"If we want healthier economies, better markets, freer commerce, healthier neighborhoods, better streets, less dependence on big disgusting tech — the energetic force that's going to make those things happen is you making more money by living your values. Plain and simple."

This is a special episode of Damns Given. Season two is wrapped, and while we're on hiatus through the end of August, Nick is sharing the town hall he'd been avoiding for months — the closest thing he's ever done to the full picture of what Trust-Made Growth is actually for, how the economy actually works right now, and what you can actually do about it.

Season three launches at the end of August with a new structure, an extraordinary guest lineup, and new ways to go deeper. In the meantime — this is worth your time.

The town hall is called The Expansion: Make More Money, Live Your Values, and Save the World. Nick opens with a thesis that runs against everything the cultural conversation is currently telling you: that making more money and living your values aren't in opposition. They're the only way forward. That if you want healthier economies, better markets, more human-scale businesses, and less dependence on extractive tech — the energetic force that makes that happen is you, building your venture, living your values, and generating more than you take.

He walks through the two games every business is playing — the Extractive Game and the Expansive Game — and what makes each one tick. He introduces the concept of the shitload fog — the compounding loneliness, overwhelm, anxiety, and distrust that every person you're trying to reach is carrying right now — and why your number one job is to move through it, not around it. He maps out the E7: the seven structural elements the economy needs rebuilt, and why at least one of them is you. And he walks through the practical path from rented growth to owned growth — what it actually looks like to move from being dependent on extractive platforms, extractive capital, and extractive selling models to building something that compounds over time in the direction you actually want to go.

This is the map. The book — The Damn Rules — comes out September 15th at damnrulesbook.com. This episode is the context that makes the map make sense.

Season three returns end of August. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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 the same conversation every time.

Why don't people love the thing I made the way I love it?

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick and Chris go deep on what's actually going on between craft and market — and why the answer isn't to make better work. The work is fine. The gap is context. The gap is relationship. The gap is the hard turn from seeking attention to paying it.

They cover the brief window in internet history when showing up was enough and why that era socialized a generation into believing the algorithm would find their people for them. Why the people building extractive platforms don't actually like people — and how that shapes everything about what those platforms do and don't do. Why the inefficiencies we disrupted out of existence were load-bearing — and what we're left holding now that they're gone. Why the house concert in Knoxville probably made more money than the venue tour. Why your customer persona named Suzy is useless and the conversation with the real Debra who came to your show on a Thursday night is everything.

And what it means to ask, as Nick puts it: what's the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?

Nick closes with a reflection that came out of a conversation with a colleague: this economy, this uncertainty, this K-shaped gap — it's already creating discomfort whether you acknowledge it or not. Moving toward discomfort isn't going to make things worse. You're already uncomfortable. You might as well grow.

Chris McAdoo: chrismcadoo.com | chrismcadoospeaks.com | fightingshapeimpact.com
More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 under the surface is deeper than your LinkedIn feed is going to acknowledge.

Nicholas Whitaker spends his days helping people work through exactly that. He's a coach who works heavily with people in tech and corporate America going through what he calls an awakening — a sudden class consciousness about the systems they're embedded in. He's also the founder of the Rebellion Collective, a community built for people trying to reclaim their time, energy, and attention from systems designed to extract all three.

This conversation goes deep into what's actually different this time — why this isn't just a classic midlife crisis dressed up in new language, but what Nicholas calls a meta crisis: multiple systems collapsing simultaneously, compounding faster than most people have the tools to metabolize. This meta-crisis is an echo of host Nick Richtsmeier's Five Interregna, described in the first chapter of his book The Damn Rules, available Sept 2026. You can get the first chapter for free at https://damnrulesbook.com

The two Nick's talk about the psychological effect of the panopticon, the shift from external colonization by media and social platforms to the colonization of the last things that were still ours — creativity, critical thinking, self-trust. They talk about why the instinct to blog about it, sub-stack about it, or perform outrage about it usually isn't the answer. And they talk about what actually is: stillness, presence, noticing your own nervous system, and slowly building capacity so that courage and confidence become byproducts rather than goals you're chasing directly.

Nick closes with a reflection on legacy, stewardship, and why the work might outlast both of them — and why that's not a discouraging thought, but a genuinely freeing one.

Nicholas Whitaker: https://www.rebelliancollective.com — including a free capacity audit worth taking 

More at https://damnsgiven.com  and https://CultureCraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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, fractional work, agency work, or any kind of advisory role — you're probably working inside a system that came from one of two tainted pools: the agency model or the McKinsey model. Both are imploding in real time. Neither was built for the world we're in now.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier gets practical. He walks through exactly what goes wrong with the two dominant approaches to getting hired as a consultant — the scoping process that produces 97-bullet-point SOWs nobody reads, and the audit tool that clients pay $5,000 for only to receive a boilerplate proposal recommending they hire you for the work they wanted to hire you for in the first place. He names both for what they are and explains why they exist — and why they need to stop.

Then he gets to the fix. The entry level offering. Short. High impact. Structured around thinking with your client rather than selling at them. Priced low enough that nobody has to go through procurement. Valuable enough that the deliverable is worth more than what they paid. A way for people to test the quality of your thinking before anyone commits to a long engagement — which in an AI-soaked world where thinking is the primary thing anyone is buying, is the only sale that actually makes sense.

This one is for consultants, fractionals, coaches, and agencies who are tired of the broken cycle and want a way out of it. And it's for founders and leaders who are hiring these people and want to know how to structure the front end of those relationships so everyone ends up doing better work.

Trust Forge — Nick's four-week live workshop on offering design — is at trustmadegrowth.com/trustforge

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 the Expansive Game. Not as a moral judgment about which kind of person you are, but as a structural reality about which direction your decisions are flowing. Because the direction matters enormously. It determines what you make, how you run your operations, how you build relationships — and whether those three layers are stacked in a way that builds something or slowly hollows it out.

He traces the Extractive Game from Standard Oil to Facebook to your content marketing problem — showing how each one starts at the production layer, taking something communal and making it singularly owned, then builds an operations layer designed to make everything dependent on the thing it grabbed, then covers the whole thing with influence peddling and PR. And he shows how the same logic — in miniature, without the malice — slips into small businesses every day when fear is driving.

Then he traces the Expansive Game in the opposite direction — starting at the relationship layer, winning by attention and clarity, distributing power through networks, and building production that actually comes from knowing the people you're building for. He uses the independent bookseller as the clearest example of a business running the expansive game right — and it's more useful than any Silicon Valley case study.

This is a preview of the core framework from Nick's book The Damn Rules, launching this fall at DamnRulesBook.com. 

If this episode speaks to you and you want to go deeper: podcast@culturecraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 genuinely useful: Brad's honest account of how the pressurization of the COVID era made him play small, and the moment earlier this year he decided that was over. How fear contracted his social circle. How his social circle contracting made things scarier. How that compounded until he realized this was not his best self — and what happened when he dropped it. He's traveling more, seeing people in person, landing bigger deals. The correlation is not a coincidence.

From there Nick and Brad play the first ever Hot Topic Knockout — a bracketed game where ten things the internet tells you to care about go head-to-head until only the one that actually matters survives. The bracket includes: Tim Cook's successor and the One Disney speech, tariffs being illegal, the end of entry-level hiring, the OpenAI bubble, middle manager burnout at a 10-year low, social media's big tobacco moment, Oracle's Larry Ellison doing what Larry Ellison does, macro economic signals and gas prices, and the cost of tokens.

Along the way they cover why Brad thinks you should go back to 1995 and be a generalist who meets people. Why the real crisis in organizations isn't at the middle manager level, it's at the top, where leaders are navigating fog with no clear destination. Why agile is a response to a goal, not a substitute for one. Why risk management with trust is the only thing that works now — and why American business is terrible at it. 

And OF COURSE what the winner of the knockout game actually is...

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 than any offsite can address. Culture is just what an organization does, how it works, and what it is without pressure or influence.

He talks about how systems self-reinforce — why a good person in a bad team eventually becomes a bad player, because the system wins. How a leader's unspoken resistance to articulating values doesn't create a blank space, it creates a vacuum that people fill with their own interpretations, producing exactly the fractured, directionless behavior the leader didn't want. And why the only thing Trust-Made Growth is actually looking for in a culture is minimal resistance to organic growth — not kombucha fountains, not Silicon Valley theater, just healthy soil that lets things grow.

The weeds tell you everything. A garden full of weeds doesn't mean you have a weed problem. It means the soil is broken.

Questions about how this applies to your venture? Reach out at culturecraft.com or find the Trust-Made community at trustmadegrowth.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 happen in leadership meetings. They don't. They happen in the revenue model—the underlying structure of how money flows through a business—and most ventures have never seriously looked at theirs.

Nick Richtsmeier opens this episode with two client stories that have no business being in the same conversation. A solopreneur content marketer working from home in Idaho. A SaaS company with 25 employees and an engineering arm in India. Completely different scale, completely different problems... except they share the same root cause. 

Neither of them understands the business case for what they're selling into, and because of that, both of them keep making the same decisions over and over, wondering why nothing sticks.

Nick breaks down how revenue defines a structure for decisioning, even when  and especially when you don't attend to it. It's why most specialists — content marketers, HR consultants, compliance experts, operations people — have built their entire practices without ever learning to speak the language of the businesses they're selling to. 

He walks through the death of per-seat SaaS pricing and what's replacing, and he makes the case that learning to read a P&L is one of the highest-leverage things a non-financial specialist can do right now.

The subscription addiction era — build a thing, get as many subscribers as possible, extract maximum value before anyone notices — is over. What comes next requires something the extraction economy never asked of anyone: genuine understanding of the financial reality of the person on the other side of the table.

**Chapters **

00:00 Two Case Studies
10:03 The Importance of Financial Leadership
14:27 Your Takeaway Question

Join Nick for the revenue model free MasterClass: https://www.trustmadegrowth.com/c/trust-made-training-events/escaping-the-funnel-growth-models-and-building-from-trust

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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 even do with extractive social platforms (like this one) and whether to keep playing in these sands.

Well Nick has decried these platforms more than most, and yet—he's here. What's up with that?

In this brief episode, Nick explains why he broke his own rules, and what it cost him to figure out a better way. 

He offers two simple guidelines for founders, fractionals, coaches, and executives who need to be online but refuse to be owned by it

Nick walks through what the feed actually does to your brain (and your prospect's brain) and your business clarity, why LinkedIn is more aggressive than you think, why his most viral moment (2 million views) was also his most useless one.

Finally he offers the framework of a Trust-Made library of content: what it looks like, and why it works in ways the algorithm chasing and numbers boosting never will.

**Chapters:**

- 00:01 “I’m Breaking My Rules”
- 02:38 Two Rules for Social Media
- 06:15 Choosing Your Space
- 08:43 Why Nick Regrets the Word “Trust”
- 09:53 Building Your Library

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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 recorded about resistance as a function of growth, what it means when your organization keeps producing the same problems, and what he's personally been up against finishing his book The Damn Rules (get advanced access at DamnRulesBook.com).

The thesis: resistance doesn't need to be fought. It needs permission to soften. And the way you do that is by pausing long enough to ask — what is this resistance trying to protect me from? Is that still a real risk? Or am I carrying something that doesn't belong here?

Then Nick practices what he just preached — live, on camera, in real time — in a conversation with Janice Porter, relationship marketing specialist and LinkedIn strategist. Because Janice does things Nick resists: cold outreach, DMs to strangers, systematic LinkedIn prospecting. And instead of filtering her out, he lets the conversation happen. And it challenges him.

We can't wait to hear how you observe this moment. Email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

What they find across their disagreement is that they care about exactly the same thing. Human connection. Trust. Showing up for people in a world that has quietly trained us to hide behind walls we don't even know we've built. Janice's approach: be interested, not interesting. Hang out in the mailbox, not the feed. Nick's reframe: we've been so focused on protecting ourselves from the wrong risk that we've missed the real one — isolation.

If you're building something and feel like you keep hitting the same wall, or if the very idea of reaching out to someone new fills you with low-grade dread — this one is for you.

Find Janice at the Relationship Rules podcast and at janicerporter.com
Make sure you're in the early access group for Nick's book, The Damn Rules: How Vulnerability, Inefficiency, and Love Liberate Leaders from the Trustbroken Economy at DamnRulesBook.com.

**Chapters:**

00:00 Introduction

01:40 Why Resistance?

11:49 Nick’s Restance — Damn Rules Book

13:47 Identifying + Releasing Resistance

22:34 Janice's Journey into LinkedIn

26:46 Janice’s LinkedIn Strategy

32:30 The Narcissist’s Dilemma in Networking

47:24 What’s Giving Janice Hope

50:16 Nick’s Final Thoughts

More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier walks through one of the most important frameworks in the Trust-Made Growth playbook: how to actually see the system you're in, understand why it's self-reinforcing, and begin to change it, without burning everything down in the process.

Lots of people are in victim mode about "how the system works now," and while that makes for great social media quips, it only supports the system as is.

The first thing you've got to do is accept the requirements for change. For the business, problem, opportunity, resistance that is right in front of you.

Nick starts where every real change effort has to start: with the energy of frustration. That white-knuckle feeling of why does this keep happening is not a problem to solve away. It's information. It's the beginning of seeing. And the first thing you have to accept — the thing most leaders resist — is that every system is working exactly as designed. Even the frustrating ones. Even the ones that feel broken. Especially those.

Nick walks through a real client story of owners whose decisions weren't sticking, traces it back to a resistance they didn't know they were carrying from a previous chapter of their careers, and shows how turning fight energy into curiosity energy opens the door to actually seeing what's going on. He connects it directly to the sales ghosting problem from the previous episode showing how a fractional leader's sales system was perfectly designed to produce people who liked her, couldn't explain her, and disappeared.

This is systems thinking made practical, made human, and made actionable for founders, department heads, coaches, consultants, and anyone trying to change something that doesn't want to change.

**Links:**

- Preorder the book: http://DamnRulesBook.com
- Engage Deeper: https://DamnsGiven.com
- Become or Hire a TMG Strategist: https://TrustMadeGrowth.com
- Hire Us: https://CultureCraft.com

**Chapters:**

00:12 Who this is for
06:15 Everything is a system
11:55 How NOT to change systems
13:11 How this shows up in sales
15:30 Nick’s advice

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

"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. And then — nothing.

This is the affinity trap. And if you're in consulting, coaching, fractional work, or any kind of service business, you've lived it more times than you want to count.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier breaks down exactly what's happening between the great call and the ghost and why the very thing that makes people like you is often the thing that keeps them from hiring you. Being seen as nice, helpful, and flexible feels good in the moment. But it produces affinity, not trust. And those are not the same thing.

He walks through the two-phase structure of a real trust-made sales conversation: the exploratory phase where your only job is to ask questions, validate experience, and get to root cause  and the offering phase, which is a completely different conversation that most people never actually have. The mistake is collapsing them together. Saying yes too early. Becoming everything to everyone. And walking away from a call where nobody rejected you... which means nobody actually considered you either.

The fix requires one uncomfortable thing: bearing the risk of rejection. Proposing something specific. Giving people something real to respond to. Because the only way they can reject a vague helpful person is to ghost them. And they ghost you because they like you.

This is one of the most practical and immediately applicable episodes Nick has recorded. If you sell services of any kind, this one is for you.

Chapters

0:00 The affinity trap
2:30 Why saying yes kills the deal
6:00 The two-phase sales conversation
10:00 How to propose without collapsing
14:00 Bearing the risk of rejection

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 worse.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick sits down with Jeff, author of Your City Is Sick and founder of Revitalize or Die, to talk about what we've actually built over the last 50 years, why it's making us sick, and what the science of place tells us about human behavior, trust, and the kind of economy we're living in.

This conversation goes places you won't expect. They cover:

• why growth is not the same as improvement why confusing the two has hollowed out communities across America
• why Dollar General and strip malls don't just look bad, they produce bad behavior
• why the biggest predictor of your health isn't your genetics, it's where you go home
• why every out-of-town business is, by definition, extracting from your community and what the solution to neighborhood health should be

Nick closes with his own reflection: trust is physical. It happens in the body. It happens in the spaces where we actually live and breathe and see each other. And any organization trying to build trust while ignoring its physical presence in the world is fighting against every human instinct it has.

This one will change how you think about where you work, where you shop, and where you live.

Jeff Siegler: revitalizeordie.com | Your City Is Sick available now More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.com

Key quotes: 

"We keep building the sets of zombie movies, and then think it's weird that people are responding like zombies."

"Growth is equivalent to improvement — that is such a fallacy. It's like saying putting on weight is getting healthier."

 "We adapt to our surroundings. When you realize it's more of a science than an art, that there are proportions and ratios... places that we think are beautiful, places we want to aspire to, it's not a mystical thing. It's liberating."

"Trust is incredibly physical and personal. It happens in the body. It happens in our physical spaces. It happens where we live, where we breathe, where we see each other. If we're trying to overwhelm the body's system for trust with a ton of digital overrun — it's going to exhaust you, your organization, and everyone involved."

"If we could just change the culture here, we could clean up the community. You've got it backwards. Clean up the community and the culture changes."

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 diagnosis of how we got here — and the origin story of Trust-Made Growth, the framework he built in response.

He traces three converging shifts: the social web's quiet gutting of institutional trust, the migration of company authority away from human judgment and toward operational metrics, and the collapse of the leadership culture that once anchored how ventures were run. And he explains why the convergence of all three — in a period of mounting geopolitical and economic instability — created a vacuum that no amount of efficiency, data, or platform optimization can fill.

What fills it is trust. And trust is not a feeling. It is a biological reality. The brain is designed to trust other human brains — and when you remove the humans from the equation, or devalue their judgment in favor of the P&L, or build your business on touchless frictionless interactions that require no relationship at all, you are working against the deepest wiring of every person you are trying to reach.

Trust-Made Growth is Nick's answer to that problem. Not a program. Not a set of steps. An ecology — built on the premise that your job as a leader is not to make good plants. It is to make good soil.

This is where it came from.

Want to ask Nick a question for one of these skinny episodes? Leave a comment or email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 corner, specifically the back of it, where the reptilian and mammalian systems are running faster than your analytical mind can keep up with, making thousands of micro-assessments about whether you're safe. When the answer is no, the brain does something specific: it closes the aperture. It lets in less information, narrows the pool of meaning you're drawing from, and starts optimizing for threat instead of opportunity. And in a world of 40 years of declining trust, most people's apertures are nearly shut before you even open your mouth.

Trust-Made Growth is, at its core, a system for opening the aperture — for the people inside your venture, and the people you're trying to reach.

Nick walks through what that looks like practically in a varity of contexts:

• Notice Meetings and the neuroscience of why good questions feel like being loved
• The pool of meaning and why better decisions require more inputs, not fewer
• The difference between vicious cycles and virtuous ones — and how most organizations are accidentally running on the wrong one
• Why clients never outgrow their onboarding
• How M&A must be handled without care because it is trust-breaking by default. 
• And why going slow early is the fastest path to lasting growth.

This is the episode for people who've been asking: okay, I get it. We've gotta solve for trust in every decisiion, but what do I actually do on a Monday morning? 

[00:13] What does a Trust-Made Decision actually do?

[06:12] How to Open the Aperture and Trust

[09:09] Vicious Cycles vs Virtuous Cycles

[11:37] The Problem You’ll Face Without This

[12:34] One Benefit of Trust-Made Growth

[14:05] Trust-Made Growth in M&A

[20:04] Final Thoughts from Nick

Quote Referenced:

“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.” - David Augsburger

Links:

• What Nick Richtsmeier Made Me Say Out Loud: https://substack.com/@jacobwarwick/note/p-192212560
• Jacob Warwick YT Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9GaGW-197U

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 old Kindles — and asks the question that matters: what are these moves actually telling us? About trust, value, and what happens when the gap between what a company is worth and what it's capitalized at gets too wide.

Nick walks through the signs of contraction: dropping product lines, meaningless rebrands, M&A as a dominant industry narrative, organic growth that doesn't keep pace with inflation — and asks you to do something most leaders resist: look at your own industry clearly, without flinching. Only by seeing our categories clearly can you know what to do to counter the contraction.

He also tells you exactly what not to do. Hunkering down and waiting for things to get better is not a strategy. It's a slow exit. The move — the trust-made move — is to find your unique problem to solve within the situation, not around it.

In this episode: 
Why HubSpot's Inbound-to-Unbound rebrand is the most revealing thing to happen in marketing this year. What Sora's death tells us about OpenAI's core product problem. Why you don't actually own your Kindle books. The difference between efficient and better. What the wealth management industry's M&A obsession is really signaling. Why "we need people to think XYZ" is one of the most dangerous sentences a leadership team can say. The five-factor relationship model and how to use it when your category is contracting. And the one rule worth repeating: when we fix it, things will get better. Not the other way around.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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, OpenAI, Google and the other big players.

Nick and Tim start with the Anthropic Mythos announcement and work their way through some of the most important questions in the AI conversation right now: 

Why do AI labs have every incentive to scare you? 

What's the difference between framing and informing? 

Why is the government their most important buyer? 

What is the actual impact of AI on careers and job prospects?

And what should a CEO who isn't an AI teetotaler actually do?

They cover the strategic independence argument — why locking yourself into one AI provider right now is the equivalent of making all your employees sell their cars and take Uber, before Uber raised its prices. They cover the Klarna story and what the CEO didn't tell you when he said he rehired all the humans. They cover labor displacement, the gig-economification of knowledge work, and the project Tim's running at Maiden Labs called Cubit: measuring job vulnerability for almost every role and task imaginable. 

And they end, genuinely, with hope. Not the utopian kind. The kind that comes from sitting with your disappointment long enough to see what you actually believe.

In this episode: The Anthropic Mythos announcement and what to make of it. Why AI labs have strategic incentives to misrepresent their models. The blackmail story and what the documentation actually showed. Why emotional reasoning beats analytical reasoning in a vacuum of meaning. The government as AI's most important and most gullible buyer. The case for strategic independence over AI teetotaling. What Klarna didn't tell you. The ONET and Helm datasets and how Maiden Labs is measuring labor vulnerability. Why the discovery moment ends — and why every lab knows it. The Uber metaphor and what it means for your tech stack. And why Tim left OpenAI before his equity vested.

Subscribe at damnsgiven.com

Join our community at TrustMadeGrowth.com 

Work with Nick at www.CultureCraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 traits. As a practice. One notch at a time, from wherever you are.

Nick tells the story of Dave — an ex-military leader who came looking for marketing solutions and found something harder and more valuable: an honest mirror and an invitation into a different way. He walks through what the Trust-Made Growth process actually looks like from the inside, why surface-level behavior tweaks break fast, what our view of the shift cycle means for your venture, and why being on the edge of your own growth is the single most trustworthy thing you can do as a leader.

In this episode:
The Dave story and what it means to be radically honest as a consultant. Why the marketing problem is almost always downstream of something else. What "all I have to sell you is scar tissue" really means. Humility as thinking about yourself less, not thinking less of yourself. Why courage makes you trustworthy. The 36-month sell-by date on any organizational shift. Why we're committed to going away. What OpenAI's current energy tells us about trust. And the one question worth asking yourself right now: what is courage asking of you?

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 called "What Nick Richtsmeier Made Me Say Aloud." Nick unpacks what that means, why good questions aren't about journalism or gotcha moments, and why the stock cocktail-party answers we all carry around are adjacent to the truth but not actually it.

He then goes somewhere bigger: curiosity isn't a magical gift some people have. It's what happens when you're internally still enough to notice what you actually want to ask next. He walks through Notice Meetings, Yes Momentum, and why the internet is fundamentally a NO-based system,

One genuine question can do what no algorithm ever will.

Get all of Nick's content at damnsgiven.com
Join the community at TrustMadeGrowth.com
Work with Nick at CultureCraft.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 we think? 

We'll answer that question by exploring the unique way AI tooling, like Claude Code, has impacted software engineering and SAAS ventures. Amy will share her insights leading teams in implementing AI and what's giving her hope in 2026. 

Even if you're not in software engineering, this episode will give you honest insights on how engineers, coders, and SAAS professionals are viewing the impact of generative AI tools, and how ventures can incorporate AI in a trust-made way. 

Get the Show Notes at: https://DamnsGiven.com
Join the Trust-Made Growth Guild at https://TrustMadeGrowth.com
Start the conversation with Nick at https://CultureCraft.com
Connect with Amy at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-carrillo-cotten/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Episode 2.03 
13:33 Meet Amy Carillo Cotten
15:55 What do Software Engineers Think of AI?
17:00 Is AI Existential?
26:55 How SAAS Could Shift
30:00 Employment and AI 
35:52 How smart is AI?
40:05 AI's Impact on Craft
49:02 What Gives Amy Hope?
51:35 Post-Interview Thoughts
55:57 The One Thing Leaders Must Do

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 have quit the platform. LinkedIn made his business, so why quit now?

We'll answer that question by exploring the challenges and consequences of maintaining an online presence, the role of digital minimalism, and the changing dynamics of trust in the digital age especially for those serving clients at the highest level.

Get the Show Notes at: https://DamnsGiven.com
Subscribe to Jacob's newsletter at https://www.execsandthecity.com 


Chapters

- 00:00 Introduction to Episode 2.02 
- 05:26 Meet Jacob Warwick
- 05:59 Jacob's LinkedIn Journey
- 20:06 The Moment He Walked Away
- 22:46 How He Shifted His Approach
- 35:32 A Frank Talk About Addiction
- 38:05 Who is LinkedIn Still Good For?
- 40:43 "You're missing out"
- 49:44 The Opportunity Ahead for the Internet
- 51:13 The One Skill Needed
- 54:30 What Gives Jacob Warwick Hope?
- 59:12 Nick's Thoughts Post-Interview
- 59:42 Three Questions 

#TrustMadeGrowth #Trust #Marketing #QuitSocialMedia #CultureCraft #Interview #podcast #ProfessionalGrowth #LinkedinStrategy

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 humans, and the role of AI in degrading not just connection but intellectual capacity and curiosity. The conversation emphasizes the importance of skepticism towards technology and the need for local engagement to foster community connections.

A must listen to for leaders who are trying to build anything grounded in trust and for all of us who find ourselves wanting a more analog and less algorithmically defined existence.

Takeaways

• Digital minimalism is more than just a fad..
• Trust in brands, institutions and people is correlative to the rise in digital dependency.
• Digital fatigue is setting everywhere, undermining our ability to think clearly.
• We are losing essential human skills due to technology reliance.
• AI can facilitate tasks but cannot replace human skills.
• Local engagement is vital for community improvement.
• The "enshittification" of tech platforms and apps is intentional and extractive
• But app makers are notice, not just in the discourse but legally as well
• The rise in AI is part of the fear in Silicon Valley trying to maintain control

References

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

Moving Offline Substack by Jose Briones

Low-Tech Life by Jose Briones

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 gone wrong with this and many podcasts), the hosts pivot to big changes coming for Working/Broken and what that means for people who want to make a difference in the world we're making together.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Working Broken Podcast

00:56
Reflections on Podcasting Journey

03:10
Identifying What's Working and What's Broken

05:54
Shifting Perspectives on Content Creation

08:45
Exploring Agency and Cultural Impact

11:51
The Need for Change in Podcast Structure

14:43
Introducing the New Direction: Dams Given

19:51
The Attention Economy and Its Impact

23:48
Reframing Our Approach to Attention

27:42
Understanding Internet Poisoning

31:32
Detoxing from Algorithmic Thinking

34:16
The Future of the Podcast and Community Engagement

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 frameworks no longer apply
• How the best marketing today isn’t marketing at all—it’s signal
• What happens when attention becomes too expensive for most businesses to buy
• Why people aren’t buying messages—they’re buying alignment
• How real resonance begins when you quit trying to prove and start trying to be

This is a powerful conversation for anyone who senses that our current approach to audience, storytelling, and persuasion has gone stale—but hasn’t quite found language for what’s next.

As always, the episode lives up to the Working/Broken premise: challenging listeners who followed the rules of the game, only to discover the game changed mid-play.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 become in the process.

Lexi and the hosts explore questions at the heart of the Working/Broken project:

What if the reason work—and life—feels so off is because the very mediums we communicate through are bending us into shapes we didn’t choose.

They tackle how social media trains us to self-narrate constantly, creates performance-driven personalities, and incentivizes simplistic, binary, hot-take thinking over honest, complex, and often uncertain expression.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

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 dinner table sets the stage. What followed? A flood of people thanking him for drawing a line—and another flood accusing him of condemning his children to a lifetime of ruin. The episode explores what it means to lead with agency, discernment, and humility in a culture obsessed with optimization.

Brad reminds us that the promises of tech are almost always overblown—and the consequences are rarely predicted. (Remember when the internet was going to make us all smarter?) Together, they call B.S. on the assumption that every AI advancement is a step toward progress.

They don’t offer easy answers—but they do offer a better question: “What are we becoming as we adopt these tools?”

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

On this episode, we tackle a longstanding battle that has nearly boiled over: the role of college in career-preparation. Or, more specifically, why do hiring managers still require degrees for new roles? And should they? 

The old biases persist: many hiring managers still view a degree as a shorthand for maturity, responsibility, and readiness. But with roles evolving fast and the shelf life of job-specific skills shrinking, is that shortcut doing more harm than good?

In the end, Brad and Nick are do what they always do, plunging us into the fundamental question of what higher ed's job is and should be in a functioning society... and is this a functioning society at all?

Together, they explore:

• Why “entry-level” doesn’t mean what it used to
• How automation and AI are softening the bottom of the job market
• The tension between hiring for the current role vs. hiring for a path
• The challenge of finding people who can evolve with the organization
• Whether freelance might be a better fit than full-time in many cases
• How the university system became a cultural scapegoat—and what we lose when we misunderstand it

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this introspective and timely episode, Brad and Nick take on a deceptively simple question: Do we really own our ideas anymore?

Prompted by Nick’s recent experience of having his writing lifted and reposted—sometimes respectfully, sometimes not—the conversation weaves through authorship, digital ethics, AI scraping, and the deeper emotional terrain of publishing on the internet. What begins as a conversation about plagiarism quickly becomes something bigger: a meditation on intellectual generosity, attribution, and the meaning of creative work in a remix culture.

Nick wrestles with the tension between wanting his writing to matter and his desire to be part of the conversation his work sparks. Brad adds reflections on how creative inspiration often flows from one source to another and how acknowledging that is more art than science.

In this jam-packed discussion, they also hit:

• How human creativity works (messy, layered, integrative)
• The rise of AI and its flattening effect on original voice
• The emotional whiplash of going viral
• Why traditional publishing may be a spiritual balm in an age of digital entropy

At the core: the internet changed how we think about ownership. AI is changing it again. So where does that leave creators, thinkers, and leaders trying to say something real?

Referenced Resources:

• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
• Definition of “Palimpsest” 

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this wide-ranging interview style episode, host Nick Richtsmeier sits down with one of the most unexpected and impactful voices on LinkedIn in 2025: Nick Power, the marketer and writer behind a wave of unfiltered, politically-aware, and often hilarious posts that challenged the business-as-usual tone of the platform.

What began as a creative shift away from conventional “thought leadership” turned into something larger: a community movement, a form of resistance, and an experiment in what truth-telling looks like on a platform built for polished personal brands.

In this episode, we unpack the unexpected intersection between late-stage capitalism, artful forms of digital protest, and rethinking the religion of personal brand. The Nicks take us through their takes on what the #weirdLinkedIn movement meant, and what happens next.

Resources Referenced

• 📚 Ezra Klein on the Temptation to Assume the End
  Referenced for insight on acting in the present rather than assuming outcomes are predetermined.
• 📱 Sharon McMahon / @sharonsaysso on Instagram
  Praised by Nick Power for making complex news stories accessible and balanced.
• 💡 The Noun Project
  Nick Power is Head of Marketing at this resource for design icons and visual taxonomies.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this timely and unfiltered episode, Brad and Nick explore the increasingly tangled relationship between politics and work culture. They ask the central question: Has politics become so pervasive that it’s breaking our ability to lead, work, and think clearly?

Key Themes:

• The Blurring Line Between Culture and Politics: Brad and Nick debate whether culture is now downstream from politics or whether it's still the other way around. Nick argues that cultural trends, even fringe ones, often precede political movements (e.g., mommy bloggers influencing public health debates).
• The Role of Algorithms: The hosts criticize how algorithmic thinking is shaping what we consume, from news headlines to music to political discourse, and how it narrows our perspectives. 
• Fear and Existential Framing: Every political issue today is presented in existential terms, which creates emotional fatigue and disrupts our ability to engage meaningfully in leadership and life.
• Leadership, Brands, and Point of View: In today’s climate, leaders and companies can’t afford to be neutral. Nick makes the case that if you’re not willing to state a point of view—on the issues that matter to your work—you lose trust and relevance. 
• Creating Better Culture: Iif we want better politics, we must first invest in better culture—through storytelling, creativity, and human connection. He criticizes cultural homogeneity (driven by platforms like Spotify or Netflix) as a breeding ground for bland politics and weak leadership.

Notable Quotes:

• "Bad culture makes bad politics." – Nick
• "Politics feels like a tax on my attention—it's stealing time from the things I care about." – Brad
• "Culture is a product of human relationships. You can't make good culture with machines." – Nick
• "If you're going to be in business today, you need a point of view. Period." – Nick

Referenced Resources:

The Cult of Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin
A deep dive into how “creativity” became central to modern work and business culture.

Tangle Newsletter
A politically balanced daily newsletter that presents left, right, and center perspectives on current events.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this thought-provoking episode, Nick and Brad unpack how fear has traditionally been used as a primary tool in marketing and communication—from political campaigns and media to brand messaging. Drawing on personal experience in marketing and spiritual development, they challenge whether fear-based messaging is still effective or ethical in a world that's rapidly waking up.

Key Takeaways:

• Fear is a primal motivator, and marketers have long exploited it to capture attention and drive action.
• There's a growing awareness in society that fear-based narratives lead to chronic stress, anxiety, and disconnection.
• Conscious consumers are increasingly seeking hope, empowerment, and authenticity, not manipulation.
• The hosts reflect on how marketing rooted in truth, love, and transparency is more aligned with inner work and long-term success, but is often treated as less successful from a sales perspective.
• They challenge listeners to notice how often fear is used to push a product, idea, or political stance—and to ask: Is this true? Is this necessary?

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this powerful and timely episode, Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris dive into the pervasive undercurrent of fear that’s shaping both politics and the workplace. From the physiological and psychological roots of fear to its impact on leadership, decision-making, and organizational culture, the conversation explores how fear manifests in leaders and teams alike.

Nick breaks down the classic "Four F's" of fear—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—and how these instinctive reactions show up in modern leadership contexts. Brad adds depth by highlighting how fear hijacks our ability to think clearly, and how leaders can regulate themselves to respond rather than react.

This episode is packed with real-life leadership tensions, practical self-regulation strategies (aka “the ice pack”), and some sharp reflections on how fear gets coded into everyday business language. It’s a must-listen for anyone navigating uncertainty, leading in turbulent times, or just trying to stay grounded.

We live in a time where leadership is both at risk and never more needed. And the line will be drawn based on how leaders deal with fear.

📚 References & Mentions

Books, Articles, and Ideas:

• "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt

Movies:

• Children of Men (2006)
• Minecraft: The Movie

Psychological Concepts:

• The Four F’s of Fear:
  • Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn
    Quick overview

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Authenticity had a good run, or so it may seem.

In this thought-provoking episode of Working Broken, hosts Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris dive deep into the concept of authenticity in a world increasingly dominated by artificiality, distrust, and digital noise. As they wrestle with the idea of being true to oneself in an environment filled with deception—fake resumes, spammy AI-generated outreach, and manipulated social trust—they ask: Is authenticity still working, or is it broken?

Brad comes into the discussion feeling disillusioned, questioning whether it's even possible to be authentic online without being drowned out by the noise. Meanwhile, Nick pushes back, arguing that authenticity is the last battleground of personal integrity. Together, they explore the overwhelming labor of simply existing in today’s digital world, the impact of a fractured internet, and whether showing up authentically still holds value.

Through personal anecdotes, cultural critiques, and practical insights, they reach a nuanced conclusion: authenticity has been weaponized against us, but it remains one of the few tools we have to create meaningful connections. The challenge is not just figuring out how to be authentic but where to show up and engage in ways that align with the world we want to build.

Tune in for a candid, insightful conversation about trust, digital engagement, and reclaiming authenticity on your own terms.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this episode of Working Broken, hosts Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris explore the complex and often misunderstood topic of mentoring. Is it truly about passing knowledge from an experienced leader to a junior employee, or is it a two-way street that transforms both mentor and mentee?

Nick and Brad examine how business leaders struggle to delegate responsibilities effectively, often clinging to the idea that “no one can do it like me.” They discuss the distinction between training, managing, and mentoring, highlighting why mentoring is the most challenging yet rewarding of the three. True mentorship is more than just transferring skills—it’s about modeling leadership, fostering growth, and embracing change in both the mentor and the mentee.

The conversation delves into why many leaders resist mentoring, fearing the vulnerability and openness it requires. They also unpack the generational shifts that create friction in the workplace and challenge outdated notions of leadership. Is mentoring broken, or is it simply that today’s leaders are struggling to embrace it?

By the end of the episode, Brad makes a compelling case: mentoring isn’t broken—leaders are. When done right, mentoring can build stronger organizations, create lasting relationships, and develop the next generation of business leaders.

Join Nick and Brad for an insightful, sometimes therapeutic, discussion on what it truly takes to lead in a way that fosters trust, growth, and lasting impact.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this episode of Working Broken, Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris take a deep dive into the world of cold emails—why they’re everywhere, why people swear by them, and whether they actually work. Spoiler alert: they’re not fans.

The conversation kicks off with a story about a salesperson convinced that blasting out 50 cold emails a day would bring in business. Months later? One booked meeting. That sets the stage for a bigger discussion about why businesses keep turning to cold outreach, even when it’s painfully ineffective. They explore how digital marketing strategies have changed, why email is still hanging on as a go-to tactic, and the psychological appeal of avoiding rejection through automation.

But the real heart of the episode isn’t just about why cold email doesn’t work—it’s about what does. Nick and Brad reflect on how business used to be done, back before inboxes were flooded with generic pitches. They talk about the power of relationships, trust, and actually taking an interest in potential clients rather than treating them like numbers in a system. The contrast between transactional outreach and genuine engagement is a big theme, and they make a compelling case for why businesses should rethink their approach.

By the end of the episode, they address email marketing's impact on company’s culture in ways that might not be obvious at first. Turns out who we spam and how says a lot about who we are.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this episode of Working/Broken, hosts Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris dive deep into the burning debate: Is it better to grow naturally, or should you aggressively scale your business? With wit and candor, they explore how the meaning of “growth” has evolved over time—from organic, sustainable expansion to the manufactured, high-speed push for scale that risks sacrificing client experience. Drawing on industry insights, personal anecdotes (including Brad’s weight-loss journey as a metaphor for shrinking old habits), and even a nod to that iconic Jerry Maguire moment, they challenge the status quo. Whether you're an investment advisor, a creative services leader, or simply a business owner questioning the path to success, this episode will inspire you to rethink your strategy and decide which game you really want to win.

Tune in and join the conversation—because friends don't let friends work broken!

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this episode of Working/Broken, Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris peel back the curtain on the wild world of marketing metrics. They dive into how even the biggest advertisers are left scratching their heads—overspending on TV ads that mysteriously boost sales, while 30-50% of online clicks turn out to be fraudulent. With plenty of humor and hot takes, the hosts break down insights from Lindsay Slaby—the “CMO Whisperer” at David Baker’s MYOB conference—and ponder if our obsession with precise ROI is just a modern-day myth. They question whether chasing data-driven attribution is really working, or if it's time for service firms to ditch the digital funnel and focus on building genuine trust instead. Tune in for a refreshingly candid discussion that challenges the status quo of digital marketing measurement.

Outside Resources Referenced:

• David Baker’s MYOB Conference
• Dead Internet Theory

Join Nick and Brad as they unravel the complexities behind digital metrics and challenge you to rethink what really drives value in today’s marketing landscape.

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

In this lively debut of Working/Broken, hosts Nick Richtsmeier and Brad Farris dive headfirst into the world of hustle culture—tracing its evolution from the early days of knowledge work to today’s digital grind. With a mix of humor and sharp insight, they debate whether the “work harder” mantra truly paves the way to success or if it simply sets us up for burnout. Along the way, the duo dissects modern hustle icons like Mr. Beast and Elon Musk, unpacking how their narratives—full of bold risks and alleged simplicity—might actually mask a more complex reality. Ultimately, Nick and Brad challenge listeners to rethink relentless hustle in favor of creative balance, arguing that sometimes stepping back can be the smartest move in an era where the old rules just don’t add up.

Outside Resources Mentioned:

• Mr. Beast’s Hustle Guidebook: A Google Doc outlining his unconventional approach to work and creativity.

Tune in for a thought-provoking and entertaining look at why hustle culture might just be broken—and what we might do instead!

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.