Ed Koper’s book Angertainment gives Steve and David a precise vocabulary for what most of us feel but struggle to name: the social media machine is not broken, it is working exactly as designed, and that design is not working for you.

David draws the line that every small business owner needs to hear: your customers are not the mob, and the mob does not care about your business.

A couch cleaning search goes sideways when Steve finds a local tradesperson’s website where the Adelaide suburbs have migrated to Darwin, Alice Springs, and Melbourne, and the copy reads like it never met a human being.

Clive Palmer’s 2014 political ads get the Perspicacity treatment, and the verdict is the same lesson in a different costume: if your message starts with what matters to you, not what matters to them, it lands nowhere.

Get ready to take notes.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
Ed Koper’s Field Guide to the Eight Types of Online Rage (and Why Your Temperature Rising Is Not an Accident)

Steve opens the final episode of Season 8 with Angertainment, Ed Koper’s forensic examination of how social media platforms and their most active users have turned anger into a business model. The book’s central argument is not that social media is unpleasant but that its unpleasantness is deliberate, repeatable, and categorised. Koper names eight distinct post types designed to generate heat rather than light, and Steve and David walk through each one with the kind of wry recognition that comes from having seen all of them in the wild.

The eight types cover a lot of ground:

• Righteous anger activation (moral language designed to recruit, not inform)
• Tribal identity framing (are you with us or against us?)
• False consistency shaming (collapsing complexity into a gotcha)
• Decontextualised rage bait (the 10-second clip stripped of the 30 seconds that would change everything)
• Cancel mob mechanics (collective punishment at scale)
• Merchants of outrage (coordinated discontent dressed as grassroots)
• Propagandatainers (whose primary business model is keeping you angry)
• Distraction (look over here while the real story disappears)

One example from the book: a single can sent to a single influencer, and a social media structure that turned a minor marketing decision into congressional investigations and millions in lost sales.

Steve frames the eight types through the lens of The Emperor’s New Clothes: once you can name what you are looking at, it loses its power over you. David adds the Jonathan Haidt layer, noting that the moral combat these posts trigger makes reasonable conversation almost impossible, and that recognising the tactic early is the first step toward choosing not to play. If your temperature is rising, Steve says, it is probably not an accident.

15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
What the Rage Has to Do With Your Next Facebook Post (More Than You’d Like)

The Principles segment moves the Angertainment conversation from survival to strategy: if this is the environment, how does a small business owner post anything at all without being swept into the current or mistaken for part of it? David’s position is direct. You are talking to a hero who needs a guide to solve a problem. That is your job on social media. The moment you wander outside that lane and into tribal commentary, you stop being a guide and become just another voice in the emotional weather.

His practical guidance covers the basics:

• Share photos of great work
• Tell the stories of people who love what you do
• Describe the new thing you have worked out you can help people with

Accept that these posts will not go viral. Accept that the likes will be modest. And then ask yourself the only question that actually matters for a business: are the people who do engage calling you, enthusiastically, ready to talk about how you can help them?

Steve adds the cautionary note from personal experience. He has a standing rule about not engaging in political discussion on social media because the medium strips out every nuance that makes such conversations worthwhile. When pitchforks arrive at your gate by accident, David’s prescription is equally clear: before you respond, ask whether the mob is interested in listening or just needs its next dopamine hit. If it is the latter, the most effective thing you can do is nothing. Do not post for two days. Let the outrage find its next target. The memory, David notes, is very short.

21:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
When the Map of Adelaide Puts Norwood Where Alice Springs Should Be

Steve’s couch needed cleaning after an 18th birthday party. What followed was a cautionary tour of local tradesperson websites that had apparently been generated entirely by AI, reviewed by nobody, and published without a moment’s hesitation. The copy was repetitive, the language was hollow, and the service area map had transposed every Adelaide suburb to a random location across the Australian continent. Norwood sat where Alice Springs should be. Brighton appeared somewhere near Sydney. Port Adelaide had migrated to Melbourne.

David’s heuristic for evaluating any website comes down to two questions. Was the person who made this website proud of it? Is the company that had it made proud of it? If you cannot say yes to both, move on. For small business owners, the message runs the other way: if you would be embarrassed to have someone scrutinise your site the way Steve scrutinised that cleaning company’s, that is worth acting on before your next potential customer does it for you.

24:45 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
Clive Palmer’s 2014 Ads: A Masterclass in Talking to Yourself at High Volume

Clive Palmer ran political ads in 2013 and 2014 that promised tax cuts, pension increases, and revolution, delivered with the earnest energy of a cardigan-wearing accountant who had somehow wandered into the wrong studio. Steve and David play two of them and reach an immediate verdict: they did not work then, and they would not work now, for the same reason.

David puts the failure plainly. Palmer was talking to himself about what he would like. He was not meeting voters at the level of their actual problems, solving those problems first, and then expanding outward to the bigger picture. Steve adds the persona mismatch: the Clive Palmer who shot from the hip in interviews bore no resemblance to the Clive in the ads. David also notes that in an era of abundant data about what does and does not work in advertising, you could still find a perfectly capable ad agency to make exactly those ads today.

The episode closes with a question Steve puts to David: given everything angertainment does to erode empathy, do people still genuinely care about others? David’s answer is that the cruelty of the current social media model lies precisely in the fact that they do. The desire to connect and belong is real and deep. What is happening is that this desire is being used to pull people into groups defined by who they are against, not who they are for. On that note, Steve holds up the little stick with the love heart on top. David says if they were not sitting so far apart, he would come and give him a big hug. Season 8 ends as it should.