Russ: This is the BusinessMakers show, heard on the radio and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com. This is episode number 379, and that show that champions those people that did it make it, that made their business, that grew their business -

John: That did build that.

Russ: - that did build that.

John: That's right, and it's all those things that you hear about happen because somebody came up with a good idea. Even as the government says, "Well, we have the road and the police departments and all this," well, who do you think pays for all this.

Russ: Right.

John: Who do you think is behind the huge amount of private sector largess that flows into the government coffers every day so they could hire policemen and fix the roads.

Russ: I can't believe that he's getting away with that.

John: I know.

Russ: You know?

John: Polls are going the other way on him right now.

Russ: Well, I - it's hard to tell.

John: Of course, the Democrats are right - we have yet to see the bounce numbers.

Russ: Right? And I think you were out of town on assignment. I think you had to go -

John: I was on assignment.

Russ: - to the U.S. Open.

John: I was at the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

Russ: Yeah, right ______ honeymoon.

John: With my beautiful bride, and one of the coolest things we did the whole week we were there, at least from my standpoint, is we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge -

Russ: Oh, cool.

John: - which lets you off at Brooklyn Heights. Now, the significance of Brooklyn Heights was a Revolutionary war battle. It was a culmination of what they call the Battle of Long Island, where George Washington and his troops were roundly defeated, and if it weren't for a freak of nature, this fog that rolled in the next morning or next day, allowed his whole army to be - to escape across the river into Manhattan Island. Had it been a clear day -

Russ: They would have been wiped out.

John: They would have been wiped out. Yeah. So it's a very - you wouldn't know it was a battle field. It's got some of the most stylist old townhouses and homes in that whole area. You wouldn't think you were in Archie Bunkerville when you're in there.

Russ: So are you sure that you were in the right spot though?

John: Oh, yeah. I checked - yeah, ‘cause I could tell by the -

Russ: Checked your GPS?

John: Yeah, my GPS told me I was in Brooklyn.

Russ: Well, that's good to hear and stuff, although we missed you.

John: Oh, yeah.

Russ: We weren't even able to update the Economic Ignorance indicator -

John: Oh, right, yeah. How's that -

Russ: - which we started. Well, I think - as you know, there's a kind of a special algorithm that we use, and it was - we started the week before. It was an all-time high then, at 173.

John: 173.

Russ: I don't think it'd ever actually been over 20 before.

John: No.

Russ: One time I think it had a little blip down briefly, when there was some free enterprise people making speeches. Free enterprise advocates.

John: Paul Ryan was doing a good job, and Romney - Clint Eastwood, who portrayed the old coot, the crazy grandfather that nobody listens to.

Russ: Well, I think even Paul Ryan kind of brought back John Galt and Daphne Taggart.

John: Oh, that's right.

Russ: See, he's got the ability. It's a rare ability, because the only way you can argue conservative values is to use facts.

John: Yeah.

Russ: Facts can get very boring, and you don't want a bunch of green-eye shades people running the government. Well, Paul Ryan is a lot like Ronald Reagan. He has a way of making the difficult seem reasonably understood by a lot of people, and he can talk in a way that is very compelling. He's got the vision thing.

John: And he's a fan of Ayn Rand.

Russ: That's right.

John: As you and I are. How this whole misbegotten show program _____.

Russ: That's right. That's right. And I don't - I think Ayn Rand would have taken issue with Barack Obama's statement, "You didn't build that."

John: That's right. Oh yeah, she would have - I'm sure she flipped over in her grave several times, if she had been. I don't know whether she was buried or cremated, but assuming she was buried, she probably flipped over in her grave a number of times.

Russ: I wonder how that works, though, if you are cremated. Does your ash just kind of -

John: Well, it depends where your ashes - if your ashes are in a box, or maybe a slight tremor in a box - some of these people, they want it spread out over Yankee Stadium, or out in the ocean.

Russ: They might flicker or something.

John: Well, they might flicker. Boy, I bet his ashes really flickered when that happened.

Russ: But back to the economic ignorance indicator, I do think that it went down slightly, and then - but the way that it all evaporated so quickly, I think it's up above 173 right now. I don't know if you ran your numbers, but I think it's up around 175.

John: I think we'll find out. After the bounce numbers and maybe a week after that, we'll see where it is.

Russ: Yeah. I think it's going to get a brutal beating, though.

John: Well, I tell you, there's a lot of Spaniards that right now are thinking of fleeing the country. I don't know whether you read the headlines the other day, but there's - a lot of the Spanish business class - we're talking about one guy who's already moved to Cambridge and took all his money with him because Spain, like a lot of other countries, are losing faith in the Euro, and evaluate, and then what they want to do is go back to the original currency they had before the Euro, which means all that cash you have is going to be revalued. So, I mean, the whole world is coming to grips with economic ignorance quotient or index, and are learning some hard truths.

Russ: I think I'm afraid, so…

John: All right.

Russ: Well, here's our lineup for today. The topic is energy. There's an energy revolution going on.

John: That's right.

Russ: It's just unbelievable that our country has found an energy source that is abundant, inexpensive, and clean.

John: And clean, yeah.

Russ: That's the trifecta, in my opinion.

John: That's right, yeah.

Russ: And the clean aspect was even recently kind of quietly confirmed by the Department of Energy when they said that the CO2 emissions in the United States -

John: Have gone down.

Russ: An all-time low, and they attribute it to market conditions, which are caused by economic, inexpensive, natural gas.

John: And it slows down the economy.

Russ: Well, that helps too.

John: People driving to work. I got to tell you, I dispute the fact that it's CO2 is a pollutant to begin with.

Russ: Well, one could dispute that, but whether you dispute it or not, there's less of it.

John: There's less of it.

Russ: Yeah, whether it's good or bad.

John: A lot of people stopped breathing.

Russ: That could have caused it.

John: It's in room temperature.

Russ: That could have caused it for sure, but our guests are, first up, Sarah Groen, co-founder of Surge Accelerator, and the surge accelerator is a cool accelerator thing. These are like one step above incubators. I mean, they give money to participants and really push mentoring, and then she's going to be followed by John Hofmeister, former President of Shell Oil Company, and also founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, putting some perspective on what American technical innovation has created in the oil field.

John: Wow.

Russ: Really cool.

John: Sound cool.

Russ: But first, that's right, it's time for the BusinessMaker's School of Business. It's the highlight of our week.

John: Oh, yeah, I'm sure it is.

Russ: And we think it's the highlight of a lot of people who are getting their business education right here, BusinessMaker's _______.

John: For free.

Russ: For free.

John: That's right, for free.

Russ: You just can't beat this, and we kick it off each week with a quote of the day.

John: Quote of the day, yes.

Russ: And although I'm a huge fan of this guy - I don't think he did so well at the Republican Convention, but today's quote comes from Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, and he made this statement, "Real leaders don't follow polls. Real leaders change polls."

John: That's right. I thought that was really good.

Russ: Ah, I just love that. I think that there's also a mathematical ignorance factored into that that's happening these days, and people believe the polls, and they believe they should follow them.

John: Yeah, I tell you, I didn't hear Christie's speech, but I read about it, and I know there are some people out there that thought he didn't do a very good job.

Russ: Not as good as I've seen him do before.

John: Yeah, but I thought all you need are a couple of key points to drive in, for the people to remember. I agree with him, and it's like Clint Eastwood, you might have thought, "What is going on?" But he says, "Hey, someone's not doing the job you hired him for, you got to let him go."

Russ: Oh, he did? Wow.

John: I know.

Russ: He was a little bit up there in the age category, so it took some patience to understand what he was saying, but it's okay.

John: It all came out, yeah.

Russ: All right, but that brings us to this week in business history. So what happened this second week in September in business history?

John: Everything, every product out there, had its beginning, and mothballs are no different, and the guy who invented them, John Kidd, was born this week in business history.

Russ: Wow.

John: September 10, 1775.

Russ: A perfect -

John: A coal tar, it could be used to produce naphthalene, is what gives the mothball their pungency.

Russ: Yeah, what year did this happen?

John: 1775.

Russ: My God. Just to think - you never learn this in regular business school.

John: No, no. The U.S. Navy has their fleet - half their fleet in mothballs. You gotta imagine how big those balls got to be for the Navy destroyers and cruisers and battleships and submarines.

Russ: Which furthers -

John: So there's no limit to the size of these things and what you can use them for.

Russ: Which further substantiates the value of what he created.

John: Of course. All right, okay. This week in business history, Francis Scott Key pens a poem which is later set to music, and then it becomes the country's national anthem.

Russ: 17-

John: 1931. In 1814, he penned the poem. In 1931, it becomes the national anthem.

Russ: 1814.

John: Now the music it was set to was a drinking song, and -

Russ: Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.

John: Not yet. Something like 99 bottles of beer on the wall. That's right, and so it was a very key part of American history, because the city of Washington's key buildings, like the Capitol and the White House burned to the ground, and then they went on to see if they could do the same to Baltimore, but they were turned back. Due to their heroism, like Fort and Henry, and the ground forces outside of Baltimore was turned away. The British land invasion.

Russ: Cool.

John: So anyhow, this week in business history, in 1851, the first issue of The New York Times appeared, found by Henry Jarvis and George Jones, and then the next day, the first correction of an erroneous article of The New York Times appeared. The day right after, and they've continued that fine tradition. _____ make errors but -

Russ: Well, it's good that they realize it.

John: Yeah, but when you have to write it like a 13-page correction, based on one of reporters had falsified all his stories, like Jayson Blair did, or you make six errors in the Walter Cronkite obituary, you think, "Hey, there's something not right in that newsroom there," okay?

Russ: You would know.

John: I would know. Okay, this week in business history, the baseball was patented in 1885.

Russ: Wow.

John: September 8th, 1885, by George Rawlings. That glove, that brand, still exists to this day.

Russ: Real cool. Baseball would be a very different game without those gloves.

John: Oh yeah, a lot of broken hands and fingers. Just imagine all the errors that would have - they did play it for a while without gloves. I mean, the earned run average statistic would be meaningless. It would be a hitter's game. Okay, also this week in business history, in 1900, the deadliest hurricane - now this is in 1900, September 8, a category 4 hurricane rolls through Galveston, killing an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people, and it goes to show you how well the building codes have -

Russ: Well, talk about -

John: Talk about legitimate function of government, I think that building codes are part of it. And then the technology of construction - because I mean - I'm not saying hurricanes are a great thing, but the death rate is awful low compared to -

Russ: This. Six to eight-thousand.

John: Back then they had wooden homes.

Russ: Of course, they didn't have the - what do they call it - the cone of uncertainty?

John: The cone of uncertainty. Nor did they have -

Russ: They had nothing.

John: Nor did they have these maniacal weathermen who would get there with these sadistic grins and taking delight in the fact that a hurricane was going to slam into your island, ‘cause there was no warning then. There could have been a warning, but the guy -

Russ: If you look out there, but I think this one even came in in the dark.

John: Yeah, under the cover of darkness.

Russ: What a mess.

John: What a mess, what a mess. Because of this, this is how Houston got its port, because after this, they knew they couldn't have a port and _____ close -

Russ: Galveston got that sea wall.

John: Got the sea wall and a couple of casinos and a good time. Let the good times roll. This week in business history, September 9th, 1956, the Elvis appears on the Ed Sullivan Show, sings Don't Be Cruel and Hounddog. His popular show, Toast of the Town, he scandalized the audience with suggestive dance moves, hips swings, and -

Russ: Which are all legal now.

John: - pelvic - well, they're always - yeah, yeah. They're very harmless looking, but he was doing compared to what some of these people do on TV these days.

Russ: I know, I know. Well, wasn't it also true that in that concert, the bass drum -

John: The bass drum came from the guy we interviewed.

Russ: We interviewed Herb Bruchstein for the show. We need to get him back. He was the founder of Pro-Mark Drumsticks, and sold Elvis his drums that were used there, and they're marked by the fact that they were like a calf-skinned front on them.

John: This week in business history in 1976, you would say one of the world's most accomplished murderers of all time would make Adolf Hitler look like humanitarian of the year. I'm speaking of none other than Chinese revolutionary statesman Mao Tse-Tung, had been suffering from Parkinson's disease and other health problems, including probably a pretty guilty conscience.

Russ: You think?

John: Well, maybe, ‘cause he knew he was dying, and he didn't know what was on the other side, I would suspect. He dies in Beijing at the age of 82. Founder of the People's Republic of China. Says here most - you see in most biographies, he's considered one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. You could say that.

Russ: Yeah, I think you could say that.

John: You could say that, and the guy born into a peasant family, and became a ruthless thug that subverted the entire country.

Russ: And ruled the whole thing.

John: With an iron first, yeah, yeah. So, anyway -

Russ: That's what happens. Sometimes -

John: Most dictators don't die of natural causes. So he was like - that was like a success story for dictators.

Russ: Good, he's gone.

John: Because most dictators get assassinated. How else are you going to get him out of office? They don't have free elections. So the only way you could get him - remove him - that's why they're always so paranoid.

Russ: But he was the exception. He made it all the way to the -

John: He made it through. That's right.

Russ: It was the booby prize.

John: Yeah, there you go. All right, now this week in business history in 1960, okay, worthless organization, OPEC is founded this week in business history, 1960. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that the - I'd say anything that founded at the Baghdad conference is not going to be good for the U.S. Even though this is back in 1960, five core members - you're talking about a rogue's gallery here. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Venezuela now wasn't a Communist country back then. It is now, and they, again, attempted to control the petroleum market.

Russ: Well, they did. The cartel. But what's so interesting right now is that based on people that we're lining up to have on this show is going to all change. The United States is going to create more fossil fuels probably in the next ten years than any of it.

John: That's right.

Russ: And it's amazing.

John: We'll be an exporting nation.

Russ: We could be, yeah. It's probably debatable whether or not we want to be, but we could be.

John: Yeah, we probably - us, Canada, and Mexico, we could really - we could form our own OPEC.

Russ: That's right.

John: Tell those suns of guns who's -

Russ: Right.

John: - what, the what for. Okay, now this week in business history in 1966, the minimum wage is changed to $1.40 an hour.

Russ: Well, we always say, if it works -

John: They should make it $1,000.00 an hour. Everybody'd be rich.

Russ: Our economic problems would be solved. Everybody would be having a lot of money to throw.

John: Everybody would be.

Russ: Everybody.

John: It would be so -

Russ: Would you take a job for $1,000.00 an hour?

John: I think I would.

Russ: If just flipping hamburgers somewhere? The only problem is, if you think about it, after everybody's rich, and they kind of don't need to work anymore, who's going to do the work?

John: We'll live in an utopia. We won't need to work.

Russ: Right. Let that guy who said to close the patent office, everything's already been invented.

John: All the work has been done. You can stop working now. Everybody go on vacation. All right, great history lesson.

Russ: Thank you, sir, as always. So, congratulations, and that's bring us -

John: Pleasure's all yours.

Russ: Right, and that brings us to navigating business jargon.

John: All right. Now I don't know the word, right?

Russ: ______ vocabulary list. John does not know it. It could be a word, it could be an acronym, it could be even a two-word phrase, and I go out and find it, discover for the week, and present it here, and John -

John: Or invent it.

Russ: - does his best -

John: You invent the words.

Russ: Sometimes. I can take credit for it, actually, some of them. Today's is a two-word noun.

John: A two-word noun.

Russ: Yeah, and it makes sense. It's binge viewing.

John: Venge viewing.

Russ: Binge viewing.

John: Oh, I know what that is. I actually read an article about it, so -

Russ: Did you?

John: Yes, I did. That is when people - they don't watch a lot of TV normally, but when they want to catch up on, say - I used to do this with that show 24 - what they'll do is they'll buy the entire season of the show and then watch it the whole weekend. Just nonstop.

Russ: Ladies and gentlemen, hold your calls.

John: People - what they're doing is catching up on shows that they missed. So it could be a mini-series.

Russ: It's exactly it.

John: Could be anything.

Russ: You knew it because you do it, right?

John: Well, yeah, but I knew it ‘cause I read an article about it. It's a period of _______.

Russ: ________ indulgence spent watching previously broadcast episodes of a TV show.

John: You're right, yeah.

Russ: All right, before we wrap up today's school of business, it's time, once again, for the very popular PKF Texas Entrepreneur's Playbook. Okay, and that wraps up today's school of business. Stay tuned in for interview with Sarah Groen, co-founder of Surge Accelerator, followed by our interview with John Hofmeister, the founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, and the former President of Shell Oil. This is the BusinessMaker Show, heard on the radio and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.