For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we’ll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,
For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey’s, surgery isn’t an if, it’s not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.
But throughout all that, he’s displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, “Scar Tissue.” And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you’ll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings.
Let’s get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey.
One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.
That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career. Back in high school he’d struggled to master all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.
But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar – it’s playing a trick on physics.
Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn’t until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.
The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury’s new backflip maneuver – the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance – he didn’t miss a jump right up to the metal round. I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to 2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record
Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury’s style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don’t even question it.
Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It’s a phenomena today’s guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: “The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that’s the point!”
Our guest has spent 25 years teaching digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of “42 Rules for a Website That Wins” and came out in 2025 with “Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics”. Let’s go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.
Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”
What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.
This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.
Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.
Today’s guest graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.
He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025.
So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson.
It’s the middle of summer when I’m recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I’m going to share some reads that go a little farther afield.
Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction.
Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths.
In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane’s entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they’d taken enemy fire and either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel.
Wald’s team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed.
Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren’t examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn’t make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn’t sample could have been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they’d been lucky! the returning planes weren’t the rule, they were the exception.
Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that’s not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution.
This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today’s episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we’ll get a bit more comfortable using them.
Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning – and statistics – to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he’s learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs.
