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
Don't Wait for Things to Get Better: Recognizing Contraction and Taking Action
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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.
