like what you’re talking about there almost makes the complete opposite assumption, which is that you are massively flawed in many ways.

Tris: Thank you.

Robin: And you now have a design exercise of working out how to deal with this incredibly flawed human being, right?

Tris: Right. Exactly. That’s why I, I love using Obsidian to design these tools because, like, a to-do list that someone else has made is never gonna work for me because I have extremely custom requirements.

For example, the, the one that works, the one that is, is… I’ve, I’ve learned that I have to just accept is that I have, like many people with ADHD and autism, I have some amount of oppositional defiance, and that, that would… What would happen is I would set a load of to-dos, you know, plan out the whole week, and then by the second day I’d wake up and look at these and go, “I’m not doing any of these.

This is stupid. What did that guy think he was? Who does he, who the hell does he think he is? I’m… He’s dead. I’m alive. I get to choose what I’m doing, and I’m going to play Skyrim for five hours or whatever.“ So I, I, I realized that this, this behavior was just obviously self-sabotaging, so I designed a system- Just, I mean, I, I based on getting things done, GTD, that just shows me the next actions in the projects that I need to be doing.

And I look at those in the morning and I go, “Which of these do I vibe with?” And it didn’t matter which of them I chose to do that day. It, it’s all gravy. It’s all good. It’s all progress. Probably if there were really, really urgent things, like a, an episode due to- tomorrow, I would feel that in that moment choose to make, choose to, to assign that task to today.

And then the rest of the day I just go, go through that short list of tasks that I’ve decided to do. Sometimes I j- they’re even written on [00:50:00] paper. Like I just look at the next actions list and I go, “Okay, well, I’ll write, write down three of them,” whatever, and then that paper follows me around the house- That’s quite interesting

or wherever I’m gonna go.

Robin: Yeah. I, I, I haven’t-

Tris: And that-

Robin: Um …

Tris: it’s worked so well.

Robin: Yeah, maybe that would work for me. Like, these are the projects, and this is the next action in each of them. There’s a menu of stuff for my monkey brain- Yeah … to decide to choose from. I like that.

Tris: Right. Yes. Okay. Well, this is exciting.

I described this method in my Obsidian for Learning video.

Robin: Right.

Tris: Or I hinted, I hinted at it, and I’m currently writing the follow-up to that video which explains all of it.

Robin: Sure. How do you do it, though?

Tris: The, the way to, way I’ve modeled this in Obsidian is that projects are notes that are tagged pro- tagged projects, and in those notes they’ve got a load of- Yeah

checklists, markdown checklists, so those are all the actions. And they’re in chronological order. You do A, then B, then C. So the first one is- Yeah … definitionally the next action.

Robin: Mm-hmm.

Tris: Then imagine you have 10 of these projects. It’s pretty reasonable. Most people have 10 things that they wanna do. You make a very simple query that shows you just the name of the project- Yeah

and then the first unchecked checkbox in each project, and there you have it. That is your morning, or that is my morning next action list. Yeah. And I look through and go, “Which of these am I gonna do today?” My little menu. And I run my fingers down it and go, “Oh, this looks, this looks tasty. I’m gonna do that,” or, “Wow-” Yeah

this is overdue. I’m a terrible person. I’d better do this today.“ And, and then I’m off.

Robin: I mean, you’re right that the, the, the basic logic of that is, is quite, is quite straightforward. Um, I… Thinking about my lists, um

I don’t know how– I mean, yes, the question is do I have projects, um, that I could define, um, that clearly, and would I do the work to define them? Um, but I will, I’ll definitely give it a go. I mean, I sort of do a version, or I tried previously doing a version of that same sort of thing ’cause I had my, my daily note, um, had like, you know, top priorities in this area, top priorities in that area, top priorities at work, um, which is a bit similar.

And then I’d often, um, as you can imagine, decide that I was gonna tackle my personal priorities even though I was supposed to be working or vice versa. Um, which are the version of the oppositional defiance you’re talking about, I think. Um-

Tris: Yes. Tim Urban calls that the dark playground.

Robin: Yeah, but I just don’t know whether, um, the extent to which I could define the projects.

Um, I mean, I can, I could, I could try. I mean, how many projects have I got that are like multi-action, that are more than just one thing? Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, uh, cool. I don’t know to the extent to which we’ve, um, explained the tools for writing really.

Tris: Yeah. That’s a very good point. We, we– So to circle back to the top, which is like mental tools, for me I really like- Yeah.

Robin: The patterns or-

Tris: Exactly. Pa- pat- patterns and habits … self habits. Yeah. So CG Pa- CGP Grey’s … So my hero, CGP Grey, made a video a while ago called Spaceship You, and it was based on a previous video of his called How to Maximize Misery, which of course was a, an anti-pattern. Here are the things not to do. Yeah.

And in Spaceship You he described separating out all of the, the different modes of your life. Like you’ve got a, you’ve got an area for like watching videos or playing games, and that is not the same area as work happens or sleep happens. And He pointed out that for those, such as students or people living at home with their parents, s- sometimes all you’ve got is one room.

You don’t have multiple rooms, and it could be very small. The way to make that work- Yeah … is through color theory and sensory grounding. For, for example- Yeah … you could have… You could change your background wallpaper on your, your computer or device, and always use the same wallpaper when you’re writing.

Then your brain is like, “Oh, I’m here. This is where I am. Great.” Maybe you always listen to the same playlist. Like, I have a writing playlist that I’ve used for many, many years, and I, I just… It’s doesn’t have any lyrics. It’s, uh, synth wave. Like, it’s upbeat, and that gets me into the zone for writing science fiction.

I have a separate playlist for writing historical fiction and for writing No Boilerplate. And I always use these playlists as tools to [00:55:00] get me into the vibe. And as I said, I’ve got ginger tea that I drink in the morning, which, like, smell is such a, a grounding sense, isn’t it? And so that, that really puts me…

That gives me the best chance of getting into the, the zone and focusing.

Robin: I don’t know whether those w- I feel like I’ve tried to do those sorts of things before, and I don’t, I don’t think they work for me. I think for me it’s more like it’s jumping myself onto the right track, but, but that’s a decision.

So if I can get myself to make the decision, then I don’t need environmental cues to keep me there

Um I just need to make myself actually decide to sit down and do that

Tris: Right. And how successful has that been? So it makes sense. How successful has that been for you?

Robin: Well, well, no, but, but what I mean is I don’t think that the, um, the changing of the playlist, the changing of the colors, these things, I think that, I think that I, um, I deliberately don’t let those things impact my direction that

Tris: I have.

Ah.

Robin: So I don’t have, I don’t have another solution per se, except that I think that, um, I’m getting better at… It’s like for some reason I’m scared of, s- on some level, some psychological level, deciding and committing to doing the thing that I n- that I know I should be doing or whatever, um, because I’m scared of failure, because I’m scared of letting someone down maybe, something like that.

Right. And the thing that’s worked for me is more like, um, through repetition and slowly building it up, lowering the Um, the fear. It’s like, it- it’s like to do it, I have to scale a wall, and every time I scale the wall, I knock a bit off the top and it gets a bit shorter.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: Easier to scale. This isn’t a perfect metaphor, but like That

Tris: is, I think-

Robin: But so anything I can do to make myself cross that boundary, um, more times then makes it much, much easier, and then I, then I get to have more control over my day and I’m like, oh.

I mean, this is how it kind of is for running ’cause I’m like, oh, I have an opportunity to go running now, and I feel excited about it. Um, I feel a bit like that’s more how I would get into writing than it is how I get into doing other useful stuff. It’s like I see… It’s like instead of it being a, um, a threat in some way, it’s, it’s, it…

I- I- I can, I gradually evolve towards seeing it as more of an opportunity somehow.

Tris: Yeah. Do you think the, the habits would evolve as well? They, they might start off being something that was not working or frustrating even, but maybe they might evolve in- into something that, that was working a little better for you.

Robin: Which habit?

Tris: Like the, the, the using the sensory stuff that I, that I talked about. The, the, the stuff you said, you said hasn’t worked for you in the past, maybe they might over time, maybe they might help improve.

Robin: Well, I think it’s just… I mean, to, to, to me, I think that that’s not gon- I, I don’t think that works any better than the basic routine.

Like, like as in like if I wake up, I take my meds, I go for a run, I shower, I go and get breakfast, and then I sit down at my desk, and then I start writing, for example.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: Right? Um, the sequence is the most… The sequence and the… But, but, but even on the level of like if I, if after I’d done that morning routine, I then was deciding, oh, what am I gonna do now?

Oh, um, I’m gonna choose between am I going to work on, am I gonna work on Decapsulate? Am I gonna work on, you know, this work thing? Am I gonna reply to this person? Um, if I’d… It’s like a neural pathway, right? Like if I’d, if I’d worn each of those neural pathways a bit more, if I built them up a bit more and they were stronger, then it’s then easy for me to make the choice to do the thing that I actually want to do intentionally.

Tris: It’s-

Robin: And I, I, I, and, and in all of that space, um, ’cause I have tried, uh, you know, sort of like environmental cues before and I just, I don’t, I don’t think they’re the thing for me, but I, um, I can give it a go.

Tris: I mean, at the very least, it’s quite nice to have a, a cup of tea or, you know, a special, a special drink

Robin: [01:00:00] Yeah.

Yeah, true. Yeah. Um, yeah, that’s true. Like you could have… ’Cause then you’re sort of making the choice earlier with a, with a much more im- a much less impactful action, right? Like rather than sitting down and actually starting the thing, it’s like, all right, which of the drinks am I gonna choose? And then you choose the drink that you, uh, that, that corresponds to the thing that I wanna do.

And it’s like maybe that’s a bit easier then to make that choice. And then I’m already on the track, so then I carry on.

Tris: Yeah. I think this is, this is the, the thesis in “Triggers,” the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith, is like you, you chain habits together and like they- Right … you hook them onto each other and there maybe is th- there’s no limit perhaps on how many you can hook on, but the first anchor has to be extremely strong.

Maybe for you that might be running or, or, or, or getting up. Like certainly for me it’s the, the morning stuff.

Robin: Yeah. I mean, I think I’ve, I think I’ve definitely got a lot better at this kind of thing, and I think now it’s partly just a decision to focus on it. Like I think I could create the space to design in, I’m gonna write half an hour every, every evening or whatever.

And if I, if I just committed to actually trying to build that, I think I’d be able to build it now, ’cause I think I’ve done it with enough things. Um, but it just hasn’t been my focus for a little bit ’cause I’ve got other things. But yeah, I mean, I, I’ll try and do that, and I’ll let you know how it goes next time.

Tris: Marvelous.

Robin: I think to a lot of people this stuff sounds, like, very, uh, untethered sort of. Right. It’s like they’re all little tips that, like, why do I care? Like, I should just… You know, they’re not the big impactful thing that’s like a transformative new technology or I don’t know what. But actually, like, building a massive arsenal of all these tiny little techniques and then figuring out which ones work for you, I think is actually, uh, um, really, really important and eventually very impactful.

Tris: Absolutely. I

Robin: think you’ve shown. Yeah.

Tris: Yeah, the sum of the parts. Yeah, the, uh, the small, the small snowball gets, uh, gets bigger and bigger, faster and faster.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah, what was that snowball, um… Sorry, this is, this is interesting to me. The snowball versus, um… Oh, yes, uh, eat the frog, right?

Tris: Yes. I used to think I was an eat the frog sort of guy, where the, the hardest, most daunting task I’ve got to get it over with first, and then, and then I can relax and blast through the others.

But I’ve actually since realized that I also really like, uh… It’s not that I like doing lots of little tasks and working my way up to the large ones. It’s that if unchecked, the little ones will stop me doing the large ones. Like, I’ll drown in the debt of all the tiny little tasks that are hanging around my neck.

Robin: For me, it’s not only that, it’s also that because I… Like, the instinct, the instinct to eat the frog then makes you feel like eating the frog has to be your next task. But then you don’t do it because you’re not ready for it yet, right? Like, you’re scared of it, so you divert from it. But then you can’t intentionally do anything else because you know the frog is the next thing you’ve got to eat.

Do you know what I mean?

Tris: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robin: Um, and so, and so you then, you then kinda get stuck there. And in, and in fact, in many cases, ’cause I’ve… ’Cause, um, this was kind of unlocked for me, like, when I was going through divorce and, I mean, I’m not divorced yet, but, um, the early stages of it, and I went and had a life coaching, like, retreat weekend thing.

Tris: Oh.

Robin: And, um, and that experience of life coach is that in a lot of cases, if I just zoom out and I look at the fact that there’s a thing that’s, that I see is in my way, which I’m really, really struggling to get done, in, in almost every case, I have to just find out how to not do it. Do you know what I mean?

I can’t force myself to do it. If I really hate it- You can’t force yourself to do it … like the fact that I have like refused to do that thing for so long means that I just, I just hate it and I just don’t wanna do it. And like there’s almost certainly another path. And there, and, and there basically always, always kind of has been.

And if I just- Right … like think a little creatively about how I could just not do the thing that I clearly just hate the idea of, then then I can kind of unlock it. And, and, and, and the– And that’s where I think the snowball thing, um, fits in because the building, building, building to a huge snowball thing has implicit within it that the thing you’re building over and over time and layering on top of is fundamentally something you clearly just want to do.

Because you obviously wouldn’t put yourself through the slog of slowly wrapping a ball in snow over a long period of time for something that you fundamentally hated, if you know what I mean. So it already switches you into the mindset of-

Tris: [01:05:00] Right. Yeah …

Robin: I’m gonna actually just follow the stuff that is where my heart is, kind of.

And the eat the frog one I feel like is the opposite of that. It’s like focus on the thing you hate, get it done, and actually a lot of the time you’re just stuck because you hate it

Tris: Yeah. Yeah, and you’ll, uh, you’ll desperately try to do anything other than the thing you hate. Yeah, that’s true. Okay. So the email cartel is what I’ve got written here.

Robin: Yes. Right. Well, I’ve been getting so many spam calls recently-

Tris: Oh, yeah …

Robin: that I eventually turned on the feature on my phone to block spam calls, which I hadn’t done up to then because I felt like they, you know, I didn’t trust their guesswork, and it seems like being able to get through to me in a phone call is, is, is important enough that I wouldn’t want to, to block, um, people.

And I– And there’d definitely been, in the last, like, two months, at least one call that actually mattered that was marked as spam, um, by my phone.

Tris: No.

Robin: Um, but the, but the overwhelm- Ooh … of the number of spam calls I’ve, spam calls I’ve been getting, that’s just meant that I’ve got no choice now. And then you commented in response to that.

Uh, can you remember what you said?

Tris: Not exactly. Go on.

Robin: Right.

Tris: You, you… I’m sure you remember better than I.

Robin: Well, I can’t remember exactly what you said, but you said something like, “Are they gonna make a monopoly out of the phone system now?” Or something like that.

Tris: Oh, right. Yes, ’cause if Google decides who is and isn’t a spam caller, then that’s an extremely powerful position to be in for a private company.

Robin: Right. Precisely, yes. And the direct analogy for that, obviously, is email.

Tris: Yeah. So it is not possible in our current internet to host your own email server and run your own, run– be your own email provider. It is perhaps technically possible, but it is almost… The complexity to do this is now out of the reach of almost everybody because of the anti-spam measures taken by the, uh…

What did we- By the cartel. That’s what, that’s what we’re calling them. By the cartel of Google, Microsoft, and Apple a- and all the, the big email providers. I bet AOL is, uh, is there as well. And they have an agreement between them about what correctly formatted and signed and authorized messages are. And if they come from one of each other, they’re sort of automatically trusted or, you know, they’re already in the allow list.

And if you, a third party, are setting up your own service, it is so difficult to get on the good list, get on the, the list to get into the cool club. And also, and I can’t stress this enough, they shouldn’t be the ones to have this list. If I’m a competitor to Google, Google just might not put me on that list in a very timely manner, or they might keep forgetting, or it might break now and then, or they might just drop me off that anti-spam list right when I’m launching a new product or anything like that.

And so this is where we are now-

Robin: Sorry to interrupt. A- a- are you s- are you saying that Google have done those things, or are you just pointing out that they could?

Tris: Uh, I’m just pointing out that they could. Right. The, the, the principle of the matter is that they- Yeah … they, they shouldn’t be the ones to decide who can send or receive email.

Uh-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: and so them being in the same position with spam phone calling just gave me instant PTSD, and I was like- Yeah … “Oh no, another problem.”

Robin: Well, and the, and the, the, the specific example for this, right, is that you, some couple of years ago or so, switched, um, maybe a bit longer than that, switched over to using hey.com as your email provider.

So hey.com is an… at the, was at the time a new email service from- Yeah … um, are they called Basecamp or 37signals at this point? I can’t remember.

Tris: They used- Thir- 37signals, yeah.

Robin: So they, so they switched to being called Basecamp, then they went back?

Tris: I think so. I think that’s, that’s the deal. But they’re the company that makes Basecamp, the company that makes…

used to make Highrise, Campfire, but Basecamp is their, their huge product.

Robin: Yeah. But at some point they changed their name to Basecamp, and I found that a weird decision because Basecamp seemed like a much more of a stuffy corporate name than… [01:10:00] Anyway, um.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: Um- Yeah … but, but, but anyway, they, they came up with, you know, hey.com, and it’s an email service that you have to pay for, right?

And, and, and that, um, has a lot of new and radical ways of thinking about email potentially that might be helpful, and I think you do find it helpful.

Tris: I, I describe it as email for autists or people with ADHD and autism. Like, they’ve, they’ve got… They don’t market it as such, but I’m, uh, I look at all of their crazy, weird, uh, features, and I’m like, “Oh, you put this in for me.”

Yeah. “Thank you. Here is my $60 a year.” Sure. “Thank you so much.” Well- But I keep getting my emails bounced from, like, when I email people who are on a Gmail account, for example.

Robin: Oh, you do? Oh, right. ’Cause I, ’cause I knew- To this day … you said that they… You, you told me that they published a lot of, like, posts or something about the struggles they’d gone through with trying to, um, get arou- y- you know, get their, get their email, their users to be, to be seen as legitimate.

Um, but I didn’t realize- Hmm … that it was c- it was a con- it c- was a continuing problem. I thought, I thought they’d sort of- … they’d, they’d, they’d solved it, but it’d just been, like, a huge amount of work.

Tris: They, they have, they have, they have solved it in all except for attachments. I can’t send attachments, uh, certain attachments like ZIP files.

I can’t send ZIP files, uh, to a Gmail account. It just will never arrive, and it would be bounced back as being blocked for anti-spam. And although, sure, ZIP files are a bit of a weird thing, and like they often contain viruses and stuff, but a Gmail account can email another Gmail account, and a Hotmail account can email another Hotmail accou- uh, can email a Gmail account a ZIP file.

Like, it’s not a, it’s not a weird feature. But it’s an example of where they’ve not quite been able to get into the cool kids club. They’re, they’re sitting in second class. They’re in the cheap seats, not up at the front.

Robin: Yeah. So I mean, I, I feel like this is all an analogy for, um, you know, what’s happening with many, many areas of our public infrastructure.

Because as– You know, this is why you need plurality and regulation, um, potentially regulation. Because- Mm-hmm The world we live in now, it’s like the only solution we have available to us is to allow two or three powerful private companies to design our public infrastructure. And when they do that, it’s not even– We don’t have to ascribe malintent to them.

It’s just, it’s just an e- emergent from that system that they will then, um, design it in a way that is somewhat proprietary, that rests on particular understandings between them. They’re not gonna fully, thoroughly document everything they’ve done. They’re not going to, like, go to the effort to, to, to make a really rigorous public standard and adhere to it perfectly, um, because they just simply don’t have to.

Oh,

Tris: yeah. You don’t need… Yeah. You don’t need any collusion when interests align.

Robin: Yeah. And that’s, and that’s where we are in more and more places- Yeah … in the world, and it, and it makes it so that No one can meaningfully compete. And you can’t… And that then creates a sort of a monopoly, a, um, oligopoly, and that in the same way as a monopoly, that drives down quality for everybody.

The thing that I was relating this to was the fact that, like, the, you know, the internet is now significantly less reliable than it was. Um, Cloudflare-

Tris: Right …

Robin: are like a massive, um, structural part of the internet, and they, around the period of like December and like November, December, had something like three or four service-wide outages.

Um-

Tris: Hmm …

Robin: something like that- Yeah, I read something about … which, which is, which is absolutely nuts for such a critical piece of, you know, our global communications framework.

Tris: Yep. And of course, GitHub are, uh, are, are terrible. I, I saw a, a post yesterday, someone said that, uh, up… So we’re the 13th of February when we’re recording this.

Up to today, or perhaps yesterday, GitHub has not been able to have three nines of availability this year. That’s 99.9% uptime. They have not reached this impossible height. Oh, I remember. It’s The Register. Uh, I, I read it in the, the marvelous register.co.uk. Yeah, they were unable to get three nines, which is like bare minimum.

Robin: Yeah. I mean, you would never… When, you know, [01:15:00] speaking from within a, a company where they make these sorts of purchasing decisions, if we were looking at a service and we were looking at, you know, taking on a, a, a service as, as, as a significant piece that our, our business relied on, and they’re not- they’re advertising only three nines of uptime, we’re not, you know…

I mean, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not gonna fly. We need at least, yeah, five, basically.

Tris: Yeah. That’s four days of downtime, like continuous, continuous days. Like it’s, it’s crazy, crazy to, to not be able to do that. Like the, the industry standard for like bare minimums is five nines at least. That’s what I was taught.

And that is like a, a couple of hours per year you’re allowed. Yeah. And even that is considered like minimum. Like you should have just a few minutes of, uh, of, of, of downtime or like it should self-heal after milliseconds. You know? That like we c- we can do this or maybe we can’t. Yeah. GitHub is anything to go by.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, so I don’t know, I don’t know what the solution is to this, um, this problem, uh, exactly. Because we do have, obviously, like the reason why I have opted to say, “Yes, phone. Yes, Google-controlled phone, please block my spam calls,” is because I’m getting too many of them. And that’s a, that’s a problem that, that needs a solution.

Um, I just– I mean, I, I suppose I feel like the… It’s quite clear that the mechanisms behind that should be much more publicly visible and publicly debated, right? So like-

Tris: Yeah, there should-

Robin: Yeah, go on.

Tris: The, the, like the, the list should be controlled by the government. Like, it, it should be in– There should be a database that the government runs that has the list, then any operator can, can use that list to check for bad, you know, known bad phone, phone numbers.

Like you, you can do like a, a half-half thing, like a, a partial private, partial public, but like the, the core data, like the main levers should be in the hands of the people, in the government.

Robin: Well, you see, I don’t, I don’t see the government– I mean, I- We, we had this debate a little bit, a little bit before.

I don’t necessarily see the government as a more benign… I mean, it, it maybe is more benign, but it’s not a benign institution. Um, both a monopoly corporation and a government are both massive, um, power centers. And so the, the, the problem comes from like, like, I mean, you know, you say the government puts it in the hands of the people.

I don’t really agree because I think the government, um, the government being one body is significantly far from the people, um, even if in theory it’s controlled by democratically elected leaders. Um-

Tris: I, I, I know

Robin: what

Tris: you’re saying. Yeah, but so- Like it’s distantly remote.

Robin: The trouble with, with it is that it’s too– Like it should be– There should be many, many layers to it where, uh, we can all see the list, we can all challenge the list.

We are all as far as possible, or at least a significant number of us, um, involved in tweaking the algorithm that comes up with the list. We can make submissions to, to challenge particular things, you know. We can, we can, uh, we can also like locally filter the list. You know, th- these would be the things that would empower people, I feel, and that’s what, that’s what you’d want in, in this.

And I think that’s sort of what the older internet kind of achieved. I mean, like, like you say, you, um… It’s, it’s, it’s a bit of a convenience versus configuration trade-off, isn’t it? Like, um, in the old days, anyone could set up their own mail server. They could become- Mm … their own email provider, and that’s because fundamentally all you’re doing is sending a, you know, a text over TCP with, with a bit of a header, right?

Just like you are with when you host a website or whatever. Um, and that’s, that’s not complicated. And that just meant that people had more responsibility themselves for then figuring out what to do with the spam. And so then you individuals would then have to, you know… And ideally, I suppose we would have built up more, um, empowered networks where we helped each other to tackle the spam problem.

But instead, um, everyone got a free Gmail account. Well, I guess first everyone got a free Hotmail [01:20:00] account, and then they got a free Gmail account.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: Um, and then Google were like, “Oh, well, we’ll just, you know, take that problem away for you.” And we obviously never, we as a, as a, as, as a human race- Yeah

never, never quite, uh, squared up to the, the Faustian bargain we were, we were entering into at that point, I think.

Tris: Right. Right. We ga- we gave up a little liberty for a little security.

Robin: Little convenience, I’d say yes. But yeah.

Tris: Yes.

Robin: Um, and, and, and that’s because– Well, I mean, it, it can’t be separated from the fact that we, um, that’s what the free market individualist Thatcher-Reagan society pushes you towards.

Um, and, and if we, if we were all used to exercising our community, um, engagement muscles a lot more like people were in, let’s say, the, the ’60s or the ’70s, um, I think we would have built systems that were more– that contained more of our individual control within them, if that makes sense. So to me, that’s the solution.

It’s like a, a, a general community engagement problem, right?

Tris: That sounds nice. I, I th- I think that maybe we’re, we’re at a point where we, we need to have a, a stronger, less, like, distributed and community-oriented government function. It– because of the threats of these large tech companies, I, I would not be confident that every individual, say, council could take on Google, but I would be more confident that if they all worked together, the UK government could, or maybe more than that.

Robin: So now we’re very much in the realm of politics, and this is a political debate, and that is my world.

Tris: Oh, no.

Robin: I think that if you look a- around a little bit to look at case studies, you would have less of a government versus corporations view of the world.

Tris: Hmm.

Robin: I think the– Where power gets centralized in government, broadly speaking, it works in the interests of capital And that’s very difficult to extract yourself from in any way.

I don’t think you can ever trust a significantly centralized power center in government to be in the interest of the people. I think the thing that makes it in the interest of the people is strengthening the direct democracy links between the people and the systems of running society. And that’s why community engagement’s the key.

Tris: Gotcha. Yeah, maybe a, like a, maybe like a hybrid method. Not, not a million miles away from perhaps something like Mastodon that’s federated.

Robin: Right. Yeah.

Tris: Like, where you, you retain a lot of control, but there are, there are national or regional or granular lists that you can s- you can subscribe to. Yeah. With sensible defaults.

Robin: Yeah. Well, I get a bit baffled when I, when I feel like I have to sort of lay this out for people, um, in the open source space because I feel like this is the, this is the stuff we’ve been dealing with for, for decades, right? It’s like we, we believe in, um… We know it’s complicated. We know there are lots of challenges along the way, but it’s an incredibly lazy solution for somebody to say, “Well, let’s just make the decision centrally.”

But there’s a reason why we still believe in open source, even though we know that, like- The that Google can just make a decision for the whole of their user base.

Tris: Hmm.

Robin: Because it’s something that, that, that, that, that brings in the plurality of, of contributions from, from the entire community, and that’s, that’s messy potentially But it is the only way to, um, to actually have the voice of the public be, be honored in any way.

Tris: Agree. Yeah.

Robin: So I mean, I think that, um, that’s, that’s the solution to the, to the email, uh, to the email phone thing, but I don’t know, um- That’s- … what you can do about it from the point we’re at at the moment. We’ll have to wait and see.

Tris: We’ll have to wait and see. Wonder what the GrapheneOS, uh, project does for this.

I bet they’ve re-engineered a, uh, a clever option. [01:25:00] GrapheneOS. Y- yes, it’s the hardened, h- paranoid Android distribution that has, like, replicated quite a lot of Google’s infrastructure, but in a user-affirming way.

Robin: Right.

Tris: It’s, uh- Well,

Robin: to me the

Tris: way- … it’s very

Robin: good. You know, they’re usually behind the structure of the project, right?

Like-

Tris: Mm-hmm …

Robin: if they were literally, like it says, it’s developed as a non-profit open source project, so you’ve got non-profit in there, that’s important, right?

Tris: Yep.

Robin: Uh, open source could mean various things, but you would assume that there’s various community contribution layers underneath that, and that’s what makes it more democratic.

The thing about Google is that fundamentally, I don’t even know who’s the CEO of Google at this point, but, um, is it still Sundar Pichai? I don’t know. Um- I can’t

Tris: remember.

Robin: But, but, but what I mean is, like, fundamentally, that is a dictatorship from the CEO down, and, and if they say you’re doing it this way, then you’re doing it that way, right?

Like, like, that’s the, that’s the thing that makes it, um… And, and, and that answers, you know, that they’re gonna centralize the, the interests of mostly, like, the, the shareholders, um, or the board of trustees that represent the shareholders or whatever. I don’t know. Um-

Tris: Yeah, of

Robin: course. And, and, and hopefully in any kind of, uh, principled organization, like what it looks like what GrapheneOS is, it’s not really in the tech that you’ll see the, what I’m talking about per se, right?

It’s, it’s in the, the systems of collaboration that exist behind the whole, the whole project.

Tris: Gotcha

Robin: Do you know what I mean? Yeah,

Tris: yeah.

Robin: Which is, which is what you, what you have in every, every open source project. And then, and then you have open source projects which are just, you know, like, um, Chromium for example, um, which obviously start to exist as only a thing that serves a particular company, and then that company very quickly sort of shuts down.

Le- like, yes, they’re open source. Yes, they might have like, I don’t know, like some ghost structures of what might be collaborative structures that might exist in a proper open source project. But they’re not actually gonna allow any meaningful decision that comes from the community through that. They’re only gonna let the decisions be ultimately in the, in, in the direction of, of whatever favors Google, right?

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: And so what makes something- Yeah … a truly open source project is that they do have those structures, and they actually allow them to make decisions that are filtered up from the grassroots.

Tris: That’s the dream. So if you’re listening to this on Patreon, thank you so much. There are some segments that we have to cut for time or cut for relevancy.

We’re gonna start putting some of those extra-long bonus segments at the end of the Patreon episodes. Hopefully they’ll be interesting. They might be a bit more rabbit hole-y, a bit more personal, but we’ll see. We’re making the first of those segments available for free in the main feed. Thank you so much for everyone for supporting us.

So on January the 14th, 2026-

Robin: Mm-hmm …

Tris: at 9:00 in the evening UTC, fully 60% of the world’s Telnet traffic dropped off and has not returned. Did you know about this, Robin?

Robin: I don’t think so.

Tris: It is astonishing. I will put the link in the, in the show notes to the, uh, the Grey Noise Lab post about this, but the, the, that’s, that’s where I first learned about it.

I probably saw it on Hacker News. What happened is that at this time, at the backbone level, like the intercontinental backbone level, Port 23 was blocked, which dropped the, the open Telnet sessions by about 60%, and they just have never come back. Uh, at– For some reason, whi- which, which actually we, we, we… I think we, we do know based on the evidence, at this point, the backbone service providers, uh, all organized exactly on the hour to block Port 23 unilaterally.

Uh, this was US, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, Egypt. Like, not, not like filtering. Oh, and Zimbabwe. Uh, not filtering, but just like zero. Like comp- the port is no longer usable. Isn’t that wild?

Robin: Yes. Um, why?

Tris: Here’s what we think has happened. Uh, a week or so after this enormous change in the way the internet fundamentally works, a CVE was made public in the t- in the GNU Telnetd program server, and it is a colossal, colossal CVE.

It’s 11 years old, and it allowed you to log in as root with no password. Every Telnet server in the world is vulnerable to this. And it’s especially insidious with Telnet because that shit’s [01:30:00] installed on firmware devices that will never see an update, and so it will never get patched The, the vulnerability is use, the attacker sends dash f space root as the username, and it bypasses authentication and logs you in as root Trivial, right?

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: Horrifying. This has been in, uh, Telnet for 11 years, GNU Telnet. And so it’s probably on your router and my router and everyone else’s router and, uh, the, the JTAG stuff in firmware and chips, bare metal chips. So-

Robin: So what– So the, the block was, was in intercontinental, um, right, but therefore not within local, like national Internet networks

Tris: Let me tell you.

So, uh, I think it is also in a lot of ISPs as well.

Robin: Right.

Tris: The, the, the, the article has four examples- Mm … uh, of complete blanket dropping of port 23.

Robin: Right.

Tris: Uh, Vulture, Cox Communication, Charter and Spectrum, which I had heard of, and BT-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: with British Telecom. I’m very… Like, we know about that. Uh, so the- they also were involved in some way.

Cloud providers aren’t part of this. Cloud providers are largely unaffected. In fact, a lot of the botnets switched to cloud providers, and so their traffic actually went up. What happened is that the, the, the blocking happened before the CV was released publicly, but these providers will have been notified befo- beforehand.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: So they will have, they will, they will have been a panicked meeting in some basement with no windows between a, like some sysadmins like, “Guys, this is terrible. We have to do something.” And they say, “Well, what can we do?” And they say, “Well, look, we’ve, we’re running the backbone. We could, we could solve this, this worldwide catastrophe that is about to happen.”

And they did. These anonymous people, these tier one transit providers just got together secretively and blocked Telnet because it was about to become a hellscape.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: January the 14th, 9:00 UTC, Telnet background drop, Telnet backbone drop begins, and with a, with a few hours it’s c- the rollout is complete.

And then on the 20th, six days later-

Robin: Yeah …

Tris: the CV advisory was posted

Robin: Yeah, I

Tris: mean that- There was six data That

Robin: is wild. But I feel like that’s only the beginning- Is that wild? … of the story to some extent. So I’m very interested in what might have been published since this article, because there’s a number of questions that enter my mind.

Firstly, with such a simple vulnerability

How, um How widespread might it have been being used up to now? And then also-

Tris: In the wild, yeah …

Robin: how much is it still an immense vulnerability despite the fact that you’ve dropped communication between those backbone points, right? Like-

Tris: Huge. I can go to your house, and if your router, like, has, uh, has a, um, Telnet enabled by default, which they, they shouldn’t have, I agree, but like sometimes these devices do.

Yeah. Then, like, just you instantly can weaponize these against the, the user that bought them.

Robin: Well, exactly. But then, but then the point is, um, the interesting thing there, because you say, like, it shouldn’t, but that’s actually something we can know. Like, I’m sure that we can graph how many home routers have port 23 open, right?

Like, um, and, and maybe it’s, maybe it’s 20%- Mm … maybe it’s half a percent, maybe it’s .0001%. Like, I don’t know. But the difference between those numbers is huge, right?

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: Um, so I … Yeah, I mean, I, uh, that’s very interesting. And then, and then what’s the loss? So like what, what was Telnet meaningfully being used for which was suddenly disabled?

Tris: That is a great question. Like SSH should be the one you should be using, because that uses real cryptography, whereas, whereas Telnet is just throw some bytes in the clear down the line. Um, I think that Telnet, that comes into its own when in low, low power devices, where you don’t want or can’t run the complexities of public/private key cr- [01:35:00] cryptography.

Robin: Yeah.

Tris: So like embedded devices, industrial, uh, industrial sensors, industrial, uh, machines, stuff like that.

Robin: Yeah, so like how much did they break? Because like I can well imagine that there were a lot of things and potentially a lot of important … And maybe they, maybe they already knew that it, that there wasn’t anything that

Like, maybe they actually did their homework on this. Maybe they discovered the vulnerability six months ago. They spent, you know, months and months chasing down what the implications of turning off Telnet would be, and they decided it was worth it- Mm … and then they did it, right? But like after a very long investigation.

I just, I mean, that, that, that’s fascinating to me. The thing that I know that I would use Telnet for occasionally was as a basic test of a TCP connection. Like that was kind of the most basic test of a, of a successful TCP connection that I could find. Right.

Tris: Just, just using the client, like poking a port with Telnet- Yeah

and seeing the raw bytes. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is in- Right,

Robin: exactly …

Tris: yeah, yeah, the vulnerabilities in the, in the, in the-

Robin: Which you now can’t do anymore, but like were people ever doing that in scripts, in like, in like automated regular jobs- Oh, well,

Tris: hold

Robin: up … in like

Tris: inside- To, to be clear, this is GNU Telnetd, the daemon, the server.

The client is, is, is, is unaffected. You can still use the t- the, a Telnet client to connect to port 80 on a web server and see some bytes come back. Uh, that-

Robin: Yeah, to port 80. Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

Tris: Yeah. Here’s the, here’s the wild thing. On December 1st, there were an average worldwide daily sessions of a, like a million, uh, daily sessions observed by GrayNoise.io, and then that dropped down to 322,000 by February the 2nd, a third of the, of the, of the baseline.

Right. Yeah. Um, I, I, I agree. I, the, by the way, this, this, this, this, this blog post, which I will link in the description and I’ll send to you, um, now, Robin, um, this was released-

Robin: I think I’m reading it.

Tris: Yeah. This w- this was, this was released three days ago. This is quite, this is quite recent. Yeah, sure. I- I’ll say, I’ll say that the, um, the thing that sticks in my mind is…

There are two things that, that stick out to me. One is we can no longer use, uh, Telnet over the internet, but local networks will still be fine, and actually probably local networks is where it was mostly used, so maybe that’s not too bad. Like, you pr- you would imagine that in, in order to, like, connect to this old creaky industrial machine, you probably boot up the Windows 98 supervisor machine, dust off the keyboard, and log in that way.

That’ll be unaffected ’cause it’s local.

Robin: Mm.

Tris: But the, the bigger question is these unnamed, unknowable backbone companies colluded together for good. No government told them to do this, or at least no one we know. They might have just acted on their own good nature to defend their own networks, and I’m very grateful they did.

This was great. But for them to have so much power, these, these backbone tier one providers, is kinda scary.

Robin: Yeah, it’s disturbing.

Tris: Yeah.

Robin: No, I agree.

Tris: Like, we don’t know what happened. No one’s saying anything.

Robin: And we have this problem in sort of in general, that like the security, like so often this is what happens with CVEs.

There’s a– You know, it is best practice if you discover a significant security vulnerability that you’re first supposed to reach out to the people who can fix it, right? And then they’re supposed to have a very carefully planned publication strategy for that. Oh,

Tris: yeah.

Robin: Um, but that is therefore necessarily undemocratic in the public good, effectively.

Like you’re deliberately keeping it secret-

Tris: Hmm …

Robin: um, because that’s what’s deemed to be in the, in the public interest.

Tris: It probably is.

Robin: And it’s a very interesting sort of paradox. Yeah. Um, uh, but, but yes, I mean, this, this– at least now that it’s public, you’d think that this should, like exactly what happened here should be in the public record.

Tris: Terrifying and fascinating. Yeah.