Damns Given with Nick Richtsmeier
(formerly Working/Broken)
Brains On. Hearts Open. Forward Motion... for the Post-Digital World.
The world has gotten very good at telling us what’s broken. Platforms. Politics. Power. Business. Culture. Every feed reminds us we’re smaller than we thought, and that the real decisions are being made somewhere else.
When that message sinks in deeply enough, disengagement, even nihilism start become the default position. Businesses holding out for "someday." Ideas in limbo. Fear run amok. Our ability to make the world a long lost fantasy. We become spectators in a life we’re supposed to be living.
Damns Given is a show for those who refuse to surrender their agency.
Hosted by strategist and author Nick Richtsmeier, Damns Given is a forum for
Nick and his guests fight back against the "it-is-what-it-is-isms" of our day and the abandonment of agency that the algorithmic systems have demanded of us, calling us forward into a post-digital world where we are free again to ask betting questions of:
- How the internet has trained us to think algorithm-first and self-second
- Why our attention is our most powerful (and misdirected) asset
- What happens when leaders disconnect from real human scale
- How to build a meaningful life and business without waiting for permission
- The small decisions and risks that actually move the world forward
The premise is simple:
We already know what’s broken.
Now we ask:
How do we show up anyway?
No doomscrolling disguised as insight. No performing for the feed. Just honest conversations with thinkers, builders, and leaders who are navigating this moment with clarity — and giving a damn about the future they’re helping shape.
Because the game isn’t over. And the people who still care will decide what happens next.
You can find additional resources at DamnsGiven.com.
Damns Given with Nick Richtsmeier
The Three Systemic Changes that Created the Trustbroken Era and the Foundations of Trust-Made Growth
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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.
