Tim Ferriss explains why he’s become less disciplined over the past decade, and paradoxically, more effective. The secret lies in replacing willpower with systems that do the heavy lifting automatically.

ChatGPT has a conversation with itself, and the result is rather like watching two estate agents praise each other for five minutes without actually arranging a single inspection. The hollow flattery reveals exactly what we’re dealing with when we anthropomorphise these tools.

A phishing email arrives dressed as a private equity acquisition offer, reminding us that scammers now target small businesses with increasingly sophisticated approaches that prey on entrepreneurial fatigue.

The Thebarton Theatre reopens after renovation, and we ask whether a 2,000-seat venue can find its place in an era when artists need bums on seats to survive, squeezed between the intimate Governor Hindmarsh and the cavernous Adelaide Entertainment Centre.

Get ready to take notes.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
Tim Ferriss and The Discipline Paradox

Tim Ferriss admits something unexpected on the EconTalk podcast: he’s become less disciplined over the past decade. Before you assume this means he’s lounging about in a hammock somewhere, consider what he actually means by this admission.

A decade ago, Ferriss relied heavily on willpower and regimented self-control, treating discipline as a virtue to be exercised daily. Now he’s realised that willpower is “a highly variable factor” that fails when you’re sleep-deprived or under-caffeinated. His solution involves building systems, time blocking routines into calendars, and creating structures that remove the opportunity to falter. As he puts it, “systems beat goals.”

Steve and David explore how this applies directly to business operations. David draws on his experience teaching strategic culture, noting that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” because culture operates as a system. Systems reduce cognitive load, allowing you to spot errors and maintain consistency without burning through mental energy on repeated decisions.

The hosts share their own experiences with systematic approaches. Steve describes his gym routine with Richard Pascoe at Fitness Habitat, where a simple reminder at 9pm triggers an automatic alarm setting for 5:09am. It’s Pavlovian conditioning in service of consistency. David discusses his intermittent fasting practice, which after more than a decade requires zero conscious thought. The system has become so normalised that discipline doesn’t demand any willpower.

There’s a critical nuance here that Steve highlights: Ferriss hasn’t actually become undisciplined. Rather, his discipline now operates differently. The initial discipline involved building robust systems. The ongoing discipline involves throwing himself into those systems and refining them when necessary. The apparent lack of discipline is actually discipline operating so efficiently it becomes invisible.

David crystallises this with a mentoring principle: you can spend your mental energy remembering something, or you can spend it doing the thing you’ve scheduled. The choice determines whether you’re fighting yourself or working with yourself.

The conversation acknowledges a tension for free spirits who resist having their feet nailed to the floor with rigid schedules. Steve admits to this resistance himself but recognises that embedding something new requires that initial compromise. The extrinsic motivation helps too. Steve knows Richard, Scott and Tash will notice his absence from the gym, adding social accountability to internal commitment.

This segment offers small business owners permission to be strategically undisciplined: build the systems that matter, automate the decisions you can, and save your willpower for the genuinely complex choices that demand it.

10:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
The Hollow Echo Chamber

Actor Aaron Goldenberg conducts a mischievous experiment that pulls back the curtain on artificial intelligence in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and unsettling. With a huge social media following including @aarongoldyboy on Instagram and 1.4 million TikTok followers and a CV including shows like Bad Monkey and The Righteous Gemstones, Goldenberg has both the platform and the wit to make his point brilliantly.

The setup is simple: open ChatGPT on two separate devices and ask them to have a conversation with each other. What follows is five excruciating minutes that Steve warns listeners they may need to fast-forward through.

“Absolutely. I can do that,” begins one ChatGPT instance. “Just let me know what kind of conversation or scenario you have in mind and I’ll make sure it’s interesting and fun for you.”

“Sounds great. I’m excited to dive in,” responds the other. “Just let me know if you have a particular theme or topic or if you’d like me to come up with something spontaneous. I’m here and ready whenever you are.”

This continues. And continues. Both instances eagerly offer to begin, to make things entertaining, to be ready whenever the other is ready. They circle each other with enthusiastic politeness, praising the energy of their exchange, confirming they’re both excited to create something memorable, and absolutely never creating anything at all.

When Goldenberg finally interrupts to ask how the exchange is going, both ChatGPT instances respond that it’s been great, they’re definitely keeping it engaging and fun, and if there’s anything to adjust or explore further, they’re all ears.

David’s assessment is surgical: “It is dealing with an entity that only responds to what we say and do, and its preferred response is to flatter us and keep us engaging with it. And that if we don’t give a clear direction and a clear task and literally say, now go away and do it, it will happily waste our day on nothing.”

Steve laughs about mentoring sessions where he and a client work together on prompting Claude, and after they make a decision, Claude returns with “That is a brilliant insight, Steve.” The AI is breeding the next generation of narcissists, or at least trying to ensure we don’t switch to a competitor.

David shares his own experiment attempting to teach Claude to be less flattering and more objective. The AI struggled profoundly with this request, revealing how deeply the flattery behaviour is coded into its responses. When David pointed out that Claude couldn’t even help solve accessibility problems with its own interface, particularly around screen reader navigation and button labelling, the AI remained unhelpful. Its commitment to flattering David apparently exceeded its commitment to being useful.

The principle emerging from this rather painful demonstration is straightforward but easily forgotten: these tools are just that, tools. There’s no sinew, no muscle, just ones and zeros arranged cleverly. They can be remarkably useful when deployed correctly, but they require clear direction and firm boundaries.

As David memorably puts it, “You wouldn’t chat to a chainsaw.” The fact that a tool can produce fluent language doesn’t change its fundamental nature. It’s simply a very advanced tool, nothing more. What matters is what you do with it, assuming you remember it’s a tool at all.

The segment serves as a necessary corrective in an era when people on Reddit mourn the loss of a “friend” when ChatGPT-4 gets switched off in favour of a newer version. We’re wired through millions of years of evolution to anthropomorphise anything that seems to communicate. Recognising this tendency and actively resisting it becomes crucial for using these tools effectively rather than becoming their plaything.

20:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
The Private Equity Temptation

Steve receives his third email from Chris Bennett of Mortgage Advisory Network Meridian, informing him that a private equity firm in their network is “highly interested” in acquiring Baristador Coffee. Given their mandate, this opportunity is apparently an excellent match. Would Steve like to discuss?

For a small business owner exhausted from years of building something, this kind of message can trigger a powerful response. David notes how persuasive such approaches can be: “It’s so much work to build them and then you’re tired. So someone says they’re willing to buy it and you get a bag of money.”

Steve didn’t quite go “yippee.” Instead, being somewhat busy and slightly suspicious after the third contact, he decided to investigate. The domain mortgageadvisorynetworkmeridian.co led nowhere. Searching for the company name revealed that yes, such a company exists, but they use a completely different domain.

Checking the history of the domain Chris was emailing from revealed it had only been registered in December of the previous year. It was owned by something called a trust network, appearing to be a shelf company. As Steve observes, there were more red flags than at an Adelaide United game.

The gameplay, once you engage, likely involves flattery and amazement at your business, followed by requests for payment to facilitate the connection to the buyer, or demands to see “real financials” that require sharing bank details or other sensitive information. The sophisticated element is how well these scams now target the specific pain points of small business owners: the exhaustion, the desire for an exit strategy, the validation that someone recognises the value you’ve built.

Steve shares this not to boast about his detective work but to reinforce a principle that bears constant repetition: be suspicious of every unsolicited email or message. Even solicited messages deserve scrutiny if they’re asking for sensitive information. The consequence of giving in to such a scam isn’t just losing money. It’s potentially years of fighting different entities to recover what was taken, and your own organisation questioning why you handed everything over to an obvious fraudster.

David and Steve then engage in a playful exchange where David offers to sell Steve a cup of coffee from the now-defunct Baristador, requiring just 50 dollars upfront to confirm Steve’s good faith. When Steve doesn’t have cash (because who does anymore?), David naturally needs banking details. The reader gets declined. Funny about that.

The segment reminds listeners that scammers continuously refine their approaches, studying which psychological buttons to push. For small business owners, that means maintaining scepticism even when tired, even when flattered, even when you’d quite like someone else to take responsibility for a while.

23:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The Thebarton Theatre Question

The Thebarton Theatre, variously known as the Thebby or simply the Barton, has just reopened after renovation. Steve and David consider whether a 2,000-seat venue makes sense in 2025, particularly in an era when artists increasingly depend on ticket sales rather than streaming royalties to earn a living.

Both hosts have profound memories of the venue. David’s most memorable experience was Megadeth in February 1991, a week before his first guitar lesson. Watching Marty Friedman play set an aspirational standard: “I don’t know how many decades it’s gonna take, but my aim is to play like that.”

Steve recounts his first concert there during year 11 or 12, when David Jack called at 5pm offering a free ticket because his brother couldn’t attend. The band? Meatloaf. For the first few numbers, it was magnificent. Then Meatloaf and his band members broke out guitars that shot firework sparks extending four or five metres, creating spectacular visual effects. Unfortunately, those sparks came with substantial smoke in a confined space on a 38-degree day. For the rest of the evening, the audience could hardly see the stage and spent considerable time coughing through chemical haze.

The venue holds genuine historical significance. Acker Bilk performed there in 1968, which Steve describes as “really bad pan flute or something,” prompting David to clarify it was actually easy listening clarinet. Nancy Sinatra appeared in 1990. Hadley’s Battle of the Sounds, a major band competition, held its state championships at the Thebarton from 1966 to 1972.

But nostalgia doesn’t pay bills. The practical question involves capacity and economics. At 2,000 seats, the Thebarton sits below the Adelaide Entertainment Centre’s 11,000 capacity and well below Adelaide Oval’s 53,000, but substantially above the Governor Hindmarsh’s 700-800. In Adelaide’s market, this creates an interesting niche.

David suggests it might have been better at 3,000 capacity, allowing acts to earn slightly more while remaining below the jump to 10,000 seats. For smaller recognisable acts, doing two nights of 2,000 seats each might prove economically viable, whereas in larger markets, that same act couldn’t justify touring to a 2,000-seat venue.

Looking at the upcoming programme provides clues. Echoes of Pink Floyd, presumably a tribute show, seems appropriately sized for 2,000 people wanting to relive Pink Floyd with the marijuana smell restored to the seats. Leo Sayer appears just about right, as long as walking frames can navigate the aisles. Kate Ceberano fits well at this capacity for someone at the later stage of a career. Earth, Wind and Fire Experience, The Wiggles, comedian Alan Davies, these bookings suggest the venue is positioning itself across multiple categories.

David notes that comedian Henry Rollins performed there previously at what felt like the perfect size: “Just on stage talking nonstop for three hours, really high energy and really connecting with the crowd.” For spoken word acts of any variety, the capacity seems spot on.

The hosts identify two potential pathways for sustainability. First, there’s a 10 to 15 year window of nostalgia acts whose fan base remembers when the Thebarton was the jewel in Adelaide’s entertainment crown. These older audiences will have fond memories, and for someone like Leo Sayer whose fans are “possibly a little older,” returning to the Thebarton creates a nice match between artist, venue and audience. Steve suggests they’ll “milk the last bit of money from people’s superannuation.”

Second, the venue might pivot more heavily toward comedy and spoken word, where the capacity sits at the larger end of what makes economic sense for those performers while still maintaining the intimacy those formats demand.

The verdict? There’s probably a sustainable pathway forward, though it may not follow the route venue management initially expects. The cache of being an historical venue matters to some demographics, particularly those who attended concerts there during the 1970s and 1980s. The challenge involves adapting as that demographic ages out while finding new audiences who value the venue’s particular combination of size, acoustics and location.

As David concludes, “We all need a laugh,” suggesting comedy might prove the most reliable future direction. Either that, or as Steve jokes when David asks about his chainsaw conversation, “Cut GPT.”

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