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"What is the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?"

Chris McAdoo has been a musician, a brand strategist, a startup advisor, and an artist since he was 13 years old. He's worked with national lab scientists sending things to space and artists introducing their work to the world for the first time. And he's noticed something: it's the same conversation every time.

Why don't people love the thing I made the way I love it?

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick and Chris go deep on what's actually going on between craft and market — and why the answer isn't to make better work. The work is fine. The gap is context. The gap is relationship. The gap is the hard turn from seeking attention to paying it.

They cover the brief window in internet history when showing up was enough and why that era socialized a generation into believing the algorithm would find their people for them. Why the people building extractive platforms don't actually like people — and how that shapes everything about what those platforms do and don't do. Why the inefficiencies we disrupted out of existence were load-bearing — and what we're left holding now that they're gone. Why the house concert in Knoxville probably made more money than the venue tour. Why your customer persona named Suzy is useless and the conversation with the real Debra who came to your show on a Thursday night is everything.

And what it means to ask, as Nick puts it: what's the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?

Nick closes with a reflection that came out of a conversation with a colleague: this economy, this uncertainty, this K-shaped gap — it's already creating discomfort whether you acknowledge it or not. Moving toward discomfort isn't going to make things worse. You're already uncomfortable. You might as well grow.

Chris McAdoo: chrismcadoo.com | chrismcadoospeaks.com | fightingshapeimpact.com
More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | 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 [email protected].

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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 [email protected].

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"In this AI-soaked era, the primary thing we're buying — anytime we're buying anything — is thinking. Consultants, you need a way for people to test the quality of your thinking. Efficiently. With a low financial impact."

Nobody sat down and decided to build a consulting offer that was bad for them, bad for their clients, and bad for their industry. It happened anyway. And if you're in consulting, fractional work, agency work, or any kind of advisory role — you're probably working inside a system that came from one of two tainted pools: the agency model or the McKinsey model. Both are imploding in real time. Neither was built for the world we're in now.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier gets practical. He walks through exactly what goes wrong with the two dominant approaches to getting hired as a consultant — the scoping process that produces 97-bullet-point SOWs nobody reads, and the audit tool that clients pay $5,000 for only to receive a boilerplate proposal recommending they hire you for the work they wanted to hire you for in the first place. He names both for what they are and explains why they exist — and why they need to stop.

Then he gets to the fix. The entry level offering. Short. High impact. Structured around thinking with your client rather than selling at them. Priced low enough that nobody has to go through procurement. Valuable enough that the deliverable is worth more than what they paid. A way for people to test the quality of your thinking before anyone commits to a long engagement — which in an AI-soaked world where thinking is the primary thing anyone is buying, is the only sale that actually makes sense.

This one is for consultants, fractionals, coaches, and agencies who are tired of the broken cycle and want a way out of it. And it's for founders and leaders who are hiring these people and want to know how to structure the front end of those relationships so everyone ends up doing better work.

Trust Forge — Nick's four-week live workshop on offering design — is at trustmadegrowth.com/trustforge

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 [email protected].

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The American economy is in contraction. That's different than recession. Most people who've been paying attention know it by now. We've got to spend less time debating it, negotiating with it, pretending it's not happening, like bad bargainers at a funeral. And start acting on what to do about it. 

Nick walks through the two games that every business, every market, every economy runs on: the Extractive Game and the Expansive Game. Not as a moral judgment about which kind of person you are, but as a structural reality about which direction your decisions are flowing. Because the direction matters enormously. It determines what you make, how you run your operations, how you build relationships — and whether those three layers are stacked in a way that builds something or slowly hollows it out.

He traces the Extractive Game from Standard Oil to Facebook to your content marketing problem — showing how each one starts at the production layer, taking something communal and making it singularly owned, then builds an operations layer designed to make everything dependent on the thing it grabbed, then covers the whole thing with influence peddling and PR. And he shows how the same logic — in miniature, without the malice — slips into small businesses every day when fear is driving.

Then he traces the Expansive Game in the opposite direction — starting at the relationship layer, winning by attention and clarity, distributing power through networks, and building production that actually comes from knowing the people you're building for. He uses the independent bookseller as the clearest example of a business running the expansive game right — and it's more useful than any Silicon Valley case study.

This is a preview of the core framework from Nick's book The Damn Rules, launching this fall at DamnRulesBook.com. 

If this episode speaks to you and you want to go deeper: [email protected]

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 [email protected].

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Brad Farris is back. And if you weren't here for the original run of the show under the old name Working Broken, here's what you need to know: Brad is one of the sharpest executive coaches working today, he was Nick's own executive coach for an extended stretch, and when the two of them get in a room together — even a virtual one — nothing stays safe for very long.

This episode opens with something genuinely useful: Brad's honest account of how the pressurization of the COVID era made him play small, and the moment earlier this year he decided that was over. How fear contracted his social circle. How his social circle contracting made things scarier. How that compounded until he realized this was not his best self — and what happened when he dropped it. He's traveling more, seeing people in person, landing bigger deals. The correlation is not a coincidence.

From there Nick and Brad play the first ever Hot Topic Knockout — a bracketed game where ten things the internet tells you to care about go head-to-head until only the one that actually matters survives. The bracket includes: Tim Cook's successor and the One Disney speech, tariffs being illegal, the end of entry-level hiring, the OpenAI bubble, middle manager burnout at a 10-year low, social media's big tobacco moment, Oracle's Larry Ellison doing what Larry Ellison does, macro economic signals and gas prices, and the cost of tokens.

Along the way they cover why Brad thinks you should go back to 1995 and be a generalist who meets people. Why the real crisis in organizations isn't at the middle manager level, it's at the top, where leaders are navigating fog with no clear destination. Why agile is a response to a goal, not a substitute for one. Why risk management with trust is the only thing that works now — and why American business is terrible at it. 

And OF COURSE what the winner of the knockout game actually is...

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 [email protected].

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In this episode of Damns Given, Nick walks through the Trust-Made Growth framework's take on culture — one of the six core factors that determine whether a venture is ready to grow or quietly working against itself. He goes back to the literal definition of the word: culture is what you put in a petri dish, the organic matter from which everything else grows. In organizational terms it's simpler and harder than any offsite can address. Culture is just what an organization does, how it works, and what it is without pressure or influence.

He talks about how systems self-reinforce — why a good person in a bad team eventually becomes a bad player, because the system wins. How a leader's unspoken resistance to articulating values doesn't create a blank space, it creates a vacuum that people fill with their own interpretations, producing exactly the fractured, directionless behavior the leader didn't want. And why the only thing Trust-Made Growth is actually looking for in a culture is minimal resistance to organic growth — not kombucha fountains, not Silicon Valley theater, just healthy soil that lets things grow.

The weeds tell you everything. A garden full of weeds doesn't mean you have a weed problem. It means the soil is broken.

Questions about how this applies to your venture? Reach out at culturecraft.com or find the Trust-Made community at trustmadegrowth.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 [email protected].

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Damns Given Episode 2.15:

"What is one way you can become more knowledgeable about the business case for whatever you're selling? One notch more knowledgeable. The more we think about these economic tools as mechanisms for value delivery, the more we get into the loamy soil of trust — which is where all the good things grow."

It's common for leaders to think their biggest strategic decisions happen in leadership meetings. They don't. They happen in the revenue model—the underlying structure of how money flows through a business—and most ventures have never seriously looked at theirs.

Nick Richtsmeier opens this episode with two client stories that have no business being in the same conversation. A solopreneur content marketer working from home in Idaho. A SaaS company with 25 employees and an engineering arm in India. Completely different scale, completely different problems... except they share the same root cause. 

Neither of them understands the business case for what they're selling into, and because of that, both of them keep making the same decisions over and over, wondering why nothing sticks.

Nick breaks down how revenue defines a structure for decisioning, even when  and especially when you don't attend to it. It's why most specialists — content marketers, HR consultants, compliance experts, operations people — have built their entire practices without ever learning to speak the language of the businesses they're selling to. 

He walks through the death of per-seat SaaS pricing and what's replacing, and he makes the case that learning to read a P&L is one of the highest-leverage things a non-financial specialist can do right now.

The subscription addiction era — build a thing, get as many subscribers as possible, extract maximum value before anyone notices — is over. What comes next requires something the extraction economy never asked of anyone: genuine understanding of the financial reality of the person on the other side of the table.

**Chapters **

00:00 Two Case Studies
10:03 The Importance of Financial Leadership
14:27 Your Takeaway Question

Join Nick for the revenue model free MasterClass: https://www.trustmadegrowth.com/c/trust-made-training-events/escaping-the-funnel-growth-models-and-building-from-trust

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 [email protected].

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"Trust doesn't look like attention."

In fact, the things that steal our attention, grab it out of the agorithmic haze are some of the most trust-breaking things we face. Just because something is good at dragging us into its orbit, doesn't mean its building trust.

In fact, often quite the opposite.

A lot of people are trying to spend less time online. And brand leaders have questions of what to even do with extractive social platforms (like this one) and whether to keep playing in these sands.

Well Nick has decried these platforms more than most, and yet—he's here. What's up with that?

In this brief episode, Nick explains why he broke his own rules, and what it cost him to figure out a better way. 

He offers two simple guidelines for founders, fractionals, coaches, and executives who need to be online but refuse to be owned by it

Nick walks through what the feed actually does to your brain (and your prospect's brain) and your business clarity, why LinkedIn is more aggressive than you think, why his most viral moment (2 million views) was also his most useless one.

Finally he offers the framework of a Trust-Made library of content: what it looks like, and why it works in ways the algorithm chasing and numbers boosting never will.

**Chapters:**

- 00:01 “I’m Breaking My Rules”
- 02:38 Two Rules for Social Media
- 06:15 Choosing Your Space
- 08:43 Why Nick Regrets the Word “Trust”
- 09:53 Building Your Library

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 [email protected].

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"The obsession with up and to the right is definitionally gonna make you less effective because it forces you to act in ways because it forces you to act in ways that are contrary to the natural flow of how things change."

Most leaders are fighting their resistance. Nick Richtsmeier thinks that's the wrong move.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick opens with one of the most honest soliloquies he's recorded about resistance as a function of growth, what it means when your organization keeps producing the same problems, and what he's personally been up against finishing his book The Damn Rules (get advanced access at DamnRulesBook.com).

The thesis: resistance doesn't need to be fought. It needs permission to soften. And the way you do that is by pausing long enough to ask — what is this resistance trying to protect me from? Is that still a real risk? Or am I carrying something that doesn't belong here?

Then Nick practices what he just preached — live, on camera, in real time — in a conversation with Janice Porter, relationship marketing specialist and LinkedIn strategist. Because Janice does things Nick resists: cold outreach, DMs to strangers, systematic LinkedIn prospecting. And instead of filtering her out, he lets the conversation happen. And it challenges him.

We can't wait to hear how you observe this moment. Email us at [email protected].

What they find across their disagreement is that they care about exactly the same thing. Human connection. Trust. Showing up for people in a world that has quietly trained us to hide behind walls we don't even know we've built. Janice's approach: be interested, not interesting. Hang out in the mailbox, not the feed. Nick's reframe: we've been so focused on protecting ourselves from the wrong risk that we've missed the real one — isolation.

If you're building something and feel like you keep hitting the same wall, or if the very idea of reaching out to someone new fills you with low-grade dread — this one is for you.

Find Janice at the Relationship Rules podcast and at janicerporter.com
Make sure you're in the early access group for Nick's book, The Damn Rules: How Vulnerability, Inefficiency, and Love Liberate Leaders from the Trustbroken Economy at DamnRulesBook.com.

**Chapters:**

00:00 Introduction

01:40 Why Resistance?

11:49 Nick’s Restance — Damn Rules Book

13:47 Identifying + Releasing Resistance

22:34 Janice's Journey into LinkedIn

26:46 Janice’s LinkedIn Strategy

32:30 The Narcissist’s Dilemma in Networking

47:24 What’s Giving Janice Hope

50:16 Nick’s Final Thoughts

More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan Mail

"Every system is working exactly as designed. Even when those designs weren't intentional. Especially when those designs weren't intentional."

You've moved departments around. You've changed leaders. You've fixed the website. You've brought in new talent. You've reorganized budgets. And the same problems keep coming back. Until you can see the system as it is, none of your solutions are going to stick.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier walks through one of the most important frameworks in the Trust-Made Growth playbook: how to actually see the system you're in, understand why it's self-reinforcing, and begin to change it, without burning everything down in the process.

Lots of people are in victim mode about "how the system works now," and while that makes for great social media quips, it only supports the system as is.

The first thing you've got to do is accept the requirements for change. For the business, problem, opportunity, resistance that is right in front of you.

Nick starts where every real change effort has to start: with the energy of frustration. That white-knuckle feeling of why does this keep happening is not a problem to solve away. It's information. It's the beginning of seeing. And the first thing you have to accept — the thing most leaders resist — is that every system is working exactly as designed. Even the frustrating ones. Even the ones that feel broken. Especially those.

Nick walks through a real client story of owners whose decisions weren't sticking, traces it back to a resistance they didn't know they were carrying from a previous chapter of their careers, and shows how turning fight energy into curiosity energy opens the door to actually seeing what's going on. He connects it directly to the sales ghosting problem from the previous episode showing how a fractional leader's sales system was perfectly designed to produce people who liked her, couldn't explain her, and disappeared.

This is systems thinking made practical, made human, and made actionable for founders, department heads, coaches, consultants, and anyone trying to change something that doesn't want to change.

**Links:**

- Preorder the book: http://DamnRulesBook.com
- Engage Deeper: https://DamnsGiven.com
- Become or Hire a TMG Strategist: https://TrustMadeGrowth.com
- Hire Us: https://CultureCraft.com

**Chapters:**

00:12 Who this is for
06:15 Everything is a system
11:55 How NOT to change systems
13:11 How this shows up in sales
15:30 Nick’s advice

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 [email protected].