Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature?

I'm in the market for a new lawyer, by the way.

Today's guest is Iain McLaren, who is a certified Competent Programmer and also currently working as special counsel at HWL Ebsworth. He does all the legal things our company needs and has always steered us right!

You might be wondering how this was possible. Well, by sealing a legal professional in a Zone of Truth prior to commencing recording, it is possible to have an honest conversation with the lawyer for up to two hours, assuming that they fail their Will saving throw and that they are not permitted to leave the spell's area for the duration.

It's Cory Doctorow, I'm not going to waste your time explaining who he is. You can find him at pluralistic.net, but I'm going to link you to this post specifically because it talks about how cool and hip I am.

Also, you can grab the book mentioned by Will at the beginning here!

Someone recently put me onto the book Crisis Engineering by Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson. It is unfortunately not about how to engineer a crisis, which would be very fun, but about how to leverage a crisis as one of the rare moments where a company is actually open to change. It is one of the rare contemporary books that is ostensibly about "business" that is going to last for longer than two weeks and probably become compulsory reading for operators everywhere.

You can read more about Layer Aleph here. Call them in an emergency! Read their book and print out copies of their faces to wear during a crisis! These are all reasonable courses of action.

This podcast is still not monetized and I didn't get paid or whatever, I just like their book.

Listen, it's Ed Zitron, he doesn't need an introduction. If you live under a rock (very reasonable mental health decision in the year of our Lord, 2026) you can find his work at Where's Your Ed At? or his own podcast, Better Offline.

This episode is with Efron Licht! I met Efron about a year ago, and I make the time to have a call with him every Thursday morning despite the myriad obligations of running a business because he's so goddamn good at programming (and also funny). His writing removed a lot of wild industry dysfunction from my brain around actually programming, and you can find it all eblog.fly.dev. Pick a random article and have fun, they're all great.

Also many thanks to Sarah for editing this episode! We have a paid editor now, everyone! (But also, many thanks to Lisa Lorenzin for getting us this far on volunteer hours!)

And finally, if you're a podcast description reader, the guest next month is Ed Zitron -- shhhhhhh, calm down, don't tell anyone, okay, this is between us.