Truthache

You could say that you have to fight to get what you deserve. But whoever said that didn't do the math, because getting a better deal at a high cost is not that great a deal.  We dive into the Trump vs Iran peace deal and apply the same principles to everyday life and business. We discuss our views on good deals, bad deals, and how optimizing to get the best deal sometimes means taking less at a l...

There’s a massive gap between serving your country and surviving a life back in it. That, as Courtney Zaugg explains, is the big challenge veterans face when transitioning from being a soldier to being a dad, an employee, or an entrepreneur. Courtney spends her life advocating for veterans, starting with her husband, Nathan, years ago. She talks about the “missing middle” between military service...

We’re releasing this episode as audio only, thanks to a setting Daniel forgot to change on the cameras that resulted in unfit footage. You deserve better, so expect more with the next episode. Jason was a minister who decided he wanted to get closer to the truth. This led him to a new set of conclusions, not in line with the denomination that he was a part of, and ultimately, they excommunicated h...

Getting older has its moments. There’s a sense of freedom, but it is also strange at times. We discuss this with Jeremy Zucker, whom I’ve known since he decided to start a business, then decided to stop. He says work is less hard, but he’s also not looking for any more corporate ladders. We talked about navigating the loss of the creative edge as you get older, and how to keep it. We also talked a...

Nick is like Uncle Rico, only with a better story. I mean that in a good way. We always look back at that time we could have been state champions if things had gone our way. As a charter high school coach, Nick did the opposite. He focused on what mattered more, the whole person, and let the opportunity to play basketball be an opportunity to build character. He took a class of unlikely contenders...

How do you divorce your work after years of being married to it? Angie says that sleeping is her secret to success. Between sleep and therapy, she’s been able to accomplish what entrepreneurs only dream about (if they ever sleep to begin with).  She’s done her fair share of not sleeping too, when she and Randy, her husband at the time, started and grew One Click Ventures to a successful exit. They...

How do you manage issues of cost, morality, and urban design simultaneously? That’s why architecture needs people who think like Scott Perkins.  Meaningful design that also functions for humans requires layered thinking, foresight, and often, course correction. Scott and I, over a glass of the good bourbon, talk about how to navigate all the above separately and what to do when they converge. Scot...

What do we talk about when we’re not talking about work? Rosie would rather talk about the biggest questions. Questions about what kind of dog this is interrupting our podcast, and why is he the best dog ever? Followed by the universal question asked by venerable Doc Brown in the 1985 film, Back To The Future: “Where we’ve been, where we’re going, the pitfalls, the possibilities, the perils, and t...

We return after a two-week break, where Daniel traveled to the UK, and Michael probably read a book or cleaned the side of his pontoon boat. Our surprise guest is a Truthache regular, Chris Handberg, who is up to date on all current events and space-related conspiracy theories. We discussed every one of them. From Trump's episodes of conquest here on Earth to our takeover of the Moon out there in...

Salespeople are the worst part of humanity. Our guest, Ian Illig, is not the one who said this, but we almost got him to agree with us.  Think about it. They wear plaid jackets or moisture-wicking fabrics, and promise you they’re giving you a good deal while selling you a lemon. The average salesperson puts pressure on you and disappears after they get their commission. And you're left with the me...

AI is a joke, and we should take it seriously. What do Cody Sharp and a software engineer have in common? Neither one of them writes any code. In Cody’s case, he has not been writing code for even longer. Now, with two working SaaS products on the market, I’d say he’s an expert at it. When we talk about artificial intelligence, Cody is always the first person to come to mind. Not just because of h...

If you want to relax and feel good about yourself, there are two good ways to do it. Visiting Stacey Blanton's spa, Skin Renew, or being a guest on our podcast. Stacey, for an afternoon, decided to do the latter, to share how she looks back on business. To learn and then move on. Another good way to relax. What keeps us up at night are the decisions we made that were maybe the wrong ones, or at le...

Oliver Mast was about as close as you get to becoming a pro golfer as anyone ever gets. He was playing full-time in tournaments, moved to Hilton Head, and was carving his way forward, until the love for the game began to wane, and the uphill battle to get a spot on a major tour became bleaker. Eventually, he decided he needed to hang up his clubs.  Oliver moved back to Indiana and found an enviabl...

We are part of the culture we created or the one we’ve accepted. Jenny Vance is very, very lucky.  She’s a strategic growth consultant and a CRO at a tech company. But I’m not talking about some financial achievement, a business exit, or a lucrative executive role, although she’s had some of those; I’m talking about everyday, strange luck. She tells us about 30 rounds being fired, feet away from h...

They say it gets harder to make new friends in your adult years. Kids, work, and being annoying can all be factors, but that's not the case for Michael and Daniel, because they need at least two hands and maybe even a foot to count their closest friends – in other words, they are successful geriatric extroverts with a busy social life. This conversation is all about making friends, keeping them, a...

How to live out your beliefs on the streets, at work, and in the community. Alex Holt was a creative director at a church when a job loss pushed him to start a full-time creative agency. A bad weekend turned out better than what he would have chosen. Since Alex focuses on helping his clients understand the beliefs that shape their business decisions, we thought we’d ask him to talk about what *he*...

Why should I hire a coach who has never played my game? If you are an entrepreneur or manager, you probably make a lot of decisions based on intuition mixed with data. Why do you need someone else to charge you to talk you through doing what you do every day? And why are there so many business coaches out there? As business-coach skeptics, Michael and I talk with Adam Weber, a tech founder turned...

What it’s like to take a break and come back to a mess? Well, it’s nice to take a long break from work over the holidays, and we talk about how unplugging can benefit someone who spends all year working hard. Then, we decided to catch up on the latest headlines.  After our guest cancelled, we were relieved that we didn’t have to subject them to a discussion about important breaking news, after ICE...

How to inspire anyone to be creative, no matter how boring they are. If the family business has an open door for you, isn’t that the best option? That’s the question Darren Cooper has asked himself. Stability sounds nice, but so does entrepreneurship, and if you’ve got the bug to create, it's difficult to do anything else. Starting your own thing is what it takes for some, stability be damned. But...

A recent graduate tells us what Gen Z thinks about the real world, and how everyone is judging them.  Kaija is a graduate of Maurer School of Law and a tax attorney. She is currently attending NYU in a Tax LLM program and is, in fact, my (Daniel’s) daughter, a guy who just does marketing (and podcasting, apparently). We talk about everything from Gen Z’s views on happiness and dating to the Americ...

How do you pursue an unlikely dream in the music business when a job that pays better is staring you in the face? Matt Soverns is a full-time musician best known for his impromptu piano performances on the streets of Indianapolis, New York City, and elsewhere. We discuss what it’s like making a living in the blue-collar music industry, where artists depend on cover gigs to supplement their pursuit...

This is an episode about how to ditch your marketing job to start a liquor company (no experience needed).  When life gives Dan Farhrner lemons, we have an idea what he does, but we wanted to find out firsthand, so we had him on the show. It was just a few years ago when he, his wife, and a close friend started High and Mighty Distillery, which is now focused on his brand of canned craft cocktails...

How will AI consume us, and what should we do about it? In this episode, we explore the ways that AI is affecting how we think about work, and more importantly, whether job loss is inevitable. Then, we discuss the problem of alignment between artificial intelligence and the humans who have created it.  As always, this conversation covered a lot of ground, from the basics of how AI works, how busin...

The best way to ensure your kids are smart and have no clue what the world is really like is to keep them at home. If you want nerdy kids that are good at math and know how to load a dishwasher, homeschooling might be for you. We talk with Michelle Ervin, a barber to the stars (specifically, most of the hosts of Truthache), who has made personal sacrifices with her husband to raise the family she...

Our relationship is built on trust, and sometimes it’s candy-coated. In this episode of Raw Truth, Carrie Herndon, Daniel’s wife, talks about how she expects the raw truth, even when it hurts. But the guys point out that sometimes the truth hurts, and it’s easier to say that everything is going to be okay, even when you don’t know that it is. This recording was captured after an episode that we di...