The Talk Show

‘Sport Mode’, With Special Guest Merlin Mann

Friday, 17 January 2020

Special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show. Topics include the renewal of U.S. law enforcement officials’ disingenuous campaign against iPhone encryption, the Houston Astros cheating scandal, how that cheating scandal relates to the Trump impeachment saga, and Catalyst and the art of Mac software design. But mostly we talk about finding a good pair of slippers.

Download MP3.

Sponsored by:

• Techmeme Ride Home: 20-minutes of today’s top tech news, every day around 5p ET. A terrific podcast that you should subscribe to.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations.

Links:

• Trump’s tweet (what else) excoriating Apple for “refus[ing] to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements”.
• Scaring people into supporting backdoors.
• Wired: “Encrypted Messaging Is Essential, But It Isn’t Magic”.
• Merlin on Back to Work, speculating on how many Apple employees today have grown up more on iOS than MacOS, and how that might be starting to shape MacOS:.
• Great video from the always-great CGP Grey: “Should all locks have keys? Phones, Castles, Encryption, and You.”.
• Mack Weldon’s One-Mile Slipper.
• Professional-Grade Crocs.
• Something pretty similar to the coffee filter cone I’ve been using for 20 years (but I only paid like $4-5 for mine).

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.