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
Damns Given with Nick Richtsmeier
Using AI without It Using You: AI Risk, Labor, Dangerous Incentives, What Joe CEO Should Do with Tim Marple
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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.
