Damns Given with Nick Richtsmeier
Brains On. Hearts Open. Forward Motion. For the Trustbroken Economy The world has gotten very good at telling you what's wrong. The platforms are extractive. The institutions are hollow. The algorithm is running the show. Your attention is the product. And somewhere along the way, the message landed: the real decisions are being made somewhere else, by someone else, and there's not much you can do about it. That message is a lie. But it's a convincing one. And when it sinks in deeply enough, disengagement becomes the default. Businesses hold out for someday. Ideas sit in limbo. Leaders optimize for survival instead of building for what they actually believe. We become spectators in a life we're supposed to be living. Damns Given is for the people who refuse to go that quietly and want the practical tools how to play a different game. Hosted by strategist, author, and Trust-Made Growth® founder Nick Richtsmeier, this is a show about what it actually takes to build something real — a venture, a community, a career, a life — in an economy designed to extract everything it can before you notice. Each episode goes one layer beneath the surface conversation to find what's actually true and what's actually worth doing about it. We've talked to a former OpenAI insider about the AI industry's incentive to frighten you. An urban economist about how we've spent 50 years designing cities for dissatisfaction. A negotiation strategist who walked away from a million-dollar platform because it was stealing his focus. Engineers navigating an identity crisis nobody named. Leaders learning that trust isn't a feeling, it's a biological reality with rules you can learn. The questions the podcast will both answer, and keep bringing you back to: Why does every system keep producing the same problems, and what does it take to actually change one? What does it cost to build on a foundation of extraction, and what becomes possible when you don't? How do you lead when the people around you are two to three times more lonely, anxious, and overwhelmed than they appear? What happens when you stop optimizing for the algorithm and start building for the humans who actually have to trust you? What does it mean to give a damn in an economy that seems to punish anyone for doing so? No doomscrolling dressed up as insight. No performing for the feed. No quippy takes recycled from LinkedIn. Just honest conversation with thinkers, builders, and leaders who are navigating this moment with their eyes open and their agency intact. The game isn't over. The people who still care will decide what comes next. Come think with us. Find every episode, the Super Show Notes, and the Trust-Made community at DamnsGiven.com
Episodes
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 quietly depressed by it. The quiet despair unde...
"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 anyway. And if you're in consulting, fractio...
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 market, every economy runs on: the Extractive Game and ...
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.
This episode opens with something genuin...
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 organizational terms it's simpler and harder tha...
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 their biggest strategic decisions happ...
"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 leaders have questions of what to ...
"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 the most honest soliloquies he's rec...
"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 see the system as it is, none of your solutions are going to stick.
"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 liked each other. They said let's talk again soon. ...
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 problem, every solution makes things wo...
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 Richtsmeier's honest diagno...
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?
Nick starts with a little brain chemistry corn...
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 Inbound to Unbound, and Amazon bricking...
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 what's really going on with Anthropic, OpenA...
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 never ask of you: humility and courage. Not as personality tr...
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 professional coaching, wrote a post cal...
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’s not changing software development like w...
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 the least likely people who should h...
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 low-tech life, the skills we are losing as ...
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