Damns Given with Nick Richtsmeier

Send us Fan Mail "What is the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?" Chris McAdoo has been a musician, a brand strategist, a startup advisor, and an artist since he was 13 years old. He's worked with national lab scientists sending things to space and artists introducing their work to the world for the first time. And he's noticed something: it's...

Send us Fan Mail Damns Given Episode 2.20 - only two episodes of Season 2 yet to go! A lot of people are waking up right now to systems they've been inside of for years without fully seeing them, many of them leaders in tech, marketing, and professional services, and it's producing something that looks a lot like grief. Bargaining with the extractive economy. Fighting it. Sometimes just...

Send us Fan Mail "In this AI-soaked era, the primary thing we're buying — anytime we're buying anything — is thinking. Consultants, you need a way for people to test the quality of your thinking. Efficiently. With a low financial impact." Nobody sat down and decided to build a consulting offer that was bad for them, bad for their clients, and bad for their industry. It happened...

Send us Fan Mail The American economy is in contraction. That's different than recession. Most people who've been paying attention know it by now. We've got to spend less time debating it, negotiating with it, pretending it's not happening, like bad bargainers at a funeral. And start acting on what to do about it.  Nick walks through the two games that every business, every mar...

Send us Fan Mail Brad Farris is back. And if you weren't here for the original run of the show under the old name Working Broken, here's what you need to know: Brad is one of the sharpest executive coaches working today, he was Nick's own executive coach for an extended stretch, and when the two of them get in a room together — even a virtual one — nothing stays safe for very long....

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Damns Given, Nick walks through the Trust-Made Growth framework's take on culture — one of the six core factors that determine whether a venture is ready to grow or quietly working against itself. He goes back to the literal definition of the word: culture is what you put in a petri dish, the organic matter from which everything else grows. In organizationa...

Send us Fan Mail Damns Given Episode 2.15: "What is one way you can become more knowledgeable about the business case for whatever you're selling? One notch more knowledgeable. The more we think about these economic tools as mechanisms for value delivery, the more we get into the loamy soil of trust — which is where all the good things grow." It's common for leaders to think th...

Send us Fan Mail "Trust doesn't look like attention." In fact, the things that steal our attention, grab it out of the agorithmic haze are some of the most trust-breaking things we face. Just because something is good at dragging us into its orbit, doesn't mean its building trust. In fact, often quite the opposite. A lot of people are trying to spend less time online. And brand...

Send us Fan Mail "The obsession with up and to the right is definitionally gonna make you less effective because it forces you to act in ways because it forces you to act in ways that are contrary to the natural flow of how things change." Most leaders are fighting their resistance. Nick Richtsmeier thinks that's the wrong move. In this episode of Damns Given, Nick opens with one of...

Send us Fan Mail "Every system is working exactly as designed. Even when those designs weren't intentional. Especially when those designs weren't intentional." You've moved departments around. You've changed leaders. You've fixed the website. You've brought in new talent. You've reorganized budgets. And the same problems keep coming back. Until you can...

Send us Fan Mail "People liking you is not the same as people trusting you. It is simply not the same." This episode is about why nice people get ghosted. Why saying "yeah, I can do that" on a sales call is a death trap. And why you're burning trust all the while they are telling you how much they like you... ...and what to do about it. You had a great call. Everybody like...

Send us Fan Mail What does your neighborhood have to do with your business or your capacity to lead? More than you think. Jeff Siegler spent years running Ohio's Main Street program — traveling community to community, dispensing conventional wisdom about economic development, watching none of it work. Until it dawned on him: they had misidentified the problem. And when you misidentify the pro...

Send us Fan Mail Something went wrong in the way we build companies. Not because anyone was evil. Not because the tools were bad. But because a series of well-intentioned shifts — the social web, the data-driven management era, the touchless transaction economy — accumulated second and third level consequences that nobody planned for and most people still haven't named. This episode is Nick R...

Send us Fan Mail What does a Trust-Made decision actually look like in practice? Don't guage it by the marketing discourse who want to frame it in moralisms, political side-taking, and feel good "integrity" vibes. A starving lion has integrity. It's authentic as can be. And it'll still eat you alive. YOu should not trust it. So how does trust actually work in orgnaiztions?...

Send us Fan Mail Something is happening across almost every industry right now and most leaders are incentivized to ignore it. Nick calls it contractive behavior. And once you know what to look for, you'll see it everywhere. This episode connects four seemingly unrelated stories — Anthropic's Mythos announcement, OpenAI killing Sora, HubSpot rebranding its flagship conference from Inboun...

Send us Fan Mail Tim Marple has a PhD in political science, spent time at Google and OpenAI, and left before his equity vested, unwilling to accept what staying would cost him. Now he co-leads Maiden Labs, a nonprofit focused on measuring emerging technologies effects on society and the economy. In short, he's the guy to talk to about what happens when you build AI into your business, and wha...

Send us Fan Mail A CultureCraft client once described working with Nick as "getting smashed in the face and then hugged afterward." Nick can't disagree, and in this episode he unpacks exactly why that's the goal. Real leadership development isn't therapy. You don't have to talk about your relationship with your mom. But it does require two things that most programs ne...

Send us Fan Mail Ep 2.04 Curiosity Isn't a Personality Trait. It's a Practice... and once you learn it, all doors are open to you. Welcome to our new short episode format... where Nick focuses on a single question that arose with a client or within the Trust-Made Guild (www.trustmadegrowth.com) After his interview on Damns Given, Jacob Warwick, one of the most direct voices in profession...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 2.03: In this episode of Damns Given, host Nick Richtsmeier interviews Amy Carrillo Cotten, an expert in engineering transformation who answers the question, "What's the future of software engineering now that AI is here?" Software is the canary in the coal mine of the new economy. It's where AI has promised the most revolutionary change. But what if it...

Send us Fan Mail Should you quit LinkedIn? Should you move aggressively upmarket? How little can you do to still build what you want to build? Episode 2.02: In this episode of Damns Given, host Nick Richtsmeier interviews Jacob Warwick, who in early 2026 left his network of over 30,000 professionals behind by deleting his LinkedIn account. Given his incredible journey with LinkedIn, Jacob is among...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Nick Richtsmeier launches the pod into its second season with with guest Jose Briones, a digital minimalism strategist. They discuss the importance of digital minimalism in recovering balance in a technology-saturated world, the decline of trust in institutions, and why we can't all just go buy dumb phones and quit the internet. They explore the need for a lo...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes you become a part of the thing you're trying to fix. And as the internet content world crashes around us, pulled to the floorboards by AI, Brad and Nick reflect on the work of podcasting and content creation, focusing on some hard lessons learned in the last year. But beyond just ruminating on what's gone wrong (and how that, in a very meta way, is what has gon...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Brad and Nick dive into what marketing is becoming now that we live in a post-trust, post-algorithm, post-authenticity world. They’re not interested in tactics—they’re interested in how the deep cultural forces reshaping trust, commerce, and identity are scrambling what it even means to “market” something. Together, they explore: Why traditional marketing framewor...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, host Nick Richtsmeier sits down with Lexi Pasi , a PhD in Communication and expert in the field of AI, to unpack what’s actually happening to our attention, language, and selves in today’s online environments. Lexi brings academic depth, cultural critique, and personal insight to the conversation—exposing how platforms not only distort what we say, but who we beco...

Send us Fan Mail This episode isn’t about AI. Not really. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves about technology, power, and what we’re allowed to feel. Nick and Brad take apart the myth of inevitability around artificial intelligence—specifically large language models (LLMs)—and ask who benefits from that myth. Spoiler: it’s not you. Nick’s viral post about saying “no” to wearable AI at the di...