Truthache

Salespeople are the worst part of humanity. Our guest, Ian Illig, is not the one who said this, but we almost got him to agree with us. 

Think about it. They wear plaid jackets or moisture-wicking fabrics, and promise you they’re giving you a good deal while selling you a lemon. The average salesperson puts pressure on you and disappears after they get their commission. And you're left with the memory of a creepy smile of a guy who...

AI is a joke, and we should take it seriously.

What do Cody Sharp and a software engineer have in common? Neither one of them writes any code. In Cody’s case, he has not been writing code for even longer. Now, with two working SaaS products on the market, I’d say he’s an expert at it.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, Cody is always the first person to come to mind. Not just because of his own intellectual makeup, but bec...

If you want to relax and feel good about yourself, there are two good ways to do it. Visiting Stacey Blanton's spa, Skin Renew, or being a guest on our podcast. Stacey, for an afternoon, decided to do the latter, to share how she looks back on business. To learn and then move on. Another good way to relax.

What keeps us up at night are the decisions we made that were maybe the wrong ones, or at least a bigger bite than we thought t...

Oliver Mast was about as close as you get to becoming a pro golfer as anyone ever gets.

He was playing full-time in tournaments, moved to Hilton Head, and was carving his way forward, until the love for the game began to wane, and the uphill battle to get a spot on a major tour became bleaker. Eventually, he decided he needed to hang up his clubs. 

Oliver moved back to Indiana and found an enviable spot as a golf pro on one of the...

We are part of the culture we created or the one we’ve accepted.

Jenny Vance is very, very lucky. 

She’s a strategic growth consultant and a CRO at a tech company. But I’m not talking about some financial achievement, a business exit, or a lucrative executive role, although she’s had some of those; I’m talking about everyday, strange luck.

She tells us about 30 rounds being fired, feet away from her bedroom window, none of which h...

They say it gets harder to make new friends in your adult years. Kids, work, and being annoying can all be factors, but that's not the case for Michael and Daniel, because they need at least two hands and maybe even a foot to count their closest friends – in other words, they are successful geriatric extroverts with a busy social life.

This conversation is all about making friends, keeping them, and thriving because you have them. ...

How to live out your beliefs on the streets, at work, and in the community.

Alex Holt was a creative director at a church when a job loss pushed him to start a full-time creative agency. A bad weekend turned out better than what he would have chosen.

Since Alex focuses on helping his clients understand the beliefs that shape their business decisions, we thought we’d ask him to talk about what *he* believes.

So, to keep things light...

Why should I hire a coach who has never played my game?

If you are an entrepreneur or manager, you probably make a lot of decisions based on intuition mixed with data. Why do you need someone else to charge you to talk you through doing what you do every day? And why are there so many business coaches out there?

As business-coach skeptics, Michael and I talk with Adam Weber, a tech founder turned business coach, about this and ask ...

What it’s like to take a break and come back to a mess?

Well, it’s nice to take a long break from work over the holidays, and we talk about how unplugging can benefit someone who spends all year working hard. Then, we decided to catch up on the latest headlines. 

After our guest cancelled, we were relieved that we didn’t have to subject them to a discussion about important breaking news, after ICE activity in Minneapolis led to the...

How to inspire anyone to be creative, no matter how boring they are.

If the family business has an open door for you, isn’t that the best option? That’s the question Darren Cooper has asked himself. Stability sounds nice, but so does entrepreneurship, and if you’ve got the bug to create, it's difficult to do anything else. Starting your own thing is what it takes for some, stability be damned. But, as Darren explains, even the most...

A recent graduate tells us what Gen Z thinks about the real world, and how everyone is judging them. 

Kaija is a graduate of Maurer School of Law and a tax attorney. She is currently attending NYU in a Tax LLM program and is, in fact, my (Daniel’s) daughter, a guy who just does marketing (and podcasting, apparently). We talk about everything from Gen Z’s views on happiness and dating to the American dream and where they fit in the ...

How do you pursue an unlikely dream in the music business when a job that pays better is staring you in the face?

Matt Soverns is a full-time musician best known for his impromptu piano performances on the streets of Indianapolis, New York City, and elsewhere. We discuss what it’s like making a living in the blue-collar music industry, where artists depend on cover gigs to supplement their pursuit of a career as an original artist.

This is an episode about how to ditch your marketing job to start a liquor company (no experience needed). 

When life gives Dan Farhrner lemons, we have an idea what he does, but we wanted to find out firsthand, so we had him on the show. It was just a few years ago when he, his wife, and a close friend started High and Mighty Distillery, which is now focused on his brand of canned craft cocktails called Shake Up. 

We spend the ent...

How will AI consume us, and what should we do about it? In this episode, we explore the ways that AI is affecting how we think about work, and more importantly, whether job loss is inevitable. Then, we discuss the problem of alignment between artificial intelligence and the humans who have created it. 

As always, this conversation covered a lot of ground, from the basics of how AI works, how businesses are leveraging it, and eventu...

The best way to ensure your kids are smart and have no clue what the world is really like is to keep them at home. If you want nerdy kids that are good at math and know how to load a dishwasher, homeschooling might be for you.

We talk with Michelle Ervin, a barber to the stars (specifically, most of the hosts of Truthache), who has made personal sacrifices with her husband to raise the family she wants, the way she wants, without c...

Our relationship is built on trust, and sometimes it’s candy-coated.

In this episode of Raw Truth, Carrie Herndon, Daniel’s wife, talks about how she expects the raw truth, even when it hurts. But the guys point out that sometimes the truth hurts, and it’s easier to say that everything is going to be okay, even when you don’t know that it is. This recording was captured after an episode that we didn’t even release (it wasn’t that g...

About whether poverty is a choice or a trap, and how it impacts some people permanently. We open by discussing what people care about discussing – you know, to try to figure out how to make a good podcast. After not getting anywhere, we get into a discussion about social class and whether you can move from the poverty class to a more thriving middle class or better. Does it take determination, or is that not enough for some people?

Can Zohran Mamdani bring socialism to the USA? If he gets his way in New York City, will it work?

We talk about ghosts and whether we believe in them, but that’s not the only thing supernatural we talk about. We also cover the possible next Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and his three big policy ideas.

• Free Busses
• Freezing Rent
• Civi...

After the No Kings protest, we’ve been thinking about what good leadership looks like in business and government. When do we trust the experts, and when is it time for the veteran leaders to step aside? Do we want new blood or generational wisdom?

Andrew Soley joins us to talk about how he sees leadership in his line of work, and what that tells us about leadership in the world around us. He also brought a bottle of bourbon (from a...