Damns Given: Nick Richtsmeier

Oct 09

Marketing truth in a lie factory

The gap between digital and reality is now an unmanageable chasm. If it's online, there's a very real chance it's not real. And that changes everything.

Oct 9, 2025

6 min read

Oct 09

The Mass Decline of Digital Marketing and What It's Gonna Cost

Podcast Ep. 116: We live in a post-trust, post-authenticity world. Tactics continue to fail. Corrosive cultural forces are reshaping trust, commerce, and identity, scrambling what it even means to “market” something. Now for the good news...

Oct 9, 2025

1 min read

Sep 25

You'll like me better up close.

Edition 133 — OR — The ongoing struggle to care about what matters Central to my work—across strategic growth for ventures,

Sep 25, 2025

8 min read

Sep 23

"We weren't built for this" with Alexandra Pasi, PhD

Podcast Ep: 115: What if the reason work—and life—feels so off is because the very mediums we communicate through are bending us into shapes we didn’t choose? AI founder and mathemetician Lexi Pasi asks the big questions.

Sep 23, 2025

1 min read

Sep 19

The peace terms between execs and marketing

Marketing makes markets, or it's a game we play with websites, words, and pretty pictures. The language and values gap between most marketers and executive suites is real, and we're long overdue to sign the ceasefire and find common ground.

Sep 19, 2025

8 min read

Jul 31

"Adopt or die."

"Inevitable" is not neutral. It’s ideological. It’s permissioned, a gate made and kept for those who will step in line and pay the long-gestating price of simply going with the flow. And it’s one of the most effective tools of marketing ever invented.

Jul 31, 2025

5 min read

Jul 16

25 Tantilizing Truths about Doing Business in the 21st Century (So Far)

The biggest challenge you face is understanding your current position and the assumptions you're making. Orientation is everything.

Jul 16, 2025

9 min read

Jul 10

How to design your own demise + midyear book recs

Even if you don't care about Elon, Tesla, or X, Ms. Yaccarino's exit from X is a Rorschach test for all of our leadership. Anyone who is trying to build in this post-trust system will find something of themselves in this story, and some of it might not feel so good.

Jul 10, 2025

7 min read

Jun 27

First Date Marriage Proposals

Most firms are so accustomed to getting married out of the gate that they're still shocked when customers aren't interested in the proposal. You have to fundamentally alter the sales process if you want to make it to the altar.

Jun 27, 2025

6 min read

Jun 13

How to Escape a Venomous Web

Everything you're spending time, energy, attention, or money on on the Internet should be driven by specific boundaries. It's to stop being Silicon Valley's lunch.

Jun 13, 2025

6 min read

Jun 04

Stop Educating Your Prospects

The initial dream of the internet was a sharing of information. Too bad that's over. This essay is about eating my own cooking, serving it to you, and doing what's necessary now.

Jun 4, 2025

6 min read

Apr 09

We make zombies here.

We’ve built a system that rewards surface-level performance and punishes depth, propping up dead companies with borrowed time and fake metrics. If you want to make something alive, you have to risk being real.

Apr 9, 2025

7 min read