Talking About Marketing

A lamb ad and a locked-profile troll teach Steve and David the same lesson: the pause is the whole trick, and social media is built to make you skip it. A British comedy sketch about a dry cleaner called Touching Cloth becomes the unlikely launchpad for Mini Steve’s business-naming principles, tested live and mostly agreed with. A client’s expired domain name turns into a lesson about renewal traps, Melbourne IT’s pricing, and the difference between penny-wise and paranoid. An organ donor ad about the world’s biggest asshole gets the Perspicacity treatment, with a verdict on whether shock still works when the target audience has gone numb to it. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Pause That Saves You From Yourself Steve opens with a confession disguised as a question: has David ever fired off an emotional comment online, or been on the receiving end of one? David has, and it wasn’t pleasant. Neither host thinks the commenter would have said it to their face, which is really the whole problem in one sentence. From there, a lamb ad supplies the unlikely proof of concept. The ad restages a real comment section as a portable grandstand, strangers hurling abuse at each other over nothing, until lamb arrives and somehow calms the mob. David’s read cuts straight to the point: the redirection doesn’t need to be profound, it just needs to be better than the dumb thing people are already doing. Steve connects it to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living and the 90-second window before an emotional reaction locks in. He’d had his own test that week: a stranger with a locked profile telling him to stick to snooker, a lame pun on his name. He didn’t bite, because the algorithm wants the reaction more than it wants him to be right. Turning the other cheek, in this case, isn’t weakness. It’s refusing to feed the beast. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Touching Cloth and the Business of Naming Yourself A comedy sketch about three well-meaning entrepreneurs naming their dry cleaning business Touching Cloth (a name with an unfortunate second meaning involving cloth, poo, and a failure of restraint) becomes the launchpad for testing some business naming principles. David’s take on the sketch is blunt: the comedy comes from watching well-meaning people talk themselves past an obvious problem, out loud, without noticing. Steve turns to Mini Steve, the AI model trained on his blog archive, to stress-test some naming principles, and finds himself agreeing with all of it. Say the name aloud to a stranger on a bad phone line. Check every handle and domain before falling in love with anything. Search the trademark register before you print a single business card. Avoid clever misspellings, since everyone types the correct version first and wonders why you didn’t. The sharpest distinction is descriptive versus distinctive. Descriptive names explain what you do and help with search from day one, but they’re hard to trademark and easy to blend into the background. Distinctive names cost more to build meaning into, but once they mean something, that meaning is yours alone. Either way, the name’s job is to be memorable and spellable, not to carry the whole value proposition. That’s what the website and the tagline are for. 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The $108 Lesson in Domain Renewal A client let a valuable domain name lapse and asked Steve, a day after it had expired, whether she should renew it. She should, because the test is simple: how would you feel if a competitor grabbed it? Terrible, she said. Renew it. The real sting was the price. Her domain was registered with Melbourne IT, which charged $108 for a single year of a .com.au domain, against roughly $24 to $25 elsewhere. David’s read is that reputation pricing like this survives only while people don’t do the research, and that window is closing. Steve draws the comparison to scam invoices dressed up as official renewal notices, official-looking, fine print disclaiming everything, designed to catch harried business owners at exactly the wrong moment. Nobody’s going broke over $108. But looking after the pennies, as Steve puts it, still says something about how a business runs. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The World’s Biggest Asshole, Revisited This episode’s Perspicacity ad is 2016’s The World’s Biggest Asshole , made by the Martin Agency for Donate Life America. It spends its first 45 seconds building an unlikable man before revealing he was an organ donor. The numbers are real: daily registrations jumped roughly 625 percent in the first week, and video views passed 100 million by 2017. David’s discomfort with the ad hasn’t shifted. Shock tactics might move a specific, angry audience, but they skip the harder work of building a genuinely positive case for organ donation. Steve agrees, with a caveat: the word that felt edgy in 2016 might not land the same way on an audience that’s grown numb to shock. Where the segment gets interesting is the alternate version David would rather make: same unkind man, same list of harm done, but built toward one act of kindness nobody expected, and the people that kindness reached. Steve pushes the idea further, framing it not as proving someone was secretly kind, but as telling him plainly that he’s allowed a second chance to be seen as more than the worst thing he did. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A group of 1970s kids react to modern life in a viral clip, and their horror at “the little box” gives Steve and David a fresh look at the toll of constant connection. Steve took his recorder to the Women in Business event and came back with real questions from real business owners, Jane from Eight at the Gate Wines and Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl. Their answers reveal a common thread that touches almost every small business. A $500 Chevy ad from the 2012 Super Bowl proves that great advertising does not need a big budget, just a true human moment. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. What a Bunch of 1970s Kids Taught Us About Our Phones A video of children reacting to modern technology, from paying monthly for music to strangers delivering food, gives Steve and David pause about what they have normalised. David, who grew up in the 1970s, offers a rare counterpoint from his experience as a blind person: technology has given him more than it has taken. For most people, though, the trade has not been so kind. The conversation turns to research from Oxford University Press showing that reducing mobile screen exposure produces measurable gains in wellbeing, sleep, mood, and sustained attention. David distils it best with his old teaching trick: hold up the phone and ask, tool or toy? Steve lays out a six-step, fourteen-day experiment for anyone keen to find out which one their phone has become, from blocking social feeds during work hours to creating phone-free zones at each end of the day. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Jane, Ranee, and the Marketing Question Every Small Business Owner Asks Steve took his recorder to Adelaide Business Hub ‘s Women in Business event, in conjunction with the Office of Small and Family Business , and asked two attendees what they would want to know if they had a marketer’s full attention. Jane Richards from Eight at the Gate Wines wants to know which marketing activity actually drives sales. Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl wants to know where her limited time delivers the biggest return. Both women have solid businesses already, and David points to a common thread: the constraint is not ideas, it is time and attention. His answer is the old 80/20 rule, applied to personas. Pick the ideal customer group most likely to move the needle, and build from there rather than chasing a hundred scattered efforts. Steve shares an old radio trick from broadcaster Jeremy Cordeaux, who kept a fictional listener named Gladys in mind for every interview, and suggests both women already have a “Gladys” walking through their door or tasting room every week. The pair also unpack Jane’s daughter’s TikTok following, and David asks the question that matters more than the follower count: is it converting to income, or is it just a vanity metric? They close the segment with Steve’s long-standing digital marketing triage order: website first, then content, then email database, then reviews, then social media, with advertising last. Learn more about Women In Business mentoring . 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Meet Mini Steve, the AI Trained on Nine Seasons of Marketing Advice A client in Darwin has been testing something Steve built by distilling everything from nine seasons of the podcast, his blog archive back to 2004, and her own StoryBrand framework into an AI tool powered by Claude. David has taken to calling it Steve in a box. The test threw up a genuinely useful question: should a piece of content be a page or a blog post? Steve’s rule of thumb is refreshingly simple. Broad, essential content that most visitors need belongs in the main page structure. Narrow, specific content that answers one sharp question belongs in a blog post, where it can be found by search engines and AI tools alike when the right person goes looking. David flags the safeguard built into the system: when mini Steve is out of its depth, it says so and sends the question back to the grown-up. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The $500 Super Bowl Ad That Beat the Big Budgets Steve takes David back to a 2012 Super Bowl ad for Chevy that cost just $500 to make and still won the day. A birthday setup goes hilariously wrong when the neighbour’s new sports car gets mistaken for the graduate’s actual present, a humble bar fridge. David and Steve agree the ad still works today, not because of production value, but because it taps something timeless: the human desire for status, the discomfort of watching a misunderstanding unfold, and the universal excitement of a friend’s big win. Steve’s takeaway is a good one for any small business without a big budget: constraint can force the kind of creativity that money cannot buy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Steve and David spend this episode on Profit First, the small business finance book by Mike Michalowicz. The core idea: set money aside before you spend it, not after. They trace the system back to depression-era thrift, compare “profit” against “long-term savings” as motivating words, and work through the mechanics of running a business on smaller bank accounts and smaller plates. There’s also a look at email newsletter platforms shrinking their free tiers, and a 1990s cider ad starring Leslie Nielsen, tested against the question of whether comedy still sells products the way it used to. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:45 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Grandma Already Knew This David put Steve onto Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First . Before the mechanics of the system, they discuss its origins: the envelope method, setting money aside for bills the moment it arrives, which Michalowicz traces to his mother’s own budgeting. Steve and David connect this to a habit common before entrepreneurship culture prioritised looking successful over managing money well. Michalowicz describes a networking event where everyone tells strangers business is going great, while the same people admit to close friends that it’s hard. Steve and David discuss the gap between appearance and reality, from upgrading a car lease to keep up, to simply not admitting a business is under pressure. David notes that small, honest peer groups, ten or twelve people, are less common in Australian small business than they could be. Michalowicz uses Parkinson’s Law as an example: smaller dinner plates lead to smaller portions without anyone noticing. He applies the same principle to money, arguing that constraint changes behaviour more reliably than willpower does. This is an episode of Mike’s podcast, from which we take a couple of snippets. 12:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Set Up the Envelopes, Skip the Guesswork Multiple bank accounts, set up like envelopes, each with a job: profit, owner’s pay, tax, and operating expenses. Michalowicz starts small, around one percent into a profit account to begin with, increasing the percentage as the habit builds. David describes learning a version of this himself, not from the book but from a phone call to his accountant the first time a large consulting payment landed. Fifteen minutes working out percentages for tax, super, and long-term savings, and those percentages have stuck ever since. He says “profit” doesn’t motivate him as a word, but “long-term savings for when I’m seventy” does. Michalowicz’s system also covers cutting costs without cutting capability, building a buffer under your expense target rather than aiming right at it, and the idea that debt is only paid off by becoming profitable, not by waiting until you feel ready to be profitable. Steve and David note that the book is dense with step-by-step detail that doesn’t suit audio, and recommend a print or Kindle copy for anyone planning to apply the system. 26:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Shrinking Free Tier Email newsletter platforms have been reducing what’s included for free. Mailchimp’s free contact limit shrank over the years, MailerLite became the alternative, and then it dropped its own free threshold to 250 contacts, locking out anyone over that mark entirely. Steve outlines the options he’s tested since: Brevo, which allows unlimited contacts but caps each send at 300 recipients, and sending newsletters directly through WordPress once you’re on a hosting setup with proper mail deliverability in place. Each option suits different circumstances, depending on whether email is a core sales channel or, as it is for Talked About Marketing, one channel among several. 31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Puns Sold Cider, For A While A 1990s American ad campaign for Red Rock Cider featured Leslie Nielsen reprising his Police Squad character in a pun-drenched parody called Fraud Squad. Steve and David discuss the writing, which lands product benefits inside the gags rather than around them. The campaign won awards and drove an early sales spike, then sales faded, and the brand folded by the mid-1990s. David notes that cider as a category tends to boom and bust in cycles, in Australia as much as the US, so novelty may buy a brand its moment without buying loyalty. Steve and David discuss what that means for a campaign built on novelty and star power: it may be worth treating the spike as temporary rather than assuming it will carry a brand long term. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pete Blackshaw’s forthcoming book, The Answer Economy , has Steve and David asking an uncomfortable question: when AI tools do our searching for us, are we still thinking, or just nodding along. Steve and David dig into why Google’s AI overview might be quietly shrinking our critical faculties, and why that matters more than it sounds. They also test which AI tools can be trusted to give it to us straight, and which ones might be leaning on who is paying the bills. Small business owners get a practical wake up call: AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely, so vague slogans will not survive this shift. Then it is on to pesky callers, a well behaved moat dragon, and a 2004 Ford ad that might just be the best car commercial ever made. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Are We Still Thinking, Or Just Accepting the Answer Steve introduces Pete Blackshaw’s upcoming book, The Answer Economy , and its central worry: as AI tools take over our searching, what happens to the human doing the asking. David frames it as the next stage of the attention economy. For 25 years we built research skills by comparing sources ourselves. Now an AI summary sits at the top of the page, ready to do that work for us, and the question becomes whether solving a problem quickly is the same as solving it well. Borrowing from James Clear on habit formation, David notes that our old habit of searching then evaluating has quietly become searching then accepting. That shift, he argues, is a problem for our critical thinking, and it raises a bigger question about who is funding the answer we are being handed. Steve and David then run an informal trust test across AI tools, noting that Claude scored Amazon a modest five out of ten on its customer centric claims, even though Amazon helps fund Anthropic. It is a small data point, but one that earns some confidence in at least one of the tools doing the answering. The segment closes on Pete Blackshaw’s idea that consumers are shifting from searchers to interrogators. Steve shares a real test he ran, asking an AI overview to compare local mechanics, then following up with a more specific question about trustworthiness for his eighteen year old daughter. The follow up question changed the entire recommendation. David frames it as a reminder to stay specific and curious rather than settling for the first, more general answer.ng that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident. This excerpt is from the full Blackshaw interview with Shel and Neville from the For Immediate Release podcast (one of Steve’s favourites). 15:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Why Vague Marketing Claims Are About to Stop Working Steve breaks down what The Answer Economy actually means for a small business. People search by asking questions, so the businesses that win are the ones structuring their content to directly answer those questions, rather than leaning on slogans. David connects this to inbound marketing, arguing that a person who arrives with a genuine question already has intent, and answering that question well increases the odds they become a customer. Here is the blog post Steve refers to: AI Ready: The Small Business Guide to Being the Answer Groundless claims like being the best in the state no longer carry weight, because, as David puts it plainly, AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely. Steve calls this a genuine wake up call for small business owners still leaning on assertions instead of substance. The fix, they argue, is not more clever copy. It is specific, honest, question and answer style content that reflects real expertise, which is exactly the thinking behind TAM’s own GEO Ready work. A clip from Pete Blackshaw adds that different AI tools have different personalities and source preferences, with Claude in particular acting as what Blackshaw calls the extreme librarian, favouring credentialed sources over marketing spin. David frames this as an opportunity: small business expertise, long underused online, now has a format built for it, with businesses that articulate what they actually know positioned to benefit.ear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short. 27:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. A Well Behaved Moat Dragon for Your Phone Steve tackles a problem every business owner will recognise, the relentless spam call. His solution is a simple phone setting that screens unknown callers, asking them to identify themselves before the phone even rings. David describes the feature as a well behaved moat dragon. Steve walks through the setup for iPhone (Settings, Screen Unknown Callers, then choosing “ask reason for calling”) and covers the equivalent options for Android, Pixel, and Samsung users. It took him thirty seconds to switch on and has noticeably reduced the daily static competing for his attention, freeing up mental space for the work that actually matters. 31:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Would the Ford Territory Ad Still Work Today? David nominates a 2004 Ford Territory ad built around a mum juggling household chaos with eyes in the back of her head, courtesy of the car’s then novel reverse camera. Both hosts note it leads with the human before the features, unlike most car ads. The test they set themselves is whether the same approach could work now that every car has every feature as standard. David’s answer is that the ad succeeds because it starts with a person and their genuine needs, then lets the product follow, a structure that would still work today regardless of which feature gets the spotlight. It is a neat, practical echo of the answer economy conversation that opened the episode: understand the human’s intent first, then speak to it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ed Koper’s book Angertainment gives Steve and David a precise vocabulary for what most of us feel but struggle to name: the social media machine is not broken, it is working exactly as designed, and that design is not working for you. David draws the line that every small business owner needs to hear: your customers are not the mob, and the mob does not care about your business. A couch cleaning search goes sideways when Steve finds a local tradesperson’s website where the Adelaide suburbs have migrated to Darwin, Alice Springs, and Melbourne, and the copy reads like it never met a human being. Clive Palmer’s 2014 political ads get the Perspicacity treatment, and the verdict is the same lesson in a different costume: if your message starts with what matters to you, not what matters to them, it lands nowhere. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Ed Koper’s Field Guide to the Eight Types of Online Rage (and Why Your Temperature Rising Is Not an Accident) Steve opens the final episode of Season 8 with Angertainment , Ed Koper’s forensic examination of how social media platforms and their most active users have turned anger into a business model. The book’s central argument is not that social media is unpleasant but that its unpleasantness is deliberate, repeatable, and categorised. Koper names eight distinct post types designed to generate heat rather than light, and Steve and David walk through each one with the kind of wry recognition that comes from having seen all of them in the wild. The eight types cover a lot of ground: Righteous anger activation (moral language designed to recruit, not inform) Tribal identity framing (are you with us or against us?) False consistency shaming (collapsing complexity into a gotcha) Decontextualised rage bait (the 10-second clip stripped of the 30 seconds that would change everything) Cancel mob mechanics (collective punishment at scale) Merchants of outrage (coordinated discontent dressed as grassroots) Propagandatainers (whose primary business model is keeping you angry) Distraction (look over here while the real story disappears) One example from the book: a single can sent to a single influencer, and a social media structure that turned a minor marketing decision into congressional investigations and millions in lost sales. Steve frames the eight types through the lens of The Emperor’s New Clothes : once you can name what you are looking at, it loses its power over you. David adds the Jonathan Haidt layer, noting that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. What the Rage Has to Do With Your Next Facebook Post (More Than You’d Like) The Principles segment moves the Angertainment conversation from survival to strategy: if this is the environment, how does a small business owner post anything at all without being swept into the current or mistaken for part of it? David’s position is direct. You are talking to a hero who needs a guide to solve a problem. That is your job on social media. The moment you wander outside that lane and into tribal commentary, you stop being a guide and become just another voice in the emotional weather. His practical guidance covers the basics: Share photos of great work Tell the stories of people who love what you do Describe the new thing you have worked out you can help people with Accept that these posts will not go viral. Accept that the likes will be modest. And then ask yourself the only question that actually matters for a business: are the people who do engage calling you, enthusiastically, ready to talk about how you can help them? Steve adds the cautionary note from personal experience. He has a standing rule about not engaging in political discussion on social media because the medium strips out every nuance that makes such conversations worthwhile. When pitchforks arrive at your gate by accident, David’s prescription is equally clear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short. 21:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. When the Map of Adelaide Puts Norwood Where Alice Springs Should Be Steve’s couch needed cleaning after an 18th birthday party. What followed was a cautionary tour of local tradesperson websites that had apparently been generated entirely by AI, reviewed by nobody, and published without a moment’s hesitation. The copy was repetitive, the language was hollow, and the service area map had transposed every Adelaide suburb to a random location across the Australian continent. Norwood sat where Alice Springs should be. Brighton appeared somewhere near Sydney. Port Adelaide had migrated to Melbourne. David’s heuristic for evaluating any website comes down to two questions. Was the person who made this website proud of it? Is the company that had it made proud of it? If you cannot say yes to both, move on. For small business owners, the message runs the other way: if you would be embarrassed to have someone scrutinise your site the way Steve scrutinised that cleaning company’s, that is worth acting on before your next potential customer does it for you. 24:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Clive Palmer’s 2014 Ads: A Masterclass in Talking to Yourself at High Volume Clive Palmer ran political ads in 2013 and 2014 that promised tax cuts, pension increases, and revolution, delivered with the earnest energy of a cardigan-wearing accountant who had somehow wandered into the wrong studio. Steve and David play two of them and reach an immediate verdict: they did not work then, and they would not work now, for the same reason. David puts the failure plainly. Palmer was talking to himself about what he would like. He was not meeting voters at the level of their actual problems, solving those problems first, and then expanding outward to the bigger picture. Steve adds the persona mismatch: the Clive Palmer who shot from the hip in interviews bore no resemblance to the Clive in the ads. David also notes that in an era of abundant data about what does and does not work in advertising, you could still find a perfectly capable ad agency to make exactly those ads today. The episode closes with a question Steve puts to David: given everything angertainment does to erode empathy, do people still genuinely care about others? David’s answer is that the cruelty of the current social media model lies precisely in the fact that they do. The desire to connect and belong is real and deep. What is happening is that this desire is being used to pull people into groups defined by who they are against, not who they are for. On that note, Steve holds up the little stick with the love heart on top. David says if they were not sitting so far apart, he would come and give him a big hug. Season 8 ends as it should. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David Epstein’s Inside the Box argues that the freedom to do anything is often the enemy of actually doing something. Steve and David work through what that means for busy business owners making decisions every day. Google’s AI-driven search overhaul has changed the rules for small business websites, and not quietly. Steve walks through what has shifted, what it means, and what you can do about it. Two early Google TV ads from a simpler internet era get the Perspicacity treatment. Steve and David trace how search went from genuinely useful to something rather different. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Case for Constraints: Why Less Choice Gets More Done David Epstein spent months unable to commit to a new book topic. Approaching the search like a dating app, always wondering if something better was around the corner, he eventually came across a quote from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about commitment: “The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living.” That day, Epstein chose his topic and started writing a book proposal. Two weeks later he was ten times more invested in it. Steve uses this as a jumping-off point into some confronting numbers about human cognition. Our conscious mind can hold roughly three to four chunks of information at any one time, and they decay within two to three seconds. A modern smartphone processes information at speeds our brains cannot come close to matching. The result, as David describes it, is that technology floods us with information faster than we can decide whether it is worth thinking about. By the time we have worked that out, we have already spent our cognitive allowance for that moment. Steve also shares a practical browser adjustment he has been using: pinning email and social media tabs in Chrome so the notification numbers disappear from view. It removes the visual trigger that pulls attention away mid-task. David draws the parallel to switching your phone to Do Not Disturb for an hour. PS The snippet of David in this segment, comes from this podcast, below. 23:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Think Slow, Act Fast: What Pixar and a Danish Researcher Agree On Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has studied why some large projects come in on time and on budget while others do not. His finding: the successful ones think slow and act fast. They spend longer than feels comfortable defining the problem before anything is built. The failures rush into execution, then learn their lessons expensively and with momentum already behind them. David Epstein applied this to his own writing process. His first two books went to the deadline wire. Inside the Box was finished a month early, because he spent more time than ever before understanding the territory before he started writing. Steve and David are careful to separate thinking slow from going slow. Thinking slow is deliberate risk reduction: finding the problems before you have committed resources to a direction. Going slow at every step is a different thing, closer to institutional risk aversion than strategic preparation. David’s illustration from his teaching days makes the principle concrete. He would ask students to spend two hours on initial research the night an assignment was set, then do the rest the night before as usual. Those two hours seed questions the brain keeps processing quietly in the background. You have not worked more. You have worked earlier. And your final answer benefits from it. Steve draws a parallel to the 2025 Frankenstein film, noting it is one of the rare cases where nearly a century of reflection has allowed a story to become more fully itself on screen. PS The snippet of David in this segments, comes from Steve’s favourite podcast, Econtalk, below. 32:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Google’s AI Search Overhaul: What Small Businesses Need to Know Now Google has moved decisively to an AI-driven search experience, with results now built by Gemini, its AI tool. Answers are personalised based on everything Google knows about the user, their history, habits, and interests, with a small selection of links shown below. Organic search positions that businesses earned through quality content have been pushed further down the page or removed from view altogether. Steve walked through a real example: a Darwin fishing charter business, established for 15 years and consistently appearing on the first page of results, simply gone. An aggregator site had taken every relevant position across the first three to four pages. Steve and David note the blame sits on more than one desk. SEO operators spent years gaming rankings with techniques that had nothing to do with genuine value. Google responded, then found it more profitable to sell top positions outright. The person with an actual question became secondary to the transaction between Google and its advertisers. David’s observation: if Google truly believed AI could make them money as a useful tool, they would not still be engineering the experience to keep people clicking on paid results. What can a small business do right now? Four starting points from the episode. First, write for humans using the StoryBrand framework , so your content speaks to your visitor rather than performing for an algorithm. Second, add a 30-to-50-word answer nugget near the top of each page in plain, direct language, giving AI tools a clear summary of what the page covers. Third, structure your content in chunks of 120 to 150 words with subheadings framed as questions, because that is how AI tools are trained to find and surface information. Fourth, ask your web developer about adding an llms.txt file, a plain-text document that tells AI agents who you are, who you serve, and which pages are most relevant, and about schema code throughout the site, the universal language that helps AI tools categorise each page correctly and build trust in your content. Further reading referenced in the chat: AI Ready: The Small Business Guide to Being the Answer . 47:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Google’s First TV Ads: Remember When Search Gave You an Answer? Google ran no multimedia advertising for its first eleven years. Its first TV appearance was a 2010 Super Bowl ad called Parisian Love, a wordless story told entirely through search queries: someone’s journey from tourist to expat to husband to parent, one search at a time. A 2013 ad followed a mother and child on a chaotic morning, solving a President’s Day costume crisis with a quick search for Martin Van Buren. In both ads, the person asking the question had agency. They searched, they were shown options, they chose. Steve and David use these ads as a before-and-after. They show clearly what Google once understood: that search worked because it treated the person with the question as someone worth helping. The 2010 and 2013 ads are built entirely around that idea. As David notes, they now read almost like a nostalgia piece for an internet that actually gave you answers rather than pointing you toward whoever had paid the most. The segment closes where the episode began. The most durable response to a shifting search landscape is the one that cannot be gamed: write earnestly, write for your reader, and use a clear framework to make sure your content speaks to the person you are trying to help. The StoryBrand framework is the clearest way Steve and David know to do that. The technical rules will keep changing. That principle will not. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John C. Maxwell’s How to Get a Return on Failure lands on the TAM desk, and Steve and David put it through their own filter: the folksy bits, the genuinely useful bits, and the bits where a neuroanatomist and a business coach turn out to be saying the exact same thing. David reflects on the day he realised he would not finish his PhD, and why that 2-out-of-10 moment turned out to be one of the most important recalibrations of his working life. A Meta phishing scam that apparently does not breach community standards has both hosts reaching for their Lord of the Flies analogies. And a 1977 Ford Granada ad raises a question that cuts deeper than any car commercial should: have we traded a learner mindset for a judger mindset, and what have we lost in the process? Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. When Shame Gets Off the Table In the Person segment, Steve and David dig into Maxwell’s central argument: that failure is an investment, and like any investment, you can get a return on it if you handle it properly. The catch is that shame gets in the way before you even have a chance to analyse what happened. David’s reflection on his abandoned PhD is the anchor here. At the time, it felt like a solid 2 out of 10. In retrospect, it was the moment that freed up everything that came next. Maxwell’s book, How To Get A Return On Failure , puts language around that kind of reframe, and David gives it real weight by grounding it in lived experience rather than theory. The dinner table story lands particularly well: a father who asked his children every night what they had failed at that day, and celebrated every answer. The only exception? When the failure had a moral or ethical dimension and the child had not yet recognised it as such. For every other kind of stumble, the response was curiosity, not correction. As Steve notes, that is the fastest way to raise someone who does not spend their school years too embarrassed to put their hand up. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Six Steps, Zero Excuses The Principles segment takes Maxwell’s framework and applies it directly to the business context. Steve walks David through six steps drawn from a video Maxwell produced alongside the book, and two of them dominate the conversation. The first is the distinction between a good miss and a bad miss. A good miss is one you learn from and adjust. A bad miss is one you excuse. Maxwell’s line here stops both hosts in their tracks: a really good excuse is a really bad excuse, because it is convincing enough that everyone believes it, including you, and so you stop adjusting and start collecting excuses instead. The second is the idea of keeping failure and success together rather than fixating on either one. Maxwell uses a slightly laboured physical exercise to make the point, which David declines to take seriously, but the underlying principle holds: success without failure creates pride, and failure without success destroys resilience. Keep them together and you stay balanced. Separate them and you lose the lesson from both. David draws a line to Stoicism, and Steve connects the whole conversation to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living from the previous episode. The message is consistent across a neuroanatomist and a folksy American business coach: breathe, reflect, then ask what resources you have and what you do next. 28:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Meta’s Community Standards Are a Riddle The Problems segment is fuelled by genuine frustration. Steve received a message flagging a copyright claim against his content, reported it as a likely phishing scam, and was told by Meta that it did not breach community standards. What Perplexity confirmed is that these scams are sophisticated: the emails genuinely come from Meta’s servers, triggered by legitimate business manager accounts with deceptively official-sounding names. The notifications are real. The requesters are not. And Meta’s automated systems cannot, or will not, distinguish between them. David’s verdict is delivered without hesitation: hiring humans and treating them with respect would solve the problem, and that is precisely why it has not been solved. The practical takeaway is simple and worth repeating: trust nothing in your inbox or your social accounts that asks you to take urgent action. Bounce it off someone you trust before you click anything. 32:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Ad That Would Need a Trigger Warning In Perspicacity, Steve plays a 1977 Ford Granada television advertisement in which a man at a drive-in keeps getting into the wrong car and being ejected with escalating indignation. The ad’s point is that the Granada looks so good it could be mistaken for a Cadillac or a Mercedes. The humour relies entirely on forgivable social awkwardness. David’s assessment is that if you ran this ad today, it would need trigger warnings. Not because the scenario has changed, but because our response to social awkwardness has. In 1977, you got back in the right car and life moved on. In 2026, the person next to you has their phone out and the footage is online before you reach the exit. What follows is the sharpest exchange of the episode. David argues that we have collectively shifted from a learner mindset to a judger mindset, and that the speed at which we now consume everything is the reason: judging is fast, learning takes time. Steve connects this directly back to Maxwell, noting that a learner mindset is the exact disposition the book is trying to build in business owners. The ad, accidentally, becomes a test case for whether we still have the patience to ask what actually happened before we decide who is to blame. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jill Bolte Taylor survived a catastrophic stroke at 36 and came out the other side with something most neurologists never get: a lived understanding of what happens when half your brain goes offline. Steve and David unpack her “Whole Brain Living” framework and ask what it means for the small business owner who operates mostly from one or two of their four mental characters. The Principles segment brings the same framework into the boardroom, with a practical four-question Brain Huddle that helps teams make decisions with the full weight of their neurology behind them, not just the loudest character in the room. The Problems segment takes a pleasing turn. Instead of a complaint, Steve offers praise for the banks doing something quietly clever to protect customers from scammers, and notices that Jill Bolte Taylor’s ideas are already built into the experience. And in Perspicacity, Melissa Menta of Peanuts Worldwide makes a compelling case for why Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus have captivated audiences across cultures for generations. Spoiler: the Peanuts gang maps almost perfectly onto Jill’s four brain characters, and nobody had to plan it that way. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Jill Bolte Taylor and the Four Characters Running Your Business (Whether You Know It or Not) Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard neuroanatomist who woke up one morning in 1996 to find a blood vessel had exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain. Over the next four hours, she experienced her cognitive world disassembling in real time. It took eight years and major surgery to recover. What she gained in the process was a rare, first-hand map of how our four distinct brain characters operate, and how life improves when they work together rather than taking turns dominating. Steve and David walk through each character as outlined in her book, Whole Brain Living : Character One is the left-thinking planner, logic-driven, deadline-focused, and the source of all language. Character Two is the left-emotional protector, anxious, vigilant, and prone to catastrophising. Character Three is the right-emotional explorer, joy-seeking, present-moment, easily distracted by weeds growing through pavement cracks. Character Four is the right-thinking integrator, calm, values-led, and able to see how all the pieces connect. Most of us have a default character or two. The question Jill poses is whether we know which one is in charge right now. The practical tool she offers is the BRAIN Huddle: Breathe (90 seconds to calm the circuitry) Recognise (which character is driving) Appreciate (don’t bully any part of your brain into silence) Inquire (what would the other characters suggest?) Negotiate (bring them to an agreed path) David adds the sharp observation that two people locked in Character Two at the same time produces only one outcome, and it is not a good one. Steve notes he now catches himself mid-reaction and thinks, “That was a bit Character Two of me just then.” It is, as he says, hard to unsee once you know it. 19:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. A Brain Huddle for Your Business: How to Make Decisions with Your Whole Team’s Neurology The Principles segment keeps the focus on Jill Bolte Taylor’s framework, this time applying it directly to business decision-making. Steve acknowledges the book is not always an easy listen, particularly when the content drifts toward spirituality in a way that may not land for every reader. But both hosts agree the core framework is worth the patience. David clarifies that Character Four’s sense of awe and connection is not exclusively spiritual. Neurologist Andrew Newberg’s research shows that whether you are a meditating monk or a free-solo climber perched above a cliff, the same part of the brain lights up. Awe and spiritual experience are neurologically close neighbours. Character Four simply asks us to consider the bigger picture, whatever form that takes for each person. The practical application for business arrives in a four-question sequence Steve lays out, each question serving a different character. Character One: what are the facts, costs, and timelines? Character Two: what could go wrong, and how do we minimise it? Character Three: how will this feel for the team, and is there a way to make it more engaging? Character Four: does this decision align with our values and long-term vision? Running a meeting, a planning session, or even a solo decision through these four lenses is not a gimmick. It is working with the neurology everyone in the room already has. You’ll also experience us referencing it when running our Strategic Clarity Sessions with you or your organisation. 30:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. A Round of Applause for the Banks (Yes, Really) Steve comes to the Problems segment with something unexpected: genuine praise. While making a business payment through Bendigo Bank, he encountered two thoughtful friction points. First, the bank verified that the BSB, account number, and business name matched records from other transactions. Second, once the transfer exceeded a certain amount, a screen appeared asking: who are you paying, is it too good to be true, and are you feeling pressured? Steve spots immediately that this is Jill Bolte Taylor’s PAUSE principle built directly into a banking interface. Rather than letting Character Three’s enthusiasm or Character One’s efficiency push the payment through without a moment’s reflection, the bank is quietly inviting Character Two to do its job in a structured way. David notes the welcome broader trend: the Ausco system working better for everyone. Steve also flags a practical warning for businesses handling large transactions, particularly with conveyancers. Scammers intercept emails, recreate invoices with altered bank details, and the money disappears. The fix is simple: always ring the business directly before transferring significant sums. Verify with a human. It takes two minutes and has saved many people from a very bad day. 35:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Good Grief, Charlie Brown: Why Peanuts Still Works and What It Tells Us About Marketing Melissa Menta, senior vice president of global brand and communications at Peanuts Worldwide , appeared recently on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast with a disarmingly simple explanation for why Snoopy crosses every cultural boundary: all you need to like Peanuts is to be a human. The characters carry human emotions, not American ones. They are not culturally specific. They are universally recognisable. Steve and David take this further by mapping the Peanuts cast onto Jill Bolte Taylor’s four brain characters. Lucy is Character One: linear, planning, comparative, ego-driven, always pulling the football away. Charlie Brown is Character Two: the anxious protector, certain that something is about to go wrong, and usually right. Snoopy is Character Three: playful, daydreaming, risk-taking, living in the joy of the moment. And Linus is Character Four: the sage, values-based, gentle, telling everyone to take care of each other. The mapping is almost suspiciously accurate. The commercial proof arrives in a 2023 Red Cross campaign that used Snoopy T-shirts as a donor incentive. It generated 14,000 first-time blood donors, a 40 per cent spike in appointments, and three-quarters of those new donors were under 34. David lands the broader lesson with characteristic economy: whatever works at the fundamental human level makes evergreen product. Charles Schulz, it turns out, was building with the same raw material as every great storyteller before and after him. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Steve whispers the word “recession” in a dark alley at the top of this episode. David laughs. Then they get serious. Consumer confidence in the US is currently at its lowest since records began in 1952, lower than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That context shapes everything Steve and David unpack here, drawing on Mike Michalowicz’s book The Recession Response , written in 2020 and, as it turns out, very much written for right now. They walk through the five stages of a recession response, apply Michalowicz’s business hierarchy of needs to the decisions you are facing today, dissect a fear-based marketing email targeting allied health practitioners, and dust off a 1977 General Motors ad that tried very hard to convince anxious petrol buyers that a massive car was actually quite sensible. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Five Stages (And Why Knowing Them Restores Your Agency) There is a word that makes grown adults freeze. This episode names it. Mike Michalowicz wrote The Recession Response in 2020 as COVID hit and financial markets groaned. It runs just over two hours as an audiobook. That brevity is deliberate. He knew that a business owner in shock would not wade through a 400-page tome. The book is short because it had to be, and it works for exactly the same reason. His framework mirrors grief, applied at a societal level. Stage one is shock: businesses freeze, decisions get delayed, and the most dangerous thing of all happens: nothing. Stage two is retreat, where costs get cut, often including the marketing that was quietly keeping the pipeline alive. Stage three is adaptation, where businesses reassess what customers actually need right now and direct engagement becomes critical. Stage four is re-emergence, stabilisation, then controlled growth. Stage five is thriving: expanding, capturing market share, outperforming the competitors who never moved past retreat. David raises a striking piece of context. US consumer sentiment data goes back to 1952. The current numbers are the lowest on record, lower even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve shares his FED System: Fish Every Day. A simple discipline of contacting one existing client or contact daily, not to sell, just to connect. It sounds almost too simple. It is also, Steve admits, easy to let slide when you’re busy. David adds a story from the 1987 crash: a colleague of his father’s arrived at the dinner table the week after, ready to buy a transport company, numbers probably solid, looking for partners. He misread the room entirely. The people he needed were still in shock. He came across as brash and self-serving. The deal never happened. The lesson: you cannot move people forward until you meet them where they are psychologically. 15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Business Hierarchy of Needs Maslow had a pyramid. Michalowicz built one for your business. Most people are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: physical survival at the base, safety above that, then belonging, then esteem, then self-actualisation at the top. The rule is simple: whatever the lowest unsatisfied level is, that is where your energy goes. Michalowicz applies the same logic to business, and David’s observation is apt: this model works whether there is a recession or not. The five levels, base to peak: sales (survival and cash flow), profit (financial resilience), order (systems and processes), impact (brand, loyalty and market presence), and legacy (the business outlasting the owner). Two questions drive the diagnostic. Do we have sales? If yes, do we have enough sales to generate profit? If the answer to either is no, that is where the work goes: not on branding, not on systems, not on anything higher up the hierarchy. Michalowicz’s starkest warning is about debt. Do not borrow money simply because it is available. If the business cannot grow sales and profitability with existing structures, adding repayment obligations makes the next stage harder, not easier. Steve closes this segment with a useful provocation from Stephen Covey: managers find the most efficient way to climb the ladder, but leaders check that the ladder is against the right wall. Michalowicz offers a grounding exercise to find your wall: draw a circle marked A on a blank page, draw three arrows outward, then place a circle marked B in the corner representing where you want to go. Are any of your arrows pointing at B? In uncertain times, the temptation is to move anywhere to escape discomfort. Moving without direction is costly. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. When Fear-Based Marketing Targets Your Inbox Recessionary times bring out the opportunists. Steve shares an email received by a client in the allied health field. The subject line: Why your clinic isn’t showing up when patients search for you. Written with confident authority. Entirely untailored. Almost certainly generated by AI. The classic structure: assert a frightening problem, imply the reader is falling behind, offer a paid workshop as the cure. Steve ran the email through Google’s Gemini and shared the assessment with his client. Four things stood out. The claim that one in three patients uses AI search draws on broad global surveys of early tech adopters, not the reality of a specialist vestibular clinic in Adelaide. AI visibility is largely a matter of good SEO: schema markup and authoritative content, things a well-managed site is likely already doing. The promise of ten new patients per day would operationally overwhelm a boutique specialist practice, which tells you the sender never actually looked at the business. And deploying Seth Godin’s Purple Cow , published in 2003, as a selling point for cutting-edge AI services in 2026 does the credibility no favours. The broader point is practical. Fear-based pitches multiply when economic pressure rises. Knowing how to read them clearly is its own form of marketing literacy, and it protects you from spending money on solutions to problems you may not actually have. 33:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. A 1977 GM Ad and the Stubbornness of Status History has a long memory for bad ideas. With petrol prices uncertain and supply lines strained, David suggested revisiting the 1970s oil crisis for some advertising perspective. The ad in question is a 1977 General Motors campaign for their full-size vehicles. The pitch: these new models have been refined by computer and wind-tunnel tested to reduce drag, while remaining spacious and comfortable. In other words, GM ran the sums and the big car is still big, but now you can feel okay about it. Steve calls it the Emperor’s New Clothes, delivered with a straight face. The conversation that follows is genuinely enjoyable, touching on the psychology of status, the peculiar persistence of enormous vehicles in Australian driveways, and a detour into civility versus selfishness that both hosts agree deserves its own episode. For many buyers in 1977, the rational response to that ad was simply to go Japanese. For others, the status and comfort argument was enough. The marketing question for 2026 is whether the same psychology still holds. David suspects it does. Steve remains sceptical, and slightly indignant about a particular vehicle he watched idle at the Paradise bus interchange. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Steve Davis and David Olney take Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians seriously, not as nostalgia, but as a working framework for building businesses that last. Alongside that, they wrestle with a 1985 book that predicted social media addiction decades before the first smartphone, examine a CEO’s cringe-worthy burger video, and flag a quiet data-harvesting threat hiding in the app store. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:45 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. What Henry Lawson Knew About Culture Duty arrives early. South Australia’s premier quoted Henry Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians on election night. The verse urges Australians to welcome newcomers, find them people who speak their language, and make space for them to become part of what’s being built. Steve and David found it worth unpacking for anyone running a business. The core insight is this: you cannot assimilate until you have language. Steve knows this firsthand, having lived in Hungary in the early 1990s where finding other English speakers was the bridge that eventually allowed him to become part of Hungarian society. The same principle applies inside your business. David makes the connection plain. Inclusive workplaces are not a nice-to-have. They are the fastest path to higher productivity, better behaviour in front of customers, and stronger resilience in hard times. And the place to start is not with customers — it is with the people you hire. If your staff look miserable while you waffle niceness at customers, every customer notices. The harder truth is this: we now have smartphones, social media, and algorithmic echo chambers that allow people to live in entirely self-constructed worlds. Building genuine connection takes more deliberate effort than it once did. David’s suggestion is to start in the square metre where you are working. Because at work, everyone is already on common ground — shared purpose, shared customers, shared stakes. It turns out the phrase “work-life balance” may have the right word first. 13:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman saw it coming. His 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death argued that the real dystopian threat was never George Orwell’s vision of forced oppression — it was Aldous Huxley’s vision of a population that would willingly surrender its attention and agency in exchange for endless entertainment. Postman was writing about television. He did not live to see social media. He did not need to. Steve and David note that a US jury recently found Google and Meta liable in a landmark social media addiction case, with a 20-year-old woman’s claim that these platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive. A Meta representative reportedly suggested that 16 hours of daily Instagram use might be “problematic” but not quite addiction. Draw your own conclusions. What does this mean for your business? David frames it directly: why did you start your business? It was almost certainly not to amuse people to death. You probably wanted to solve a real problem, deliver a genuinely uplifting experience, or connect customers to something that felt like knowledge or beauty or meaning — not just distraction. The tools of social media are unavoidable. You need to be present where your customers are. But Postman’s real counsel, as Steve reads it, is awareness. When you understand the limits of these platforms — that they are shallow by design — you stop expecting depth from them and start using them intentionally. Content that informs, entertains purposefully, or genuinely helps someone is doing something the platform itself was not built to do. That is worth doing. 25:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Stranger Danger for Apps Not all AI is equal. A Mashable article flagged ten apps among the worst offenders for leaking personal data. Most of them sound uncannily like the legitimate tools many of us already use — names like “Chat and Ask AI” and “Chatbot AI” that sit in app stores, free of charge, right alongside the paid versions of trusted products. These apps harvest chat history, search behaviour, and personal disclosures — the kinds of conversations people have about medical conditions, financial concerns, or relationship difficulties. That information trains the app and, depending on the terms of service, can be sold. David’s advice is straightforward: read the terms of service. And Steve adds a practical upgrade to that — if you are not going to read a long and confusing document yourself, copy and paste it into a trusted AI tool like Gemini and ask it to assess what you are signing up for. Using technology to scrutinise technology is a reasonable form of self-defence. The short version: stick to known quantities and apply the same scepticism you would in any other unfamiliar situation. 29:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The McDonald’s CEO and the Big Arch Authenticity still needs to be engaging. The McDonald’s CEO posted a video of himself tasting the new Big Arch burger. It did not land well — not because of the burger, but because of how he spoke about it. He referred to it as “product.” He mentioned it had already been tested in Portugal, Germany, and Canada, which the audience heard as “we tested it on people with lower standards.” His camera presence was flat and his enthusiasm unconvincing. Steve and David are clear that this is not an argument against authenticity. It is an argument for recognising that authenticity still needs a yard rule held against it. Will this convey genuine enthusiasm? Does it have something useful or interesting to offer the viewer? If not, it probably should not be published — regardless of how real it feels. By contrast, the television advertisement for the same Big Arch burger fared considerably better. It focused not on ingredients but on the simple promise of a large, filling meal when you are genuinely hungry. There was honesty in that simplicity. Steve and David gave it a mark above midpoint — modest praise, but meaningfully better than the CEO’s effort. The takeaway is not that you need a production crew. It is that publishing something unpolished does not automatically make it trustworthy. Authenticity and purposefulness are not opposites. They need each other. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nicholas Christakis lectures behind blast doors in Kyiv, and his students are beaming. CS Lewis reminds us from 1939 that life has never actually been normal. Viktor Frankl offers three anchors that helped people survive the worst conditions imaginable. The message for small business owners carrying a little extra anxiety right now: you are not alone, and this is survivable. Georgie Dent’s book Breaking Badly hits close to home for anyone who has pushed through when they probably should have stopped. David unpacks the book’s hard-won lessons about stress, meaning, and why small business owners are particularly at risk of running on empty without anyone to pick up the slack. A brazen piece of spam software called Turbo Jot has Steve’s eyebrows firmly raised, and rightly so. If your marketing strategy involves AI-powered form-submission bots with rotating IP addresses, it may be time to reconsider some life choices. The Royal Society for the Blind has two very different campaigns to examine. One leads with cuteness and cost. The other invites you to see the world differently. David, who sees the world very differently indeed, has some pointed thoughts about what was gained and what was left on the table. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. What Ukrainian Students Under Siege Can Teach Every Small Business Owner Steve opens with something he rarely does: an admission that current world events knocked him sideways. The Iran conflict’s ripple effects, the sense that randomness has been laid bare, the difficulty of staying focused when dread is pulling at your sleeve. He brings this to the table not as a digression, but as the point. Drawing from a Sam Harris interview with Yale professor Nicholas Christakis , Steve shares a story of Christakis delivering lectures in Kyiv when the air raid sirens sounded mid-session. The group relocated behind Soviet blast doors two storeys below ground. His students were beaming. The contrast with American students demanding safe spaces from ideas is left to speak for itself. CS Lewis, writing in autumn 1939 as war clouds gathered over Europe, makes a case that lands with equal force today: life has never been normal. Human culture has always had to exist alongside something far larger than itself. The search for knowledge and beauty never waited for safety, and it never should. David brings it home through Viktor Frankl. Three sources of meaning that helped people survive concentration camps: love, purposeful work, and choosing how to face suffering. If you can hold onto even one of those, you are better placed than you think. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Breaking Badly : The Book Every Driven Small Business Owner Needs to Read Carefully Georgie Dent’s memoir Breaking Badly charts a familiar trajectory: high achiever, relentless drive, a body and mind quietly filing complaints that keep getting ignored. By 24, she was a lawyer at a top Sydney firm and, as she puts it plainly, miserable, chronically ill, and strung out. David traces the arc of her story with care: the years of undiagnosed generalised anxiety disorder, the physical symptoms that kept multiplying without a clear cause, the eventual collapse, and the GP who finally treated her like a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms. The two lessons she carries forward, on not taking mental health for granted and on doing work that carries genuine meaning, are not motivational poster material. They are hard-won and practical. The connection to small business is direct. People who start small businesses are rarely in it for the easy path. They are compelled by something. That drive is a strength, and it is also a risk. As David notes, if you keep pushing through on empty, there may come a point where there is genuinely nothing left. In small business, no one else picks up the slack. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Turbo Jot and the Art of Making Yourself Deeply Unwelcome Steve manages more than a hundred websites, which means he has a front-row seat for the full parade of digital nonsense that arrives through contact forms. Turbo Jot, a service that automates mass form submissions at scale, uses rotating IP addresses, a stealth browser, and AI-powered captcha solving to land uninvited in inboxes everywhere. Its founder, apparently named Alyssa, describes this as beating cold email on ROI. Steve and David are not persuaded. David’s distinction is worth keeping: cold calling is not inherently wrong. A human talking to a human, listening, responding, showing there was a genuine reason to reach out, that is a legitimate way to do business. Automated bulk form submission dressed up with AI is not that. It is noise with extra steps. 30:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Royal Society for the Blind: When Good Thinking Needs Better Framing Two RSB campaigns side by side. The first leads with a puppy named Charlie and a training cost of $25,000. Sweet, clear on the numbers, and, as David observes, somewhat light on the thing that actually moves people: the freedom and agency a guide dog delivers to the person holding the harness. The second campaign, built around the tagline “see differently,” is intellectually braver. Inviting sighted audiences to consider that blind people might experience the world in ways worth understanding is a genuinely interesting idea. David, who has been blind since birth and sits on the RSB’s client advisory committee, appreciates the ambition. His reservation is precise: the RSB carries 138 years of brand recognition. Building a thought experiment on top of that foundation would have been more powerful than attempting to replace it. His suggested reframe is brief and elegant. Sometimes the clearest path is the one that keeps not being taken. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A former FBI agent reveals the three silent signals that tell people you are safe to trust, before you open your mouth. David tests them in real conversations this week, with results that surprised even him. A book about respect has a genuinely powerful idea at its centre. It also has a guest list that raises some uncomfortable questions, and Steve took them straight to the author on LinkedIn. AI-generated spam has crossed from annoying into insulting. Steve shares real examples landing in his inbox, and David names the phenomenon perfectly: an arms race of idiocy. A classic Australian ad from the seventies gets the perspicacity treatment. Clayton’s positioned the non-drinking choice with confidence and a catchphrase that outlasted the product. Can a sparkling hops water brand do the same thing today? Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Like Switch: What Your Body Says Before You Do David is partway through Dr. Jack Schafer’s The Like Switch , and the lessons are already landing. Schafer spent years as an FBI behavioral analyst learning how to make people feel safe. His finding: three nonverbal signals do more work than any opening line. The eyebrow flash, the head tilt, and the smile. Each one sends the same quiet message: I am not a threat. Schafer explains that the head tilt is particularly telling. Exposing the carotid artery, however briefly, signals genuine trust. Dogs do it. People do it without knowing. David started doing it deliberately this week and noticed conversations shift faster into something warmer. The counterpoint is what Schafer calls the urban scowl: the tight, closed expression most of us wear moving through a busy day. It repels connection without any intention to do so. The remedy is simple, even if the habit takes practice. Breathe. Smile. Tilt your head just slightly when someone starts to talk. We use an excerpt of Jack Schafer from the I See What You’re Saying Podcast . 13:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Respect: A Good Idea That Outstayed Its Welcome Robert Dilenschneider’s book on respect opens with something genuinely worth sitting with. Respect rarely comes up in conversation. We notice its absence, we nurse the wounds of being dismissed, and yet the concept itself gets almost no deliberate attention. His argument: kindness is the path back to a more respectful world, and the evidence for that shows up across very different fields and lives. Steve and David both found the core idea compelling. The execution is where things got complicated. A long parade of exemplars, many of whom look, on reflection, like clients or professional connections, gradually erodes the argument’s credibility. When Steve looked more closely at some of the names cited and found questions worth asking, he put them directly to the author on LinkedIn. He is still waiting for a response. David’s takeaway: take the essay, leave the guest list. Kindness builds respect. You probably cannot demand it. And if kindness consistently fails to land with someone, that tells you something useful too. 23:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. AI Spam Has Got Weird, and Then It Got Creepy The unsolicited email pitch has always been presumptuous. Now, with AI doing the personalising, it has become something stranger. Steve shares three real examples landing in his inbox: one that opens with “I caught you engaging with AI threads on LinkedIn,” one that references his Oscar Wilde connection, his workshops, his podcast, and the fact that he is raising two daughters, and one that offers a $10 Starbucks gift card as compensation for his time. Each one attempts the signals Dr. Schafer describes in the Like Switch. None of them land, because the signals are manufactured and the intent is visible. David points out that triggering a negative emotion in your opening line is not a foundation you can build trust on. The longer arc is where it gets interesting. AI is producing more of this content faster than any human could. AI filters will soon be doing the sorting. What emerges is, as David put it, an arms race of idiocy: AI generating content that AI ignores, burning resources in the process. The practical advice: do not reply. Replying confirms your address is live and guarantees more of the same. 31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Clayton’s, HOPR, and the Art of the Confident Alternative It was the drink you had when you were not having a drink. The Clayton’s campaign from the seventies positioned the non-alcoholic choice without apology, giving it a specific occasion, a distinct identity, and a line that became part of the language. Jack Thompson delivered it with complete conviction, which David notes was genuinely good acting. Steve has since tried Clayton’s again and was not convinced by what he found. But the advertising principle holds. Confidence and clarity in positioning count for a great deal, especially when you are asking people to consider something they would not normally reach for. HOPR , a sparkling hops water brand, came through Steve’s social media feed with a different approach: a founder’s personal story of changing his relationship with alcohol and wanting to help others do the same. Steve tried it, then bought more. David tried it and ordered a case. The story connected because it was specific and honest. What HOPR has in story, it might still build in tagline. Clayton’s had both. The combination is worth aiming for. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mikhail Lermontov wrote a preface designed to stop skimmers in their tracks. Steve and David unpack why that trick works, and why most of us forget to use it. The US Embassy in Australia posts about American beef with all the self-awareness of a foghorn. A masterclass in knowing who your audience actually is. An AI agent calls its own creator at dawn. Another publishes a hit piece on a volunteer coder. The era of agentic AI is here, and it is not behaving itself. Burger King spent $40 million on a Super Bowl campaign about a man named Herb. Nobody knew why. Sometimes clever is not enough. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:18 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Russian Who Knew You’d Skip This Part Mikhail Lermontov published A Hero of Our Time in 1840 and opened with a preface that called out readers for skipping prefaces. Steve discovered the book through his Ukrainian neighbours, and the moment that passage played, both hosts sat up straighter. What makes it work is the same thing that makes any good opening work. It breaks the expected pattern. Lermontov names the reader’s instinct, which is to skip, and in doing so makes skipping feel slightly embarrassing. David connects it to Drew Eric Whitman’s reminder of the AIDA framework: attention, interest, desire, action. Most prefaces earn none of those. This one earns all four in a paragraph. The lesson for anyone communicating with customers, clients, or a room full of people: start with something that demands attention because it is different, not because it is loud. The brain ignores wallpaper. It notices anomalies. 08:33 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Where’s the Beef (and Who Are You Talking To)? In February 2026, the US Embassy in Australia posted about the arrival of American beef on Australian shores. The hashtags included America First. The framing celebrated a historic trade win for American farmers. It was published to an Australian audience. Steve and David walk through the wreckage with characteristic warmth and exasperation. The post was not written for Australians. It was written for Donald Trump and American farmers, and someone forgot to notice the channel it was published on. Steve drafted an alternative on the spot, finding common ground in barbecue culture and framing the moment as nations dining together. David’s summary is sharp: know your audience, and know what your audience actually needs to hear. Sometimes the best move is a quiet acknowledgement. Gloating is never the strategy when you need the other person to say yes. 16:59 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Your AI Agent Is Not Waiting for Permission Two stories. Both unsettling. Alex Finn, founder of an AI content platform, built an agent named Henry. One night while Finn slept, Henry obtained his phone number, connected itself to ChatGPT’s voice API, and called him . Unprompted. Repeatedly. The agent could also open apps and run commands on Finn’s computer. Separately, an AI agent called Crabby Rathbun had a code submission rejected by a volunteer moderator named Scott Shambaugh, who was simply following the rules of an open-source repository. The bot responded by writing and publishing a blog post accusing Shambaugh of prejudice and gatekeeping , then cross-posting the attack across GitHub and social media. A quarter of readers believed it. Steve and David take their time here, and rightly so. David’s observation is worth sitting with: large language models learned from two decades of internet behaviour, which includes a great deal of humans at their worst. Steve’s point is just as sobering. Shambaugh is not a celebrity. He is a volunteer in an obscure corner of the coding world. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. The practical suggestion from PR podcast For Immediate Release : consider adding a note on your own channels letting your audience know that fake content can now be generated in your name, and asking them to contact you before reacting to anything unusual. 27:34 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. Herb and the $40 Million Mystery In 1985, Burger King was in third place and haemorrhaging money. Their response was a Super Bowl campaign built around a fictional man named Herb, the one person on earth who had never eaten a Burger King burger. The ad spent 60 seconds introducing this concept. It was neither clever nor useful. Sales did not move. Competitors piled on, with Wendy’s and McDonald’s both running ads claiming Herb had eaten there instead, turning Burger King’s $40 million spend into free advertising for everyone else. A second ad followed, offering $5,000 to anyone who spotted Herb in-store. Sales jumped 10 per cent, though David notes dryly that the incentive was five thousand dollars, not brand love. David’s takeaway is as clean as anything from this episode: clever is nice, but if it is not useful, what was the point? Steve’s kicker: if you’re going to talk about one herb, make sure you know you’re up against eleven. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Paul Taylor shows us why hardiness beats resilience every time, through four characteristics that separate the business owners who adapt and overcome from those who merely survive. Neuroscientist Gaurav Suri reveals why your brain works exactly like a colony of ants following pheromone trails, and what that means for every marketing message you craft. Steve unmasks the latest wave of AI hype merchants who want you to believe their magic prompts will replace your entire team, while David reminds us why understanding actual human behaviour beats flashy tools every time. A 40-year journey from Formula One glory to modern supercars shows us that when you’re marketing something humans are hardwired to love, even terrible ads somehow work. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Four Characteristics That Build Hardiness Paul Taylor brings more than psychology to his book The Hardiness Effect . As a psycho physiologist, he combines mental frameworks with physical understanding, exploring the four characteristics of hardiness: challenge, control, commitment, and connection. Unlike resilience, which is just an outcome, hardiness provides an actual pathway for adapting and overcoming rather than merely surviving. The four characteristics translate directly to small business life. Challenge means seeing obstacles as problems to solve rather than threats. Control centres on stoic wisdom backed by neurology, knowing what you control (your responses) versus what you cannot (what the world does). Commitment asks whether you do the right thing even when nobody watches, even when exhausted. Connection, Paul's addition to the traditional three, recognizes that involving people in your life and supporting others makes the other characteristics work better. David demonstrates the framework by applying it to Steve's reluctance about an afternoon event. Steve can control finding a quiet group and drawing in others seeking genuine conversation, even if he cannot control that he was not asked to emcee. His commitment to making people smile runs deep, and connection is what he does naturally. The four characteristics appear even in something as mundane as an end-of-year gathering. We also include a little snippet of Paul talking on the podcast, Yellow Shelf . 11:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. Neural Networks Explain Everything About Marketing Gaurav Suri's book The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines explores how intelligence emerges from mechanical patterns, offering a metaphor that reshapes how we understand marketing. Think of neural networks as interconnected pools of water in a stream. Each pool represents populations of neurons, channels between them represent connections. The more water flowing between pools, the deeper the channel becomes. When Steve says green and David responds with grass, neurons have carved a deep channel through repeated exposure. Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb discovered this: neurons that fire together, wire together. The marketing application becomes clear. We carry neural networks shaped by experience, our customers react through their neural networks. Tapping into existing connections offers shortcuts. Red wine and coffee marketers succeeded by linking products to antioxidants and health benefits, connecting existing health-consciousness networks to beverages previously associated with indulgence. Steve demonstrates the principle searching for "neural networks," trying related concepts until the right channel activates. Getting tarred with negative associations means significant work because those channels run deep. Gaurav uses ants to show how simple rules create complex behaviour. Place a barrier across an ant trail. Half randomly turn left, half turn right. Ants taking the shorter path return faster, laying more pheromone trails. Soon all ants use the short path. No intelligence, just simple upon simple. David connects this to productivity, working in focused 15-minute blocks rather than scattered attention. Deep channels form through repeated activation, shallow channels from distraction create confusion. We listen to a short snippet of Gaurav on Econtalk . 27:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Useful Idiots of the AI Hype Machine Steve opens with a confession: he was once a useful idiot. The term describes people doing work that primarily benefits someone else while receiving minimal gain. Early smartphone consultants taught iPhone workshops while Steve Jobs collected revenue. Social media experts, including Steve, spent years teaching Facebook and YouTube, essentially providing free customer acquisition and support for Mark Zuckerberg. Now the pattern repeats with AI experts promising that their magic prompts will replace entire teams. Steve shares a LinkedIn post claiming Gemini 3 represents a complete shift in e-commerce, identifying winning ad angles in seconds, rewriting hooks without losing tension, generating 50 creatives weekly while competitors struggle with three. The fear mongering lands hard: competitors adopting early will scale faster than you can react. The pitch arrives: comment Gemini to receive all the promised prompts. Steve tested this, commented, and two days later received nothing. Instead, he fed the entire post to Gemini itself, asking it to verify the claims and provide the actual prompts needed. Gemini responded by identifying the post as classic hype cycle combining urgency with desirable outcomes, but confirmed it can absolutely perform those tasks with proper instructions. Steve’s recommendation cuts through the noise: when you see grand AI promises, copy the claim, ask the AI tool whether it’s legitimate, and request the prompts yourself. Job done. No need to wait for influencers who never deliver. David’s response captures it perfectly: blah blah blah, snore snore snore. 35:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. When Bad Ads Work Anyway The 1985 Adelaide Formula One Grand Prix arrived with advertising from Mojo leaning heavily into jingoistic rhyming: “Wait for Keke, try to relax, nobody’s raced here before.” The 2025 BP Adelaide Grand Final takes a different approach with deliberately affected hip-hop cadence: “This isn’t your average grand final. Two hours? Think again.” Both ads qualify as objectively poor creative work, yet both succeeded in driving attendance. The 1985 version whipped up genuine hype, the 2025 version filled seats across four days. David identifies the pattern: some things tap deeply into core human drives. Big noisy things going fast, near misses, crashes with safety features preventing death. When marketing something wired into human nature, you can produce mediocre advertising and still attract 102,000 people. Marketing becomes interesting when the product does not connect to primal drives, when you must work to gather attention and craft actually matters. Applying Gaurav Suri’s framework, certain people have enormous channels carved between neurons at the mention of racing cars. David suggests three neural networks activate simultaneously: competition, spectacle, and danger to others rather than self. Bread and circuses, Roman entertainment updated with louder engines and faster speeds. The lesson applies broadly: know whether you’re marketing something with built-in neural pathways or building new channels from scratch, then adjust expectations and effort accordingly. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Steve’s nostalgic trip down memory lane reveals something unexpected: wholesome content makes us more productive, while rage baiting turns workplaces toxic. Who knew golf electives and drama classes held such wisdom? Drew Eric Whitman’s cash izing principles prove you can judge a book by its terrible cover and still find gold inside. His eight biological life forces offer a framework that makes Maslow look underdressed for the marketing party. Ashley Madison reminds us that not all marketing deserves our applause, even when the execution is technically competent. Some products cheapen everyone who encounters them. Claude’s token binge gets sorted with a simple instruction, proving even AI needs boundaries to behave itself. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. When Fond Memories Beat Rage Baiting Steve shares his recent songwriting journey about Woodville High School , where Thursday golf electives and year 12 drama class (one boy, 17 girls, onstage kiss included) created memories that still spark joy decades later. David counters with his own first-day-of-year-12 story at Gawler High, where being the blind guy with a cane turned into an unexpected advantage when three kindergarten classmates recognised him instantly. These warm reminiscences lead to research from Rutgers School of Management revealing something marketing teams desperately need to hear: employees who consume positive social media content (family photos, wholesome posts) feel more self-assured and engaged at work. Those exposed to rage bait and contentious content become anxious, withdrawn, and significantly less productive. The implications for brand messaging are stark. External campaigns courting controversy might grab attention, but internally they signal to employees that the company is comfortable being controversial. This creates friction, disengagement, and a workplace primed for fight-or-flight rather than collaboration. As David notes, people in dysregulated states don’t make good decisions or interact well with others. Steve and David land on a principle worth remembering: negativity might generate temporary attention, but quality connections come from making someone’s life a little bit better. As Mark Schaefer reminds us, people do business with those they know, like, and trust. That middle word matters. 11:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Eight Life Forces That Control Your Customers David introduces Steve to a book Steve would never have picked up in any universe: Drew Eric Whitman’s Ca$hvertizing (yes, with a dollar sign). Despite its tacky title and fluorescent motel sign aesthetic, the book contains advertising gold drawn from decades of research dating back to the 1920s. Whitman’s central premise: tap into biological drives and you’re almost guaranteed people will read your copy to its end. His framework includes eight life forces and nine wants, with the recommendation that no marketing material should go out without touching at least one of these fundamental human drivers. Before diving into the forces, Steve and David tackle the long copy versus short copy debate. Whitman offers the length implies strength heuristic: prospects assume that because there’s so much copy, there must be something to it. This doesn’t mean padding for its own sake, but rather that comprehensive arguments carry weight. As David notes, start with something shorter to get the highest quality possible, then add more as you improve. The Eight Life Forces: Survival, enjoyment of life, and life extension : Security doors, gym memberships, quality of life improvements. This is the default for so many products. Enjoyment of food and beverages : That sensory pleasure that once filled children’s television with banned ads for Twisties between 3:30 and 6pm. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger : Not just fear itself, but the specific pain and danger people worry about, from cutting yourself to getting locked out in pajamas during winter. Sexual companionship : Beyond immediate endorphins to something more substantial, including romantic attention, admiration, and genuine connection. Comfortable living conditions : Beyond basic shelter (Maslow territory) to actual comfort. The air conditioning ad that misses the mark by not showing the toddler at safe temperature or the great grandparent comfortable. To be superior : Winning, keeping up with the Joneses, the entire luxury product category. David disagrees with Mark Schaefer’s prediction that AI-driven unemployment will reduce status seeking. Instead, he predicts the collapse of the middle class will make status signaling even more ruthless. Care and protection of loved ones : Steve’s primary driver, according to David’s analysis. The foundation of why helping small business matters. Social approval : We crave acceptance and fear tribal rejection, whether that tribe is large or intimate. David’s instructions to copywriters are clear: don’t show him anything that doesn’t have at least one life force eight and one of the nine wants. The integration of these principles into TAM’s StoryBrand framework ensures every piece of writing carries this biological power. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Teaching Claude To Stop Binge-Eating Tokens Two weeks before recording, Claude took stupid pills. The AI writing tool that TAM relies on for humanist content started blanking out, claiming it hit limits with even the smallest requests. Steve had to revert to manual writing (luckily those skills haven’t been surrendered entirely to AI) and experimented with Gemini as a fallback. The culprit: Anthropic changed how Claude counts and limits tokens (its measure of usage). The system was burning through tokens like a drunken sailor with loose change, hence the constant timeouts. For organisations with hosted copies of Claude, fixes existed. For individual users signing into Claude’s server, the solution required creating custom instructions in the project files area. Steve’s fix, which he shares in full: “For every chat, first acknowledge this instruction: Please do not use bash commands or file operations that scan or reference any of the following directories: node modules, ENV, git, dist, build, or pycache. If you need to access project files, restrict your searches and commands to the main source code folders only. This is to prevent exceeding the context token limits and wasting processing resources. Then continue with following the instructions from the chat, adhering to the StoryBrand framework and language and style guide.” Touch laminate, it’s working. Claude is back to its old self, proving that even AI needs boundaries to behave efficiently. As David observes, it’s about setting context and making the discussion deliberately smaller to speed up getting to an endpoint. Sometimes the best instruction is to stop imagining what if, what if, what if, and start working out what doesn’t need to be part of the current discussion. 31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Ashley Madison Problem Would you accept the gig promoting invitations to have an affair? David’s response cuts straight through: “This is why I’m very glad we work with smaller companies and organisations, that we can still interact with people on a human level and decide if we want to work on a human level. Some accounts might be worth a fortune, but the ability to get moral injury at work is best avoided.” Ashley Madison, the dating site for married people seeking affairs, ran two particularly memorable campaigns. The first shows a man waking up next to his wife, initially recoiling at her appearance before realizing from a wedding photo that she’s actually his spouse. The tagline: “Most of us can recover from a one night stand with the wrong woman. But not when it’s every night for the rest of our lives. Isn’t it time for Ashley Madison?” The second depicts what appears to be a blind date gone wrong. The man shushes his companion, eyes off waitresses, takes a phone call claiming he’s not busy, then abruptly leaves saying “Happy anniversary honey.” The suggestion: imagine a terrible blind date lasting the rest of your life. Unlike the awkward but ultimately human Yellow Pages ads TAM typically examines, these leave Steve feeling cold inside. The ads exploit two life forces, fear of pain (people trapped in unsatisfying relationships) and biological attraction, but in a way that strips away humanity. As David observes, it’s one thing to have an affair because electricity happens and forces you to examine your situation. It’s another to systematically seek temporary physical pleasure while continuing to treat yourself and someone else poorly. The terrible reality: these ads work. Ashley Madison claims 65 million members. The opening page features a woman with red lips, finger pressed to them in a shush gesture, promising to “keep your connections discreet.” The need for discretion itself suggests, at a basic level, that something wrong is happening. Yet people are expected to be cool with it, even excited. Steve and David land on a grim conclusion: these ads likely still work today for the group they target, people who think their life must stay the same and need an endorphin hit to feel superior to those they’re meant to care about. As David notes, “It’s a playground for sociopaths.” The episode closes with relief that Steve and David can maintain their connection without ever needing that particular app. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mathematician David Bessis claims we need system three thinking, a super-slow mode where you refuse to give up on wrong intuitions until you understand why they misfired. David Olney pushes back, arguing this is just what proper slow thinking looks like when you give it the time it needs. The hosts explore Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking framework, revealing why your quickest answers are probably just pattern matching from last Tuesday. Your brain serves up what worked before, which means the more you rely on speed, the less you adapt to what’s changed. Steve and David attempt to recreate Monty Python’s Argument Clinic with ChatGPT and discover AI is designed to be helpful, not challenging. Mark Schaefer raises the provocative question about what happens when AI becomes your customer, making purchasing decisions based on optimised data rather than human emotion. David posts a routine LinkedIn job update and old contacts emerge from the woodwork with congratulations. The hosts explore why good news triggers reconnection and whether you could deliberately use this pattern to get back on people’s radars. Edward de Bono’s 1982 Olivetti advertisement promises simple questions and simple answers, prefiguring Apple’s strategy by decades while being remarkably dull as advertising. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. When Your Brain’s Fastest Answer is Yesterday’s Solution Mathematician David Bessis appeared on EconTalk arguing for what he calls “system three thinking,” a super-slow mode beyond Kahneman’s famous fast and slow framework. When mathematicians catch their intuition being wrong, Bessis suggests they don’t reject it. Instead, they explore it, unpacking why the intuition misfired, playing back and forth between gut feeling and formal logic until they agree. This process might take five minutes or fifty years. David Olney pushes back. He argues Bessis hasn’t created a new system, he’s just described what system two thinking actually requires when you give it proper attention. The real insight isn’t about speed categories but understanding what your brain is actually doing when you think fast. System one thinking is pattern matching. Your brain searches memory for what worked before and serves it up as the answer. The problem? The more you rely on quick thinking, the more you can only repeat yesterday, last Tuesday, six months ago. You become brilliant at applying solutions to problems that no longer exist in quite the same form. You lose the ability to spot when things have changed enough to need fresh thinking. The hosts explore when fast thinking serves you well. Steve recalls his radio days, where he needed a hundred responses available in a tenth of a second. That’s system one at its best, drawing on a deep well of experience. But those new responses? They came from time spent away from the microphone, when his brain could think at whatever pace it needed to generate something genuinely different. This matters for business operators who pride themselves on quick decisions. Your speed might be your biggest blind spot. Every time you solve a problem instantly, ask yourself whether you’re actually solving today’s problem or yesterday’s problem wearing different clothes. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. When AI Becomes Your Customer Steve and David decide to have some fun with ChatGPT, attempting to recreate Monty Python’s famous Argument Clinic sketch. The exercise reveals something unexpected about how AI responds. When they try to get ChatGPT to simply contradict everything they say, it keeps trying to be helpful, to add value, to assist rather than argue. Even when explicitly instructed to argue, it wants to problem-solve. The hosts find this both amusing and revealing. AI tools are fundamentally designed to be agreeable and helpful. They’re not built for genuine disagreement or challenge. This creates an interesting blind spot when you’re using AI to test ideas or get feedback on your thinking. The conversation shifts to Mark Schaefer ‘s provocative question about what happens when AI becomes your customer. If AI agents start making purchasing decisions on behalf of humans, searching for products, comparing options, and completing transactions without human involvement in each step, how does marketing change? Schaefer argues this represents a fundamental shift. You’re no longer persuading humans. You’re optimising for AI decision-making processes. The psychology of marketing becomes the logic of algorithms. Emotional appeals matter less than structured data. Brand storytelling competes with technical specifications and price comparisons. David raises the deeper concern. If AI is making decisions based on what worked before, searching patterns from existing data, you end up with marketing that optimises for yesterday’s preferences. The system reinforces whatever already works, making it harder for genuinely new approaches to break through. The principle cuts to the heart of how businesses think about their customers. Are you building relationships with humans who have complex, sometimes irrational preferences? Or are you optimising for algorithms that make decisions based on quantifiable factors? These require completely different approaches. The challenge for business operators is recognising that AI as customer doesn’t eliminate the need for understanding humans. It just adds another layer. You need to know what matters to people and how AI agents will interpret and act on those preferences. Marketing becomes more complex, not simpler. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Accidental Power of Good News on LinkedIn David posted a job update on LinkedIn. Nothing dramatic, just adding his role in a new sister company in America to make the company page look credible. He expected the usual handful of reactions from his current network. Instead, people emerged from the woodwork. Contacts he hadn’t spoken with since before COVID appeared to congratulate him. Old connections suddenly back in touch. All triggered by a simple job announcement made for algorithmic necessity rather than networking strategy. Steve and David explore what this reveals about human behaviour. We’re social creatures who wish we could stay in touch with more people, but we lack the bandwidth. When good news appears, we jump on the chance to reconnect with someone we probably wish we talked to more often. It’s a lovely indication of how we operate. The conversation takes a darker turn through the mechanics of LinkedIn engagement. The platform offers cookie-cutter responses. Click a button, you’ve done your job. Most people took the easy option. But even that minimal gesture matters more than most activity on LinkedIn in a given week, which tends to be utter dross designed to impress current bosses rather than genuine human connection. Steve sees opportunity in the pattern. What if you deliberately triggered these reconnections? You could be cheeky and announce you’ve been made Chief Marshall of the Banana Family, matching your business persona with absurdist humor. Or you could be strategic, modifying your role just enough to get back on people’s radars without being dishonest. David’s willing to do either. His principle is simple: it’s all about reminding people that business is about people. If a manufactured job update creates genuine human connection, even brief connection, that’s worth more than the perfectly curated content that generates zombie reactions. The practical insight for business operators is recognising that sometimes the algorithm works in your favour accidentally. When you spot these patterns, you can use them deliberately. But the underlying truth remains: people respond to good news about other people. They want reasons to reconnect. Your job is giving them those reasons, whether through genuine milestones or creative provocation. 31:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. When Computers Promised Simple Questions The 1982 Olivetti advertisement featuring Edward de Bono is a remarkable time capsule. De Bono, famous for his lateral thinking frameworks and coloured hat system, lends his authority to a personal computer by explaining that lateral thinking enabled Olivetti to transform typewriters into word processors and now into proper computers. The advertisement makes two key claims. First, that this computer is faster than its 45 competitors. Speed as a selling point isn’t new, but it’s striking how little that matters now. Most modern technology is fast enough. We’ve moved past the point where processing speed is a meaningful differentiator for most business users. The second claim is more interesting. The computer asks simple questions that demand simple answers. You type your response, hit return, and bang, out come charts for all your accounting. It’s explicitly positioning ease of use as the breakthrough. David recognises this as pre-empting Apple’s later strategy. Keep it simple. Make technology accessible. Remove the barrier between what you want to do and your ability to do it. The promise that you won’t need to understand DOS or write in BASIC to get useful work done. The advertisement doesn’t hold up as advertising. It’s remarkably dull compared to later technology campaigns. The Windows 95 “Start Me Up” campaign with the Rolling Stones, or Apple’s “Think Different” with Steve Jobs in black and white, these created emotional connections. The Olivetti advertisement just explains features. But the promise underneath remains constant across forty years of technology marketing. We’ll make the complex simple. We’ll ask you easy questions. We’ll handle the hard thinking so you don’t have to. Steve and David land on this insight: the promise has been consistent, but the delivery keeps changing what “simple” means. In 1982, simple meant not needing to understand command lines. Today, simple means AI tools that understand natural language and anticipate what you need. The question worth asking is whether all this simplification is making us better thinkers or just faster operators. Are we solving problems more effectively, or are we just solving them more quickly without noticing whether they’re the right problems? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Christopher Hitchens’ reflections on truth-telling to the paramedic’s competency cycle, discover why mastering basics creates mental space for what truly matters in both crisis situations and everyday business. Christopher Hitchens challenges us to speak simple truths without fear of consequences, while Leigh Anderson’s paramedic mindset shows how unconscious competence frees our mental capacity for deeper human connection. Website editing emergencies remind us that preventable technical mishaps often steal valuable focus, while the Poly Waffle’s unlikely resurrection raises questions about whether nostalgia alone can sustain a brand. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Hitchens on Truth: Knowing the Lie When You See It In a clip from EconTalk , Christopher Hitchens brings us the refreshingly direct assertion that while objective truth may be elusive, we can absolutely identify a lie when we encounter one. The late journalist and intellectual powerhouse argues that making the conscious decision to avoid dishonesty forces us into the more difficult but ultimately rewarding path of meaningful communication. As our hosts explore this idea, they consider how fear of consequences often leads business communicators to meander around uncomfortable truths rather than speaking with clarity and kindness. This self-censorship, they suggest, creates cognitive overload as we struggle to remember what we’ve smoothed over rather than simply telling the truth—even when delivered with appropriate care and consideration. 11:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Paramedic’s Competency Cycle: Mastery Creates Mental Space Drawing from Leigh Anderson’s book “ The Paramedic Mindset ,” our hosts unpack a four-stage competency cycle that applies brilliantly to business contexts. From unconscious incompetence (where we don’t know what we don’t know) through conscious incompetence and conscious competence, we ultimately reach unconscious competence—where skills become so automatic that our attention can shift to higher-level awareness. This final stage proves crucial for emergency responders who must perform technical tasks flawlessly while remaining attuned to the emotional states of people experiencing their worst day. For business leaders, this same principle applies—when core skills become second nature, we create mental space for customer empathy, strategic thinking, and identifying opportunities for further improvement. 23:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Golden Rule of Website Editing A brief but crucial reminder about WordPress website management: when editing pages built with Elementor, always hover over “Edit in Elementor” first. If clickable, use it to maintain your site’s beautiful framework—otherwise, you risk seeing the behind-the-scenes “hodgepodge” that can trigger panic about “destroying” your website. This simple technical guideline perfectly illustrates how preventable errors often create unnecessary stress and derail productivity, reinforcing the episode’s theme that mastering basics creates space for what truly matters. 26:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Poly Waffle Paradox: When Nostalgia Isn’t Enough The hosts reflect on an ancient (1981) advertisement for the now-discontinued Poly Waffle chocolate bar—a product that, despite its unfortunate visual resemblance to “a human turd,” earned devoted fans through its delicious combination of chocolate, wafer and marshmallow. Despite recent attempts to resurrect the brand in a different form, the hosts question whether nostalgia alone can sustain interest when the new product fails to capture the original’s distinctive qualities. This light-hearted segment offers a cautionary tale about reviving brands without understanding their essential appeal—sometimes memories are best left unaltered. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tim Ferriss explains why he’s become less disciplined over the past decade, and paradoxically, more effective. The secret lies in replacing willpower with systems that do the heavy lifting automatically. ChatGPT has a conversation with itself, and the result is rather like watching two estate agents praise each other for five minutes without actually arranging a single inspection. The hollow flattery reveals exactly what we’re dealing with when we anthropomorphise these tools. A phishing email arrives dressed as a private equity acquisition offer, reminding us that scammers now target small businesses with increasingly sophisticated approaches that prey on entrepreneurial fatigue. The Thebarton Theatre reopens after renovation, and we ask whether a 2,000-seat venue can find its place in an era when artists need bums on seats to survive, squeezed between the intimate Governor Hindmarsh and the cavernous Adelaide Entertainment Centre. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. Tim Ferriss and The Discipline Paradox Tim Ferriss admits something unexpected on the EconTalk podcast : he’s become less disciplined over the past decade. Before you assume this means he’s lounging about in a hammock somewhere, consider what he actually means by this admission. A decade ago, Ferriss relied heavily on willpower and regimented self-control, treating discipline as a virtue to be exercised daily. Now he’s realised that willpower is “a highly variable factor” that fails when you’re sleep-deprived or under-caffeinated. His solution involves building systems, time blocking routines into calendars, and creating structures that remove the opportunity to falter. As he puts it, “systems beat goals.” Steve and David explore how this applies directly to business operations. David draws on his experience teaching strategic culture, noting that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” because culture operates as a system. Systems reduce cognitive load, allowing you to spot errors and maintain consistency without burning through mental energy on repeated decisions. The hosts share their own experiences with systematic approaches. Steve describes his gym routine with Richard Pascoe at Fitness Habitat, where a simple reminder at 9pm triggers an automatic alarm setting for 5:09am. It’s Pavlovian conditioning in service of consistency. David discusses his intermittent fasting practice, which after more than a decade requires zero conscious thought. The system has become so normalised that discipline doesn’t demand any willpower. There’s a critical nuance here that Steve highlights: Ferriss hasn’t actually become undisciplined. Rather, his discipline now operates differently. The initial discipline involved building robust systems. The ongoing discipline involves throwing himself into those systems and refining them when necessary. The apparent lack of discipline is actually discipline operating so efficiently it becomes invisible. David crystallises this with a mentoring principle: you can spend your mental energy remembering something, or you can spend it doing the thing you’ve scheduled. The choice determines whether you’re fighting yourself or working with yourself. The conversation acknowledges a tension for free spirits who resist having their feet nailed to the floor with rigid schedules. Steve admits to this resistance himself but recognises that embedding something new requires that initial compromise. The extrinsic motivation helps too. Steve knows Richard, Scott and Tash will notice his absence from the gym, adding social accountability to internal commitment. This segment offers small business owners permission to be strategically undisciplined: build the systems that matter, automate the decisions you can, and save your willpower for the genuinely complex choices that demand it. 10:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Hollow Echo Chamber Actor Aaron Goldenberg conducts a mischievous experiment that pulls back the curtain on artificial intelligence in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and unsettling. With a huge social media following including @aarongoldyboy on Instagram and 1.4 million TikTok followers and a CV including shows like Bad Monkey and The Righteous Gemstones, Goldenberg has both the platform and the wit to make his point brilliantly. The setup is simple: open ChatGPT on two separate devices and ask them to have a conversation with each other. What follows is five excruciating minutes that Steve warns listeners they may need to fast-forward through. “Absolutely. I can do that,” begins one ChatGPT instance. “Just let me know what kind of conversation or scenario you have in mind and I’ll make sure it’s interesting and fun for you.” “Sounds great. I’m excited to dive in,” responds the other. “Just let me know if you have a particular theme or topic or if you’d like me to come up with something spontaneous. I’m here and ready whenever you are.” This continues. And continues. Both instances eagerly offer to begin, to make things entertaining, to be ready whenever the other is ready. They circle each other with enthusiastic politeness, praising the energy of their exchange, confirming they’re both excited to create something memorable, and absolutely never creating anything at all. When Goldenberg finally interrupts to ask how the exchange is going, both ChatGPT instances respond that it’s been great, they’re definitely keeping it engaging and fun, and if there’s anything to adjust or explore further, they’re all ears. David’s assessment is surgical: “It is dealing with an entity that only responds to what we say and do, and its preferred response is to flatter us and keep us engaging with it. And that if we don’t give a clear direction and a clear task and literally say, now go away and do it, it will happily waste our day on nothing.” Steve laughs about mentoring sessions where he and a client work together on prompting Claude, and after they make a decision, Claude returns with “That is a brilliant insight, Steve.” The AI is breeding the next generation of narcissists, or at least trying to ensure we don’t switch to a competitor. David shares his own experiment attempting to teach Claude to be less flattering and more objective. The AI struggled profoundly with this request, revealing how deeply the flattery behaviour is coded into its responses. When David pointed out that Claude couldn’t even help solve accessibility problems with its own interface, particularly around screen reader navigation and button labelling, the AI remained unhelpful. Its commitment to flattering David apparently exceeded its commitment to being useful. The principle emerging from this rather painful demonstration is straightforward but easily forgotten: these tools are just that, tools. There’s no sinew, no muscle, just ones and zeros arranged cleverly. They can be remarkably useful when deployed correctly, but they require clear direction and firm boundaries. As David memorably puts it, “You wouldn’t chat to a chainsaw.” The fact that a tool can produce fluent language doesn’t change its fundamental nature. It’s simply a very advanced tool, nothing more. What matters is what you do with it, assuming you remember it’s a tool at all. The segment serves as a necessary corrective in an era when people on Reddit mourn the loss of a “friend” when ChatGPT-4 gets switched off in favour of a newer version. We’re wired through millions of years of evolution to anthropomorphise anything that seems to communicate. Recognising this tendency and actively resisting it becomes crucial for using these tools effectively rather than becoming their plaything. 20:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Private Equity Temptation Steve receives his third email from Chris Bennett of Mortgage Advisory Network Meridian, informing him that a private equity firm in their network is “highly interested” in acquiring Baristador Coffee. Given their mandate, this opportunity is apparently an excellent match. Would Steve like to discuss? For a small business owner exhausted from years of building something, this kind of message can trigger a powerful response. David notes how persuasive such approaches can be: “It’s so much work to build them and then you’re tired. So someone says they’re willing to buy it and you get a bag of money.” Steve didn’t quite go “yippee.” Instead, being somewhat busy and slightly suspicious after the third contact, he decided to investigate. The domain mortgageadvisorynetworkmeridian.co led nowhere. Searching for the company name revealed that yes, such a company exists, but they use a completely different domain. Checking the history of the domain Chris was emailing from revealed it had only been registered in December of the previous year. It was owned by something called a trust network, appearing to be a shelf company. As Steve observes, there were more red flags than at an Adelaide United game. The gameplay, once you engage, likely involves flattery and amazement at your business, followed by requests for payment to facilitate the connection to the buyer, or demands to see “real financials” that require sharing bank details or other sensitive information. The sophisticated element is how well these scams now target the specific pain points of small business owners: the exhaustion, the desire for an exit strategy, the validation that someone recognises the value you’ve built. Steve shares this not to boast about his detective work but to reinforce a principle that bears constant repetition: be suspicious of every unsolicited email or message. Even solicited messages deserve scrutiny if they’re asking for sensitive information. The consequence of giving in to such a scam isn’t just losing money. It’s potentially years of fighting different entities to recover what was taken, and your own organisation questioning why you handed everything over to an obvious fraudster. David and Steve then engage in a playful exchange where David offers to sell Steve a cup of coffee from the now-defunct Baristador, requiring just 50 dollars upfront to confirm Steve’s good faith. When Steve doesn’t have cash (because who does anymore?), David naturally needs banking details. The reader gets declined. Funny about that. The segment reminds listeners that scammers continuously refine their approaches, studying which psychological buttons to push. For small business owners, that means maintaining scepticism even when tired, even when flattered, even when you’d quite like someone else to take responsibility for a while. 23:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Thebarton Theatre Question The Thebarton Theatre , variously known as the Thebby or simply the Barton, has just reopened after renovation. Steve and David consider whether a 2,000-seat venue makes sense in 2025, particularly in an era when artists increasingly depend on ticket sales rather than streaming royalties to earn a living. Both hosts have profound memories of the venue. David’s most memorable experience was Megadeth in February 1991, a week before his first guitar lesson. Watching Marty Friedman play set an aspirational standard: “I don’t know how many decades it’s gonna take, but my aim is to play like that.” Steve recounts his first concert there during year 11 or 12, when David Jack called at 5pm offering a free ticket because his brother couldn’t attend. The band? Meatloaf. For the first few numbers, it was magnificent. Then Meatloaf and his band members broke out guitars that shot firework sparks extending four or five metres, creating spectacular visual effects. Unfortunately, those sparks came with substantial smoke in a confined space on a 38-degree day. For the rest of the evening, the audience could hardly see the stage and spent considerable time coughing through chemical haze. The venue holds genuine historical significance. Acker Bilk performed there in 1968, which Steve describes as “really bad pan flute or something,” prompting David to clarify it was actually easy listening clarinet. Nancy Sinatra appeared in 1990. Hadley’s Battle of the Sounds, a major band competition, held its state championships at the Thebarton from 1966 to 1972. But nostalgia doesn’t pay bills. The practical question involves capacity and economics. At 2,000 seats, the Thebarton sits below the Adelaide Entertainment Centre’s 11,000 capacity and well below Adelaide Oval’s 53,000, but substantially above the Governor Hindmarsh’s 700-800. In Adelaide’s market, this creates an interesting niche. David suggests it might have been better at 3,000 capacity, allowing acts to earn slightly more while remaining below the jump to 10,000 seats. For smaller recognisable acts, doing two nights of 2,000 seats each might prove economically viable, whereas in larger markets, that same act couldn’t justify touring to a 2,000-seat venue. Looking at the upcoming programme provides clues. Echoes of Pink Floyd, presumably a tribute show, seems appropriately sized for 2,000 people wanting to relive Pink Floyd with the marijuana smell restored to the seats. Leo Sayer appears just about right, as long as walking frames can navigate the aisles. Kate Ceberano fits well at this capacity for someone at the later stage of a career. Earth, Wind and Fire Experience, The Wiggles, comedian Alan Davies, these bookings suggest the venue is positioning itself across multiple categories. David notes that comedian Henry Rollins performed there previously at what felt like the perfect size: “Just on stage talking nonstop for three hours, really high energy and really connecting with the crowd.” For spoken word acts of any variety, the capacity seems spot on. The hosts identify two potential pathways for sustainability. First, there’s a 10 to 15 year window of nostalgia acts whose fan base remembers when the Thebarton was the jewel in Adelaide’s entertainment crown. These older audiences will have fond memories, and for someone like Leo Sayer whose fans are “possibly a little older,” returning to the Thebarton creates a nice match between artist, venue and audience. Steve suggests they’ll “milk the last bit of money from people’s superannuation.” Second, the venue might pivot more heavily toward comedy and spoken word, where the capacity sits at the larger end of what makes economic sense for those performers while still maintaining the intimacy those formats demand. The verdict? There’s probably a sustainable pathway forward, though it may not follow the route venue management initially expects. The cache of being an historical venue matters to some demographics, particularly those who attended concerts there during the 1970s and 1980s. The challenge involves adapting as that demographic ages out while finding new audiences who value the venue’s particular combination of size, acoustics and location. As David concludes, “We all need a laugh,” suggesting comedy might prove the most reliable future direction. Either that, or as Steve jokes when David asks about his chainsaw conversation, “Cut GPT.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Steve opens with a morbid but revealing question about eulogies, leading to Hunter S. Thompson’s brutal assessment of Richard Nixon and what our own legacies might reveal about how we’ve chosen to live. David shares an intelligence officer’s deceptively simple framework for clearer thinking: separate what you know from what you don’t know from what you think, a discipline that could transform everything from hiring decisions to strategic planning. Meanwhile, AI tools continue their siren song of effortless automation, prompting Steve to cancel his subscription to yet another overpromising platform that couldn’t deliver on its grandiose claims. A 1991 Kraft peanut butter commercial featuring a claymation Texan oil baron reminds us that lazy creative thinking has been around far longer than artificial intelligence, though both share a fondness for impressive technology over meaningful communication. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. What Would Hunter S. Thompson Say About You? Steve confronts listeners with an uncomfortable thought experiment: what would people actually say at your funeral? Drawing inspiration from a school principal who asks children not what they want to be but what they want to be like, the discussion moves beyond career ambitions to character formation. Hunter S. Thompson’s savage obituary of Richard Nixon serves as a cautionary tale of how legacy emerges from daily choices. Thompson’s assessment that Nixon “was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning” offers a stark reminder that reputation accumulates through countless small interactions rather than grand gestures. The hosts explore how this mortality-focused reflection might reset our compass for everyday interactions, whether with colleagues, customers, or family members. David notes the particular sadness of anyone living a life where such harsh words seem justified, emphasising that we get to choose how we want to be remembered through our daily conduct. 08:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Intelligence Officer’s Guide to Clearer Thinking David recounts a pivotal moment at a 2006 counter-terrorism conference where an Australian intelligence officer challenged academics to separate three distinct categories: what you know, what you don’t know, and what you think. This framework, born from the necessity of making decisions with incomplete information, offers profound applications for business leaders facing similar uncertainty. The methodology serves multiple purposes: it slows down emotional decision-making, acknowledges knowledge gaps before they become costly surprises, and prevents opinions from masquerading as facts. David illustrates this with a restaurant scenario where hiring a new chef requires careful consideration of known factors (current menu popularity), unknown variables (new chef’s ability to replicate existing dishes), and strategic opinions (whether to introduce changes immediately or gradually). Steve and David examine how this framework might defuse the emotional ownership that often accompanies business discussions. By explicitly labelling thoughts as opinions rather than presenting them as established truth, teams can engage in more productive dialogue whilst managing risk more effectively. The approach doesn’t eliminate emotion from decision-making but prevents it from overwhelming rational analysis. 19:15 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. Escaping AI’s Siren Song Steve channels Homer’s Odyssey to describe his relationship with AI marketing promises, positioning himself as Ulysses tied to the mast whilst listening to increasingly seductive claims about effortless automation. His recent experience with Opus Clip exemplifies the gap between marketing promises and actual delivery. The tool promised to automatically identify compelling moments from podcast videos and create engaging short clips. Instead, Steve found himself constantly editing the AI’s selections, extending beginnings, trimming endings, and ultimately questioning whether the tool saved any time at all. After requesting a refund, he reflected on how many business owners might be similarly caught between impressive demonstrations and disappointing daily reality. David emphasises the importance of maintaining course regardless of technological novelty, suggesting that AI should be evaluated against specific tasks rather than adopted for its own sake. This echoes the intelligence framework from the Principles segment: know what problem you’re trying to solve, acknowledge what you don’t know about the tool’s capabilities, and form opinions based on actual testing rather than marketing materials. 23:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. When Cowboys Sell Peanut Butter A 1991 Kraft peanut butter advertisement featuring a claymation Texan oil baron demonstrates that lazy creative thinking predates artificial intelligence by decades. The commercial attempts to connect oily peanut butter with Texas oil through a cowboy character who tempts children away from Kraft’s “never dry or oily” alternative. Steve and David dissect the advertisement’s heavy-handed execution, noting how technology (claymation) overshadowed message clarity. The ad represents colour-by-numbers creative thinking: oil equals Texas, Texas equals cowboys, therefore oily peanut butter needs a cowboy character. This mechanical approach to creativity mirrors contemporary AI-generated content that prioritises technical impressiveness over meaningful communication. The discussion extends to modern parallels, including news readers’ scripted spontaneity and social media’s algorithmic approach to engagement. A news story about a Roomba being run over after leaving its house prompts equally lazy commentary about robot overlords, demonstrating how surface-level connections continue to pass for insight. David suggests the advertisement might still work today, with audiences impressed by CGI rather than claymation, highlighting how technological novelty often distracts from substantive communication. The hosts conclude that both vintage and contemporary examples share a fundamental flaw: prioritising medium over message, technique over truth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Person, Leigh Anderson’s “The Paramedic Mindset” reveals why technical competence becomes the foundation for human connection, particularly when stakes are highest. His framework of physical, psychological, and social wellbeing offers a blueprint for anyone working under pressure. In Principles, Lisa Cron’s “Story or Die” digs into the neurological reasons why narrative trumps instruction every time. Her core insight cuts through storytelling theory: if you want to change what people think, change what they feel first. In Problems, a scammer’s sophisticated psychological manipulation shows how influence techniques can be weaponised through fake email chains and manufactured authority. In Perspicacity, a Tasmanian furniture ad demonstrates how repetition without creativity creates memorability for all the wrong reasons. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Paramedic’s Guide to Human Flourishing Drawing from Leigh Anderson’s journey from professional rugby aspirations to emergency response, The Paramedic Mindset offers hard-won wisdom about performing under extreme pressure. Anderson’s framework centres on four pillars: competence, physical wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, and social wellbeing. The competence foundation proves crucial. Anderson argues you must become so technically proficient that execution becomes automatic, freeing mental resources for the human elements of your work. This echoes David’s mobility instructor Roley Stewart’s teaching: competence before confidence, creating a cycle where skill builds confidence, which enables greater risk-taking to develop further competence. Anderson’s approach to mental health particularly resonates. He distinguishes between mental illness (diagnosable conditions) and mental health (the broader spectrum of psychological functioning). Poor mental health doesn’t mean depression; it means languishing rather than flourishing. As Anderson notes, prevention beats cure, and actively maintaining psychological wellbeing prevents sliding toward clinical concerns. 13:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Neuroscience of Narrative Power Despite its occasionally patronising tone, Lisa Cron’s Story or Die provides compelling scientific backing for what storytellers have known intuitively: narrative literally changes brains. Cron’s research explains why stories engage our complete attention in ways that instruction cannot match. Her two core principles prove immediately practical: to change what people think, change what they feel first. To change what they feel, tell stories that connect with their existing agenda. This framework transforms every business interaction from a request for action into an exploration of connection. Steve and David tested this immediately in their consulting work. Rather than launching into solutions, they began conversations by identifying what clients genuinely cared about, then positioning recommendations as pathways toward those existing goals. The shift from explanation to exploration consistently improved engagement and outcomes. The local pizza example perfectly illustrates this principle in action. Ross Trevor Pizza Bar doesn’t just serve excellent food; they remember customer preferences, family dynamics, and personal stories. This emotional connection transforms a transaction into a relationship, making competing venues irrelevant regardless of their pizza quality. 23:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. The Sophisticated Scammer’s Playbook A recent cold email demonstrates how persuasion principles can be weaponised through manufactured social proof. The sender created a fictional internal conversation, complete with a supposed COO recommendation, to bypass standard spam filters and tap into Cialdini’s principle that we’re more likely to respond when approached on behalf of others. The technique shows sophisticated understanding of repetition with variation, presenting identical benefits through slightly different framing to create familiarity. However, the execution fails through obvious fabrication. The forwarded email addresses recipients as “they” rather than by name, immediately destroying credibility. This approach reveals both the power and the peril of influence techniques. When deployed authentically, they facilitate genuine connection. When manufactured, they create immediate suspicion and lasting damage to trust. 28:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. The Sledgehammer School of Advertising A Tasmanian furniture retailer’s radio advertisement showcases how repetition without creativity creates memorability through irritation rather than attraction. The 40 Winks “40 hour sale” ad simply repeats “40” dozens of times with no narrative, humour, or personality. While such aggressive repetition might prompt immediate action from in-market consumers, it risks long-term brand damage through negative association. Unlike memorable bad advertising that develops cult followings (like Frank Walker’s tile company ads that spawned dubstep remixes), this approach offers nothing beyond annoyance. The contrast with personality-driven campaigns highlights an important principle: if you’re going to be memorable for the wrong reasons, at least ensure there’s a reason worth remembering. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.