Russ: Good morning. This is The BusinessMaker Show heard here and online at thebusinessmarkers.com, and this is that show about the private sector, about the business builders, about those that create companies and create jobs.

John: That's right, Russ. These are people who are really the artists, the athletes, and I would say the gallant knights of the free enterprise.

Russ: And they have to work hard to get there. That's why I call them the working class.

John: That's right. They are the real working class, not to take away from those blue collar people out there, but it's a lot of hard work doing what they do.

Russ: And here's our lineup for this morning. First up for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, Erica O'Grady, our own social media specialist headed out to the Bay area where she landed some quality time with Elliott Ng, co-founder and VP of marketing for UpTake, a new travel site that is really really gaining traction. Then for our featured guest segment, more from Erica's west coast trip, because she managed to sit down with Shel Israel, author of the just released Twitterville the book focused on the business uses of Twitter. But first... That's right. It's time for the BusinessMakers school of business, and this is not your business as usual school.

John: No. It's actually several cuts above what they're getting in business school these days. We're real world. We actually go to the history of business and vocabulary and dumb moments so people know what to avoid when they're running their companies or going to the voting booth. I think we've got it nailed.

Russ: Being a student in the school of business increases your odds of success, right?

John: It does increase your odds of success, although we can't afford to give out diplomas yet.

Russ: That's true. All right. We kick off the school of business each Saturday morning with a quote of the day, and today it's a Mark Twain quote.

John: Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens.

Russ: Just seemed real appropriate. "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or imbeciles who really mean it."

John: How do you know the difference?

Russ: You don't. That's the problem. [Laughing]

John: I got another one for you. one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes, and I'm paraphrasing here, says, "Be careful when you read a healthcare article ‘cause you may die of a misprint."

Russ: There you go, and healthcare is in the news once again.

John: That's right. It's gonna be a dumb moment here coming up.

Russ: All right. That brings us to this week in business history.

John: Here we go. This week in business history. In 1775, that's the year before the Declaration of Independence, a guy named Dr. John Kidd was born and he's the man behind the mothball.

Russ: Well man, that just proves that we cover everything here.

John: I know. He demonstrated that distilled coal tar could be used to produce a chemical that gives moth balls their pungency and drives away the moths.

Russ: And what would we do without that?

John: I don't know. We'd have holey clothing. This week in business history, in 1776 the world's first submarine attack during the Revolutionary War. A submersible craft The Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to haul the British Admiral Richard House flagship eagle in New York Harbor.

Russ: Wow, underwater and a submarine in 1776.

John: The submarine was entirely hand powered.

Russ: Wait, wait, how was it hand powered do you think? Do you think there were little holes and the guy kind of stuck out his arms?

John: I think there was probably a hand controller or propeller or something.

Russ: It probably wasn't real high speed though.

John: I know, but he had almost secured the bomb when his boring tools failed to penetrate the layer of iron ‘cause these are iron clad ships, and he retreated and the bomb exploded nearby causing harm to no one.

Russ: Well good I guess.

John: Okay. This week in business history in 1813 the United States nickname "Uncle Sam" happens. The United States gets its nickname and the nickname is linked to Samuel Wilson, a meatpacker from Troy, New York who supplied barrels of beef to the United States Army during the War of 1812. Later on Thomas Nast, the famous political cartoonist, began popularizing the image of Uncle Sam, but nothing is more popular than that World War I poster where he's pointing the finger, "I want you for the U.S. Army."

Russ: But how did a meat packer, how did he come up with it?

John: Well it all began when he supplied barrels of beef to the Army and he stamped the barrels with "U.S." for United States, but the soldiers started referring to the grub as Uncle Sam's grub and that's what happened. This week in business history in 1882 the first Labor Day is celebrated. We all get a day off.

Russ: Yeah. It's great to have a holiday.

John: Entrepreneurs never get a day off.

Russ: That's right. They don't get off of Labor Day. Maybe we ought to have an entrepreneur day and they could work double time during that day.

John: And not get paid for it. How about that? Okay. This week in business history in 1885 the baseball glove is patented by George H. Rawlings in St. Louis. 1885 they started making baseball gloves.

Russ: That's very interesting, so that's like 124 years ago. Wow. Cool.

John: This week in business history was the first drunk driving arrest in 1897.

Russ: Goodness. We just barely had cars then.

John: I know. In 1897 a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving. He slammed his cab into a building. He later pleads guilty and fined 25 shillings. The first laws in the U.S. against drunk driving went into effect in New York in 1910 and the rest is history. This week in business history, in 1900 a new electric car speed record is set 5 miles in 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

Russ: Whoa, so 1900? That would mean he was probably going about 30 miles an hour.

John: Yeah, roughly. I don't know how many times he had to change the battery. The fact is the electric car remained somewhat competitive until 1920 because they perfected the gasoline.

Russ: Internal combustion engine came along pretty strong.

John: Right, and you can go 300 miles before you have to do any maintenance.

Russ: Now I bet you $100.00 they never cover stories like this in regular business school.

John: I bet they don't. Okay. This week in business history also in 1900 a category 4 hurricane rips through Galveston, Texas killing about 6,000-8,000 people. A 15-foot storm surge floods the city. Back in those days you had very little warning the thing's coming, and the warnings they did get they didn't believe.

Russ: Well I always like to put those kind of catastrophes in perspective compared to how we complain about them these days. We never have catastrophes that kill that many people these days. Never.

John: No we don't. These are the good days. Okay. This week in business history in 1935 Frank Sinatra only 19 years old sings with the Hoboken Four in this very famous radio show, the Major Bowes's Amateur Hour, and that leads to a regular job in the show and the many nightclub performances, and in 1940 he's singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

[Music: "Fly Me to the Moon"]

Russ: Well that must be when he befriended the Mob.

John: That's right because according to the Godfather they held a gun to Tommy Dorsey's head and said, "Either your signature or your brains are gonna end up in this contract if you don't let our boy go." That's just a rumor, but The Godfather is based somewhat on fact. Okay. This week in business history, in 1936 Buddy Holly is born about a year after Frank Sinatra makes his debut. Buddy Holly is born in Lubbock, Texas and he started out as a country western singer, but switched to rock & roll after opening for Elvis Presley and decided that was a –

Russ: Said, "Wait a minute. This guy's got something going here."

John: Looked like a more lucrative route and he formed that rock band The Crickets and recorded That'll Be The Day

[Music: "That'll Be The Day"]

John: And unfortunately died in a plane crash in 1959 with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper.

Russ: That's right, the day the music died.

John: The day the music died and one of my favorite songs the "American Pie" song, which is recorded in 1972 very allegorically it refers to that. This week in business history in 1938 an air conditioning apparatus was patented by Ruben Underag.

Russ: My goodness. What would we do without that? Thank you, Ruben.

John: Thank you, Ruben wherever you are. I guess he's not around, but his descendents. Hopefully they're sharing in the royalties. This week in business history, racketeer Johnny Dio is convicted and he was arrested in 1956 when one of his cronies along with him attacked a journalist. What they did is they blinded him by throwing acid in his face.

Russ: That's dirty pool there. My goodness. We dig down deep here on the BusinessMaker show, business history once again outperforming regular business school.

John: That's right. This week in business history in 1956 Elvis appears on Ed Sullivan, sings "Don't Be Cruel" and "Hound Dog."

[Music: "Don't be Cruel"]

Russ: Now I watched that night. Did you?

John: I kinda remember that.

Russ: I was like seven, but I remember watching it.

John: Did you recognize the drum set there in the back?

Russ: Yeah, bought from Herb Brochstein, a Pro Mark drummer. At the time he hadn't started Pro Mark drumsticks, but he was in the music business. This is a guy that was a guest here on the businessmakers show.

John: That's right. This week in business history, in 1963 Leave It To Beaver airs its last episode. Man, that was a great show.

Russ: Well last week we reported the end of Ozzie and Harriet and this week, wow, Leave It To Beaver.

John: I would say the big deal in Leave It To Beaver is they had a character who was not a very nice guy, Eddie Haskell. "What a wonderful, beautiful dress you have on today, Mrs. Cleaver." "Well thank you, Eddie."

Russ: Why as a matter of fact I remember you discussing this in the past and you thought Eddie was actually coming on to Mrs. Cleaver.

John: I think he was. I think there was something going on there ‘cause she was always perfectly dressed when Eddie showed up.

Russ: She was dressing up for him.

John: I think there was a little bit of requited mutual admiration going there, but who knows? This week in business history, in 1976 I'd say one of the world's great mass murderers of all time succumbs of Parkinson's disease in '82 that has to be Mao Tse Tung the chairman, the leader of the People's Republic of China.

Russ: Well he really was a heavy handed leader, right?

John: When you kill millions of people that kind of qualifies you and the pantheon of leaders you don't want to invite to lunch. Some people could say China did progress. But one of my favorite quotes about communism is by George Orwell saying, "You've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette", and George Orwell said the problem with that is you never get the omelette with communism. You get a lot of broken eggs, but hey, where's the omelette? There's never an omelette. This week in business history in 2001, I'll never forget this, attack on America, two passenger airplanes crash into the World Trade Center. Another one crashes into the Pentagon and then the other one over Pennsylvania, the passengers made a valiant attempt to take control of the plane and they died.

Russ: Unbelievable, and I certainly can never forget it. Isn't it unbelievable that here we are eight years later and there's not been another attack, and everybody dismisses trying to recall the attack too as though that's some un-American thing to remember it.

John: Yeah. They very rarely show the film or the tape of that. The fact that we haven't been attacked in eight years I think has been dually recognized and in a proper way by the current administration because they wanna go after the CIA agents who did the interrogations of the Al Quaida operatives and they wanna prosecute them possibly along with the lawyers who drafted the memorandums outlining the rules and laws covering what constitutes torture versus what constitutes aggressive interrogation. The whole world's turned upside-down.

Russ: I agree.

John: So I hate to end on a negative note, but –

Russ: Well you have to include that one in the history lesson ‘cause we're never gonna leave it out. Okay, and continuing on though, the school of business moves forward into our vocabulary lesson.

John: Yes. I might add though however if people want the full monty, in other words the full unextrigated, unedited version of the school of business just go to thebusinessmakers.com shortly after the show and you'll get the whole thing.

Russ: Because on the radio we have like a truncated version of it.

John: That's right because we're under time constraints. With the Internet, man, you can just talk all day long.

Russ: All right, and that brings us to our vocabulary lesson where we actually focus on jargon, navigating business jargon. We do this sort of as a public service because we want our listeners to be up to date with the words and phrases and acronyms that are showing up daily this thing evolved is a contest format where John does not know the word. I select the word and then I say the word and then John guesses the meaning.

John: That's right, and I do not know the word.

Russ: That's right. No wagering please.

John: Void where prohibited by law.

Russ: Okay, and here's this morning's jargon phrase: cornea gumbo.

John: Okay. Cornea of course is a part of the eye, the very important part of the eye. Gumbo is something that you eat and it's very good. It's made in New Orleans. That's where it originates from, Louisiana. I guess what they do is sometimes when they run out of meat for the gumbo they put pig's eyes in the gumbo and the eyes are – it's pretty bad when you're staring at that gumbo and the gumbo is staring back at you. That's cornea gumbo. Is that wrong?

Russ: In fact I'm gonna give you a second chance. This one is so far out there. The phrase "cornea gumbo" is used to describe a website.

John: Oh, okay. That's when you get on the website and there's so many parts to it and so much visual noise that you just can't focus on any one thing.

Russ: You hit it right on the bull's eye.

John: That's what I thought it was, but I like the cornea staring back at you.

Russ: It's a visually noisy or over-designed website usually with too many graphics, too much animation, too much flashing and all that stuff. Cornea gumbo. Good job, man. You deserve that hint because otherwise it would've been impossible. Okay. That brings us to dumbest moments. Do you have a story for us?

John: Yeah. This is in Great Britain. I know a lot of people here want the government to run the healthcare system here, but there have been examples and there have been trials of this in the past and there's actual countries out there that have actually put the government in charge of healthcare. This is one of the little teeny tiny things that can happen. In Great Britain it turns out that prisoners are eating better than patients in hospitals.

Russ: You're kidding me.

John: Right. The latest figures show that in 2007 according to the National Health Service, 242 patients died of malnutrition. It's the highest toll in a decade, and more than 8,000 patients left the hospital undernourished, double the figure when the Labor Party came to power.

Russ: So if you're in England and you're beginning to feel sick you should go commit a crime so you can go to prison and they'll feed you better.

John: Well and to get into dollars and cents the prison system in Great Britain spends 2.12 pounds a day for food. Ten hospitals in the system spend less than that, and one spent just 1 pound a day, half the price, and the prison system there's a focus on carbohydrates and it's very healthy. They don't add salt, very little frying of food. The total opposite is done in the healthcare system.

Russ: That's an interesting perspective.

John: I know, and there's been reports of meals going to waste, millions of meals get thrown away because they don't get delivered properly to the patients. There's not enough help to feed the elderly, just a big, huge mess. This is what we have to look forward to.

Russ: I'm really looking forward to that. [Laughing]

John: So if you're in Great Britain don't go to a hospital. Go to prison instead. You'll get treated better there.

Russ: All right, and before we wrap up the school of business this morning it's time for the very popular PKF Texas entrepreneur's playbook. Let's welcome Greg Price on the piano.

[PKF Texas – The Entrepreneurs Playbook]

Russ: All right. That wraps up this morning's school of business. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.