Episodi

  • The Hidden Half Of Business Success

    The Hidden Half Of Business Success
    Sep 30 2026
    Dr Angela Duckworth spent years telling us to stick at it. Now she says the situation you stick at it in matters more than your willpower, and if your good hires keep leaving after six months, the problem probably isn’t them. Michael Blastland explains why the best-laid plans can fail on one small detail, and David reaches for survivorship bias and the OODA loop to keep small business owners moving anyway. The AI doom headlines get a calm second look, with David following the money and Steve calling Claude Code an intern who has read a lot but never done anything. Samuel Pepys, a wine-loving politician and a bee-themed Banrock Station ad show how a label creates value, and why status signalling and virtue signalling are different things. 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.Change the Situation Before You Blame the Person Steve opens with Dr Angela Duckworth, whose 2016 book Grit gave us “stick at it, sunshine and you’ll get there.” Her new book is, Situated. David notes she was explaining her own life at the time, when writing Grit. Later she saw that passion and persistence work best when the situation around them is supportive. Jerry Seinfeld’s “nighttime Jerry” and “morning Jerry” show why willpower alone bends to circumstance. The guy who looks like the party animal is actually one of the most organised people you could imagine. Duckworth’s box theory runs from situation to thoughts to response. Self-help books tell us to change our thoughts, but if the same negative situation keeps dragging you back, that has limited effect. Steve recalls an organisation that held a big “we’re doing things differently” meeting every couple of years. It never lasted a week and left everyone cynical. David lists the four parts of a situation you can change: physical space, peer relationships, mentor relationships and culture. You change culture by changing the other three. The small business test is a good one. If talented people you interviewed and hired keep leaving after six months, ask what’s wrong with the situation. Tired, frustrated staff and cynical comments overheard at the end of the day are the signs. David’s first step is to stop blaming yourself or others, find one tangible thing to change, then look for the next. 15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.The Hidden Half and the Photocopier That Sank a Water Project Steve brings Michael Blastland, author of The Hidden Half, from an EconTalk conversation with Russ Roberts. We spend our lives finding regularities, like trusting our bike brakes. A lot of life sits where those regularities break down. Blastland’s example is a water supply project in the Indian subcontinent, reported to have had a very low sign-up rate because nobody could photocopy the application form. Esther Duflo’s point is that one weak link in implementation can mean total failure. David adds the fundamental attribution error: our successes are skill, and other people’s are luck. He also names survivorship bias. We hear from the entrepreneurs who took the risk and won, and never from those who took it and disappeared. Look at the 99 failures and you find more than one way to succeed. You can spread your bets, with some low-risk, reliable earners and a few small long shots. Steve calls it a dose of stoicism, shock absorbers for your head, heart and business. David’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) keeps you doing small things in a big world. Be prudent, but keep moving, because sitting still too long simply hands the opportunity to someone else. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.How Do You Solve a Problem Like AI? Steve borrows from The Sound of Music and swaps Maria for AI. Both are useful, occasionally alarming and hard to pin down. David has a calm view on the recent wave of AI horror stories. In the cases he’s read about, these were models in training with low alignment and few controls, deliberately tested with minimal restrictions. His real line in the sand is letting AIs run their own recursive self-improvement. Steve says he now feels more anxious than when the segment began. David’s view on the commercial side is to follow the money. The data centre builders are making it, and he suggests scary headlines suit companies that need us to buy protection. He cites Jensen Huang’s remark that there’s no problem, just a lack of code: build in the alignment and don’t test with out-of-control AIs. Steve’s own experiment with Claude Code on a WordPress site was so dumb at times he could have done the job faster himself, like having an intern who has read a lot but never done anything. David’s advice for small business is to use the tools that are useful and pay for what adds value. If ...
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    47 min
  • Is Your Business Leaving A Mark ?

    Is Your Business Leaving A Mark ?
    Sep 14 2026
    A lamb ad and a locked-profile troll teach Steve and David the same lesson: the pause is the whole trick, and social media is built to make you skip it. A British comedy sketch about a dry cleaner called Touching Cloth becomes the unlikely launchpad for Mini Steve’s business-naming principles, tested live and mostly agreed with. A client’s expired domain name turns into a lesson about renewal traps, Melbourne IT’s pricing, and the difference between penny-wise and paranoid. An organ donor ad about the world’s biggest asshole gets the Perspicacity treatment, with a verdict on whether shock still works when the target audience has gone numb to it. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Pause That Saves You From Yourself Steve opens with a confession disguised as a question: has David ever fired off an emotional comment online, or been on the receiving end of one? David has, and it wasn’t pleasant. Neither host thinks the commenter would have said it to their face, which is really the whole problem in one sentence. From there, a lamb ad supplies the unlikely proof of concept. The ad restages a real comment section as a portable grandstand, strangers hurling abuse at each other over nothing, until lamb arrives and somehow calms the mob. David’s read cuts straight to the point: the redirection doesn’t need to be profound, it just needs to be better than the dumb thing people are already doing. Steve connects it to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living and the 90-second window before an emotional reaction locks in. He’d had his own test that week: a stranger with a locked profile telling him to stick to snooker, a lame pun on his name. He didn’t bite, because the algorithm wants the reaction more than it wants him to be right. Turning the other cheek, in this case, isn’t weakness. It’s refusing to feed the beast. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Touching Cloth and the Business of Naming Yourself A comedy sketch about three well-meaning entrepreneurs naming their dry cleaning business Touching Cloth (a name with an unfortunate second meaning involving cloth, poo, and a failure of restraint) becomes the launchpad for testing some business naming principles. David’s take on the sketch is blunt: the comedy comes from watching well-meaning people talk themselves past an obvious problem, out loud, without noticing. Steve turns to Mini Steve, the AI model trained on his blog archive, to stress-test some naming principles, and finds himself agreeing with all of it. Say the name aloud to a stranger on a bad phone line. Check every handle and domain before falling in love with anything. Search the trademark register before you print a single business card. Avoid clever misspellings, since everyone types the correct version first and wonders why you didn’t. The sharpest distinction is descriptive versus distinctive. Descriptive names explain what you do and help with search from day one, but they’re hard to trademark and easy to blend into the background. Distinctive names cost more to build meaning into, but once they mean something, that meaning is yours alone. Either way, the name’s job is to be memorable and spellable, not to carry the whole value proposition. That’s what the website and the tagline are for. 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.The $108 Lesson in Domain Renewal A client let a valuable domain name lapse and asked Steve, a day after it had expired, whether she should renew it. She should, because the test is simple: how would you feel if a competitor grabbed it? Terrible, she said. Renew it. The real sting was the price. Her domain was registered with Melbourne IT, which charged $108 for a single year of a .com.au domain, against roughly $24 to $25 elsewhere. David’s read is that reputation pricing like this survives only while people don’t do the research, and that window is closing. Steve draws the comparison to scam invoices dressed up as official renewal notices, official-looking, fine print disclaiming everything, designed to catch harried business owners at exactly the wrong moment. Nobody’s going broke over $108. But looking after the pennies, as Steve puts it, still says something about how a business runs. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.The World’s Biggest Asshole, Revisited This episode’s Perspicacity ad is 2016’s The World’s Biggest Asshole, made by the Martin Agency for Donate Life America. It spends its first 45 seconds building an unlikable man before revealing he was an organ donor. The numbers are real: daily registrations jumped roughly 625 percent in the first week, and video views passed 100 million by ...
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    43 min
  • Questions Arising From Women In Business

    Questions Arising From Women In Business
    Aug 31 2026
    A group of 1970s kids react to modern life in a viral clip, and their horror at “the little box” gives Steve and David a fresh look at the toll of constant connection. Steve took his recorder to the Women in Business event and came back with real questions from real business owners, Jane from Eight at the Gate Wines and Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl. Their answers reveal a common thread that touches almost every small business. A $500 Chevy ad from the 2012 Super Bowl proves that great advertising does not need a big budget, just a true human moment. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.What a Bunch of 1970s Kids Taught Us About Our Phones A video of children reacting to modern technology, from paying monthly for music to strangers delivering food, gives Steve and David pause about what they have normalised. David, who grew up in the 1970s, offers a rare counterpoint from his experience as a blind person: technology has given him more than it has taken. For most people, though, the trade has not been so kind. The conversation turns to research from Oxford University Press showing that reducing mobile screen exposure produces measurable gains in wellbeing, sleep, mood, and sustained attention. David distils it best with his old teaching trick: hold up the phone and ask, tool or toy? Steve lays out a six-step, fourteen-day experiment for anyone keen to find out which one their phone has become, from blocking social feeds during work hours to creating phone-free zones at each end of the day. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Jane, Ranee, and the Marketing Question Every Small Business Owner Asks Steve took his recorder to Adelaide Business Hub‘s Women in Business event, in conjunction with the Office of Small and Family Business, and asked two attendees what they would want to know if they had a marketer’s full attention. Jane Richards from Eight at the Gate Wines wants to know which marketing activity actually drives sales. Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl wants to know where her limited time delivers the biggest return. Both women have solid businesses already, and David points to a common thread: the constraint is not ideas, it is time and attention. His answer is the old 80/20 rule, applied to personas. Pick the ideal customer group most likely to move the needle, and build from there rather than chasing a hundred scattered efforts. Steve shares an old radio trick from broadcaster Jeremy Cordeaux, who kept a fictional listener named Gladys in mind for every interview, and suggests both women already have a “Gladys” walking through their door or tasting room every week. The pair also unpack Jane’s daughter’s TikTok following, and David asks the question that matters more than the follower count: is it converting to income, or is it just a vanity metric? They close the segment with Steve’s long-standing digital marketing triage order: website first, then content, then email database, then reviews, then social media, with advertising last. Learn more about Women In Business mentoring. 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.Meet Mini Steve, the AI Trained on Nine Seasons of Marketing Advice A client in Darwin has been testing something Steve built by distilling everything from nine seasons of the podcast, his blog archive back to 2004, and her own StoryBrand framework into an AI tool powered by Claude. David has taken to calling it Steve in a box. The test threw up a genuinely useful question: should a piece of content be a page or a blog post? Steve’s rule of thumb is refreshingly simple. Broad, essential content that most visitors need belongs in the main page structure. Narrow, specific content that answers one sharp question belongs in a blog post, where it can be found by search engines and AI tools alike when the right person goes looking. David flags the safeguard built into the system: when mini Steve is out of its depth, it says so and sends the question back to the grown-up. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.The $500 Super Bowl Ad That Beat the Big Budgets Steve takes David back to a 2012 Super Bowl ad for Chevy that cost just $500 to make and still won the day. A birthday setup goes hilariously wrong when the neighbour’s new sports car gets mistaken for the graduate’s actual present, a humble bar fridge. David and Steve agree the ad still works today, not because of production value, but because it taps something timeless: the human desire for status, the discomfort of watching a misunderstanding unfold, and the universal excitement of a friend’s big win. Steve’s takeaway is a good one for any small business without a big budget: ...
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    53 min
  • Take Your Profit First

    Take Your Profit First
    Aug 10 2026
    Steve and David spend this episode on Profit First, the small business finance book by Mike Michalowicz. The core idea: set money aside before you spend it, not after. They trace the system back to depression-era thrift, compare “profit” against “long-term savings” as motivating words, and work through the mechanics of running a business on smaller bank accounts and smaller plates. There’s also a look at email newsletter platforms shrinking their free tiers, and a 1990s cider ad starring Leslie Nielsen, tested against the question of whether comedy still sells products the way it used to. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:45 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.Grandma Already Knew This David put Steve onto Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First. Before the mechanics of the system, they discuss its origins: the envelope method, setting money aside for bills the moment it arrives, which Michalowicz traces to his mother’s own budgeting. Steve and David connect this to a habit common before entrepreneurship culture prioritised looking successful over managing money well. Michalowicz describes a networking event where everyone tells strangers business is going great, while the same people admit to close friends that it’s hard. Steve and David discuss the gap between appearance and reality, from upgrading a car lease to keep up, to simply not admitting a business is under pressure. David notes that small, honest peer groups, ten or twelve people, are less common in Australian small business than they could be. Michalowicz uses Parkinson’s Law as an example: smaller dinner plates lead to smaller portions without anyone noticing. He applies the same principle to money, arguing that constraint changes behaviour more reliably than willpower does. This is an episode of Mike’s podcast, from which we take a couple of snippets. 12:45 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Set Up the Envelopes, Skip the Guesswork Multiple bank accounts, set up like envelopes, each with a job: profit, owner’s pay, tax, and operating expenses. Michalowicz starts small, around one percent into a profit account to begin with, increasing the percentage as the habit builds. David describes learning a version of this himself, not from the book but from a phone call to his accountant the first time a large consulting payment landed. Fifteen minutes working out percentages for tax, super, and long-term savings, and those percentages have stuck ever since. He says “profit” doesn’t motivate him as a word, but “long-term savings for when I’m seventy” does. Michalowicz’s system also covers cutting costs without cutting capability, building a buffer under your expense target rather than aiming right at it, and the idea that debt is only paid off by becoming profitable, not by waiting until you feel ready to be profitable. Steve and David note that the book is dense with step-by-step detail that doesn’t suit audio, and recommend a print or Kindle copy for anyone planning to apply the system. 26:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.The Shrinking Free Tier Email newsletter platforms have been reducing what’s included for free. Mailchimp’s free contact limit shrank over the years, MailerLite became the alternative, and then it dropped its own free threshold to 250 contacts, locking out anyone over that mark entirely. Steve outlines the options he’s tested since: Brevo, which allows unlimited contacts but caps each send at 300 recipients, and sending newsletters directly through WordPress once you’re on a hosting setup with proper mail deliverability in place. Each option suits different circumstances, depending on whether email is a core sales channel or, as it is for Talked About Marketing, one channel among several. 31:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.Puns Sold Cider, For A While A 1990s American ad campaign for Red Rock Cider featured Leslie Nielsen reprising his Police Squad character in a pun-drenched parody called Fraud Squad. Steve and David discuss the writing, which lands product benefits inside the gags rather than around them. The campaign won awards and drove an early sales spike, then sales faded, and the brand folded by the mid-1990s. David notes that cider as a category tends to boom and bust in cycles, in Australia as much as the US, so novelty may buy a brand its moment without buying loyalty. Steve and David discuss what that means for a campaign built on novelty and star power: it may be worth treating the spike as temporary rather than assuming it will carry a brand long term.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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    38 min
  • The Answer Economy Raises Important Questions For Your Business

    The Answer Economy Raises Important Questions For Your Business
    Jul 27 2026
    Pete Blackshaw’s forthcoming book, The Answer Economy, has Steve and David asking an uncomfortable question: when AI tools do our searching for us, are we still thinking, or just nodding along. Steve and David dig into why Google’s AI overview might be quietly shrinking our critical faculties, and why that matters more than it sounds. They also test which AI tools can be trusted to give it to us straight, and which ones might be leaning on who is paying the bills. Small business owners get a practical wake up call: AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely, so vague slogans will not survive this shift. Then it is on to pesky callers, a well behaved moat dragon, and a 2004 Ford ad that might just be the best car commercial ever made. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.Are We Still Thinking, Or Just Accepting the Answer Steve introduces Pete Blackshaw’s upcoming book, The Answer Economy, and its central worry: as AI tools take over our searching, what happens to the human doing the asking. David frames it as the next stage of the attention economy. For 25 years we built research skills by comparing sources ourselves. Now an AI summary sits at the top of the page, ready to do that work for us, and the question becomes whether solving a problem quickly is the same as solving it well. Borrowing from James Clear on habit formation, David notes that our old habit of searching then evaluating has quietly become searching then accepting. That shift, he argues, is a problem for our critical thinking, and it raises a bigger question about who is funding the answer we are being handed. Steve and David then run an informal trust test across AI tools, noting that Claude scored Amazon a modest five out of ten on its customer centric claims, even though Amazon helps fund Anthropic. It is a small data point, but one that earns some confidence in at least one of the tools doing the answering. The segment closes on Pete Blackshaw’s idea that consumers are shifting from searchers to interrogators. Steve shares a real test he ran, asking an AI overview to compare local mechanics, then following up with a more specific question about trustworthiness for his eighteen year old daughter. The follow up question changed the entire recommendation. David frames it as a reminder to stay specific and curious rather than settling for the first, more general answer.ng that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident. This excerpt is from the full Blackshaw interview with Shel and Neville from the For Immediate Release podcast (one of Steve’s favourites). 15:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Why Vague Marketing Claims Are About to Stop Working Steve breaks down what The Answer Economy actually means for a small business. People search by asking questions, so the businesses that win are the ones structuring their content to directly answer those questions, rather than leaning on slogans. David connects this to inbound marketing, arguing that a person who arrives with a genuine question already has intent, and answering that question well increases the odds they become a customer. Here is the blog post Steve refers to: AI Ready: The Small Business Guide to Being the Answer Groundless claims like being the best in the state no longer carry weight, because, as David puts it plainly, AI search tools ignore vague marketing claims completely. Steve calls this a genuine wake up call for small business owners still leaning on assertions instead of substance. The fix, they argue, is not more clever copy. It is specific, honest, question and answer style content that reflects real expertise, which is exactly the thinking behind TAM’s own GEO Ready work. A clip from Pete Blackshaw adds that different AI tools have different personalities and source preferences, with Claude in particular acting as what Blackshaw calls the extreme librarian, favouring credentialed sources over marketing spin. David frames this as an opportunity: small business expertise, long underused online, now has a format built for it, with businesses that articulate what they actually know positioned to benefit.ear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short. 27:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.A Well Behaved Moat Dragon for Your Phone Steve tackles a problem every business...
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    39 min
  • Are you talking to me? Social media marketing in the angertainment era

    Are you talking to me? Social media marketing in the angertainment era
    Jun 29 2026
    Ed Koper’s book Angertainment gives Steve and David a precise vocabulary for what most of us feel but struggle to name: the social media machine is not broken, it is working exactly as designed, and that design is not working for you. David draws the line that every small business owner needs to hear: your customers are not the mob, and the mob does not care about your business. A couch cleaning search goes sideways when Steve finds a local tradesperson’s website where the Adelaide suburbs have migrated to Darwin, Alice Springs, and Melbourne, and the copy reads like it never met a human being. Clive Palmer’s 2014 political ads get the Perspicacity treatment, and the verdict is the same lesson in a different costume: if your message starts with what matters to you, not what matters to them, it lands nowhere. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.Ed Koper’s Field Guide to the Eight Types of Online Rage (and Why Your Temperature Rising Is Not an Accident) Steve opens the final episode of Season 8 with Angertainment, Ed Koper’s forensic examination of how social media platforms and their most active users have turned anger into a business model. The book’s central argument is not that social media is unpleasant but that its unpleasantness is deliberate, repeatable, and categorised. Koper names eight distinct post types designed to generate heat rather than light, and Steve and David walk through each one with the kind of wry recognition that comes from having seen all of them in the wild. The eight types cover a lot of ground: Righteous anger activation (moral language designed to recruit, not inform)Tribal identity framing (are you with us or against us?)False consistency shaming (collapsing complexity into a gotcha)Decontextualised rage bait (the 10-second clip stripped of the 30 seconds that would change everything)Cancel mob mechanics (collective punishment at scale)Merchants of outrage (coordinated discontent dressed as grassroots)Propagandatainers (whose primary business model is keeping you angry)Distraction (look over here while the real story disappears) One example from the book: a single can sent to a single influencer, and a social media structure that turned a minor marketing decision into congressional investigations and millions in lost sales. Steve frames the eight types through the lens of The Emperor’s New Clothes: once you can name what you are looking at, it loses its power over you. David adds the Jonathan Haidt layer, noting that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident. 15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.What the Rage Has to Do With Your Next Facebook Post (More Than You’d Like) The Principles segment moves the Angertainment conversation from survival to strategy: if this is the environment, how does a small business owner post anything at all without being swept into the current or mistaken for part of it? David’s position is direct. You are talking to a hero who needs a guide to solve a problem. That is your job on social media. The moment you wander outside that lane and into tribal commentary, you stop being a guide and become just another voice in the emotional weather. His practical guidance covers the basics: Share photos of great workTell the stories of people who love what you doDescribe the new thing you have worked out you can help people with Accept that these posts will not go viral. Accept that the likes will be modest. And then ask yourself the only question that actually matters for a business: are the people who do engage calling you, enthusiastically, ready to talk about how you can help them? Steve adds the cautionary note from personal experience. He has a standing rule about not engaging in political discussion on social media because the medium strips out every nuance that makes such conversations worthwhile. When pitchforks arrive at your gate by accident, David’s prescription is equally clear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short. 21:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.When the Map of Adelaide Puts Norwood Where Alice Springs Should Be Steve’s couch needed cleaning after an 18th birthday party. What followed was a cautionary tour of local tradesperson websites that had apparently been generated entirely by AI, reviewed by nobody, and published without a moment...
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    31 min
  • If You Are Not Engineering Your Time In This Age It Will Be Engineered For You

    If You Are Not Engineering Your Time In This Age It Will Be Engineered For You
    Jun 15 2026
    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 ...
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    56 min
  • When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson

    When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson
    May 25 2026
    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 ...
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    39 min