The Crisis Leaders Mistake as Midlife

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.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dams Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless ways that humans build, collaborate, and buy. Welcome to Dams Given, a podcast this week about the heartwarming topic of what it costs to be awake and alert amid the mass extraction in our markets and systems. I'm Nick Richmeyer, your host. There's a lot of conversations happening right now about what's broken with the economy, the algorithm, the trillionaires, and this sort of digital panopticon of surveillance that we wake up every day inside of. Lots of good substacks about it, lots of good places you can read about it. A lot of it veers into the problem analysis slash problem evangelism arena, which I totally get, right? There we're there's a media blindness that's happening around us. There's a sense that the information that we're getting is not telling the full story. Obviously, distrust abounds everywhere. So, you know, there's a there's a subset of people who sort of take it upon themselves to say, hey, we're gonna narrate a more robust telling of what's really happening at the system scale. And I think those people are super important. And I collaborate with a lot of them, I engage with a lot of them. I think where that runs into a limit, a limiting factor where that kind of idea ideation work can be limited, is we only need so many blogs about the problem of Elon Musk being a trillionaire. Like we I get it, right? We we sort of just get it that that's probably not how an economy should work. And there's also a sense of like, well, what are we gonna do about it? And and I think there's a short list of people thinking well about what to do about it. And one of those people is the person I'm talking to this week, Nick Whitaker. Um he doesn't just sort of pontificate about the problem. He's actually actively involved in helping leaders embody their own solutions in the world. He's a coach, a mediator, a systems thinker, and the founder of the oh so subtly titled Rebellion Collective. It's really a community of people who are are done, kind of resigning themselves to their fate of the machine and are ready to actually do something a little bit different. Um, he works primarily with people inside the tech sector and kind of waking up to the systems they've built and how they aren't working for them anymore. Um, but he's just as far as you can get from the guru space, which I'm super, super grateful for. Um, and we really got together as just fellow students trying to figure out how to move through this particular moment in history with integrity and and with authenticity and really with a sense of how to build for what's next. We share a lot of language, uh, not just a name, but we share a lot of language and a lot of the shared conviction. So um, but you're also gonna find, I think, in today's call, just uh some legitimately interesting tensions in how we think about some of this. And you're gonna hear both sides of some things today. Um this is really like I mentioned at the top of the show, what it costs to be awake right now and what it means to build something generative inside an era that's really doing everything it can to extract the last main domains out of our personal and um economic sovereignty, creativity, critical thinking, self-trust. So without further ado, here's Nicholas Whitaker and our conversation on thriving in the extractive economy. All right, friends. Well, we're back here with maybe the best Nick that's ever been on this call. Nick Whitaker is here. Many of you know Nick. Uh, we share a community, we share lots of folks in common. Just you and I, other than sharing a name, we also share a view of the world. And we're gonna jump right in today. Really, this question of if we're under a giant extractive system that is not moving, is finding more capital every day, is a system built on a system on us built on a system all that's self-reinforcing. People are little by little waking up to going, this sucks. I don't really want to do this. Some of those people are in-house, in technology firms or other large companies, some people are entrepreneurial. There's like they're in lots of different states. And my observation is everybody's in various forms of almost grief. Like they're online bargaining with this idea of an extractive system, trying to see if they can play along, trying to see if it will keep them, you know, compensated for as long as possible. Some of them are in fight mode, some of them are honestly probably in depression. Like, how do you you deal with much more the coaching, emotional, personal side of this? How do you see people reacting and living through their reaction to this awakening?

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah. Well, first of all, Nick, it's great to see you. It's great to be on the podcast. And it's been just really cool also just watching you work in the world and like what you're putting out there. So I'm really excited that our worlds have started spiraled more closely together. Me too. I I think it's so important to be having these conversations. And I think, you know, what you're the language that you're using is very similar to mine. The word that you just use is the one I think that I'd love to grasp onto. It's this idea of an awakening. And I think there's something really profound there. And I think what most of the clients that I talk to are experiencing is some form of awakening, class consciousness, you know, a sudden awareness of the systems that they're in. I have a tattoo on my arm of the panopticon. If people aren't familiar with that concept, it's a utopian building structure. Jeremy Bentham developed back, you know, was it the 1800s or something like that? And it was, it was supposed to be the structure that anything could recur within it, a school, a prison, you know, a factory. The whole concept behind it was it was structured in such a way that the people with the inhabitants of the cells in the outside area could not tell when they were being observed or not by the guards. And the structure worked so well, you could remove the guards, and the system would continue to perpetuate itself based on whatever rules were set out of fear, out of fear of repercussions of being seen as not being in alignment with that system. I got that tattoo back in 2008 after grad school. And I was very steeped in the literature around these topics. I was learning a little bit about Michel Foucault and his studies around control. And fast forward, here we are in literal digital panopticon. And the the digital tools that we use on social media, the corporate structures that we work within, quite literally Meta within the last few days, weeks has decided to start monitoring the keystrokes and the mouse movements of their employees, supposedly to train AI. But I think there's multiple reasons for for why they're doing that, probably as a way to move people out of the company that aren't abiding by the new rules of what their leadership is. But I think so many people that I talk to these days are starting to wake up to the system that they're in. And I think a lot of them knew it all along the way, but there was this willful ignorance and this willful blinding of themselves so that they could just do the thing. You know, I talked to somebody yesterday in particular, who's like, I'd done other things. I went to undergrad, I got straight A's, I went to grad school, I got my MBA, I got the big boy job at a corporate entity, and suddenly the rug gets ripped off from underneath me, and all of this is for what? Like, what did I do all of this for? So I think a lot of folks that I'm working with, it's an identity crisis, it's a spiritual crisis, it's a crisis of confidence, and it's this struggling with the recognition of and the awakening of that they're in a system that isn't necessarily working for them and wasn't built for them.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Yeah. And I we should say that you work with a ton of Silicon Valley people, right? So, and you work with a lot of middle and senior managers. So this, you know, I think sometimes some of our audience that maybe is a little farther than that, or they run businesses and professional services, or they're a little further away from sort of the heat map of this, might hear this and go, oh, well, this is, you know, this is classic, you know, line workers shaking their fists at the bosses, don't want to be managed, you know. And I I want to be really, really clear. That's not what this is. This is about overt economic wide, right? Economy-wide systems of control to extract value everywhere to an extreme minority of people.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

Right. And using technology to do it. And that's different than sort of a classic midlife awakening of like, oh crap, all ever all of this has been for nothing. I should go buy a Corvette, right? And I think part of the challenge of it is it has colors of that. Yeah. Right. It's sort of if if you listen with a with a cynical ear, you're like, well, haven't we been here before? Isn't this like boomers in the 80s, you know, et cetera? How is it different this time?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah, it's a really important question. What I'm noticing is it's a metacrisis. It's multiple things at the same time that are all kind of crashing. And there is that layer of the midlife, you know, if you call it a midlife crisis, it's because you're not aware of what's happening. You don't have the tools to actually reckon with it. And that's where we end up buying the sports cars and things like that. I'm literally buying a motorcycle right now. So I'm I'm somewhat like, you know, am I you're just having a self-aware midlife moment. There it is. Yeah, it's a very, it's a very intentional one. I'm upgrading. So there is that layer to it. But I think by and large, it's, you know, while that was focused on a particular demographic of people at a particular slice of their life, and largely I think it's because a lot of people they don't really have the opportunity to reflect and actually think about what matters to them until that age of life. What got them there, as the old adage uh goes, isn't what's going to get them to the next level. And there's this collapse of identity, and there's a crisis that occurs. And that's like the midlife crisis that we all know so well. But what I'm hearing more and more are people experiencing quarter life crises. And, you know, they're going through these experiences more often and more rapidly. And I think it mirrors a lot of what we're seeing within tech and within the social sphere that we're in, and media and all these different forces that are coming together that had for decades promised us wealth and freedom and safety and time. And now we have AI, which is impacting things at scale, not maybe in the same ways that the media is hyping, but what I'm noticing more often than not is, you know, it's it's extracting the last domains of what is ours, our sovereignty, that big media and social media and other technologies weren't able to get to. And what I mean specifically by that is our creativity, our critical thinking, and our self-trust and our self-confidence. Like we now are turning to these tools, these external exogenous sources for wisdom that we would have internally if we would just give ourselves the time to actually look into it. So, you know, the thing that's different, I think, about it is that say 10 years ago or even five years ago, there was still a distance between us and say big media, for example, and social media. There was a distance there that it wasn't pervasive to the point where it's in in invading every single area of our life. And I think that the shift here is that the last little domains of colonization of our humanity is now being approached by these technology companies. And I think that's the tension that a lot of folks are feeling. It's it's not just, oh, it's like a new iPhone that's changing things. It's it's a radical shift in how we work, it's a radical shift in how we make meaning and how we connect with each other and information. And we're still trying to catch up from the technology of the smartphone and social media. So I think it's this compounding effect of crises that people have not had the time to metabolize. And now we're seeing this as identity collapse and mental health collapse and all the things all the way down.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Yeah, the way I resonate with all that. I mean, the way I frame it um in the book that's coming out uh here in a couple months is that this is really that you we use the Panopticon as this sort of philosophic idea. Here's another one is this idea of an interregna, right? So uh a interregnum, a gap between reigns, literally in the Latin. And it would be one thing if we were entering into a big gap between, like, you know, the media era and the digital era or something like that. But really, what we're having is four or five of these massive systemic shifts all lining up with each other. Um, there's a great book out there that I disagree with huge sections of, but the book is excellent called the uh the Gutenberg Parenthesis. And he makes the case that we're at the end of print, right? So we're end of a 500-year reign where words won, words win, right? Words don't win anymore. Words on a page, right? And that creates a level of chaos. It's well documented that we're clearly at the end of the neoliberalism regime of the last 50 years. That's creating a level of chaos. And then on down, right? Even to the end of digital e-commerce as a primary trustworthy place to transact business, digital e-commerce. Everybody's in chaos about this, right? Can you actually make money on the internet anymore? What is online advertising? Like, you know, uh and and all of these things unraveling at the same time have psychological, social, sci social psychological effects. And one of the things we were talking about before we jumped on the call is that a first stage of this for leaders is you have to be awakened to and accept that that some of this and a great deal of this is external to you. Right? That it's not just, oh my God, I'm freaking crazy. Am I losing my mind? Okay, am I just like, what is wrong with me? Because it is easy to go to the I'm having a midlife crisis. Right. Until I remember that multiple times a day, I literally have a version of the thought of, hey, I should go check my advertising feed. And then I scan for half an hour of advertising to see if that makes my brain work better. Right. Maybe I'm not having a midlife crisis. Maybe I'm literally doing self-inflicted brain damage. So let's say I've accepted that and I've gone, okay, systems effed. I hate this. Now what? Right? Now what? Because this is, I think, the a crux that I'm wrestling with right now that I want you to help me and help all of us with. Because I think the reaction, in some ways, created by the social media culture is you know what we should do? We should blog about it.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

We should write some substacks. Yeah. We should call out the big issues. We need to black square our Instagrams, right? And I, having lived through the 2020, you know, performative social media in the way that I personally did, it just all feels really sickening to me. I'm like, what is what are we doing?

unknown 15:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

But maybe you have a better, different lens on it than I do. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

We'll see. Let's see where we can go with it. You know, I am yeah, I think there's layers to this, you know, because I am also a consumer and being consumed by social media as everybody else is. You know, I use it as a tool for marketing. I use it as a tool to find clients. I'd say 90% of my clients come through LinkedIn. I was talking with somebody in the journalism industry yesterday, one of my clients, and we were talking about it as serfdom. You know, like we're all sharecroppers on borrowed land. And there's a reality to that that I think if you can be aware of it and understand what that actual relationship is and dynamic is, understanding what the panopticon shape is that you're in, then it gives you some agency to be subversive. It gives you some agency to like reclaim some of your attention. And to me, it's so much about intentionality. You know, so for folks that to your point, you know, like if the reflex is, let me go shake fists at clouds and you know, rail on social media about the ills of the world, but not actually having a solution behind that. If that's all we're doing, then well, we're just kind of playing the game that the system is designed for us. I was I was watching a video on YouTube which I would caution people. It's called Matrix Explained. It's a whole video series and it deconstructs the Matrix movies. Um, the dark wormhole that I've been spending months in now. But it basically flipped the whole movie on its head. Everybody's like, oh, if we could just be Morpheus or Neo and extract people from the Matrix, then everything will be great. And somebody was saying in this video is like the Matrix movie was exactly the type of movie that the Matrix would make to placate people within the system to give false hope, a Zion that I'll fly to. And I don't know that that's the answer. You know, I think the answer, it's it's staring the beast right in its face and understanding exactly what it is, what our role that it wants us to play is, and then resisting where we can and subversing or subverting where we can. I speak about it in terms of rebellion, reclaiming our capacity from these systems, and capacity being a combination of our time, our energy, and our attention. If we can have more domain over those things and understand when our attention gets pulled off and we start scrolling endlessly and notice that almost like a meditation and using that as a signal to bring our attention back to what actually matters, then slowly but surely we can start to bring our attention back to the things that we actually want. And we can hopefully put our energies into things that will help progress us forward. Like, for example, just being in contact with other humans, helping your neighbor, you know, like simple things. Perhaps creating a new business, creating a new field that hasn't been developed before. And that may be very aspirational for most people. I think a lot of people, they're just trying to pay their mortgage. They're just trying to fulfill the life promise of what they've created already. And I think some of it requires a radical shift and understanding of what does make for a good life these days. And can we maybe pull ourselves away from some of these technological advancements? Can we focus our attention on, I don't know, reading books? Can we focus our attention on staying present, staying grounded and connecting with others in a way that's meaningful? I think those are really basic ways. And it maybe seems trite as solutions, but I honestly think it's going back to first principles of what makes us human and what's allows us to be in community with one another is a really beautiful place to start.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Yeah, I think what I find is I have a similar conversation with others, and I agree with what you're saying, is like there's this tension of like, well, there must be some really radical thing, you know, that we can do. You know, people will ask me on podcasts, well, what's the one thing people should do? I say, well, that's the beautiful thing, is that because the path forward is so human, there's like a billion things. You know, it's part of what really slowed me down in writing the book. I'm like, do we really need another book on this? There's, you know, go read Walden. Go read, like, I'm never gonna compete with that stuff. Like the reality is we all know what we need to do. In fact, our bodies are telling us what to do. And hopefully to some degree that's encouraging, right? Because if we can start to re-resource ourselves, right to your point, right? We get some capacity, and then all of a sudden you have energy and movement to figure out what to do with that capacity.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

And maybe it's creating some safety for the people who report to you in the business that you work at. Maybe it's doing something entrepreneurial. Right. I'm a big believer that these two systems, the extractive system and the expansive system, live in coexistence. Because the extractive system depends on the expansive system to exist. It's got to keep pulling the oil from the ground. So it can it's gonna need contact with the ground forever. So what we have to do is to realize hey, if all the capital and resources are up here in the extractive system, then we just go visit every once in a while and pull some capital and resources out and build something regenerative. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Yeah. And I think to me, that connects the dots between what we were just saying a minute ago. It's like, well, yeah, do I just go and create a sub stack? Do we just write about these things? Well, maybe. But like I think the the the inherent piece within that, that it's it's the next step forward to that is like building community, building connection. I I talk about it as lashing our rafts together in a storm. We don't know what the future is gonna be like. I can guarantee it's gonna be more chaotic than it is now, at least, and say that for sure. We don't know what the shape of it's gonna be. And I think what we've experienced for the last 40, 50, 60 years, at least my entire lifetime, is this idea of radical self-reliance, the pulling up of the bootstraps, the lone wolf mentality. You know, it's it's this very American Western kind of view of like how to how to move through. I remember when I was uh at the big tech company that I worked at, they had a whole program on resilience. And it was a sports psychologist that had gotten a degree in resilience, and she was pioneering this whole set of trainings around it. And it was targeted at the individual. Here's how you can be more resilient within a system that's broken. It's essentially what the implication was. And I watched people recoil against this language and myself even recoiling against this language because it puts the onus on the individual to figure it all out and have all these answers. And yeah, to some point we do have them. We can pick up Walden, we can go out and touch grass. But a lot of us have this myth that we need a bigger gesture. We need something much bigger than that to actually create change. And we want it now. We want that immediacy, which we've been trained to accept is like the default. We just want to door dash our social change. And it just doesn't work that way, you know. And to me, I just got back from Arizona. I got a chance to see the Grand Canyon and talk about a humbling experience. You look at this giant structure of earth that's been carved for millennia by water. And it's like, that's the answer. It's the slow, persistent flow of energy and the capacity we have to make change over time. But it's not by ourselves. It's not just the one drop of water. It's all of us pushing and efforting towards a better future that's really going to allow us to change all of this or to survive all of this. So, you know, I think for me, it's, you know, can we be very clear about what role we have? And can we start, first of all, internal? It's an intern inside job often. Can we ground ourselves? Can we then in concentric circles radiate outwards and support others within our immediate family, with people in our neighborhood, people, you know, in our larger social group, within our workplace? And then, you know, find together collective resilience or community resilience that allows us to survive and to thrive, hopefully, as things continue to spiral.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the one of the things that I've tried to get my head around and I've been talking with others about is I really believe that whatever we build, whatever resilient, energetic solutions, economic solutions we build in our lifetimes, we're not going to see their long-term effect. Right. Like I just I I had this I had this realization during COVID. I woke up one morning and I'm like, I'm never gonna see if any of this was worth it. Like never. Like I'm gonna be one of those people that when the history books are written, not my name, obviously, but that that chunk of people live through one of those eras that just there was no resolution.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

You know, there's like whole chunks of hundred-year chunks and 50-year chunks and 70-year chunks where it's just like, well, that was messy. And then later some things became clear. Yeah. And I really believe that this first half century of the 21st century, at least is that is this unknown space that we have to decide how we want to live in and what we want to leave behind. And I get that's big legacy thinking, and you know, it sounds like an old guy and whatever. But at the end of the day, I think the work outlasts us. And that to me gives us a little bit more resilience in then it's not just about survival. It's about hey, if the algorithmic society degraded and destroyed fundamental institutions that created stability for hundreds of years, the solution isn't to try to reclaim those institutions. They're gone, right? That doesn't mean I'm gonna turn off my New York Times subscription, but the New York Times as a stabilizing institution or the print media as a stabilizing institution is gone. Or corporate America or the idea of a linear career path.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Like all of these social contracts have been broken.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

But to build a healthy future, we need stabilizing institutions.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

So how do we spend the next 20 years experimenting and trying and connecting and believing and again moving capital because let's and I I get some trouble in this. Please don't email me. There's so much capital to be had. Yeah. It's just running around doing wasteful things. So we can build things to re cut into that capital flow and move it to places that are generative and build beautiful things. Yeah. Um, we don't have to be subsistence farmers. And I think some people are like, well, I guess this is our lot. It's the billionaires and us in endless poverty. It just doesn't have to be that way.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Yeah, and I hear that a lot too in the con. So there there used to be a lot more naysayers in my comments uh a couple years ago. And I think a lot of those people have quieted down. It's always the same demographic. It was older white men. And they would jump into the comment thread and they would be like, well, this is just how it is. This is just how corporations are. Like the whole purpose of a corporation is to achieve profit for shareholders. It's like, maybe, maybe I have a corporation, my company is a corporation, and that's not why I've built the thing. You know, it's it's to support people, it's to create connection, it's to, to your point, to pull some of that capital that's flowing out there and redirect things that are actually useful. In the way that I'm doing it individually, it's, you know, often I'm getting these my clients are using the corporate-funded education credits or reimbursement credits that they have from the companies to help their career and professional development. And I'm I'm helping them leverage that capital and their energy, their literal life force to then focus on things that actually matter to them. And to some degree, yeah, I mean, you know, those of us who have children, I know you have kids. I have cats, so it's a little bit different for me. But, you know, what we are talking about in some ways is legacy. But I think also what it is, it's it's looking at the long arc of humanity. Like, what is the impact that we want to have for humanity as a whole? And again, I think that starts as an insight job. You know, I work with people all the time. I facilitate meditation and mindfulness programming. I hear all the time from people like, I just don't have time to meditate. I have a job and a mortgage and I take care of my kids and all this other stuff. And it's like, that's exactly the reason why you need to make time. You know, you put your oxygen mask on first to abuse a cliche so that you can be of greater service to the world, so that you can have some sort of purpose and impact. And I think one of the promises of corporate America was like, if you get your name and your title on a business card, you get that fat salary. Now we've bequeathed you with purpose and meaning. And what I see time and time again is when people lose that salary and they lose that title, they're left with a question of who am I now? And then they start seeking purpose and meaning. And it's a struggle. And like now we're at a survival state, it's very hard to get to that top of the Maslow's hierarchy of need and start dealing with purpose and meaning and all these higher philosophical things when you're just literally trying to put food on the table. So, what I try to encourage people to do is before you get to a crisis point, further upstream, assume that you're gonna get laid off, assume that the rug's gonna get ripped out from underneath you, and start building more indelible ways of relating to yourself and relating to your role in the world, not as a definition, as a title that you get for a job that you're doing, but like what's the reasoning behind that job? Like, what is it you're really trying to change at? And it could be all types of things, you know, but it requires some space to be able to even get to that place.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Yeah, I think that's true. I you've said a bunch of things here, and I want to kind of pull apart a few of them and give some credit to some other, you know, smart thinkers here. So, like, I don't know if you've read Eric Reese's new book. You know, he's you know famous for uh basically inventing half of the Silicon Valley methodology, but his most, he's kind of I wouldn't say he's recanted, but there's been a little bit of like, well, I didn't really realize it was going to turn into this. And so now I have some other things to say. But he he his the opening of his new book is really an assault on shareholder primacy. And he's and he says, look out the window, and almost guaranteed there's a tree that you can see that is older than shareholder primacy. So the idea that the purpose of a business is only to enrich the shareholders is newer than your than the things outside your window. And I do think that is really, really important that we ground ourselves to that we we are being asked to accept some premises that are so young and so untested. And every test that they've been offered, they are failing, like shareholder primacy. That this shareholder primacy is failing at every test. It creates bad companies and fragile economies and bad leaders. It does terrible, terrible, unreliable things. And we can respond to that test failure and do something different. Um so I just wanted to sort of double down on that. I, you know, I have a lot of uh founders in my world, and they I think they just sort of have absorbed it, right? They their MBA program or whatever. And like, you don't have to do this. You don't have to do this this way. Um I want to come full full circle a little bit to like the the the legacy piece, and and I think what you're saying is that this is you know, some people like what's for my kids or whatever, but I think I think fundamentally it's about stewardship, right? This is what we get, this is the time that we get, and how do we want to embody it? And not just not just these 80 years, but this week, this month, right? What and and I love this idea that you bring up of let's not over-index to stability because it's not really there. It appears to be there in certain places, but it's not really there. And then we can start to, I think, I want to play a little bit with Maslow here because I'm a notorious Maslow hater. I think then we can adjust to the fact that maybe Maslow's hierarchy collapses a little bit. That when we're actually in our bodies and we're in our real life situations and we're not in a mode of striving, just remind the audience that Maslow's hierarchy was created to defend eugenics so that Maslow could say, Yeah, white people with jobs in in colonist countries are the best. So maybe there's some flaws in the logic. And that really we can live within an experience of scarcity or need or even worry and still be attuned to why am I in the world? Yeah. And we can do both.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Yeah, and I would I would almost take it a step further. I would say that's a necessary constituent element of actually being present and alive, you know, to be able to hold the truths as being a yes and it is both chaotic, it is uncertain, there is a lack of stability, and I can stay grounded within myself. I can stay true to the values that I adhere to. You know, what you're talking about, you said it out loud, the word intergenum, you know, and I think for folks that maybe aren't familiar with that, it's actually the first time I heard it pronounced out loud. I saw it in writing a few weeks back, and I've got an article that's half written that talks about this exactly as talking about the difference between that and say, like liminal space. Or, you know, a lot of people talk about it in terms of chrysalis, you know, like a transformation from a worm to a butterfly. And our entire existence, our entire life has been in this period of transition.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

And, you know, I think it's really interesting to evoke this idea that these corporations as we know it today, these structures, these government systems, these, you know, the ways in which we access data and interface with each other on social media is younger than most things you look out the window and see. And having that perspective and understanding that these are all just experiments and that we don't necessarily have to assume that that's the given. It's the only way to operate. Absolutely. All of this possibility, even on an individual level, of like, well, if that could be true, what does that mean for me as an individual? What agency do I have? What ability do I have to affect change if those things are not a given? And I think it opens up all these really interesting possibilities of like how we might structure work, how we might structure businesses, how we might structure community for that longer arc. And I think maybe what you know, I hear in some of what you're sharing too, it's like even the frameworks uh that have been used to help make meaning of our lives and our existence are a byproduct of systems of control. That's right. So if we can unwind that a little bit and maybe just get in touch with our own heartbeat and our own, you know, involvement with nature, I'm a big nature fan, that might begin to give us a pathway through something that's a little bit different. And sure, it might not happen within our lifetime, but I still still think it's an oval work. And if we do anything during this period of time of transition, I think being curious and being courageous and being willing to try new things and stay connected to our own lived experience and commit to something that's really important to us and to the world writ large, I think is a pretty decent way of going about it.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Yeah, I really think that we've got to just get very comfortable with experiments.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Like we just because we just don't know. And I think what can be kind of sort of crazy making for people is is it's so freeing to not know once you realize that nobody else knew either. Right? When Milton Friedman invented shareholder primacy, he didn't know. He was just making shit up. It was all made up. And then a bunch of people like, well, that makes sense. Let's do that. Right? So let's make up different shit. Like there's no I I know this can be chaos creating for people, and I'm like uh, you know, high risk, out on the edge of the world, but it's part of my job to sort of draw people toward that in the world, is it's all made up. Yeah. All of this is something somebody made up. So make up something else. There I think once we get really good at going, I can accept what's real and what's been presented to me. I can accept that my phone is primarily an advertising delivery addiction device. I can accept that. I don't have to live in judgment every time I pick it up. I can still pick it up and go to Instagram if that's what I want to do, and accept that it is an addiction machine. And then once I can do that, then I can go, well, what else could be true? Yeah. Right. And you do that a lot of work, right, with people just within their lived experience. But the same is true inside a company, inside an organization. Is once you stop trying to fight and judge and go, that's wrong, and that's bad, and that's in fire and gotta fix that. And right, all of that command and control stuff that says we gotta put out every fire and solve everything. And no, you actually actually you don't. You don't have to do it. 90% of what you're doing, you don't have to do. Susie can be mad, and this tech can be broken, and the office down the hall can be a mess, and you can bring down all that neurological reactivity and go, well, what else is true?

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:06

What do we want to do? What are we uniquely capable of doing that nobody else can do? And all of a sudden, what felt like this, because that's when we're in fear and reactivity and distrust, right? It looks like this, our eyes closed, for those of you who are just on audio, and blinders on, all of a sudden the blinders come off and the world opens up.

SPEAKER_00 37:26

That's right. Yeah, and and you know, I think it's I'm in a unique position because I get to work with individuals on this. And what you just described is essentially the arc that I bring clients through. It's it's stillness, it's slowing down, it's paying attention, it's being aware of the systems that they're in, the and the reaction that their system their own internal systems have in relation to those things. That scales, that exact method also applies to teams, it applies to orgs, it applies to whole companies, it applies to governments and systems and social structures and all of the things. But it requires us to pause for a minute to take a beep. And we've been just brutalized over the last 100 years of we've got to do it all right now. And we have to do it hockey stick up and to the right. Everything has to go up in that direction. We're failing somehow. And it's it's profound the shifts that people can experience when they just slow down for a second and they just ask themselves, like, well, what else could be true? And it's just a basic, basic practice that, you know, if you give yourself that as a mantra, you know, as a regular daily practice, over time, what it does create is it creates more space to be able to deal with things like volatility and overwhelm and isolation and distraction. And it allows you to see how the system works on you. You know, I actually, my skin on my face broke out over the last week or so. I have a nervous system response, which is a holdover from my experience in corporate corporate America. I experience stress, I experience you know, distress, and my body internalizes that, and my body reacts as an inflammation response. So my gut gets all screwed up, my skin breaks out. And these are early warning systems, right? I would say more like lagging measures of an impact of something that happened days ago. And for the longest time, when I was corporate America, this would happen on a monthly basis. And I was like, oh, maybe it's something I ate. And it was like, actually, no, it was something I ingested, but it wasn't something I ate. It was something that was in the system that I metabolized, and my body couldn't deal with it. It couldn't hold it. So it inflamed and it shows up as a nervous system response. Even today, with all my meditation and my mindfulness practice and all the work that I do to stay grounded, my body still responds to stress in that way that it's been trained. And I think this is exactly what happens to clients that I work with and teams that I work with. I worked with an organization not too long ago where you know they brought me in for training on bullying, workplace bullying and psychological safety. And before we even got to that, we did a bit of an analysis and realized that there were several people within that organization who were the culprits of the workplace bullying. And instead of doing a workshop to like help educate people on the ills of workplace bullying, it's like, well, we just need to get rid of those people. Those people are the problem. They're the cancer within the system. And, you know, I think a lot of people, they they focus on the wrong area. They were they focus on like prophylactics or they focus on like a band-aid to support a systemic failure that's occurring. And in order to be able to see those systemic problems, it requires space and it requires time and it requires a clarity of mind and a courageous mind in order to then move forward and do something different.

SPEAKER_02 40:40

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's a you know, increasing sort of at least banter about systems work and paying attention to systems and and dealing in systems. I think what's under report is what you just said, which is what does it take to be a person who can deal in systems versus dealing in symptoms? And it it yes, it manifests as courage, yes, it manifests as humility. But I think what I appreciate the most about what you shared is it it starts with an embodiment. It starts with that I'm I'm out of my own reactivity. Because I actually think if I'm like, okay, I'm gonna be courageous today, I think that goes in weird places. But if I'm I've done the work to dial down my reactivity, then courage sort of comes out of me. That's right. Because I don't, I'm not as afraid. I'm not as I'm I'm not neurologically in this place of the whole world is against me. And then what comes out of me looks like courage, but it's not because I woke up today to be brave, right? Because I looked at a cat poster.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Yeah, I have a lot of clients that come to me, they're looking for confidence. A lot of times that's what I hear from them. It's like, oh, my confidence is just shot. And I tell them, I'm like, confidence is a lagging measure of success. You know, it's not something that you cultivate, it's something that you look back at as a diagnostic. Courage to me is another byproduct of connection with self and being present. And so much of what we're talking about, these extractive and distractive systems, are designed literally to keep us from being present to our own lived experience. And that's why it becomes really difficult for us to make cogent decisions and to be healthy and to support ourselves and others. We're we're stuck in the system, we're stuck in this matrix. And it's not that there's an escape to a Zion to go to, but it's like, can we be present to this experience? Can we pay attention to what it does to our bodies, to our nervous systems? And then can we find systemic solutions individually or as a culture that counteracts those forces? And we're never gonna be able to get rid of them. They're here for for at least our lifetime. But what we can do is I think create little embassies within these systems, little moats, if you will, to protect us and create a bit of a bubble around these things so that we can then send out little, you know, missions to extract back some of what has been taken from us. And I think cumulatively over time, that creates healthier individuals, that creates healthier societies.

SPEAKER_02 43:16

We have to remind ourselves that the systems that we are drawing from when we move into expansion and we choose to orient ourselves toward expansion, that those systems are the most powerful systems in the world in all of the creative world, right? You know, and and sometimes I'll show people like those creepy images of old amusement parks that have been overrun by nature. And nature wins.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:43

Nature always wins in the end. And so when we when we lean into our nervous system that wants to be slower, that wants to be less reactive, when we lean into ways of relating to each other that is more natural to the human biology, when we lean into Ways of being that doesn't take us out of our these rhythms that are that are healthy and whole and all of that. We're at the power center, not in an extractive way. We just we're we're we're leaning in to where the opportunity is. The extraction systems are trying to grab that. They're doing everything in their power to grab that, to pull the oil out of the ground. And I try to remind people that all they can do is pull dead bodies out of the ground. That's that's oil, right? Oil is just liquefied dead dinosaurs. And so all extractive systems can do is pull death out of the ground. And we can do so much more than that.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:35

There's so much more we can do. So on that note, I always ask people at the end what's giving them hope in in our current scenario. And uh what would you say these days, what's giving you hope?

SPEAKER_00 44:45

There's a lot of room for hope. You know, I think for me, what I what I find really compelling is how many people are now kind of flocking to the language that I'm using around extraction, distraction, rebellion. You know, I've been pretty provocative over the last year. And, you know, I started to put out more language around this of like rebelling against the status quo. And I see more and more people showing up and asking questions and being curious. I see people resharing uh some of the things that I'm talking about, where four years ago they would have been afraid to even touch it. And to me, there's more of like a landswell that's occurring that people are are waking up to this and they're asking questions instead of just resigning themselves to the fate of like being in this machine. They're asking, like, well, what else can I do? What's possible here? And I see more and more voices like yourself and others who are out there talking about the systems, talking about the the problems that we're encountering and offering solutions, other pathways to do this. And to me, that's a good indicator. When you see multiple different people showing up using similar language and offering potential pathways and solutions, that to me says that there's a lot more people under the radar that aren't speaking up yet that are probably feeling this way and they're just looking for ways to come together and to find another pathway through. So I see over and over and over again language like guilds, like collectives, like cooperatives. And I think this language to me is an indic indicative of a yearning and a desire for coming together in a way that we haven't been able to in the last decade or two. So I think it gives me hope. It's gonna be a long haul. I think we're not clear of the inter germs state yet, this in the in-between state. Uh, and we probably won't be within our lifetime. But I do believe we get to make meaning out of what we do with this time. And for me at least, I want to bring people together and help them find, not from me as a guru, but like as all students learning how to move through this world.

SPEAKER_02 46:46

Well, I hope um some folks listening in today find you. Uh where can they find you? What's their best next step if they're like, oh my gosh, this Nicholas Whitaker guy rocked my world?

SPEAKER_00 46:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for the opportunity just to chat. Um, I encourage people to check me out at rebellioncollective.com. I have private coaching. I have a community called the Rebellion Collective where we're all trying to figure some of this out and lash our rafts together. Uh it's a beautiful space. Uh, we meet twice a month for 90 minutes and just talk through some of these issues and and connect online uh through group chat. And then on that same website, you'll find uh a free tool. It's called a capacity audit. I think the very best thing that people can do is to build awareness. This tool is designed specifically for that to simply allow you to understand better where your time, energy, and attention is being extracted and give some options and some suggestions of things to actually do to help reclaim some of that capacity. And then if you folks want to discuss the results or they want to talk about what comes next and they want some support with that, I'm always here to listen.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

Yeah, well, just as a endorsement, I've taken the capacity audit a couple times and sort of a self-check of like, hey, how am I doing? And it it does. It just sort of like it just it doesn't, you know, it's not necessarily like, oh, I didn't know that, but it's like, oh yeah, that's validation of what I've been feeling. So uh I would encourage folks to at the very least go do a capacity audit and see where you are today. Well, Nicholas, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Yeah. And uh we will, I'm sure, talk more at a future time.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

Yeah, I hope so. Thanks so much, Nick. Thanks for the work you're doing on the world.

SPEAKER_02 48:17

Thanks, you all. That was some heady work, but uh thanks for spending some time with us today. If this conversation moves something for you, if you found yourself pausing the episode or thinking, oh, I need to go sit with this again, or I need to take a note or uh responding in some way, it would that's really how the show is designed to work. It's designed to pause, to invite, to engage, to require a little bit of us as we listen, not just sort of banter. And I hope that you had some of that experience of like, oh crap, I gotta rethink that. That is the show working as designed. That is Dam's Given as intended. And if that happened for you, I am gonna ask for your help. If you can just put that in a review on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube, if you can put it in the comment stream, if you can really invite us into your thinking, because we all get so much better when we get invited into your thinking. As far as Nicholas Whitaker goes, you can find him and take his free leadership capacity audit at rebellioncollective.com. It's totally worth doing. I've done it multiple times myself. And then for everything related to me, in the in the near term, you can always find the best information at nickrichmeyer.com. Specifically, it's got the most up-to-date information about the book that's coming out this fall, the damn rules. You're gonna want to know about that. You can either find that through nickrichmeyer.com or find that through damnrulesbook.com. And of course, at the end of the day, if you want to subscribe to everything that I'm publishing, you can do so at damnsgiven.com. If this is your first time, welcome. We're so glad you're here. Subscribe wherever you listen because we cannot trust the algorithms to bring us what we need. Really turn on those notifications. Again, I hate saying ring that bell or whatever, but it really is your best way around the algorithm. And then you get to control what you want to be notified of as and when. Again, thanks so much for hanging with us today. And as I say, often at the end of the newsletters, forward, forward.