Fire Walk With Me: When Personal Responsibility Outshines Regulation

Rick Caruso demonstrates why planning for disaster means you might be the only building left standing when LA’s wildfires rage through – and why his private firefighter strategy offers lessons for us all.

David Lynch’s legacy reminds us that creating characters people genuinely care about is the secret ingredient to making audiences lean in and stay engaged – even when the narrative deliberately avoids closure.

Meta’s inbox impersonators are getting craftier with their urgent demands for “verification,” proving that digital scammers are banking on our panic response.

A small child tapping alongside a street performer in Galway asks the question we all need to consider: why aren’t more of us willing to step out of our comfort zones and join the dance?

Get ready to take notes.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

01:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
Rick Caruso’s Private Firefighting Playbook

Rick Caruso, former LA Department for Water and Power commissioner, real estate mogul and philanthropist, shares a remarkable tale of foresight that left his shopping centre standing while LA burned. Steve encountered Rick’s discussion in In The Politics of Catastrophe – Waking Up Podcast #399.

Drawing on lessons from previous Montecito disasters, Caruso and his team built a shopping centre with non-combustible materials, minimal venting, and a private firefighting strategy that didn’t deplete municipal resources.

Steve and David unpack this approach through the lens of strategic planning, noting how the “pre-mortem” exercise (imagining future failure and working backward) overlaps with Caruso’s meticulous planning. They explore the growing necessity of personal responsibility in an era where Donald Trump and Elon Musk seemingly mock standards, asking whether we should all be holding ourselves to higher account in both business and personal life.

As David notes, we’re entering a period where “if you don’t look after yourself, no one else is going to” – pointing to rising insurance costs, healthcare expenses, and other signs that systems we once relied on are faltering. Self-sufficiency, from solar panels to physical fitness, might be the new normal in weathering life’s inevitable storms.

13:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
David Lynch’s Guide to Character Connection

Following the death of filmmaker David Lynch in January 2025, Steve and David reflect on the appointment-viewing phenomenon that was Twin Peaks and what made Lynch’s storytelling so powerful. Steve picked up on the news after hearing Tamler Summer from the Very Bad Wizards podcast, eulogise the famous director.

They explore Lynch’s deliberate avoidance of narrative closure – “as soon as you get closure, it’s just an excuse to forget you saw the damn thing” – and what this means for business storytelling.

The hosts connect Lynch’s character-building prowess to Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework, noting that Lynch understood what takes many marketers years to learn: audiences connect with vulnerable characters who keep trying despite uncertainty. The key insight? In your marketing, position your customer as the hero and your business as the guide – not the other way around.

As David notes, “Lynch always left his central characters with some degree of vulnerability. We came to really care about the fact they were vulnerable, and it could go wrong, and they didn’t have all the answers, but they kept on trying.” They conclude that while storytelling in marketing isn’t new, Lynch reached a depth that many storytellers – and marketers – are still trying to catch up to.

21:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Meta Verification Scams Get Craftier

A plague of convincing scam messages is hitting Facebook business pages and Instagram accounts, purporting to be from Meta with urgent notices of policy violations. These messages, typically from accounts with blue icons featuring three people, warn of imminent account suspension or deactivation unless “verification” is completed within unreasonably short timeframes.

Steve shares examples of these messages, pointing out