Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard on the radio and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.
John: That's right. That's one of these adventures and capitalism that we undertook several years ago.
Russ: 325 episodes to be exact.
John: I know. It's amazing.
Russ: All right, all right.
John: It seems like we just started this ten years ago.
Russ: You bad. [Laughter] All right. Actually it was six.
John: I know. I know.
Russ: And we champion entrepreneurships.
John: That's right.
Russ: We feature those that, they're making our lives actually better.
John: Uh-huh.
Russ: And speaking of entrepreneurship, here's our weekly shout out at the EO Houston Group.
John: Oh yeah, we love those guys.
Russ: That's the Entrepreneurs' Organization of Houston.
John: Yeah, we went to one of their dinners one time.
Russ: That's right, that's right.
John: Many years ago.
Russ: Yeah, we're still acknowledging them just to pay for that dinner. [Laughter]
John: I know. That's right. We had to trade it out for a time on the BusinessMakers show.
Russ: eohouston.org
John: We're just kidding, of course. Yeah, we're just kidding about that, that's right.
Russ: But also another shout out to our new show, The Energy Maker Show.
John: That's right.
Russ: Broadcast weekly at www.theenergymakers.com, hosted by Paul Dickerson.
John: Uh-huh.
Russ: And here's our lineup for today. Today we do cover the spectrum, because first up Paul Dickerson, host of the Energy Maker Show, the new addition to our network, talks energy with Congressman Ted Poe and then that's going to be followed by my interview from last week in Austin, Texas, where I interviewed the co-founder of House and Earth, Zach House, but first, That's right it's time for the BusinessMakers School of Business. This is our specially selected curriculum that is not business as usual.
John: That's right. It's a very special curriculum. So special in fact that I think we're probably the only business school that ever thought of putting this package of information.
Russ: Right.
John: Salient information.
Russ: That's right.
John: The business history, the dumb moment, all that stuff. When you look at in its totality over the past six years, I mean it is a plethora of information.
Russ: I think we're actually gonna disintermediate some of the business schools out there right now.
John: I know, or probably discombobulate some of the schools out there.
Russ: That's true. [Laughter] That's true. And we kick off the School of Business each week with the quote of the day.
John: The quote of the day, yes.
Russ: And this morning's quote is in honor of, early this week I heard about a vote taken by some of the leading economists in the United States.
John: These are leading economists?
Russ: These are leading economists.
John: Who are the following?
Russ: I don't know. We don't even mess with those guys. We're not going to be pulling quotes from them, but the leading economists took a vote.
John: Uh-huh.
Russ: On what they thought -
John: Right.
Russ: - was the best medicine for the economy, but I think those that thought spending cuts and being frugal won by about 60 percent to 40 percent.
John: Wow, carried the day, huh?
Russ: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Yeah, wow.
Russ: Now, and I've heard on another radio network.
John: Yeah, we won't mention their name.
Russ: No, they're initials though are NPR.
John: Yeah.
Russ: They were reporting the same vote and they acted like the fact that 40 percent thought more stimulus dollars was necessary.
John: Yeah.
Russ: It was like a major victory.
John: And that was the lead. That was the lead.
Russ: That was the lead story, yeah. And here's the quote. It's by George Bernard Shaw. Now he's dissing economists in general.
John: Yeah.
Russ: And he's been, "I don't think we're dissing them now that they just took that vote" but who knows.
John: That's empty yarded gets some stand on that.
Russ: That's right, we're dissing them. So here's the quote, "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion"
John: That's right.
Russ: They wouldn't.
John: I know, because the problem economists have is they think they can predict the future.
Russ: Yeah.
John: Or they attempt to predict the future.
Russ: Right, yeah.
John: And nobody can really, with 100 percent certainty predict the future.
Russ: That's right. That's right.
John: If they, sometimes they say, "Well, I'm 100 percent certain that X is gonna happen" and X does happen, but that falls under the category of a broken clock being replaced a day.
Russ: Right, exactly.
John: For the most part, they cannot predict the future. Nobody can.
Russ: That's exactly right. Now back to this quote.
John: Yeah.
Russ: There's also a corollary to this quote.
John: A corollary?
Russ: Yeah.
John: Okay.
Russ: It goes like this, something like, "If all economists were laid end to end it would be the first time that most of them had been laid"
John: Yeah. Who said that?
Russ: [Laughter] I don't know.
John: PJ O'Rourke?
Russ: Probably, it's not on here. I just remember it. I just remembered it. [Laugher]
John: That's better than Jay [Laughing and speaking over each other] Well, I think that's what they need.
Russ: That's exactly what they need. All right and that brings us to this week in business history. So what happened right at the end of August and beginning of September business week?
John: Okay, this week in business history. In 177, the American flag is flown in battle for the first time, it's during the Revolutionary War skirmish at Cooch's Bridge in Maryland.
Russ: Wow.
John: Yeah, how about that?
Russ: Yeah.
John: And Betsy Ross, all that work.
Russ: Oh yeah, yeah.
John: Okay, this week in business history, in 1869, the first death from a motor vehicle accident occurs. In 1869, that like right after the Civil War.
Russ: Wow.
John: Mary Ward, she was an Irish scientist, who was killed when she fell into the wheels of an experimental steam car built by her cousins. That sounds like foul play.
Russ: It does.
John: May be she left a motor running, because she forgot to shut the trunk or something.
Russ: Right and got out.
John: And she slammed trunk and may be it went into reverse.
Russ: Well I bet this is also the first week in business history in 1869 where a plaintiff's lawyer had a good lawsuit on this.
John: That's right. Yeah, the Texas Hammer was over there in Ireland, right?
Russ: [Laughter] Right, right.
John: So anyway, I just read, by the way, that the Volkswagen is coming out with a single seat car.
Russ: Well that's interesting.
John: Yeah, that's probably gonna add to the fatality count, probably because the single seat, I mean the thing's probably about the size of this chair that I'm sitting in.
Russ: My god, that's worst than a motorcycle.
John: Of course, I may be speaking out of turn, but Volkswagen does make very safe cars.
Russ: All right.
John: And they're very good quality.
Russ: All right.
John: Okay, this week in business history, in 1886, Geronimo, the Apache war chiefs, surrenders to the US government. 30 years this guy was just exasperating the US government and the cavalry and with the skirmishes here, skirmishes there, and they could never really defeat him.
Russ: Right.
John: But then finally a guy, General Nelson Miles, accepted Geronimo's surrender, making him the last Indian warrior to formally give into US forces and that was the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest.
Russ: Yeah. Now they also gave him a Cadillac from what I understand.
John: Yes they did. Well, I mean, you've got to give him something.
Russ: Well they could've given him one of those single seat Volkswagen's.
John: They could've. Well a horse was a single seat vehicle.
Russ: [Laughter] That's right, back then.
John: That's what Volkswagen doing. It's a horse. [Laughter]
Russ: Just bring back a horse. [Laughter]
John: [Laughter] Yeah, right. All right, this week in business history, in 1935, premiers they have President Franklin Roosevelt's famed Revenue Act, which was an attempt to tax the wealthy.
Russ: Yep.
John: And it was a big controversial tax and everybody, especially people in the upper income brackets, thought Roosevelt was a traitor for doing this.
Russ: Right.
John: Traitored his class, they called him a communist and everything else and they're probably, in a way, may be he's not a communist.
Russ: Right.
John: But he ended up taking from you and me or somebody else.
Russ: Right.
John: And giving it to somebody else who's not working, there's an uncruciated depression, so maybe it was the right thing to do. What do you think?
Russ: Well, it's a controversial topic that we're living with right this moment. Once again, the general feel by most capitalists is, is that these people, about 100 percent, but very many of them had the talent and skills to make the economy run as successfully as it did.
John: Right.
Russ: And they're the people that hired people and made jobs and stuff. I don't think you can say that no taxes are necessary.
John: Yeah, we're not anarchists.
Russ: We're at the BusinessMakers Show.
John: Right.
Russ: Right, we're not. I read somewhere where the average American pays 35 percent of their income is taxed, when you add everything up, sales tax.
John: Yeah, sales tax, property, cities, locals.
Russ: Right, right.
John: County, federal and I think that's enough.
Russ: That's right.
John: The government grabs a third of your income. I mean, what's going on here?
Russ: Yeah, I think if you go much further, you start heading south real quickly.
John: That's right, because the dynamics of the individual taken play.
Russ: Right.
John: Because they're not gonna sit still and let all the government.
Russ: Right.
John: So they're gonna, they'll leave the county, or they'll cheat on their income tax.
Russ: Right. Well that brings up the whole bureaucracy of calculating some of this stuff.
John: Yeah, right.
Russ: Which brings us back to Steve Forbes when he was on the show presenting his flat taxes.
John: Flat, yeah, right.
Russ: This is like five or six years. It makes so much sense.
John: Yeah.
Russ: Everybody seems to benefit, except the tax preparers and the tax lawyers.
John: Yeah, right.
Russ: And then the lobbyists, those poor guys would have to go away.
John: Well yeah, I'd say there's two reasons why there are lobbyists.
Russ: Yeah.
John: Number one is for, you give their client regulatory relief.
Russ: Right.
John: Then the other reason is to give their client tax relief.
Russ: Tax relief.
John: So you take the relief then off the table, all you have is regulatory.
Russ: Yeah.
John: And you don't need that many lobbyists for just half, half the work load.
Russ: I still remember the example he had, was that the Starbucks Corporation and their lobbyists effectively lobbied the Federal government to categorize them as a manufacturer, as opposed to a retail establishment.
John: Oh, right.
Russ: Which significantly changed their tax burden.
John: Oh really?
Russ: Now I don't blame Starbuck's for doing that, but I blame the system that we've set up that encourages people to do that.
John: Because someone else is gonna have to make up that revenue.
Russ: I think you and I are.
John: I know. I know, I'm [Laughter]
Russ: Right.
John: My goodness, we had this radio show on the tax laws. Actually, the most important I'm looking at right now, is the fact that this week in business history is the birthday of Archie Bell, who later headed up a group called The Drells from Houston, Texas.
Russ: Yeah and they addressed the economy too, we got to tighten up.
John: Yeah, tighten up, baby.
Russ: The tighten up. [Laughter] That's exactly. It's all tied together today.
John: Yeah. This week in business history, in 1955, William J. Cobb tests drives the world's first solar powered car at the General Motors Powerama in Chicago, in 1955.
Russ: Wow, Powerama.
John: Yeah.
Russ: I bet they don't do that anymore and they're not trying to do a solar powered car, trying to do an electric powered car.
John: That's right.
Russ: General Motors is.
John: That's right, but the solar powered probably only went about five feet.
Russ: Well maybe.
John: Back then the technology wasn't there.
Russ: Yeah. It doesn't say here, it might have been one of those little model cars actually, maybe -
John: It probably could've been, yeah, it probably wasn't a real car.
Russ: It wasn't a person carrying car. [Laughter]
John: Okay, this week in business history Toyota launches Lexus. First Lexus was sold this week in business history launching their new luxury division.
Russ: Talking about a people carrying car, man.
John: Yeah, it's a nice car.
Russ: Yeah.
John: Yeah, and it was given the code name F1, so people really wouldn't know what they were up to.
Russ: Yeah.
John: And it's still out there going strong. You see them all over the place.
Russ: Well I know you remember this. Right at the same time of the launch, the Nissan Company was launching the Infinity.
John: Yeah, worst TV in ad campaign.
Russ: The famous ad campaign.
John: There's no car. There's no car, just a woman on the beach with hair blowing through her hair, talking about this car.
Russ: Right.
John: You know, "Where's the car!"
Russ: That's right. [Laughter]
John: So I kept saying.
Russ: That's right.
John: Okay, this week in business history, in 1995, eBay was founded. It was founded by a French born Iranian computer programmer, because he wanted to help his fiancé trade Pez dispensers.
Russ: That's right.
John: I mean, can you imagine that? Then any [tape skips] put a broken laser pointer.
Russ: Right.
John: And someone bought that and he called the guy up, asking why he wanted a broken one, he said, "Because I collect broken laser pointers"
Russ: [Laughter] Yeah that was the whole thing.
John: That's the aha moment, if there ever was one.
Russ: There were people saying, now wait a minute, people are just gonna put broken down printers and stuff on the deal and people are gonna buy them and the answer is yeah.
John: Yeah, they did it, yeah right. Okay, last but not least, this week in business history, in 2005, our show, The BusinessMakers, had Sonya Clayton, who's the founder and CEO of Virtual Intelligence and she was talking about how she got out of Venezuela.
Russ: Yeah. And that kind of wraps it up. It started as a history lesson.
John: Yeah, it starts out with the Stars and Stripes and ends with someone fleeing her native country to get here to avoid some mayhem.
Russ: Get prosecuted for shooting your boss.
John: Shoot your boss, yeah.
Russ: [Laughter] Right.
John: Boy, what a great American story that is.
Russ: That's fantastic. All right.
John: Okay. All right, okay.
Russ: Great history lesson overall.
John: Thank you sir.
Russ: And that brings us to the jargon challenge room, also known as our vocabulary lesson. I think you all know the exercise here. I get to go out and find a new jargon word, take those speak acronym, keep it away from John all week.
John: Don't know what it is. That's no jive.
Russ: That's right and then challenge him with coming up with the meaning.
John: Right.
Russ: Today's word is charticle.
John: Charticle?
Russ: Charticle.
John: Okay, that's a - okay, it's very, it's an infographic. In other words, it's a graphic that newspapers use, or print media use that you see on TV and usually just the very fact that you look at this chart, or this infographic, you don't really need a story, because if you just read the details.
Russ: Hold your calls ladies and gentlemen. I think we have a winner, but I expected it, because he is a publisher with a decade worth of experience in the newspaper world.
John: Decades yes, many decades. Yeah, that's right.
Russ: The official definition is "A news article that consists of a chart, or similar graphic, with a small amount of explanatory text"
John: Yeah, well the text is usually around the graphics.
Russ: Right.
John: But we need to, if you really want to see a good example of a charticle, just read The Onion every week, because they got, they have like two or three of them on there.
Russ: [Laughter] Yes, and that -
John: When they make no sense.
Russ: And that's good news over there at The Onion.
John: That's right, yeah. It's always good news at The Onion.
Russ: [Laughter] All right.
John: All right.
Russ: All right and that brings us to dumb moment to business. Do you have one for us today John?
John: Well, I've got two of them.
Russ: All right.
John: And one is based on a former dumb moment, but I think it'll really get us out this economics whirlwind that we're in.
Russ: Wow. Well, do you got a solution?
John: I'd answer yeah.
Russ: Nobody else is offering solutions.
John: I know, I think we oughta take the sub-prime mortgage and reinstitute it in the American economy.
Russ: What an idea!
John: Well look what happened the last time we did it. I mean, we had 15, at least 10 or 15 years of prosperity.
Russ: It would fix the housing industry.
John: Right, people would go back work, the prices, your homes would cost - I mean, you could get secondary mortgages and go out and buy flat screen TVs, go buy your car, you can go to Europe. I mean, just to -
Russ: Maybe, maybe this time it would work permanently, I don't know. We'll ask the people.
John: Well, I mean, if you're over 70, it will work permanently.
Russ: It is permanent. [Laughter]
John: Okay, all kidding aside, I think a dumb moment, and we're not sure how the outcome of this is gonna be, but HP declaring that they're gonna get out of the PC business.
Russ: [Sighs] What a controversial set of historical actions taken by the Board over there in the last probably 15 years, remember?
John: Yeah, I know.
Russ: How they buy Compact, the CEO in charge of that was fired, Carley Fiorino.
John: Uh-huh.
Russ: A lot of people think she put them on the map.
John: That's right, yeah.
Russ: And then all of a sudden, like a year later, they're having to fire people, because investigators are coming because they were eavesdropping.
John: Yeah, they were tapping phone lines.
Russ: Just like - that's where the, what is it, the news guys over in -
John: Yeah, the Newscore.
Russ: They learned of it from HP's Board how to do that.
John: Yeah, right. [Laughter] I know.
Russ: That's really a good lesson to learn. [Laughter]
John: Well, see the thing is, I think maybe they're over relying on the mobile devices and hand held.
Russ: Right.
John: Even the tablets.
Russ: But they're not a leader in tablet sales. I mean, they're chugging pretty far behind.
John: Well, I think so is everybody else in the tablets.
Russ: I think they're putting the tablet maybe in the same category as the PC or something. I don't know, because that tablet is already sort of been taken off of the market.
John: Yeah.
Russ: We featured that tablet on the show here only six weeks ago.
John: I remember that.
Russ: Yeah.
John: And I still see commercial for it.
Russ: Yeah? Well, and but now I saw them for $99.00.
John: I know.
Russ: In fire sales and they're going down. [Laughter] All right.
John: Okay, so we're having to wait and see on this. Sometimes our dumb moments are wait and see.
Russ: They are.
John: Because we're not really sure.
Russ: Although that first one you gave us, that's not a wait and see. We've already seen that, reintroducing sub-prime mortgages.
John: Just make sure you die before the economy collapses. [Laughter]
Russ: You'll come out of it just fine. [Laughter] All right.
John: [Laughter] That's the key.
Russ: All right and before we wrap up this morning's School of Business, it's time for that very popular PKF Texas entrepreneur's playbook.
John: All right.
Russ: Here he comes and here he comes, he's sitting right down there and he's writing bytes. So Craig, here we go.
John: A one and a two and a
Russ: And that wraps up today's School of Business. Stay tuned in for Paul Dickerson's interview with Congressman Ted Poe, followed by my interview with Zach House, of House and Earth. This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard on the radio and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.
