What it's going to take to heal our economy and what Nick's doing about it

"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.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dam's Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless way that humans build, collaborate, and buy. Hello friends, this is Nick. Welcome to a special episode of Dam's Given. If you've noticed, we've been on a little bit of a hiatus uh through the summer, and uh we've wrapped up on season two, which was a really fun exploration of going a bunch of interesting places, and we're about to jump into season three. I delivered what is functionally a town hall meeting um last week, uh really talking through what are the really foundational issues of what's going on with the economy, with the uncertainty, how that's affecting small and medium-sized businesses, and what is the path forward. It's really the closest I've ever done to sort of the big giant picture on building a venture, whether it's a solo venture, a medium-sized business of 30 million, an advisory firm, anything in between, how you can really capitalize on building a business that's going to zag away from the most destructive elements of the way the economy is currently structured and get back to trust. So I'm sharing that town hall with you today. And it's going to be an exciting use of your time to get a sense for what does this mean for you? Not just what are the big ideas or how do we speak in theory or how do we break down these things, but what does it mean for you? And it gives you a little bit of a reprieve while we're on this little bit of an extended break before the end of August, where we come back for season three with an incredibly powerful guest lineup, a new structure, some new ideas into how to really engage, and how we talk about giving a damn about what happens in our economy, in our markets, in our businesses, and all of this uh happening consistently with the launch of the book. Um Dams Given, my book is coming out in September. Other than that, jump on in to our little town hall on what we call the expansion: how to make more money, live your values, and save the world. Hope you enjoy. You guys, this is the town hall that I've been avoiding, to be honest, because I was doing a lot of work with individuals, with teams, with our community at the guild. Some of you are from the guild, and in those environments, I was like, can't we just sort of like can I just sort of stay in the underlayment? Can I just sort of stay in the quiet corners and instigate this and that? And the more I was doing that work, and then I made the silly decision to write a book, the more I was like, oh, you have to be more clear. You have to say the thing that feels obvious to you but isn't obvious to everyone about where we are and what has to happen to get where we're going next from an economic, cultural, and societal framework. And you have to push yourself, Nick, to do it in a way that is incredibly practical. What's interesting for people who engage me and my work in different places in different ways is some people like, gosh, you I had somebody say something the other day, Nick, you like do like sales coaching with individual people. Yeah, do sales coaching with individual people, how to sell, how to have the conversation, what meetings to have, what to say in what meetings. And other people who work with me primarily in those environments go, oh, you wrote a book about like how to rebuild the economy and restructure our marketplaces and our businesses so that that can work. Yeah, I did. Right. So this is really an effort to bring all of those things into conversation, but not at a theoretical place, at a very practical place. Like the title says, make more money, live your values, and save the world. And those first two things, we live in a culture where you are being trained that those two things are in opposition. You're being trained by the social media feeds, by the media, but you and I both are being trained to be, oh, if you want to grow your business, make more money, be more financially successful, what we'll frame in this conversation is be have more economic liberty, more freedom to make economic choices the way you want to make them, that to do that, you have to sort of extract, steal, scheme, right? And this is not a new conflict. The conflict between financial well-being and sort of moral functioning in the world has been an age-old conflict, right? That money is the root of all evil, right? And these other sorts of framings. What we want to talk about today is we're gonna look at how those two things are actually essential to work together. That for you to make money living your values is the only way that things get better. That if we want healthier economies, if we want better markets, if we want freer commerce, if we want healthier neighborhoods, if we want better streets, if we want less dependence on big, disgusting tech, if we want to stop hearing the name Elon Musk, if we want those things, the energetic force that's gonna make those things happen is you making more money by living your values. Plain and simple, that's our thesis for today. That if we want to fix what's broken, it's on us. In one of the early pages of the book, I reflect back on the infamous phrase, right? We are the ones we've been waiting for. We love that phrase. It calls us into our higher being. We are the ones we've been waiting for. But I pair it with a second phrase, which is we are the we are the reason we've been waiting. We are the reason we've been waiting. And so today we're gonna dig in how to engage that from the chair in which you sit. All right. So we're gonna look at it from a couple different places. Why you're here. So we're gonna I want to introduce some framing in terms of types of businesses, how they work, and how you might be impacted. I'm gonna uh introduce two ideas, the solo-ish and the smittish. Um, the soloish and the smidish. They're not purely clean categories because a lot of it has to do with how you run your business. And some of you are here as team members of larger enterprises, and we'll talk about that role as well as we go. We're gonna start with those of you who are founders or owners or solos, so you really understand how you're sitting in this space. The solo ish space, we're gonna treat as sort of like 250 to 2 million. Now, why do I start at 250? Because below 250, this isn't purely true. Again, there's little asterisks everywhere, but below 250, a business really starts to become a little bit more lifestyle and a little bit more freelancer. Nothing wrong with a freelancer. We love a freelancer, but it really is a you selling a service. It doesn't necessarily have all the infrastructure that a business requires. Closer to 250, so you have some free cash flow, you have some tools, you have some needs to do more things. And then upwards to two to three million is where things start to shift into the more Smitish category. In the solo ish category, you have some kind of a team sometimes. Often freelancers, other independents, people who are on 1099, those kinds of things. And that's why we call it solo-ish, because above half a million, probably, most firms in that scale have at least some form of support system, either some uh freelancers or agencies or other partners or things that are helping them along the way. So it's solo-ish, but it's really you. You're the driving energy. So the where I draw that little line between soloist and schmidt-ish is that a solo-ish practice is designed to thrive at a founder-focused scale. So this thing that you're building is really meant to be about you. You have some other people, they may do some things in your price, some service, but it's kind of the you show. And there's zero things wrong with that. In fact, next year, we're expecting that more people will be independently working in solo ish kinds of ways than are working as employees for the first time since the industrial revolution. We're gonna have more independent workers than employed workers. So solo ish is a real thing and it's important and it's valuable. And it's okay that it's designed to thrive at a you-focus level. To grow a solo-ish structure, your growth is primarily in depth and focus, not necessarily in size. So you want to get better and better and better at the craft that you're doing, and usually that's by focusing more and more and more on doing a specific set of things for a specific set of people. For some leaders and some organizations, their natural inclination is to move beyond that. And again, no right or wrong answer here, but as we move beyond the solo ish structure, we move into the smittish structure or the small medium market. The smittish market is designed to expand the boundaries of opportunity within a human scale. Those are two big things. So they're designed to get bigger, they're designed to expand, right? But they're designed to do it at a human scale. They don't want to get to the point where it's all operations and machines and processes and SOPs and et cetera. That's the enterprise scale, where we're basically just sort of, you know, running, turning on the factory, swapping out employees here and there as necessary, and making things go. There's nothing inherently evil about the enterprise scale. It is where values-based leading gets more and more complicated. So I've worked with leaders of the enterprise scale, I've consulted businesses in the enterprise scale. We can do good things there, but the bulk of our conversation here is really in that SMID space, which is just designed to expand the boundaries of opportunities within a human scale. In here, you do grow the team size. You do tend to increase. We have five to 75 is kind of a loose range here. Your client breadth does expand. So you're probably not going to have just one very tightly specific kind of client. It's going to expand. And you're looking to have an increasing footprint of localized at this finished level. There are a lot of businesses in this range: $30 million businesses, $20 million businesses, $50 million businesses, and some of you may work for them that are trying to function like enterprise. They're, you know, that you have 10 clients and the CEO is like, well, we need to figure out how to scale this. That is an absolutely insane impulse. It's not good for the business, it's not good for the employees, it's not good for the clients. I understand where it's coming from because that's in the line we've been being fed by the media, but that's not the work. You have to be able to function at a high level at a human scale before you think about systems and processes that are going to expand you to a scale level, if you think about that at all. So for those of you in those two groups, or if you are a leader in an enterprise or another company that you want to see function in a more value-oriented way, here's what I want you to take away from today. Here's what you can count on taking away from our experience. One is how do you understand the structural economic constraints that you're up against beyond sort of the LinkedIn fodder crap and the media headlines? From there, how do you position that thinking about your venture, the thing you do every day and your goals up against this landscape? So, how do you take what you wake up every day and go, this is what I'm trying to build, this is how I'm trying to build it, this is how it works. How do you understand that differently by when you understand the landscape? Right? If we change the scenery of a play, the play changes. And the scenery of the play has changed dramatically in the last five years. Dramatic changes coming out of COVID. And there were dramatic changes leading into COVID. And so there's a lot of rhetoric and mindset that's still sort of like, hey, it's 2018, but with AI on top, which is not at all what's actually happening out in the world. And I think you probably intuitively know that. You intuitively feel that what is happening out there in the world doesn't actually gel with how the world is being talked about. And that's maybe why you're here today, is to explore some of that. So we're going to get you up against the landscape as it actually is, so that you can evaluate what you're doing in a more realistic way. The next, then you start to come into play. What is the interaction between you as the leader and your venture, the thing that you're making at your scale? Which is another way is just how do you recognize your part in this? Your human part. How are you complicit? How are you part of the problem? How are you part of the solution? We're going to surface some of that, right? Number four, the role of trust as both the problem and the solution. You guys who've known me, who worked with me before, know that I talk about trust extensively. Trust is both the problem and the solution here, and we're going to talk about that. We're going to give you a timeline for your development and your venture development about how things should go, what's the process by which a venture moves, and then how my work, the trust made community and culture craft, is taking all of this and inviting you out into the streets and what that means for you. Okay. So based on that, we want to start with what the game is. The technocratic command and control extraction system is built to benefit the very few at the cost of the many and our future. And that is in meteoric ascent. We're going to talk a little bit about what extraction system means here in a second, but you guys kind of know what I mean, right? The companies, the shareholder primacy, all the things that are taking more out of the economy that they're putting in, that is growing and empowering at a rate that is very unnerving, both at the political level and the social scale. And the way it works is it demands your complicity and thrives on fear and chaos. So one of the things, if you haven't thought about it before, that I want to, what I want you to understand and why we're being pretty meticulous about talking about structure and processes and systems on today's call is because I want to help you ground yourself, put your feet on the ground in the actual work of growing businesses. Because the more your feet are on the ground, the more you see that as tactical and operational, and that it's about building reliable systems and not some like reacting to headlines thing and figuring out what you're going to say on LinkedIn tomorrow, the more you ground yourself, the more you pull yourself out of the fear and the chaos. Because even reacting to the fear and the chaos in sort of helpful ways is being a part of the fog. And we want to help pull you out of that. That's been a lot of the work I've been doing for the last six months is pulling myself out of the fog, another layer than what I already was, so that I can have a level of objectivity to even have this conversation today. So let's talk about extraction versus expansion. All right. This comes out of the book. Um, but there's two games that you can play. One is an extractive game and one is an expansive game. And they work by a different set of rules. And we're gonna look at this from the bottom up. So the the the way you recognize an extractive game is an extractive game takes more than it gives. It depends on resources that it cannot own. So think about oil. Think about the attention economy, think about Facebook, right? Their entire business model depends on something that they cannot own. The oil companies can't own the oil. They can own the oil derrick, they can own the oil rights, but the thing in the ground that has to be there for their business to exist, the fundamental reason their business exists, they can never own. The fundamental reason that Facebook exists, the thing that they make everything out of, which is your attention, your content, your ideas, your posts, your clicks, the thing that they make they can't own any of it. So they have to extract it. And so they build systems of extraction, right? So that's why the extractive game starts at the production layer. And they win by mining and theft. So they go in and they drill and take and dig and steal in some cases. Right. So the production layer, they they start by, hey, what we are we're gonna get go get this thing. We're gonna go get oil, we're gonna go get attention, we're gonna go get data, we're gonna go get clicks. And then we're gonna build a giant system at the operations layer that can only grow by scale and rent seeking. And what do we mean by rent seeking? For those of you who aren't familiar with that phrase, rent seeking simply means is we're not gonna sell you anything. You're never gonna own anything, you're gonna rent forever. So people like to talk about SaaS, like software as a service. I like to think of it as software as a rental. SAR, right? Because you never own anything anymore. And the decimation of the ownership economy was willful and intentional by extractive forces so that you and I never own anything. In fact, they don't even want us to even own the things we make. They want to kill copyright and they want to kill trademark because why should you own anything? Right? You should be dependent on us and pay us rent for that dependency to live, right? This is why a lot of people in this in this point of view love universal basic income. Because, well, gosh, let's just not have people own anything, let's not have them produce anything, let's not have them actually do anything. Let's have them wholesale give themselves over to these gigantic systems which conveniently a small number of people run, and then they'll just be dependent on us. And gosh, we're so nice. We're gonna give them money. We're gonna give them money. We're gonna give them some very nice money. And that is a rent-seeking structure, okay? And then they use relationships for PR and consolidation. So they use relationships to sell the story, to buy and consolidate, to merge in, to build monopoly conglomerates, right? And you see this now today all over the place, that primarily what the AI companies are using their relationships to do is to influence pedal in Congress and in the White House and to sell a narrative.

unknown 17:22

Right?

SPEAKER_00 17:23

So when Elon Musk gets on TV and says in 10 years money won't exist and it won't matter that he's a quadrillionaire. He doesn't mean any of that. All of that's just influence pedaling. It's just a way to manipulate the perception so that he can keep doing what he's doing. We know all of this too well. Now, in its replacement, we're trying to build an expansive game. And an expansive game returns more than it takes. That's the number one rule of an expansive game, is that it returns more than it takes. And so when you think about your venture and the things that you work on every day, does it return more than it takes over long periods of time? Now it doesn't have to happen in a week or a month or even a year, but over long periods of time, does the thing return more into the world than it takes? Now you're gonna have some moments through this process where you may start to feel tension or something that might be easily labeled shame or guilt, or I should be doing more, or I'm doing it wrong, or oh my gosh, I'm part of the wrong program, or whatever. Shame is of no use to us. Guilt is of no use to us, it's not doing any useful job in any of this. We're just trying to observe things as they actually are and then make decisions accordingly. Okay. So if you're feeling some of that pop up, just go, oh gosh, thank you for being here. Goodbye. You're not in charge. Because what we want to do is have a really healthy and whole observation of reality as it actually is. Now, an expansive game returns one that it takes, it also expands the pool of ownership and creation. Now, when we think about that, you may find yourself thinking, well, gosh, that seems fantastical. That seems like oh amazing. How would that ever happen? Right. But this is how nature works all the time. This is how nature works all the time. You put a teeny tiny seed in the ground and it produces all these, all these, all this food, all these things. And then those tomatoes become family recipes. And then those family recipes become the secret jar of tomato sauce that grandma made that she teaches everybody how to make every year that only people know how to make, right? Becomes this expansive thing of creativity and creation and ownership. Nature is by definition expansive, it gives more than it takes. So when you build on things that are alive and human and growing, it naturally expands. We don't have to be intimidated by that. We don't have to feel like it's magical because it's actually the most natural force in the universe. The extractive game, going all the way back to oil as our sort of fundamental example of extraction, the extractive game depends on things that are dead and then uses that dead thing like oil, which is basically decayed dinosaurs and paleo plant life. It uses that thing that's dead to convince other people to be dependent, to make other people dependent on a system. And both these games are operative all the time. And once you have a lens for them, you're gonna see them everywhere, you're gonna feel them everywhere. You probably feel them now, but now we have a name for these two things: the extractive game on one side, the expansive game on the other. And today, in your actions, in your behaviors, you're gonna be doing some of both. You're gonna be doing some expansive things, you're gonna do some extractive things. And that's okay. Because the goal here isn't judgment. The goal here isn't the moral high ground. This isn't Twitter where we're learning to trying to make score points on our sort of ideological enemies. The point here is to build a better, healthier economic system where you make more money by living by your values. So we're just going to observe and see which games are working and how they're working for and against us. Now, here's the best news extractive systems are inherently fragile. That's why they consume and waste so many resources. Their fragility increases over time as they become more and more dependent on unnatural and self-destructive behavior. And the visual I want you to have, I should have put it in the slide deck. Sorry about that. The visual I want you to have is those pictures you can Google, or at least you used to be able to Google. Apparently, we don't say Google anymore. We're supposed to say search it up. You can search it up on the internet of those old theme parks that have been overrun by nature, right? And these giant metallic, ironclad theme park rides are collapsing in on themselves from nature, right? The vines are pulling them in, the trees are breaking the concrete, everything's sort of pulling itself in. That is the nature of extractive systems, is they have they have to get more and more and more and more rigid. In a business sense, I have a friend who works in a really large insurance company, and he said the thing that should terrify everyone is that every single one of these large financial companies have data systems, technology systems that are so old that some guy in the basement knows like three code words of what to do with them. And when he goes, the whole thing goes. Because it's layer upon layer upon layer of code, and that code is messier and messier and messier and messier, and it becomes more and more and more fragile. There's all kinds of apocryphal information about this about the Facebook code base. That one of the reasons why Facebook is as terrible as it is, among many reasons, one of them, one of the reasons is the code base is so unmanageable. It's layers and layers and layers and layers of code. So it becomes more and more and more fragile. This fragility then creates more dependency. So what I want you to remember and be excited about and be passionate about is that these systems that we're so irritated by, they're so fragile. They have such glass jaws because that's why they constantly go running to congressmen and running to, you know, open AIs like, well, the government's gonna invest in us. Well, why do you need that? Why do you SpaceX, why do you need to have billions and billions and billions of dollars of government contracts where it's impossible for you to make money? If what you do is so important and so good, why shouldn't people want to buy it? Right? Somebody did a study where they added up all the money that Elon Musk companies have ever made, all the revenue ever made, and it's significantly less money than his personal net worth. He took more than he gave. He, not just his systems, if he hadn't all his systems, they took dramatically more than they gave. But he personally took more than he gave. That's the essence of an extractive system. And that's why when you see them on TV or when people or they're, you know, throwing fits on Twitter, right? Because they're fragile. They're weak, because there's nothing natural there. And the natural is the resilient. This is a core thesis of what we're doing together. And what I want you to think about embedding more into your work is that the natural is the resilient. The more natural, human, organic, connected, expansive way that you run your own leadership and run your own business, the more resilient you become. And I don't mean resilient in the sense that you sort of hear on Instagram or whatever, well, it's a bad workplace, so you got to have some resilience. I mean resilient in the sense that an oak tree is resilient, in the sense that a perennial plant is resilient that disappears and then comes back to life every 12 months, right? That kind of resilience where its ability to thrive despite its circumstances are baked in. And I want you to think about what it would be like to be a leader running a business where the ability to thrive beyond circumstances was baked in, was just part of who you are. That may seem a little fantastical right now, and that's okay. We're not gonna be those people tomorrow. We're not gonna run those businesses tomorrow, but it is possible when we get back to trust and building for trust, which is one of the primary ways that we get back to the natural rhythms of things. Okay, so really quickly, I'm gonna move through these somewhat expediently because they're kind of in the background, but I want you to think about these. I call them the E7, because they each have a little goofy little E at the front of them. These are the things that if we're gonna turn extraction into expansion, they have to get built. Number one is ambitious adults. We've all had the ambition beat out of us because we think ambition means ego, or it means people we don't like, or it means people who need to be have their at, you know, be seen on the internet, or people who need clicks, or people who need like we have a lot of really warped ideas about ambition. But you have ambition. You have someone you want to be, you have something you want your business to be, you have something being drawn out of you. And we need more of that ambition. Now, the other code word here is adults, because most of the ambitious people we see are functionally emotional teenagers or middle schoolers. And I mean that quite literally, that they function with the emotional framework of a teenager or a middle schooler. You yell at me, I'm gonna yell at you back. You push me, I'm gonna push back, right? So we need ambitious adults. We need to build ambition, but we also need to do it in a way that is embodied in people who function like adults, which means they take personal responsibility, which means they own their own reactivity, which means they have the ability to deal with difference and people who think differently and act differently than them, we need ambitious adults. We need to regenerate the SMIDL. We've talked about the SMIDs or the SMID issues. We need to regenerate the SMIDL. So all of you who are connected to those $3 million to $50 million businesses that are struggling, that are trying to figure out what to do and how to thrive and don't want to just, you know, spend all their time on social media or making content marketing or whatever, like we need to regenerate that space so that it gets back to the expansive engine that it was 70 years ago. Now, there's a lot of things we can't go back to. Almost everything we got to do is we've got to go forward. But we can learn from an economy 70 years ago that was heavily smidal market run. It was small and medium-sized businesses that were the engine of the economy, right? That were built and run in many cases by war veterans and baby boomers coming back from the war. That environment, that strong middle class, there's a lot of things that created that, but we need to get back to that. So if you are building a business in that middle, we are heavily dependent on you thriving. And we and I'm actively building tools to help you do that. If you're in the solo space, we need superpowered solos. This we're gonna have so many solo-ish businesses. There's so many of you out there. We're gonna need you to be functioning at a very high level. And that produces what I refer to in the copy here as an enzymatic system. What I mean by an enzymatic system is one, it's one more E for the E7. But two, is it goes in and in a garden, the enzymes, the grubs, the chemical processes clean up the dirt. That if you put the right things in the soil, the soil is self-healing. In an economy, the solo practices, the one to two to three person teams that are touching and helping and strategizing and advising and providing small focused surfaces here, there, and everywhere, those folks are the enzymes in the soil that transform how the underlying economy runs. We need more of that. Obviously, this is going to produce and needs to produce true towns and neighborhoods. We don't have a lot of time to go into this today, but if this doesn't reflect in localized physical expressions, better streets, better parks, more engaged ways of building businesses, not a McDonald's on every corner, but a local cafe on every corner, right? Because all of that, the way that we're building cities and towns right now is so extractive. It's got to become expansive, which means that the town becomes better because something's in it. Well, every time you put in a McDonald's, millions of dollars leave your town. That's just the way McDonald's works. Now, the other fast food chains are no different, but McDonald's is done at the largest scale. If you put in a local business and people go buy their hamburgers there at that local business, then that money stays in the town and in the neighborhood. And that's really, really important beyond the scope of today's conversation, but it isn't out. Central to all of this is we need expansive capital. We need money to work in ways where it adds more than it takes. One of the problems with the much of the VC and private equity markets, not all, right? There are some really thoughtful, regenerative, intentional PEs and VCs out there. So we we can never throw away the baby with the bathwater. But we need more of that and less of the norm, which is, hey, let's just smash everything together and lay everybody off, right? We need more expansive capital. We need independent markets. What I mean by independent markets is places where we can buy and sell, where we're not dependent on extractive third parties. So we need Craigslist, not Facebook Marketplace. Craigslist is an independent market. He's just a guy, right? And we traded Craigslist for Facebook Marketplace because it was easier. But the reality is what Facebook Marketplace is harming us all day long, every day. It's feeding an extractive system, right? We need independent markets. We need, we need neighborhoods, we need places where people buy and sell locally. We need collaborative collaborations between online um service businesses, like many of you on this call, so that we're working together to improve each other's businesses and to grow and to refer and all of that kind of stuff. And then to do all of this long term, we need a democratic age academy. There is a very real role that higher education has to play in this. I've done some work in higher education. This is beyond the scope of today's call, but the the it is incredibly important that we rethink how we embed, build, grow, develop young leaders, young adults, um, and and have them thinking inter in interdisciplinary ways. The academy is designed to help people think in interdisciplinary ways. And we need that more than ever. We need more philosophy majors, we need more communications majors, we need more gender studies majors, we need more art history majors, we need people who understand context and place and theme so that we can build things that stand the test of time, not things that just react to somebody's uh teenager feelings in the moment. So those are the E seven. What does this mean for you? At least one of the E seven is you, and we can't afford for you to opt out. At least one of the E seven is you, and we can't afford for you to opt out. So maybe you're a leader who needs more support and training to build regeneratively. Maybe you're that number one. And you work in a business, you don't own a business, maybe it could be either one, but when you're looking at it, it's just like I I need that ambitious adult, I want to be that ambitious adult. You own or lead a business in that kind of three, I should say three to fifty scale that needs to re-establish and rebuild itself and get back to regenerative growth and off of extractive systems, which we'll talk about how that works here in just a second. Or you're a solo and somewhere in that consultancy solo-ish space and you need to reposition for expansion. You're just you're just surviving. You're like, well, I just got to find some people, buy and you know, do a little bit of business there, take care of my family, right? And you don't haven't had the vision of how you, in collaboration with a larger network of solo providers and solo-ish providers that are running actual businesses, not just jobs or freelance uh organizations, but actual businesses that work together, network, and build the next thing, right? And rebuild the soil that all of us are growing in. Um, we need you, right? So you're you're probably one of those things. Um, I want you to identify yourself as one of those things. You're not doing that in the chat right now, you should be. Identify yourself as one of those things in the E7 and what this means for you. Okay, how do you move from expand extraction to expansion? The primary way you do it is to how is how you think about growth. The primary way that you move from extraction to expansion is how you think about growth. And the resistance force that's keeping you from doing that is this thing I write about called the shitload fog. Um, there's a link to a newsletter about the shitload. If you haven't read that newsletter, you can read it. But everybody in our current environment, and this is going to go on for another decade at least. This is not going anywhere, is everyone in our current environment is suffering from loneliness, right? Our hearts are lonely, overwhelmed, our brains are overwhelmed by attention triggers and software that functions like dopamine addictions. We're overwhelmed. We have high levels of embodied anxiety. We've been trained to be distrustful and anxious. And then again, that distrust is distrusting ourselves, distrusting systems, distrusting each other. Your number one job, no matter which of the three previous things you picked, your number one job is to move through distrust. Not to get rid of distrust, to move through it. Because we have to trust the distrust first. It's all there for a reason. This, like, hey, this is wrong and it shouldn't be this way, is there for a reason, but we got to move through it, not get stuck in it. So here's five ways that you can move through that shitload fog from to move from rent growth to own growth. We can move from depending on algorithmic platforms to growing via own networks and organic campaigns. So it doesn't mean you have to turn off Facebook or turn off Instagram or turn off whatever, but if what you're doing is dependent on those systems, it's just that much harder to work in an expansive way. Right. I'm doing a big event through one of our programs you'll hear about later on this call. I keep saying later, we only got 10 minutes left. I promise you we'll get there. I'm doing a big event. It's gonna require some Instagram ads. That's how we get to let people know that this event is happening and people are gonna go. I'm not against using some Instagram ads here or there. We the bulk of the work is word of mouth, it's emails, it's invitations, it's the network that I've built around this event. So we want to reduce dependency on those algorithmic platforms. We want to move from being funded by extractive capital, which is basically like grow, grow, grow, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale. Who cares about the outcomes, just get bigger no matter what, to mission-aligned ownership structures and governance. The Incorruptible book by Eric Reese, which is making the rounds, is an incredible book on this mission-aligned ownership and structure and governance. You need to move from being built on third-party data and software. So essentially, all these people who are spinning up AI companies that are made on the backs of Chat GPT or made on the backs of anthropic, that's absolutely asinine. You don't own any of that. You're living on rented land. You're essentially participating in your own future demise. You need to move from being built on third-party data and software to build on first party data and systems. You have to make that move over time. Subscription-based selling and building to transaction and engagement-based selling and building. Subscriptions aren't inherently wrong, but if everything you're doing is a subscription, unless you're a magazine, I'm really that unless you're a magazine or a newspaper that's constantly producing time-based, time-sensitive information and resources, subscription-based tends to degrade into the extraction. Retainers, the way a lot of fractional contracts are built, all of those things tend to bend you into the extraction, unintentional. Whereas transaction engagement based, which is this is what I'm selling for this period of time for these outcomes, is trust building. And the more the more that we do, the more that people take the courage to sell in that way, the better results that we get. Decontextualized market and message. What we mean by that is the way the internet has asked you to do is just scream into the void. There's no context there. Just put it on a giant platform where billions of people read it and hope something happens, right? It lacks context. You're speaking to the great unknown, and the message can't cut through because there's no particularity to it. And so then we have to move into local and communal and/or value-based context. Some of you do work as I do, that it's impossible for it to be exclusively local. The work that I do can't exclusively be based in Des Moines, Iowa. I have people on this call and people in my relationships that are spread across the world, right? But I can orient it toward a very specific context of people with shared values. And that allows me to move more to a place of owning my own growth and owning the outcomes of that growth, moving from rented growth to own growth. This is just a big reminder that what got you here won't get you where you're going next. And a lot of the work that we're going to describe here in the final minutes here comes back to what we call root work. And if you feel any of this, what I was said here, that the top line isn't moving like it's used to, the bottom line is shrinking, the status quo is getting more and more expensive with lesser outcomes, and your venture is outgrowing its current constraints. It used to work. It used to work more easily. You're feeling the pressurization, the encasement of extraction. And what's worked is no longer meeting the moment. We call that getting root bound. And root bound is a natural function of a growing thing, right? You put a plant in a pot and it gets bigger, and then the roots get caught up in the pot and you got to put it in a bigger pot. So root bound is not bad. It is a function of a growing thing. But the system that we've built is intentionally putting you in smaller and smaller pots, higher and higher levels of containment, so that the root bound becomes more and more often and more and more difficult, which is why we need more support. Your pivot out of passive complicity, again, no shame, no guilt. We're just all passively participating in the extraction stuff, and into the active creative risk of expansion is three things context specific, category agnostic, and time sensitive. So, first, context specific. You have to know where you live physically, ideologically, values, people, who you want to be around, why you want to be around them. You have to deeply understand the context that you want to be and you have to know where you want to be and why you want to be there. It's category agnostic. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer or you sell technology or you sell marketing services or plumber or none of this matters. It's category agnostic because what's happening in the extraction is extraction has reached into every category to pull out the underlayment. And we have to build all that underlayment back. And it's time sensitive. We have to start turning the tide. That is all there is to it. We have to start turning the tide. Um, this is just a little bit of the system of what I'm building to make this happen. And I call it a network of new and very old systems and tools to accelerate health and trust. So for ventures, we have trust-made growth, which you may have heard something about. It's our system for building ventures and growing ventures. Partnering with it, you're seeing more and more of this if you're following me and following us, is Undivided Leader, which is the human part underneath trustmade growth. How do you make leaders who make trust-made growth? We can build ventures in systemic strategic ways to produce more trust and pull more trust into the ecosystem. But those ventures eventually start pressurizing the leader inside of them. And the leader has to function in different ways. You may be feeling that like, oh my gosh, I'm trying to build a good business with good values and things that I care about, but I'm being pressurized. And so we're deepening our offerings with Undivided Leader to really help the humans inside these systems. Again, just a little bit of sort of brand recognition here. Culture Craft is the strategy house where all the programs and consultancy come from. Some of you have seen and I mentioned earlier our local work with Lexicon Farms. This is our little experimental lab. It's physical places doing deep connectivity, doing deep work in person, creative, experiential, exciting things happening with Lexicon Farms. Interregna Press is our brand new independent publisher. This is where ideas and intellectual rigor come out. We're going to be publishing more things. So if you want to get involved in what we're doing on the publishing side, let us know. And then coming next year, we're building out the platform for actually some of that expansive capital. How do we start partnering with and co-building ventures with folks so that what you're building out there in the world, we can help you co-create it and incubate what your entrepreneurial vision and goals are. Okay, how does all this work? This is the big messy map. You ready for this? So I'm going to send you this deck. We're not going to spend as much time on it as we could. But what happens with growth, what I want you to see on this, is that we move from trustmate growth, which is how we build the business, the venture itself. And slowly over time, the tooling becomes more about how do we build the person. We usually can't start with how do we build the person because we're all feelings and et cetera. We got to start with how do we build the thing. Because the venture itself, the thing you're trying to build, will pressurize you. It will send energy back to you to go, well, now you have to be better. You have to be different. You have to expand. So when the venture starts pressurizing you back, then you need some of the tools of undivided leader, which is what that sliding scale is. Across the top line is really our smittish line. So I'm going to cross that top line here first. The first thing that happens is the leader of the venture accepts reality. And that's really the first 30 minutes of this call. Are you willing to accept the reality of what we're up against, how it works, and what's required of you to make it better? Are you willing to accept and embrace that reality? Then you need to move to what is it that you're doing that's keeping you stuck in the way things are. We do that through the process of uh, again, a program called Root Work. We do root work for SMID businesses, it's a little bit more robust, and we do a root work for solos, solos and uh you know, solo ish practices that's for smaller organizations. You can see the link on the screen there for root work. If you're interested in root work, you can find out more about it. You can get on the wait list and we'll let you know how that works. We support all of that, all the people involved in any of those things through the guild. So we have a guild of people who are like, yeah, but I care about this stuff and I'm excited about it and I want to work on it. And it's it's really just an online community of people that you can be a part of that are asking similar questions and working on similar things. You can join the guild. Root work then moves you into building trust-making systems. All of this is systems work. Everything we're doing is systems work. We have to break down and degrade, right? Remember the collapsing amusement park. We have to break down and degrade broken systems. We have to undermine them at the foundational level. And then we have to build healthy systems, which is happens sort of like a wave. It goes up and down, it goes in and out, it cycles, it's not linear, right? And we move through identification of new root problems, discovery and exploration of the key decisions that have to get made. And we move those decisions into a change motion, and then we integrate, just like nature, right? Something new goes into the ground, we look into the ground, go, do we have good soil? Yep, we check the soil, we put something new into it, we make a decision. The seed of every good thing in your business is a decision. So we put something new in the ground, we make a decision. And then out of that decision, we do a change motion. We water, we fertilize, we make sure there's sun, we do a change motion to make sure that seed takes, and then we see what happens. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it works quite exactly what we want it to, and it produces a whole bushel full of jalapeno peppers, and sometimes it doesn't. And we have to learn and we have to put something new in the ground. And we go back to soil and we go back to seed and we keep those transformational cycles. That's the work that we do in the SMID space over and over and over and over again in those transformational sprints. And that produces businesses that are then more and more capable of regeneration. Businesses that are more and more expansive, more and more scale, scale in a way that is at a human level, that touches people and puts more back into the world than it takes out. Now, on the solo wish path down below, we do a similar, much smaller root work, because again, the job of your small solo is business is to make sure that you're using your own capacity in the best possible way. That's really the primary job. You using your own capacity and cultivating your own leader capacity in the best possible way. Your first thing you have to do is you have to move from a job to a venture. You have to stop just being like, well, I gotta show up every day and see if I have some clients. If I do have some clients, I'm gonna do some work and then I'm gonna go home. Building a solo ish practice is not a lunch pail job. You know, it doesn't have to be a 70 hour week job either, but it's not show up for the hours I'm scheduled, eat my lunch, show up for the hours I'm scheduled, and go. You have to have a sense of ownership that you're building something bigger than you in the world that is then driven by you.

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Once you

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Have that sense of ownership when you move from job to venture, then a couple things happen. One is we probably need some leadership support, which is that middle channel. You're gonna need to lead differently. We're gonna talk about that note here in just a second, right under the A of transformational sprints. But we're also, after you've done some root work, after you've explored what you need as a solo wish venture, you're gonna have to learn the skills to do it: operations, finance, sales, how to craft it, how to craft the right offer. And we have one tool that already does that. We have one tool called TrustForge, which some of you have heard about, and we'll talk more here about the end. We have one cool tool called TrustForge that already does that. And then we're expanding very, very soon into what we're just loosely now calling the academy, which is we're taking solo wish leaders to school, to business school, to say, okay, finance, operations, hiring, staffing, project management, selling. How do you sell in a way that you can feel good about and get results? How do I build an offer? How do I think about pricing? How do I think about my own PLs? All of these kinds of tools that no one taught you because you didn't go to business school, but are essential for that solo ish part of the business to really develop. We want to bring you into that through this academy that we're building. All of it will come out of individuals like you doing the solo ish root work. Um, it all starts there, if that's somewhere where you want to start. We have those links available. So all of this flows together in an organic path, in a way of working together so that we get better and better and better and better leaders. The ventures make the leaders. The ventures create the pressure, the crucible, the systems, the challenges, the requirements, so that you as the leader have to go, oh, I gotta be better. And one of the reasons why some of the people who should be leading things aren't leading things and are staying in the background is because you're afraid of having to be better. So you build small. You treat it like a job instead of like a venture. You treat it like a thing to show up to every day instead of something that you can expand on. Or if you're in the smittish space, you just try and go, well, we've got enough working here. We can just survive for a while. How long can we survive and hope that things get better? It's not things are not going to get better. We got to make them better, right? And so to get to that regenerative space, to get to that expansive space, we have to become bigger and more expansive leaders. And we do that by reorienting the way we think about our businesses and putting more into the businesses that we build. So from here, some things that may have popped up for you. If you want to do root work, if you're thinking about root work and going, well, how does this apply to me and my business, whether you're a solo or a smid, you can go to culturecraft.com slash rootwork. That's the root work. If you know, if you are a small, uh, if you are a solo or a smallish business, you're like, I just want to figure out how to sell and get my offer in the world and just really make that pivot from, hey, I have a thing that I do to really owning a venture and putting it out into the world. TrustForge is your place. We're starting TrustForge next week, but we have two spots left. So if you want one of those two spots for Trust Forge, make sure you jump into culturecraft.com slash trustforge. We'll have a wait list after that for the next one. We have two spots left. And if you do nothing else, join the guild. Join our guild. Get to know the team, get to know the community. There's so many cool people uh in the guild doing cool things. And that joining the guild of trustmakers moves you down a path that maybe eventually you're going to do your own root work. And then maybe you're gonna set your offer in a way that is aligned through TrustForge or some of the tools. And then eventually what we're doing, and we have the early crew of this, we're so excited about the first, I think, five people that are actively doing this, is you become a part of our trustmade expansion. You are delivering trustmade services. You have the stamp of approval, the training, the resources, and you can go out in the world and you can do this yourself in your own venture, in your own way, in your through your own value. And you can do that in a $10 million business or a $3 million business or a $40 million business. It doesn't matter. So, last one last quick thing, then we're gonna move to the questions and what's in the chat. If you haven't heard before, the book's coming out. The book's coming out in just six weeks here. It's gonna be um here uh September 15th. And we really need you to be a part of it. We need you to pre-order uh damrulesbook.com. We need you to talk to your friends, we need you to have it be a part of your group. If you have a podcast or know someone who has a podcast, we need to be a part of it. This book lays out the map. The seven rules you see on this screen, it lays out the map of how do we actually do this? How do we build these trustmade ventures out in the world? If you're even slightly interested in that, we're gonna be doing a bunch of cool things, free copies of the book, free training, lots of cool resources, some very sexy swag, right? And you can be a part of the launch team. And that's at culturecraft.com slash launch team to be a part of the launch team for the book. So thank you so much. We'll see you in the guild, we'll see you in the work, and let's expand. Let's do expansion together. Let's do it. All right, thanks all.