Talking About Marketing

Hosted by Auscast Network

Business Marketing Education

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Jun 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 15, 202656 min

If You Are Not Engineering Your Time In This Age It Will Be Engineered For You

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.

May 25, 202638 min

When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson

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.

May 11, 202643 min

Working With Your Whole Brain Costs Peanuts

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.

April 27, 202642 min

The Recession Response Episode

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.

April 13, 202639 min

The Duty Of Australians In Business

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.

March 30, 202641 min

Surviving For The Sake Of Yourself And Your Business

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.

March 17, 202645 min

Marketing vs Spam: An Arms Race Of Idiocy

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.

March 2, 202637 min

Will You Have Fries With Your AI?

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.

December 24, 202543 min

Emergence: Why You Do The Things You Do

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.

December 10, 202540 min

May The Life Forces Be With You

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.