This is an excerpt from Episode 175
Friction, with Soon Yu
Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll
Episode 218
In 1985, Robert Fulgham published a book that has gone on to sell 7 million copies. That puts it in league with nonfiction books like the biographies of Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela & the Diary of Anne Frank. In “All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten,” Fulgham lays out a handful of rules we all internalized on our way to adulthood. They include…
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
You’ve probably noticed the problem with Fulgham’s syrupy homespun advice. It’s not the world we live in. kindergarten class bear no resemblance to Capitalism— which is more like what you see in recess on the playground. From a marketing perspective, there are critical qualifiers we must add to Fulgham’s rules to make the applicable to the Big bad world out there:
Share everything? Sharing sounds noble… but capitalism says if you come up with an idea and patent it, those whom it’s shared with have to pay you for its use. Sharing doesn’t automatically mean you lose your competitive edge
Play Fair? Sure, play by the rules. But know that the biggest rewards go to whoever understands the rules best. If your competitors are using a playbook, you should change how the game’s played, and beat everyone else in the process.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours? You shouldn’t steal, of course… but marketing is literally the legal appropriation of someone else’s audience. History’s full of greenfields where pioneering R&D created a category…only to see it harvested by a fast moving disrupter.
To sum up, being a producer in this system is trying to outdo your fellow producers to win a consumers’s business, you should use every exploit capitalism allows to win.
Our guest has been in and worked with many startups, showing them how to bend the rules in their favour. He has run conferences that have brought thousands of companies together to share these unfair advantages. He’s also co-authored a book showing how to identify growth hacks using analytics. And in 2025 he and his co-author released the book “Just Evil Enough”
Let’s go to Montreal to talk with Alistair Croll.
Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro: Kindergarten Rules Don’t Apply to Capitalism
0:02:55 Redefining Marketing: Attention, Behavior, and Medium’s Role
0:07:21 Embracing Disagreeability and Psychological Nuances in Business
0:13:55 Leveraging OODA, Bug-to-Feature, and TRIZ for Advantage
0:19:50 Analyzing Markets with Objective, Subjective, and Collective Lenses
0:27:01 How Novelty and the Overton Window Drive Change
0:33:54 Navigating Ethical Lines and Disrupting Incumbents Responsibly
0:41:54 Embracing the Underdog Advantage and Promoting Subversive Ideas
People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the episode:
Just Evil Enough by Alistair Croll and Emily Ross on Goodreads
Construal Level Theory and Klaus Fiedler
Product-Market-Medium Fit:
“How Minds Change” by David McRaney with Objective / Subjective / Collective lenses
Enshitification (coined by Corey Doctorow)
Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
Alistair and Emily’s Recon canvas
Scar Tissue, with Danny Covey
Episode 217
For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we’ll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,
For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey’s, surgery isn’t an if, it’s not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.
But throughout all that, he’s displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, “Scar Tissue.” And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you’ll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings.
Let’s get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Danny’s personal site: dannycovey.com
Danny’s book Scar Tissue
Website Wealth, with Philippa Gamse
Episode 216
One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.
That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career. Back in high school he’d struggled to master all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.
But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar – it’s playing a trick on physics.
Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn’t until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.
The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury’s new backflip maneuver – the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance – he didn’t miss a jump right up to the metal round. I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to 2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record
Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury’s style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don’t even question it.
Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It’s a phenomena today’s guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: “The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that’s the point!”
Our guest has spent 25 years teaching digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of “42 Rules for a Website That Wins” and came out in 2025 with “Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics”. Let’s go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury
The Path to AGI with John Thompson
Episode 215
Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”
What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.
This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.
Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.
Today’s guest graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.
He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025.
So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson.
Shownotes
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
John’s book, The Path to AGI
Previous episodes with John:
Explainer – How the Transformer enables models like ChatGPT
GPT-created movie about Brian Eno
IBM’s Watson winning on Jeopardy!
