Talking About Marketing

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 clea...

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...

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...

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 Princi...

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 i...

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...

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 b...

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-...

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 c...

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 merch...

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 t...

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 p...

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 free...

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...

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 t...

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 wh...

Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” offers profound guidance for business owners feeling overwhelmed by today’s relentless news cycle, reminding us that survival often depends on having something meaningful to work toward rather than comfortable circumstances. Steve shares practical questions for creating AI language guides that capture your genuine voice inste...

Steve sets the scene with a restaurant analogy that cuts to the heart of our AI dilemma: magnificent handcrafted hamburgers versus mass-produced alternatives both serve purposes, but only when we choose consciously rather than defaulting to whatever feels easiest. The conversation examines three fundamental human vulnerabilities that make us susceptible to AI’s false promises: our brain&rsqu...

Steve and David emerge from a classified briefing at the Australian Cybersecurity Centre with sobering news: the average cyber attack costs small businesses $50,000, and we're all walking around with targets painted on our digital backs. Bevin from Legends with Bevo shares his painful experience of losing his Facebook business page to scammers, illustrating how quickly years of hard work can vanis...

Stan McChrystal reveals why character equals conviction multiplied by discipline – and why this military wisdom transforms how we approach marketing authenticity in a world obsessed with quick wins. Andy Clark’s neuroscience research exposes how our brains work as prediction machines, explaining why marketing messages that create massive prediction errors trigger emotional retreat rath...

Belle Baker’s thoughtful response to our previous episode on conversational power sparks a deeper exploration into the magic words that either constrain or liberate our thinking. When we default to asking “what should we do?” we’re unknowingly shutting down possibilities, but shifting to “what could we do?” opens creative floodgates. Steve draws unexpected paral...

Rutger Bregman challenges us to create ripple effects from small personal changes that benefit entire communities. Jefferson Fisher revolutionises everyday communication by eliminating power-draining language and embracing uncomfortable directness. A hotel chain’s tone-deaf Mother’s Day spam highlights the need for sensitivity in seasonal marketing. And Golden North’s Giant Twin...

In Person, we discover why songwriters and business folk alike benefit from fresh eyes that ask the right questions, revealing how collaboration creates outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. Principles explores whether archetypes offer genuine strategic value for businesses or simply provide convenient shortcuts to avoid the hard work of authentic brand development. Problems exposes dubiou...

Will Guidara’s journey from awestruck 12-year-old at the Four Seasons to creating one of the world’s best restaurants reveals what “unreasonable hospitality” truly means. Disney’s insistence on breathing animatronic birds teaches us why perfection in unseen details creates experiences customers can feel. Steve confesses how a questionable radio crossfade between Deep...

Willie Nelson once said you should “get to the heart of feelings and keep it to a minimum” for maximum effect. We wish Facebook had taken that advice before building an empire on manipulating our emotions. Sarah Wynn-Williams lifts the veil on tech’s “move fast and break things” mantra in her revealing memoir of life inside Meta’s walls. David shares his belated...