Your mind works like water flowing through channels in a stream, which explains why sometimes the hardest marketing challenges need the simplest solutions.
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.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S07E09
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Talking about marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders. Produced by my dad, Steve Davis and his colleague talked about marketing David Olney, in which they explore marketing through the lens of their own four Ps person, principles, problems, and per ity. Yes, you heard that correctly. Apart from their love of words, they really love helping people, so they hope this podcast will become a trusted companion on your journey in business.
Steve Davis: David, are you consciously aware of every single thing you do? Through the day.
David Olney: Not all of it, but unfortunately too much of it. It’s kind of a necessity when you can’t see where you left stuff. That’s a good point. So the bits where
Steve Davis: you don’t is closer to how many of the rest of us are.
David Olney: My general perception is most people wouldn’t find their
Steve Davis: car keys unless they could see [00:01:00] them.
Mm-hmm. You grab the car keys and off you go across town. No problem whatsoever. Did you, uh, race in the BP Grand Final?
David Olney: Thankfully, no, they won’t let me hang the cane out the window, so I said no. Well, there was some shenanigans on that course. See, I think
Steve Davis: you would’ve fitted right in,
Caitlin Davis: uh, four ps. Number one person. The aim of life is self-development to realize one’s nature perfectly. That is what each of us is here for. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: for the person segment. In this episode, the last episode of 2025, Paul Taylor gets a Guernsey. So Paul’s got a book called The Hardiness Effect, and David, you are, I wouldn’t say fanboy, but you really are quite taken by the work that Paul Taylor’s put together. I
David Olney: really like it because. He’s completely honest that he’s bought a heap of stuff together and [00:02:00] put it together in his own unique way, but constantly admits, Hey, I, I’ve collected great stuff that I’ve used in my own life and I’ve put it together in a system so you can use it in your life.
So I like someone who both. Adds to what’s there, but also admits they’re standing on the shoulders of giants
Steve Davis: and part of him standing on the shoulders of giants. From our perspective of things we can put into practice are the four C’s. What are the four C’s? The
David Olney: four C’s are challenge, control, commitment, and connection.
Which on their own don’t make a lot of sense, so I’ll explain them. What Paul’s book is really all about is that psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists and lots of other people have been studying the idea of hardiness instead of resilience. ’cause resilience just means you survive. What happens hardiness, the premise is you adapt and overcome and you keep doing slightly better or avoid the next problem because you’re always learning and evolving.[00:03:00]
Paul Taylor: Hardiness is, it’s a kind of a close cousin of resilience, but it’s also different, right? Resilience is an outcome. It doesn’t tell you how to get there. Yeah. Whereas Hardiness does okay, and there are so many real world benefits of hardiness from career longevity and high performance occupations such as military, police, first responders, but a huge amount of benefits for people’s physical health if they’re hiring and hardiness.
Even kids hiring hardiness are more likely to go to university. And so there’s so many real world benefits and you can learn hardiness much easier than you can resilience. Um, because it is a pathway. And that’s why, I mean, I was studying it, my PhD and I thought, I see, you know what, this is gonna make a great book, um, after the second one.
Uh, so that that’s really what hardiness is. Yeah. Uh, but uh, in all the literature, there’s 30 years of research behind it.
David Olney: Hmm.
Paul Taylor: But it’s all about psychology now. I’m a psycho physiologist, so I just had to bring the [00:04:00] physiology to match the psychology because I’m a firm believer that anybody tells you that you can optimize for mental health and cognitive function just with thinking skills.
Yeah. Is batshit crazy?
David Olney: Yeah.
Paul Taylor: You know, our physiology and our psychology are intimately entwined. Yes. And this is what I really dive into in the hardiness effect. So things that you can do cognitively as well as physically to really grow from stress, optimize your health, and live longer.
David Olney: The researchers have worked out, there’s four characteristics of hardiness and they are that you see things in life as challenges rather than threats. When something’s in front of you and you go, oh, we’re not sure about that. You go, not sure how I’m gonna overcome that challenge right now. Might take me a day.
Rather go, oh, that’s a threat. I’m in trouble. I don’t wanna start
Steve Davis: that reminds me of that book, the [00:05:00] Fourth Protocol, Harry. Oh, the fourth pillar. The fourth pillar, yes. Uh, Harry, what’s his surname?
David Olney: Moffitt Harry Moffitt. It shares an awful lot in common because. Paul is probably as much of a stoic fan as Harry.
They’re just looking at it from a slightly different perspective.
Steve Davis: Well, the, the thing that overlaps for me with Harry is, and we talked about that in a previous episode, uh, but not this point is when stuff happens that is off the rails a bit. He’s one of his go-to phrases is Right what next? Yep. Like, yeah, come on.
You’ve done your best. Yep. Come on. Next thing, come on, next thing. Come on. Make it worse. Yep. I think that’s very similar, isn’t
David Olney: it? Yes. Very. Like they’re both so grounded in Roman stoicism. So Paul’s second. C is control, and again, very much a stoic point, but backed by neurology, knowing the difference between what you control, which is your responses to things or the actions you take.
And what you can’t control is what the world does and what the world does in response to things you do. So if you can tell what you can [00:06:00] control and what you can’t control, and you let go of what you can’t control and focus on what you can control, you are always going to feel better about, well, I’m not in control of that, but I can do something about my response.
His third C is commitment, which really comes down to do you do the right thing, the thing you need to do even when nobody’s watching, even when you’re tired. And what research after research shows is the person that gets home from a long day eats a healthy meal, takes a bit of a rest, and then goes and does a workout on a day like that, is gonna cope with most things that come down the pipeline at
Steve Davis: them.
And, and that marries with another saying, and I forget, I think this was the book on character. Where, how you do one thing is how? How you do everything. Everything. Yes. And that’s what that is. Yep. When no one’s looking, are you still going to apply the same Yep. Principle and level of detail that you would otherwise?
David Olney: Yep. And you know, [00:07:00] historically in this research on hardiness, challenge, control, and commitment were the normal three. From the researchers before Paul Taylor. Paul has added connection to the end because what he’s realized in his own career, uh, as a naval helicopter pilot and then being involved in martial arts and just doing all sorts of different things, becoming a psychologist is the more connected you are and the more you involve people in your life and the more you are there to support other people that.
Connectedness makes the other three things work even better. So he’s taken it from the three Cs to the four Cs. And you know, his argument is that, you know, if you’ve got a couple of them, great, now what are you gonna do about, you know, getting the other two? And you don’t have to have them evenly, but you’ve gotta put effort into developing the ability to say things is a challenge.
To work out what you can and can’t control, to be committed to doing the right thing and to make sure that even if you’re an [00:08:00] introvert who’s really uncomfortable around people, that you recognize that the effort towards connection will make you feel better and will put you in a better position when things get hard.
Steve Davis: So what’s that like in daily life? Running a small business or being a leader in a small organization?
David Olney: That’s what I love about the way Paul’s looking at this. Again, he’s a very practical person that wants the ideas to be useful, so his breakdown really is wherever you are and small business is no different.
Do you see things that pop up in front of you as a challenge or a threat? If you see them as a challenge, you are bringing positivity to the game. If you see them as a threat, you’re bringing negativity to the situation. The minute you bring negativity to the situation, you are already moving forward with one foot and one hand tied behind your back.
Don’t do it if you can avoid it in terms of control. If you’ve gotta build a team around you and trust them to get on with their job and trust them to help you build the organization. You have to surrender the things you can’t [00:09:00] control and focus on the things you can. So that wonderful comment that gets said to company founders, are you working in the business or on the business?
Mm-hmm. Well, the only way to grow the business is to work on the business and let other people work in the business to give up that control over all the details in terms of commitment. You get up in the morning and do what you need to do because that’s what it takes to run a small business. There’s no shortcut.
If this really matters and you really want to do it, and the sooner that doing the right thing becomes a habit, and the less you have to think about it, the better the outcomes are and the more energy you have. For the rest of your life. And as we’ve seen time and time again in small business, the more connection you have, the more people you talk to, the more people you have who are sort of peers or mentors that you trust to talk things through with, the greater the chance you don’t get stuck, the greater the chance you don’t get frustrated, the greater the chance you do something new, solve the puzzle and get success.[00:10:00]
Steve Davis: So at events, I’ve got an event to go to this afternoon. Um. I’d really rather not be going. It’s one of these end of year things. ’cause I prefer to either be the mc or, uh, be with people in a small group, like one-to-one or one to just a few. Mm-hmm. Uh, I it. Apply the four C’s here. Give it
David Olney: to me, David. So in terms for this, you know, that is a challenge, not a threat, and it’s important to state that.
So you’re positive, but that’s a given with you. Yeah. You also know what bit of this you can control and what you can’t. You can’t mc it. You weren’t asked to do that job. But you can find a nice bunch of people to stand in a quieter spot and talk to, and you can draw people in who are looking for a nice group of people to talk to.
So you can go into that thing and still do the thing you like by taking control of what you can control and let go of the rest. Mm-hmm. In terms of commitment. You always try and make people smile. You always try and make people [00:11:00] feel included, so your level of commitment to being a caring, respectful person is so hard wired in you.
It’s not even funny. It’s just so deeply there. So you’ve got that one totally under control and connection. Well, the connection is what you thrive on. So really this afternoon is a perfect example of, you may not really want to go, but you are gonna go there and do all four C’s in a way that Paul, in his really harsh bell first accent would be very positive about.
Steve Davis: Did the small business minister put you up to this?
David Olney: No, but I’m happy to whisper in there if it helps us
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps. Number two principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. Oscar Wilde
Steve Davis: David. Yes. Oh, this is going to be a challenge because the examples I’ve got, I’ve just [00:12:00] realized are going to be different. So if I said green to you, what comes to your mind? Grass. Blue sky. Okay. What am I missing? Because you’ve got it connected through narrative and from your early years.
David Olney: Yeah,
Steve Davis: I,
David Olney: I remember enough color, so I’m okay with that stuff.
So like if you say red to me, I think of the Goler fire service firetruck, which the Fireies used to let me sit on and turn the siren on when I was tiny. If I say fast, uh, I think of what’s the fastest car I’ve been in? My friend Ken’s red Hot super that had all these Toyota fast parts. That thing was scary fast.
What if I say wobbly? Uh, je that didn’t have enough gelatin in it. What if I say hard? Um, I would think of our granite, mortar and pestle. What if I
Steve Davis: say
David Olney: lips? Um, that’s a hard one. ’cause then you wanna associate it with a person. Yes. And
Steve Davis: I’m deliberately getting more and more obscure with my choice. I think I’ve made the point.
[00:13:00] I think you have. Uh, so I heard a fantastic interview, uh, with, uh, Gora Siri. I apologize if I’ve mispronounced your name. I’ve tried to get it right. He’s the author of a book called The Wonder of the Emergent Mind, and he was on my. Favorite podcast other than the ones we make, it’s called EconTalk. I, I really think, I’m so glad I’m alive at a time in history when that podcast is around.
It is my academic food and, and more than that, it’s actually my soul food. It’s such, such thoughtful conversations. It’s not often you have a podcaster urging people to listen elsewhere, but I do because it is such a gift to the world. Anyway. What, uh, Gora has, uh, done beautifully and I want to get this book.
It’s not an audible, uh, yet, it’s not an audio version. So I am waiting out because I do fall asleep when I read paper books these days. I need to have that, uh, audio [00:14:00] companion is, he has explained how mind. Comes to be, we might call it intelligence or mind, whether we’re talking about a human, an animal, a, an ai, or a robot.
He argues really clearly that when you think about the pattern in which neurons fire together. It’s the same very mechanical thing that’s going on yet it looks so organic to us, David. Mm. Um, what about, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s neuro, not plasticity. This connection. I’m just having a mental blanket.
Oh no. This is, uh, a synapsis. The point where the electric charge goes between the cells. Actually, this came up in the conversation. That’s not it. I know, I know. And one of the tricks he said was, keep coming up with similar things. That are relevant to what you’re trying to [00:15:00] say because it’s in there somewhere.
We’re just trying to find the connection.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: So he was talking about the patterns that, uh, happen in the mind, the connections that are there. There are pathways, neural networks. There you go. That’s what I was looking for, David. I just demonstrated. For real what he said. He used the example of, you’re trying to remember Jennifer Aniston’s name.
And so you think of movies and TV shows and blonde hair and all that sort of stuff. I think my idea was more highbrow. David, I like yours better ’cause I don’t ever think of Jennifer Aniston or I have to think of friends and I shut her. So, uh, yes, neural networks. So what’s going on inside? All, anything that seems to have the properties of mind is this emergent mind.
And I we’re gonna listen to him describe, because this is the most eloquent description I’ve ever heard.
Gaurav Suri: One metaphor that, [00:16:00] um. My co-author, Jay McClelland, uh, recounts, is to start thinking of neural networks as reservoirs of interconnected pools of water. Like in know, in a stream how, uh, waterfalls, there’s little pools, and the, there’s a channel from one pool to the other pool. So think of these little micro pools as units, which are populations of neurons, and think of the channels between them as.
The, the connections between these neurons and the more water that goes from one pool to the other pool, the deeper the channel. Right? And, and, and the thought here is that the more a neuron is co-occurring with another neuron. So if I say green and you say grass. What happened? Well, what happened is that neurons corresponding to the word green are have a [00:17:00] deep channel or a connection with neurons, connected with saying the word grass or thinking of grass.
And what made this channel, it’s the frequency of exposure, right? So this was. Uh, Canadian neuroscientist, Donald heb came up with this idea that if two things are cove, they become connected. So neurons that fire together, wire together is, it’s called, it’s a, uh, it’s simplification of HEBs rule, and it’s, it’s a beautiful rule.
I’ll, I’ll repeat it. Neurons that fire together, meaning they’re coved together, wire together, right? So imagine your brain. We’ve been imagining your brain as an ant colony. And now imagine it as the system of pools, uh, of water in a stream, uh, maybe in a waterfall. And the, the pools fill up. Some pools fill up, depending on how the water is [00:18:00] falling.
Water comes and goes. The traces of the traffic between the pools that stays, and that’s the knowledge of the system, right? So this is a startling idea, but it’s useful to think of connections as pa. It’s useful to think of your thoughts as patterns of electricity in your brain. Patterns of activation.
Thoughts come and go, just like water comes and goes in a stream, but your knowledge are the channels, are the connections between neurons, and this is why people respond differently to the same input because they have different connections. They have different. Channels that takes the input that they’re seeing or smelling or tasting and sends it to different parts of the brain based on, in part their experience.
And if you’ve had different experiences, [00:19:00] uh, than mine, then. Your channels are gonna be different. Your pathways in your brain are gonna be different and you’ll respond differently to the same input than I will
Steve Davis: David, since I heard that analogy of the neurons being these little pools or ponds in our brain and the little pathways between them when thinking, when mind, when energy flows between them and where it flows more. Where it gets wired together. Even when the thought’s not there and everything’s dried up, so to speak, the moment it comes back again, there are channels and pathways to find.
Hence green has been associated with grass so much for you and I that there’s a deep groove there. Mm. It’d be hard to associate it with something else. We could over time. We could go seasick, um, if we wanted to force that point. But the one at the top with the deepest canal is [00:20:00] green and grass. I wanted to bring this up in the principles section because it is at the heart of everything we do in marketing because we.
Are the, well, the children, the carriers, the purveyors, the developers of our neural networks, our customers and clients are also reacting to their own neural networks. Part of our job in marketing is to help with messaging that sends out the little. Uh, trial to start making little pathways between neurons and patterns of neurons that connect to us.
I think that’s. It shows that we’ve to come from nothing. That’s a big job to tap in to existing connections between neurons and, and patterns of neurons. That’s how we can short circuit some of our, our work [00:21:00] inside marketing. Yeah,
David Olney: we’re essentially linking networks. Hmm. Linking a person who’s thinking about one thing and a person who wants that person to think about a particular thing.
How do we get those two networks to make sense to each other?
Steve Davis: And I think the red wine and the coffee people have done well because they, we associate them both with well naughty things that add joy to life. But the, the people who are advocates for both of those talked about that element within them.
Was it the FOLs or something?
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Uh,
David Olney: there, there’s some element I haven’t, yeah, the antioxidant. Yes. That is very good for us. And how much of it is really in there? And is it enough to really make a difference? Well, those of us who love coffee and red wine are definitely gonna remember that it’s in there.
Steve Davis: Yes. So I now have that connection when I’m sipping on my black coffee. It’s not firing or full of one of the fullest channels, but it’s there in the background and it will keep there washing with thought through it and connection for a long time. So hats off to them because you go back probably 20 [00:22:00] or 30 years and the assumption would’ve been no, you’re actually breaking all the rules to drink coffee or red wine.
And so those marketers have done a good job in setting that up. It also means that if you get tarred with a brush, you have got quite a bit of
David Olney: work to try and change perception. Yeah.
Steve Davis: But I think isn’t part of what makes the game a bit easier knowing. The rules of the, of the ecosystem. Surely that gives us an advantage over competitors who are not aware of this.
David Olney: It’s a lovely reminder why we read neurology and psychology and then apply it. Because that’s where the real research is. That’s why people do
Steve Davis: things. And I wanna say, don’t overthink this. Um, I, I actually did the pun on purpose then. David. Thank you for that smile. Uh, I, I’ve [00:23:00] just voiced his smile ’cause I wanted to get some.
CL claim. I wanna finish this segment. We are sharing a little story that, uh, Gav shares in the article. Oh, I can’t wait to get the book. I’m the moment. It’s audible, I’m there, and it’s, it explains how we see our minds and we see these AI systems and they do complex things. But he said at its heart it’s simple upon simple, upon simple.
And the excuse, uh, the explanation he uses. Is if you watch ants, they found a source of food and there’s a big long column of them if you like. He did when he was a kid, would put a twig or a barrier over their path, but not symmetrically. So 25% on one side, 75% on the other. So there is a short way and a long way to go around it.
Within very short measure, the ants have discovered the short path, and we think, oh wow. What’s happening Is their [00:24:00] communication with the queen. What’s, no, it’s not. It is exactly simple upon simple. So what happens is roughly half of the ants who hit this twig will go left. Half will go right. It’s just.
The nature of the beast. There’s nothing no other reason. Ants are not smart beings. What ants do is lay down pheromone trails and follow pheromone trails. All right? That’s what’s going on. So just imagine being one of the ants that happened by luck to find the short way they get around it. They find the track that’s heading to the food source, off they go, and then they come back when they come back.
Do they go left or right? Well, they end up going left the short way because there’s extra pheromone trail. They’ve left their own pheromone trail there, so they follow that. The ants had gone the long way, take longer to get around. They get to the food source by the time they come back. Arthur Ants would’ve piled on the short side.
There are many more pheromone trails there, and so it looks like [00:25:00] magic. It looks like wisdom to us. It’s just simple upon simple, upon simple. Any final thoughts, David, to leave people with over the summer break?
David Olney: Well, final thought that fits with this. I think it’s very important. So many things when we look at them on their own, you discover there’s something simple at the core, but it’s the interaction of so many simple things is the point where things get too complex for us and then systems break down because all these simple things can’t necessarily work as cleanly as a group of ads.
So I think the thing I’d like to say to end this is remember that. You know, the ant is not seeing or paying attention to so many things happening around it. We are, we ah, yes, get stuck with the overwhelm of too much stuff. Remember, you can focus in on the thing you really want to focus in on. You can get a particular task done, you can have a particular aim for what you’re gonna achieve and for a short period of time, it’s.
Well, it normally is the best thing to [00:26:00] do is go, no, I could engage with everything, or I can do something properly for 15 minutes and an awful lot of my day every day. Is deciding next 15 minutes I’m doing this thing properly, then I’ll let the scope get big again, see if there’s anything I have to pay attention to, or do I pick my next thing to do properly for 15 minutes.
And I think, you know, linking this to the model of the pools and the channels and the ants is a really good way to explain why I get so much stuff done. And very rarely feel
Steve Davis: overwhelmed anymore. Oh, you’ve tapped on some more. I, I’m gonna have the link to this episode, uh, which he has that interview ’cause he also talks about how goal setting fits into this.
And it is about that deliberate focus and that’s what you’ve just espoused. So thank you. And by the way, there’s just an ant crawl, New York coffee. Just, that’s okay. Extra protein is always good.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps, number three problems. I asked the question for the [00:27:00] best reason possible, simple curiosity. Oscar Wilde,
Steve Davis: David, I was once a useful idiot. That should be a T-shirt. Were you ever a useful idiot?
David Olney: I think there was a massive risk when I was in academia and would go to academic conferences and deliver papers that were incomprehensible to anyone outside of the audience that I probably got pretty close, and my normal response was to want to run screaming.
Steve Davis: Well, the definition of useful idiot that I’m uh, talking about here are people who end up doing the work, doing the bidding of someone else who gets all the benefit. They might get some small benefit, but they’re actually. They’re actually helping someone who almost undeservedly gets the benefit. I’ll just explain that.
That sounds exactly like my career in academia. [00:28:00] I’m talking about when smartphones first emerged. There was some of us, I wasn’t quite one of these. I sort of was, but not fully of consultants who came outta the woodwork who had an iPhone. They put out their, um, shingle. They are the expert at smartphones.
They run workshops. Admittedly, I still run the photography one, but it’s deeper skills. It’s not just the phone. I’m just try and distance myself a little bit. But you know, there’ll people who would argue and convince people to buy the iPhone, Steve Jobs. Who I think was still alive when that came out would’ve just been sitting back in his rocking chair thinking having another green juice and thinking, fantastic.
Thank you. Useful idiot. You are making me money while I do nothing. Yep. Self emergent champions. What more do you want? Then we had social media, and this is where I was one of the useful idiots where I became one of [00:29:00] those go-to people and I would spend time teaching people, uh, how to use Facebook and YouTube and all those places.
Twitter, I’d look back with some. Degree of embarrassment now, but then there were people who took it to the nth degree and they would have whole tribes of people who followed them. Just, you know, moms and dads who became super experts at big conferences and they spent their time and what they thought was.
Earth shatteringly important was how Facebook today unveiled something where if you go down here, go across to that screen, click that button, you are gonna have a little bit brighter colors in your photos, and it’s, oh, and you have these hordes of useful idiots channeling everyone in. And meanwhile, mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, sit back and go, well.
This is just fantastic. Not only are they convincing more people to hop into our slaughterhouse, uh, sorry, business, um, but uh, they’re [00:30:00] actually doing all that work for us. We don’t even have to do user guide. We don’t even have to do CU customer support. They’re doing it all. Thank you. Useful idiots. That’s by way of prelude.
Um, am I a bit emotionally tied to that? You might
David Olney: think. I was gonna say it sounded more like the beginning of a monologue that was gonna end in self-help.
Steve Davis: No, we have, we are standing at the next wave of useful ears and these are the AI experts. And I wanna read you something that came across my LinkedIn feed from an Alex ov, I think that’s how, or Federov, I don’t know how to pronounce his name.
And I’m gonna jump in here and say, bath warning. Bath warning. Have your bag ready. Okay, here we go. Gemini three just dropped yesterday. And if you run e-com, you better lock the FFR in. I’ve spent the last five months testing every major AI model for E-com. Clawed sonnet, 4.5 GPT five deep. See car one Higgs Field.
All killers [00:31:00] all useful, but Gemini three, it’s a complete shift in how e-comm brands will operate. Here’s what I saw in the first 48 hours. It identifies winning ad angles in seconds stuff. He used a different word that used to take agencies weeks. It breaks down competitive funnels with scary accuracy.
It rewrites hooks in your brand voice without losing tension. It builds offer variations that actually convert not generic template trash. It generates new creative concepts faster than you can test them. This isn’t AI that helps. This is AI that replaces three people on your team without blink. Thank you chat UTI for writing that part of it.
I ran it through 150 plus creative tests, 12 funnels, and 40 plus product angles. The results were insane. Five new creative concepts that hit above 1.7. Return on ad spend on cold CPC dropped 22% on [00:32:00] two of my testing campaigns. Cost per click. It found competitor patterns inside get hooked that I didn’t even see.
It generated static ads that looked handcrafted, not AI goo. It gave me 20 hooks from one single winning angle. No more blank page syndrome. And here’s the part nobody’s ready for. Your competitors who adopt Gemini three early will scale faster than you can react. Not because they’re smarter, but because their creative volume just multiplied overnight.
E-comm is a speed game. If you’re still launching three creatives a week, guessing angles, manually analyzing competitors, spending days, writing scripts, relying on outdated product research methods. You are gonna get buried by brands using Gemini to pump out 50 creatives a week. Six to eight new angles every Monday.
Daily funnel audits, real time offer iteration, instant competitor tear down. This is the gem moment for e-comm. The same way Meta’s gem updated update [00:33:00] punish slow advertisers. Gemini three is about to punish slow operators. If you wanna stay relevant in 2025, E-Comm. Start using AI as your creative engine.
Build systems around it. Connect with me, comment Gemini, and I’ll send it over all the prompts I’m using to generate high performing angles, hook scripts, and PDP updates. Wow. David,
David Olney: blah, blah, blah. Snore. Snore, snore. Bath, bath, bath.
Steve Davis: I thought what I’d do though is play along and I popped in Gemini. I’m just curious to see ’cause he caught me a bit agitated.
Yes. I thought, let’s just see. Through it all. Anyway, I did that two days later, nothing. So instead of Gemini, I deleted that and I replaced my comment with this. Are you ready? I’m ready. Actually don’t worry. That’s in relation to sending the thing I gave you post to Gemini and I asked it to replicate all the prompts for me.
It has, it did say this though. [00:34:00] This is a classic hype cycle. LinkedIn post it blends high urgency language. You’re gonna get buried with specific desirable income or outcomes, lower CPC high ROS, while the poster is leveraging the Gemini three rumor and release hype, which is common in the AI influencer space.
The specific tasks they describe are absolutely things I can do for you right now with the right instructions. Below is the e-comm dominance workflow. I’ve reverse engineered the claims in that post to create the exact prompts you need to achieve those results. Cheeky. I gotta love Gemini. It has become one of my new tools of choice.
Uh, it has a bit of spunk in the way that it reacted to that. Again, nothing crickets, uh, from the hype master. But what’s interesting, and I encourage this is why this is in problems by the way, if you are seeing these grand, all promising things in ai. It’s [00:35:00] ai. Copy their claim, go to the AI tool they’re talking about and say, this sounds suspicious to me.
Can you check? Is this for real? And if it is, can you please create for me the prompts and the workflow that will help me achieve these outcomes? Job done? And hopefully we can. Wrought out and root out rather, this next wave of useful idiots before they get bigger than they already are. Should I clap now?
I’d
David Olney: really like to clap now.
Mm-hmm. Yay.
Goodbye idiots.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps, number four per sy. The one duty Weta history is to rewrite it. Oscar Wilde.
Steve Davis: Finally in this episode, per Per Cassidy, we look at old campaigns and we ask, would they work today? Well, today we’re actually doing a side by side. At the [00:36:00] time of recording, which would’ve been a few weeks ago, Adelaide had just staged the, what do they call it? The BP Grand Final, basically a supercars race with he put Grand Final The Night makes it sound even more special.
You’ve got footie and. Car. Yes. Foot car. So here’s the thing. We were marking 40 years since the Formula One Grand Prix came to Adelaide in 1985. And this one, they even had a Formula One card. Do some exhibition, uh, set of laps to bring back memories and just subtly remind us that okay, we are making do with less these days.
However, wasn’t that lovely. Wasn’t that a quaint time? Let’s have a listen to the ad that was used for the original Formula One. And you know how you said get the, the bath ready for, uh, I think you’re gonna need this again. Mojo was responsible, so you kind of know the advertising [00:37:00] people. Uh, it’s gonna be jingoistic and probably a lot of annoying rhyming.
Let’s have a listen.
TV Ad: Wait for a kicky. Try to relax. Nobody’s raced here before. Nelson’s not worried. Well, maybe a bit. It’s no track like he ever, ever saw Ilios. Ready? Nigel’s not fasting. Nikki’s so cool in the heat. And Jones has been waiting, biting is time to take ’em all on in the street comes alive. November 85. There’s never been a motor race like this comes alive.
November 85. This is what show Noah one wants to miss Eddie now. Eddie? Not yet. Elaine. Clamp your eyes hard on that light. McKayley selected. Antons a rev. Seconds away from the fight. Millions of race fans all over the world. Everyone poised for the gun. A lake’s done and it’s finally on It’s Fanum Formula one, the A [00:38:00] stricken Formula one Grand Prix.
October 31st of November 3rd here on channel nine. This is what show number one.
Steve Davis: The only thing they didn’t put in there was calm on Aussies. Calm on. What do you think,
David Olney: David? The only thing it’s missing is someone opening a stubby on their eye socket.
Steve Davis: Oh wow.
David Olney: It was a different time,
Steve Davis: wasn’t it?
David Olney: I remember being at high school and that ad being on TV and going, I’m so glad. That’s not interesting. ‘
Steve Davis: cause it did whip up hype, so it definitely worked. Yeah. Oh yeah. So here we are being reflective and some might say snide David. Oh, I’m being snide. Yep. Okay. Why did it work?
And why does the BP Adelaide, wait, let’s just before you answer that, let’s have a listen to the BP Adelaide ad from 2025.[00:39:00]
TV Ad: This isn’t your average grand final two hours. Think again. This is an unmissable four day lock-in of speed and sound. Where rivalries are settled and immortality is the prize with Epic concerts headlined by Lenny Kravitz and AC DC. This is the BP Adelaide Grand Final where champions are made,
Steve Davis: so no awkward, repetitive rhyming. But a really weird voice. Deliberate just as, just as bad.
David Olney: Just different.
Steve Davis: Yes. Trying to be hip rap, but not quite, Ugh. Anyway, uh, can you
David Olney: answer my question? I think what’s going on here is that. There are some things, you know, as Drew Eric Whitman would say, in [00:40:00] cash izing there are life foresight.
There are some things that humans generally get excited about. Big, noisy things that go fast, near misses, crashes, rollover where the person probably doesn’t die ’cause of all the safety features, like we love loud noises, fast things, and thrills. And we love being in a crowd yelling and screaming for all those things.
And I think what’s so fascinating with marketing is when you are marketing something that taps so deeply into the core of what makes humans, humans, you can do trash ads and get 102,000 people. Marketing gets interesting when it’s something that is not deeply wired into being human, and you have to work to gather attention.
Steve Davis: But if we apply. RA’s, uh, work on the emergent mind. There just must be this, I think this is what you’re saying in his lens. Huge channels [00:41:00] from neuron to neuron within certain people that the moment you mention racing cars, the brain just follows those channels and that section lights up. That neural network is alive and is automatically wired with picking up the phone or going online to buy a
David Olney: ticket.
And I reckon it’s probably three. Three neural networks lighting up competition. Mm-hmm. Spectacle, danger. Mm-hmm. But danger to others, not to self. And that’s the critical version of the danger network.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: It’s danger to self like come along, but you are at a 50% risk of dying in the crowd. No one’s turning up, but because it’s danger to others.
And you’ve got spectacle and you’ve got competition game on, uh, that sounds like ancient Rome bread and circuses. Just an updated version that’s louder and faster.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I, I’m guessing when it was a lion chasing a Christian, it was all pretty quick.
Steve Davis: Oh dear. If I knew who was racing, I would try and [00:42:00] have a, an, an analogy there, but there are none.
I’ll just think of, uh, who, Dick Dick’s, uh, who was the Ford? Dick Johnson. Dick Johnson and Peter m. Peter Brock. Peter Brock. I was gonna say Peter Moffitt. Who was
David Olney: Moffitt? Alan Moffitt. Alan Moffitt. He, in the end was the weird dude who raced an RX seven. Like you’re in Holden versus Ford and you turn up in a Mazda.
What the actual, well, he just had a different neural network. Why didn’t he? Yep. I’m amazed the sponsors kept funding it. But that’s a whole other issue. Uh, we’re gonna hop in the car now. I need to get you home. Excellent. I’m driving.
Caitlin Davis: Thank you for listening to talking about marketing. If you enjoyed it, please leave a rating. Or a review in your favorite podcast app, and if you found it helpful, please share it with others. Steve and David always welcome your comments and questions, so send them to [email protected]. [00:43:00] And finally, the last word to Oscar Wilde.
There’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.