This week, I sit down with Nick Richtsmeier to explore something many business owners feel but struggle to articulate: trust is eroding, and it is affecting every sales conversation.

Nick challenges the traditional growth playbook. Instead of treating hesitation, resistance, or disengagement as problems to fix, he reframes them as valuable data. Distrust is not a failure. It is information.

We talk about why digital systems reward speed and extraction over relationship building, and why small businesses feel the impact most. Nick introduces the idea of “trust nodes” as simple, human touch points that shape long-term loyalty far more effectively than funnels or persuasion tactics.

If you have ever wondered why prospects seem more skeptical, why sales cycles feel longer, or why pushing harder no longer works, this conversation will give you language and clarity.

At its heart, this episode is about returning to what actually grows business:

authentic relationships built on transparency, alignment, and integrity.

Key Takeaways

1. Resistance in a sales conversation is not rejection. It is feedback.
2. Distrust often reveals misalignment in expectations, incentives, or promises.
3. Small relational moments, or trust nodes, matter more than automated campaigns.
4. Traditional persuasion tactics are losing effectiveness in a skeptical market.
5. Sustainable growth comes from strengthening relationships, not gaming systems.

You can find Nick at: Culturecraft.com

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A LinkedIn Checklist for setting up your fully optimized Profile:

An opportunity to test drive the Follow Up system I recommend by checking this presentation page - you won’t regret it.

AND … Don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and be eligible for my complimentary LinkedIn profile audit – I do one each month for a lucky listener!

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/janiceporter/

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https://www.instagram.com/socjanice/

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Nick, Hello everyone, and welcome to this

week's episode of relationships rule. My guest today is Nick.

Rick Meyer, and Nick is a growth strategist and founder of

culture craft who challenges conventional digital and

marketing rules, helping leaders rebuild trust as the foundation

for sustainable business growth in what he calls a post trust

world. Welcome to the show,

Nick, thank you. Janice, so glad to be here.

I appreciate that.

We had a chat last week, and I really enjoyed

talking to you, and since then, I've done a little bit of

reading of some of your stuff and some of your like your

website and some blogs, and listen to you speak, and I'm

like, I'm not sure that that, you know I can keep up with your

level of rhetoric, but what I get from everything And from our

conversation, is that we are on the same page when it comes to

relationships in business, and so I think when we talk about

the lack the the lack of trust, or the distrust that's happening

these days, I think I recognize that in what I see as I'm so fed

up with everything being digital that I can't, that people don't,

don't bring it down to the caring and the of people. And so

I want to know your perspective and what has changed in the you

know, the marketing world, the world today in business. And why

does this matter so much right now? I know you're going to have

a take on that. Yeah.

I mean, I think we're at an inflection

point, you know? I think the undermining of trust and by the

digital ecosystem and the all these tools that we were told

that we were told that we're supposed to create connection

and bring us together and blah blah blah, ended up doing

nothing of the sort. And that doesn't mean there weren't some

good things, you know. It doesn't mean you weren't, didn't

reconnect with your, you know, high school best friend through

Facebook or whatever, you know. But writ large, we've been on

this probably 10 to 15 year journey of digital moving from a

sort of creative ecosystem where people can find each other and

find information and it's sort of expansive and interesting to

one that's really primarily extractive, that what that

spending time online is more and more a feeling of what company

is trying to get, what from me, and what am I being surveillance

and data and, you know, all that kind of and AI and all of that

like it just, it's not pleasant, and it's not pleasant for a

reason. It's, it's not just because, you know, it's not just

because it's like, the the design of it's bad or something.

It's actually designed that way on purpose, and and we can go,

oh, well, great. Well, then let's just all get off social

media. That'll be great. Well, you know, some sort of

technology solution. The reality is, we all now come to the world

with a much more cynical eye. There's all kinds of evidence

for this, that the trust in institutions is at historic

lows, that we're much less willing or interested to walk

across the room and engage someone who's unfamiliar or new

because of our expanse of distrust. And you know, I was on

a call conversation this morning with a colleague, there's

increasing evidence that our emotional fragility, we're just

more we just more emotionally kind of wound up, so to Speak,

because of our online experiences that we don't handle

disappointment and frustration and these things that are just

normal human experiences. We're just we're just grumpier, right?

And all of that just makes having real relationships

harder. So this, this idea that I think a lot of people go,

Well, yeah, digital and online is kind of a BS, reality, social

media, AI, whatever. But what I think people have missed, and

why this is so important, is that we forget that our brains

are being wired by the amount of time that we're spending in

these environments, and now the way we experience digital is now

seeping in to how we experience real life, and that's that's

scary, right? Because relationships and how we engage

each other is what really matters totally.

So when we say that and when you say we I think

I could be wrong, but my experience seems to be that it

depends on what generation you. Are as to whether you see it

from, you know, one side of the coin or the other. Because so

many of the young people they've grown up with that, that they

grew up in that digital even, I got to say this even something

the other day, my granddaughter, who's six, six and a half, she

proudly says her mom found, bless you. Her mom found a

drawing app that she put on the child's iPad that she uses for

educational stuff, and she loves it, and she's drawing and

stopping the thing and drawing whatever. And ironically, I had

just bought her a book with that kind of thing in it, where you

copy the drawing step by step, and she'd already seen the app,

so she's using the app. So when I introduced her to the book,

she wasn't as interested. It was really weird, because she's so

geared towards the screen. Terrible thing. She's six and a

half, and I think it's too much. However it's again, the

perspective is different, because that's what she's

growing up with.

Well, I think I wouldn't frame it as

generational. I would frame it as exposure, okay? And because

there's, there's really good evidence, and I have some

anecdotal experiences as well that there's an enormous number

of young people who are moving to a low

digital Thank goodness. Love to hear that,

because they don't like it. They you know,

the advantage, in some ways, the advantage of being 14 or 17 or

20 in this current digital environment is you kind of

weren't alive for the good part. Yeah, like, or you were maybe

alive, but you were little or whatever, right? So you've never

had a good social media experience. For someone who's

17, their entire experience of social media has been bullying

and terrible image expectations and advertising and so it

really, it's about exposure, I mean, because, for example, one

of the really pervasive issues is that people 50 and above

wholesale committed to Facebook over the 2010s and they haven't

left. Right? Most people younger than them have left.

Yeah, they're the only ones there. Yeah, exactly,

yeah.

And that platform in specific, is

incredibly destructive from a validation of data, distribution

of reality, use of AI, right? There's enormous problems. So

if, if if you have a lot of really nice, thoughtful, you

know, people who have who should be very analog focused, folks

who who spend four or five hours a day on Facebook, you know, and

they they're there. They're there because originally they

were there to see their grandkids photos or whatever,

but now they're being inundated by this non reality?

Yeah, that's so true. Okay, so let's, let's go

to this trust eroding environment in business. Can you

explain what this looks like in everyday business terms for a

small business owner or sales professional?

Yeah, absolutely it. It means that the

starting point for anybody who's buying for you is that you're

not you're not on their side. The starting point for almost

everybody who sits across the table from you, whether it's a

future employee or a future customer or whatever, the

starting point is distrust, because that's how we've been

socialized. They're expecting an extractive experience, because

the majority of experiences they have with providers and vendors

is extractive. What does that mean? Extra means that they're

taking from you instead of giving to you, okay, and

certainly on the employment front and the other and the

reality of that is, the more you're generating that

opportunity. Let's say that that perspective customer that you're

sitting across the table from, that you they found you by way

of your ads on LinkedIn, which then went to a landing page,

which then went to a website, which they went to, whatever,

all of the parts of the brain that those certain experiences

fire with those parts of the brain are used to being lied to

and manipulated and so, so now you're right. Remember a billion

years ago, right when you sell, when advertising used to be like

billboards and TV commercials and all of that, businesses were

really, really careful, like, what sitcom they put their

commercial into, because what you were next to told your buyer

what

kind of company you were right. That's who you

identified

with, right? And we don't do that anymore.

Right now, businesses are putting their advertisements

into a. Social media feed right next to somebody who's putting

up an AI image that's falsifying a news story that, and all of

that is just going through the same part of somebody's brain,

right? And so we have to completely rethink about how we

find each other, because if we keep finding each other through

these distrustful venues as the primary way. That doesn't mean,

I'm not saying that you can't be on LinkedIn if you're a business

owner, that's fine, but you've got to start to think about the

long term effects of that. Yeah.

And you have to be discerning, questioning,

curious kind of person, and not everybody is

so yeah. I mean, I the the level of

critical thinking that it requires today to just be able

to sort through what's true and what isn't is, I know,

significantly higher.

Yeah, it's, it's very scary. I actually came

across a post that that you put up yesterday. I think it was,

it's very short. It just says, I just got off a call with I kind

of want to challenge this interesting comment, but I just

got off a call with a client who has valuable roles to fill, only

two hours after a colleague with a very strong following here on

LinkedIn, I assume that lamented another month of extended

unemployment. The client specifically said, We've got to

stop wasting time with LinkedIn. And then you say, I'm convinced

more people would be more gainfully employed if this app

didn't exist. Was that you saying that?

That's me, that I believe that. Okay,

so I challenged that a little bit, but speak to

me about that.

I think that millions and millions and

millions of dollars and 10s of millions of hours of attention

are being spent trying to force feed connections through a

platform, okay, yeah, that reliably doesn't work. You have

there are people, and I know many of them that are spending

dozens of hours on LinkedIn every week trying to post the

right thing and click on the right person and find the right

connection and blah, blah, blah to apply to the right thing that

then feeds them, and they've applied to hundreds of positions

on LinkedIn, yes, 600 700 800 positions on LinkedIn never even

gotten a response.

So that that part, I totally agree with you

that that happens on a daily basis, and I think it's

terrible, and it's frustrating and but to me, that goes back

to, you know, even when you were just sending your resume and

cover letter to the recruiting agents, you know, by mail, it

was the same thing, they all sat in a pile on the desk. Because

ultimately, it's about people. It's not about right? It's about

network.

I think that's true. But even you the story,

the example you're describing, of the recruiting agent, there's

legitimate friction there, and that for that friction is

valuable. So the effort that it takes for me to write a write a

cover letter and produce a resume and mail it, and the

friction that it requires for a recruiting manager to review,

like all of that friction is human friction, it's not digital

friction, it's human friction, right? And that human friction

allows us to make better decisions. So I am convinced

that that recruiting manager with 600 resumes on her desk is

in a better position to hire someone successfully than the

recruiting manager with 4000 candidates from five different

apps in her inbox where she can't even access them because

the platform and some of them are through ads and some of them

aren't. And instead of spending time with the application, she's

going, Well, gosh, which one of these have we screened through

the AI? And which should we? Should we switch our ads from

LinkedIn over to indeed, maybe indeed has better at right? And

the attention, because attention is so important, the attention

being spent on manipulating the digital platforms is attention

that isn't going to reading the resumes. That's why that woman

sitting there with the 600 resumes on her desk, if, if

she's got three hours set aside to find the candidate that day,

we know she's going to spend it on the resumes. We don't know

that today, in fact, we know that she's probably not going to

spend it on the resumes.

But then today, I still think that I've always

believed this, that it's not what you know, it's who you

know, and if you are able to use the platform, in this case,

LinkedIn, to find a way in to somebody who knows, somebody

that you know, in. That particular company that you

would like to get into, or, you know, whatever, then if that

person gives you a little nudge to the person with the 4000

resumes on their desk, they're going to look, if they respect

that person, if they know that person, if they trust that

person, they're going to look for that resume. Because it

makes it a little bit easier. I know that's favoritism and all

of that.

No, that's not the issue that I mean that would

be great if it was true, but that's not the reality is that

person that you're trying to reach to give you that nudge,

they don't check their DMS in LinkedIn anymore because their

DMS are full of sales trash and automated AI messages, so

they've stopped reading their DMS, so you can't even reach

somebody through LinkedIn anymore, and I'm broke, so I

can't afford to DM people on LinkedIn anymore because it's

now a paid service. I can't afford to pay the DM service

anymore because I don't have a job, whereas before it was a

phone call or a postage stamp. Now I have to figure out, or I

meet somebody for coffee right now, if I want to use LinkedIn

to do it, it's going to cost me a $600 or $1,200 membership to

LinkedIn, money I don't have.

Well, that's totally that is. That is an

example, for sure. And there are people in that situation,

definitely.

I mean, there are hundreds of 1000s of people

in that situation. Yeah. So your premise is correct? It is

people. The question is, is LinkedIn the best possible way

we could imagine to get people to find each other? And

increasingly, it's the worst?

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to say it's the worst.

I'm not going to agree with that, but I think that the the

the whole thing of coming back to relationships and

relationship building in a more authentic way, or, you know,

yeah, and there are different strategies to get people to the

right people that can be better than what most people don't.

Most people don't have a clue, to be honest, and that's the

problem when it comes to how to use that platform. I did a

presentation yesterday in front of 50 people, and I said, How

many people have a LinkedIn profile? And they all put up

their hand, except for maybe one or two. And I said, How many

people are using LinkedIn? Maybe five put up their hand. So, you

know, they don't know what they're working with or how to

make it better. So that's an aside, though, now, because

that's not what we're here for, but I just see it as you know,

one of the things is, you've gotta find a way that makes you

stand out from the crowd. Whether it's because you picked

up the phone and called somebody and maybe they didn't answer,

that's fine. Most people don't, but when they do, oh my god,

it's such a bonus. But when they don't, at least they've heard

from somebody in a different way. And so you've drawn

attention to it. It's funny. I interviewed a guy a while ago,

and I can't remember his name right now, but he was telling

stories about he also was about relationship building and

whatever. And he in the he was a pharmaceutical salesperson back

in the early days, and that's what he he wanted to meet

doctors. And he, you know, they're the hardest people to

get hold of and he said that he would put on a, you know, a

doctor's coat, white coat, medical coat, whatever you call

them, and go stand in the parking lot to just when this

guy, you know, the doctor, was coming. He would do these trick

things, these, you know, strangely courageous things in

my mind, but sometimes funny. And he would get to have the

conversation because he stood out, or he would send crazy

gifts to them or whatever. But people have lost that by the

way, they've lost that ingenuity because a lot of people feel

entitled these days. So there's that side of it, too. I think,

yeah,

that's not my experience. When I talk to

people who are underemployed, who are trying to find their

next great position, or I'm talking to founders who have

built great small businesses that they're trying to find a

way to not have to spend 15 or 20% of their revenue on ads.

It's I don't find entitlement. What I find is exhaustion.

Okay, so you talk about when a prospect hesitates,

disengages, or goes quiet, and this would be to those founders

that you were just talking about. I'm thinking most people

see that that is a problem. You see it as information. What

should these people be doing to be paying attention to in these

moments? How is it information?

Yeah, I mean, behavior is always information.

So when someone's exhibiting a behavior, often out of our own

drive or neediness or whatever we try to, we try to change the

behavior. And the problem is, as soon as like, it's just like.

With, like, with your kids, right? As soon as you try and,

hey, stop doing that, then they want to do it more, right? Yeah.

And so that's just not how human beings work. So when you have,

when you're having the experience that someone's

showing you signs of distrust, then your first question should

be, why? Why is this reasonable person distrustful? Not? What

can I do to get their attention? That's what the internet teaches

you, is, what can I do to get their attention right? More,

more, more. No, you need to have the humility, yeah, to say this

reasonable person is distrustful is giving me distrustful

behavior. We don't know if they're distrustful Right,

right, but they're giving me distrustful behavior. I wonder

why that is, and then that will impact what my next best action

is. Now my next best action is also going to depend on what

access to them I have. I've already emailed them three

times, and they're ignoring me and they're giving me

distrustful behavior. Is a fourth email really going to

build trust? Probably not. No, right? So again, some of this

depends on context and all of that when we stop competing for

attention, this game that we've been incentivized into for the

for a decade or more, and we start treating people as

reasonable actors who are doing what just makes sense to them in

life, then we can go, Okay, I'm kind of a distrustful person

too, and I don't really like sales calls and I don't really

like people, you know, intersecting themselves into my

life. So how might I add value to this person? How might I make

their situation better? Right? And there's going to be a flurry

of answers depending on what your relationship then is. Have

you ever actually met them? Is this a cold call, right? There's

all of that's contextual, but that's, that's what I mean by

distrust, is information.

So I'm thinking that if we get that information,

then we know we have to pivot somehow to get their attention,

and we can't really do anything direct, because we're not

they're not my client yet, they're not your client yet.

They're prospects still. So So that takes either a lot of

ingenuity or someone to help you who's got that ingenuity to to

make that happen. So most people get stuck there. So what do I

do?

Well, I some of it. I I would build a

business where, where, which I've done, and I coach other

people do where, with everything in my power, I would never be in

a situation doing cold outreach. That's the number. That's the

first thing I would do. Okay, so the situation that you're

describing sounds like cold outreach to me. I'm not a cold

outreach expert, so I don't know. Once you piss somebody

off, I don't know. Yeah, no. Good point, like, good luck. I

mean, again, there are people out there that are really good

at that kind of thing, and I just am. That's just not my

business. I think the what I advise people to do is, from the

jump, build networks of relationships, so that you're

never in a position having to build cold relationships, right?

Okay, that's where I was hoping that you

would go. Is that what you call trust nodes?

So trust nodes are places where trust

transactions happen. So a trust node is anywhere where we can

trade value for trust, right? And so value might be me

listening to you. That's value. And so if I give you that little

bit of value, you're going to give me a little going to give

me a little bit of trust back right. Value might be showing up

on time. Value might be being the one to buy the coffee. Value

might be following up with a email afterward that says, hey,

this is my notes of what we talked about. These aren't AI

generated. This is generally what I thought was important

about our conversation. Really appreciate your time, right? And

and smart business development people and business development

work builds on those little nodes over time, because what

happens in the back of the brain, which is where trust

happens, is those then all that stuff compiles, and now all of a

sudden, I've trusted you in that 10 minutes that you listened to

me, and I've trusted you to buy the coffee, and I've trusted you

to give you the time to read the review of our meeting together,

and I've trusted you that I gave you the my cell phone number,

right? And now all those little bits of trust are adding up, and

I, as the person who's doing business development, is what

I'm watching that happen, right? Because all behavior is

information. I'm watching that happen. And I notice when we've

built an up enough trust for me to pull from the bank account

and to go, Hey, can I? Can I offer an opportunity for me?

Invest further in this relationship for us to do more

together. Are we? Are you open to that conversation? And you're

now in the habit of saying yes to me. It's the thing that in

our trainings we call yes momentum. You have yes momentum

with me, and now I can ask something a little bit more

risky, because you've learned that when you say yes to me,

good things happen.

Okay, this is good. So I've had conversations

with two different people lately. That one was on my

podcast just recently, and the other one a while ago, and

they're both talking about this being the year of referrals.

Okay, it is referral time. I mean, we again. It's back to

relationships, and back to, you know, people that know and trust

you, that you want to do business with. And then that'll

make it easier if they refer people that you can also know

that anyway, you know what I'm saying. So one of them says you

never have to ask for referrals. If you do business properly, you

don't have to ask for referrals. Referrals. The other one says,

this is, and this is this one is done through a process that we

look at on LinkedIn that will help you get to people that can

be referred by someone in your right, in your circle of

influence. So which, where do you sit on that?

I mean, I'm kind of neither.

You are. You are a contrarian, though, yeah.

I mean, I spent 10 years teaching a

referral program to professional services people, okay, so, I

mean, I, I don't teach it anymore, and I wouldn't

necessarily draw from it, because it was 10 years ago, so

it's a little old, yeah, but I know a little bit about this.

What we what we frame as referrals, is really just to me,

two things. One is, do the people who know about you know

that you're open for business, meaning that you have space that

you could take on people that you could help? So whether

you're pinging people on LinkedIn, which, depending on

how you do it can be very intrusive, or whether you

magically are such an excellent service provider that people

volunteer referrals to you. I mean, I that has been mostly my

experience, so I hate to say that that person's wrong. I

don't ask for referrals, and I mostly live exclusively on

referrals. I wouldn't necessarily say that that's

universally true, regardless the what you have to have is people

who know that you have capacity to take on more clients or more

people. And those people have to know who you'd like to work

with. Fair enough.

Yeah. And if people know that stuff tends to work out.

Well, I would add a piece in there that I believe

makes it happen, and that is that usually the people that

bring you referrals are people that have known you forever. And

would you know would always refer you because they love you.

And then there's those you've worked with that had a

successful experience with you, right? And but the the missing

piece there for me is staying in touch with them. If you don't

stay in touch with them, you get forgotten for the next shiny

object.

Oh, sure, yeah, right, yeah. I mean,

that's what I mean. I guess I when I say those people have to

know those two things. They have to know it in the current

moment, right? They have to have to have enough reasonable

experience with you in the last three months or six months or 12

months, yeah, to know that those things are true.

Yeah, that's when I was getting out there. Okay,

so how does building trust? Wait, I just have to read this

one. No. Okay, so for someone, okay, this is kind of

interesting. You have said that the growth rules are stacked in

favor of incumbents. Not sure what you mean. How can small

businesses stop playing a game that quietly works against them?

Do they mean against them or against the incumbents?

No, against them as small businesses, yeah,

okay, yeah, so

the big boys versus the Yeah, yeah. So, can

you speak to that a little

bit Sure? I mean, and some of this is

digital, like the platforms, the at, certainly the at the digital

ad business, all of these things are overtly biased toward large

existing players. Yes, there was a time where you could like game

SEO as an as a as a startup, and use use search engines to sneak

in, right and all of a sudden be this snappy new player that all

of that's gone. Okay. And yet, if you talk to a small business

that's starting, you know, they've had some success.

They've been referral based. They they've never really needed

a ton of marketing. Inevitably, they raise their hand and

they're like, You know what we need? We need some social media.

We need, we need to do, we need to do SEO. We need to, I want to

be number one on Google.

It's like they grab these things out of the

air, and inevitably,

I'm like, why? Yeah, why would you want to try

and compete in the forum where you are overwhelmingly under

resourced, right? Whereas, I think this is part of your arena

is, you know, where you're never under resourced is across the

table from somebody who knows you, or knows someone who knows

you, right? Then it's just, then it's just trust and value. Yeah,

exactly, and, and, but, but the level of resistance by leaders

and founders to doing that, because they've been convinced

that there's these magic wand things you can do on the

internet to get around it, I know. And the good news is,

whatever what there was of those magic one things, they're gone.

They've been eaten by AI. And so now all that we have left is

this that we will history will look back and go. That was kind

of funny from like 2010 to 2021 when people thought this weird

place called the Internet could do all these things because it's

over.

Yeah, I agree. And it's like, it's so passive

in a way. I mean, it's like, Okay, I'm going to put all this

stuff out there and then just wait for the it to come to me.

You know, you can thank HubSpot for that. They

invented that idea. Oh, did they Okay?

All right. So last question about this, for

someone listening who feels overwhelmed and skeptical

themselves, what is one mindset shift or small change they could

make that would immediately improve how they show up in

sales and client relationships.

Someone's overwhelmed and skeptical.

What's one way they could shift?

I mean, I guess they have to trust whoever's

guiding them, don't they? Yeah. I mean,

to some degree, distrust is a secondary

effect of something deeper and and for most people, what I

teach in my trainings often is that everyone you're engaging

with, almost everyone you're engaged with, is some version of

lonely. Yeah, I was gonna say fear is right, lonely, anxious,

afraid and mentally exhausted, because digital life is

incredibly taxing on our brains. So if I reverse that and look in

the mirror and I want to be more resilient as a sales leader or

as a founder or whatever it is, then I need to be proactive

about addressing one of those three things, loneliness,

anxiety or mental exhaustion. So loneliness, I need to find some

people who are going to be a compassionate witness to my

life. That's the way you solve loneliness, is you find a

compassionate, compassionate witness to your life, someone

who says, Hey, that sounds hard. Or let's talk about that. Or let

me ask you questions. Anxiety, it means that your body is

telling you that you're trying to do things you have no

business doing. That's what. Or again, if it's chronic medical

anxiety, it's a different situation, but just sort of

basic anxiety. So that means that you're doing things you

shouldn't be doing. So most of the best way to solve for

anxiety is to do fewer things.

You need to step back. Oh, so. And in my world,

I'm always telling people this motto that came from a friend of

mine, when it comes to LinkedIn and outreach and so on, slow

down your output. To speed up your outcome. You just got to do

fewer things exactly. So that's beautiful. Thank you.

And then you know, mental exhaustion is,

again, that will is related. You have to feed your brain with

things that are stimulating but not overwhelming, which is,

again, analog things. Go listen to a record, read a book, read a

magazine, walk a dog, right? These are things that bring down

all that mental exhaustion, talk to a friend.

So that leads me to the perfect ending. The last

thing I want to talk about, which has nothing to do with any

of this, is that I saw that you are a movie person. Oh yeah, I

love movies. Oh, my God, I love movies. And I want to have a

whole conversation with you about movies, but just briefly,

I think it was, was it a post you did? A lot of people wonder

why I'm so obsessive about saving the movie theater

experience. That's a whole thing in itself, going to the movies

as opposed to watching them on TV. But that's somewhere where I

saw that you're obsessed with movies. And. Um, do you like,

are you an Academy Award person like?

Do you have to watch? Yeah, well, yeah, try to

catch as many of those films before the awards come out. And,

Yep, yeah.

And I see you've seen a few already that two of

whom, no, I've seen Marty supreme. I've seen one battle

after another, yeah, but I haven't seen the other ones yet

on your list. I'm not a Lord's Lord of the Rings person, but

the testament of Anne Lee. Who is it that's in that?

Oh, now Susan, you have to ask me, I'm

sorry, but I know that she's in two movies, and

one of them is that one, and the other one is the more

popular I can picture her. She was in Les

Miserables. She was in Mean Girls. She was in,

yeah, it's gone from my head anyway, yeah, yeah,

but I heard that that was really good. Yes, obviously you've

written, you've seen it, yeah, it's good, okay, and Hamnet is,

I think it's in the theaters here now. Hamnet is incredible.

Hamlet's bit. Hammer's remarkably hard to

find, which I think is silky.

Well, I think because it's probably seen as

what I call a film, as opposed to a movie, yeah, a more artsy

art.

But I think it's still, I think, I think

it's having sort of a second round of release now that it's

Oscar nominated. Yeah, Hamnet is excellent, okay, but sad, that's

the thing, right? Very sad, but beautiful. Sad. It's about how

art it's about how art can heal us. It's beautiful.

Okay, I am going to see it before the camp. So

anyway, I just wanted to share that love of of cinema with you

and and you talked about, I think taking your child, your Is

it a son? Yeah, I have three. I have three sons a lot. Yeah,

yeah. I think that's really cool, and I love that. Anyway, I

just wanted to share that with you and and so what's your,

what's your prediction for this year? What's going to be the

best movie, or the best top three?

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, I mean, it's

a, it's a for Best Picture. It's a one battle, sinners, Marty

supreme race, yes, almost, I'm sorry, a ham net race. Marty

supreme Hamnet race. He should win, though, for best but, but,

but, one battle will win

because of what the writing it's, it's a truly

American movie, like it's a truly Yeah.

I mean, so sinners and so is Marty supreme.

I mean, like they're all of those movies are asking really

fundamental questions about what it means to be an American.

Yeah, okay, and that's where we're at right now

in the world, right? Yeah, okay, yeah, perfect. All right. Thank

you so much for your time. Thank you for your wisdom and your

thoughts on, you know, distrust in the world today, in business

and things to think about in that regard. How can people find

you?

Probably the easiest way. I mean, you can

find me on LinkedIn, until I eventually find eventually,

finally quit, because I hate it. But the easiest way is just my

my newsletter is at dams given.com

and you have a book coming out? Yes,

yeah, probably late spring, early summer.

Yeah, awesome. Well, do come come back around

when that's happening, I will, and we can talk about my book.

Alright, yeah. Totally appreciate your time. And for my

listeners, anybody who really wants to get in on this

conversation, I think you should reach out. Let us know, leave a

review. Contact Nick. See all of his website and his you've got

more than you've got. Your website, your culture, yeah.

Culture, craft.com, is the business.

Culture, craft.com, is the business. Trustmade growth.com

is the community. If you are a independent professional, you're

a consultant, or you're a coach or something, we have a

community for people like you at trustmade growth.com and then

just my publishing site is dams given.com Perfect.

Thank you so much and remember everyone to stay

connected and be remembered. Bye.