Ditching Hourly

DH ### Nick Richtsmeier

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Introduction

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Jonathan Stark: Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am joined by guest Nick Richtsmeier. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Richtsmeier: Glad to be here.

Jonathan Stark: Today we are going to talk about Nick's probably forthcoming book, maybe it'll just be out by the time you hear this, called The Damn Rules, which is one of my favorite book titles in a long, long time. But first, Nick, could you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, I am, I guess the dirty word is growth consultant. I haven't found a less dirty way of saying what I do. But I work with, I really work on two tracks. I work with medium-sized businesses on some enterprise stuff on growth resistance and why the things that used to work don't work anymore. So we do systems work for the people at that scale. And then we have a separate track that we do similar work to in kind of the solo and solo-ish space, which is partially why I think we're in this conversation for folks who are small and want to stay small and have faced similar problems where the old systems don't work the way they used to.

Nick's Background and Work

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Jonathan Stark: Perfect. Well, let's just jump right in there. What systems are not working anymore?

Why the Internet Is Toast

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Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, I mean, I took a lot of flack in, I think, 2024 when I first publicly said, hey, the internet's toast. I know. And now it's kind of like, oh yeah, too bad. The internet was fun while it lasted. Obviously, the internet will carry on and people will be on the internet and be on social media and all of these things. But the incentive system and the underlying inefficiency that made it a heyday for the 2010s, that door is closed. And so the big thing when we really look at this from a historical perspective is Google and Meta and a handful of others, which really those two had ridiculous monopoly-level control over this massive world-shaping platform. And for reasons, I think, mostly due to the fact that it was brand new and they didn't know what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to extract maximum capital out of this thing that they owned. So for a period of time, you could go on the internet and basically create a brand and a way of showing up in the world and you had relatively free distribution. And if you did it right and if you played the game right and if you knew the hacks, you could essentially create the appearance of scarcity where, hey, you can go on the internet and find me and I have all these big ideas and wouldn't you love to know about them? And then there's a bottleneck right before you hire me. And that bottleneck allows me an enormous amount of offer control and price control, which allows me to build a really profitable business for myself. Well, if we remove the distribution side and we remove the idea that knowing things on the internet is valuable, which now that you have AI, that's really in question of whether knowing things on the internet is valuable anymore, then everything else that comes after that starts to break. And that's where a lot of businesses are.

Jonathan Stark: Let's unpack the word distribution in the context for this audience.

What Distribution Means Now

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Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. So essentially what we mean there is you have an idea and you can get it out in the world and people who want to know about your ideas can find you. So you can build an email list, you can build a podcast audience, you can build a social media following if you're into that kind of thing. A lot of what people have framed as personal branding sort of falls in that category. But really what it is, is the digital ecosystem could produce lead flow and you could use any number of tools to export your ideas. That's what I mean by distribution, to create inbound opportunity, that magical word inbound. And so the 2010s was this phenomenal era of this inbound magic that is functionally gone.

Jonathan Stark: I think a lot of people listening, I think that they're nodding their heads right now because they're sensing it. Especially, I've personally noticed it quite a bit in the last two years. And I mean, I thank my lucky stars that I've been doing a daily mailing list for 10 years where I have more or less non-algorithmic intermediated communication with people who give a crap about the kind of things I write about. So what was the model before the internet that everyone would be familiar with?

Inbound as Attention Arbitrage

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Nick Richtsmeier: There really wasn't one. I mean, inbound is really a shorthand for the attention arbitrage of the early internet. So you could basically trade attention for money in the early internet and we called it inbound. Well, prior to the internet and the mass ability to mass distribute information either through email or newsletters or websites or whatever, all of that way of gaining attention and then turning that attention into money, that didn't work, right? You built businesses by way of networks. And those networks were human and social and collaborative and often local. And so the internet was this amazing thing of like, oh my gosh, I don't have to do all this stuff anymore, right? That was the promise. And for a while that promise held. But inbound is just a shorthand for a kind of a brief fever dream that was the 2008 to 2022 internet.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. I think it might've even gone back, I would argue, maybe a little bit.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, probably a little earlier than that, probably 04, 05, somewhere there.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. And there are other ways, pre-internet ways to get the word out, but they all cost money and they might have created incoming leads, but it was like TV ads and radio ads and billboards and direct mail and it all cost money.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. I mean, the reason why I don't lump that into, why I wouldn't lump traditional media and advertising into inbound is because I think the hallmark of inbound is I can say, because I made this newsletter, I can contain people inside the newsletter. I can contain people inside my social media list. And therefore I have an audience that I can do attention arbitrage with. I can play the attention game with. You can't do that with direct mail or a TV ad because you're always subject to having to just pump out a new thing, right? Media is just very different than the containment game that inbound was really built on.

Jonathan Stark: That's interesting. Okay. That's a fine definition. I don't know if I would have defined inbound to have anything to do with content. To me, it's more like content marketing. It's like you write a book, you get inbound. You speak at a conference, you get inbound.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. I mean, I think that's true. I mean, again, I think if we're good, it's really depending on how broad we want to let the definition go. A lot of that book writing and conference stuff in the last 15 years has been dependent on the internet.

Jonathan Stark: Sure. Agreed. Okay. So that's very interesting. Okay. So what, so, so this is the system that has stopped working. I tend to agree with you. I haven't been paying, I don't think about it a lot. I don't write about it a lot, but I've certainly noticed that, um, I mean, just a couple of, couple of things. Like it seems like, um, for example, I think last year I had a, I had a post on LinkedIn that got like, I don't know, 2 million views or something like that. Ask me how much business I got. Zero. Zero. For sure. Yeah. So what's going on with the attention economy air quotes? Yeah. I mean, unfortunately a lot of what

Nick Richtsmeier: we call the attention economy is just branding that Google and Meta wrapped around an incentive

The Attention Economy Is a Casino

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Jonathan Stark: system to get you to put content on their platforms for free. Yeah. Yeah. Keep going.

Nick Richtsmeier: Like there isn't really an attention economy. Like there, most people are losing tons of money, tons of time, tons of attention, tons of focus, and their ability to actually run their businesses by trying to chase this stuff. The algorithms say are available to them. It's just, it is a black hole of waste. Um, and, and, you know, and other people have written about this extensively. They refer to it as a casino. It is so much more like a casino than almost any other metaphor that we apply to it. You just keep pulling the lever and enough people win that you keep gambling as far as you know. Yeah. Like, well,

Jonathan Stark: there's enough anecdotal evidence that people, you know, enough stories that people win.

Nick Richtsmeier: Right. But most people are losing that most people are losing dramatically. So if we want to talk about the attention economy, the attention economy is how a handful of monopolies extract maximum rent value and attention from every business in America. That's what the attention economy is.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I agree. I think everyone at this at this late date, this was like this was controversial like three years ago, and I think it's become a little bit more accepted now. Yeah. So in terms of I think what you mean is like the lived experience of like, hey, I'm trying to use content and and those kinds of things, the incentive systems are really broken down and you use LinkedIn as the example, the the thing that the platform started to realize coming out of COVID is their maximum incentive was to keep you on platform. So their number one thing they wanted you to do was to stay on platform. And the one thing that got you off platform was finding something

Nick Richtsmeier: valuable. So their incentive is to read this, and they've been doing this for years, is redesign the algorithms so that you get a minimum amount of value

Jonathan Stark: and and a lot of frustration. So you keep scrolling. Oh, yeah. OK, that makes sense. Right. So, yeah. What's it called? It's like unpredictable rewards or something like that. Exactly. So that is OK. So this is sort of obvious to me, but there's an angle here that I've never thought about before that I think is really, really good, which is if they find something of value, they're going to leave because LinkedIn is not that valuable. Right. So like it's a shinier object. So they don't want to show the shinier objects. But every once in a

Nick Richtsmeier: while, they'll give the creator two million impressions for no obvious reason, because it was basically just as good of a post as any other one. Well, because you usually usually it's because you happen to hit what the platform has decided is the topic to share. And so you happen to sort of bun up against a keyword or a theme or a something. Right. So like I had one that went to the kind of the multi-million views, I think sometime last year. And I made some snarky post about I'm if you show up at my house with wearable AI, I'm locking your wearable AI in the closet. You can still have dinner with me. Yeah. Yeah. And I got like two million views out of this because I think, again, this is all theory because they'll never tell you. But I had like a little photo of a thing that OpenAI, somebody had done like an AI version of this is what we think OpenAI thing is going to be after they hired Jony Ive. And that photo all of a sudden was showing up everywhere. Well, my gut suspicion is I had just the right mix of snark and a photo that the algorithm had said, hey, this is the topic du jour. And away we go. I just want to emphasize your point about them wanting

Jonathan Stark: to promote stuff that's of middling value or worse. That is that makes tons of sense. So the idea of trying to do something more and more and more valuable to the people who are following you, which you don't see your stuff anyway, right, is a fool's errand, basically, because they don't want you to see that. And this and we can basically prove this is true. Or certainly a big piece of evidence is that if you put a link to something great, they won't show any to

Nick Richtsmeier: anyone. Yeah. So there's yeah, there's link nerfing, which has been going around for a while. Some of the other stuff that tends to happen that is really provable is you look at the stats and what percentage of you say you get a thousand views on a post, which God love you. That's a very lucky day anymore. You get a thousand views on a post. Look how many of them are in network. People who actually follow you. It's probably less than 20 percent. Yeah, it is. I

Jonathan Stark: check. I get that kind of views all the time. And it's a massive number of people who are second and third order connections commenting. And it's like, how are these? Why are these people even seeing that? I mean, it's fine that

Nick Richtsmeier: they see it, but yeah. And and the platforms and the algorithms will tell you, oh, well, that's us helping you expand your reach. No, it's not. What it's doing is feeding an addiction machine and creating a stream of barely useful information. Because if it was if I followed you, I would find what you said really useful and I would be interested in you. What they really want

Jonathan Stark: is people who are interested in LinkedIn. Yeah. Just barely interested enough. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That is great. So that's why things like posts that your network comments on become so prevalent in your feed is because, well, I guess I'm sort of interested in this because someone I know commented on it. So I might be like, well, why did Jim comment on that? And I might zoom into the post. I actually care about that post. Right. And I certainly don't care about the person who wrote it. Yeah. OK, so so the attention to the so the attention economy is basically like a marketing trick property perpetrated on us by the social media platforms. Yes. OK. And that does make sense. So these are the this is the big thing that is has stopped working. And what's I don't know how old you are, but I you know, I had a black and white TV, so I'm old enough that I've seen lots of, you know, a couple of phases. Yeah. Of big transitions. And and it doesn't really bother me if this one goes away or this one's dead. But people who are 20 years younger than me who grew up on the Internet, they don't know anything else. Yeah. So it feels like the end of the world or something. I think

Five Major Disruptions

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Nick Richtsmeier: there's a couple of things that I would say to that. And some of this is in the book at in a deeper level, if people are interested. The first is and I mean this with all respect, you have the luxury of not caring, being not having to care about that. Agreed. Because like you said, you have you have a unmitigated audience, right? You can directly email people and they want to hear from you. And you've built that over a really long period of time. So people who don't have that are trying to figure out what the hell to do. And that's a very real problem. The the other piece of this is this would be so much easier to solve if it were the only massive disruption we were in the middle of. But it is just one of what I argue in the book is five major disruptions we're in the middle of. And those disruptions are creating a level of chaotic resistance and doubt and distrust. Things that always happen when we're in sort of what the word I use in the book is interregna, the old sort of old Latin book of we're in between rules, right? We're in between kings. And there are systems that used to work and they're they're fading out of view. And there are systems that haven't yet been built to replace them. And so everything's kind of chaos. And that sense of chaos is creating all kinds of nervous system resistance and tension and anxiety and distrust and all this kind of stuff, which for anybody who's trying to sell something makes everything 10 times harder.

Jonathan Stark: Yes. OK, do we want to can we jump to the five things or do you want to?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. Yeah. So the the the digital marketing thing is one layer, right? The next layer would be sort of just the commons, the idea that these are these two things are related. So we've kind of talked about both of them. The commons is just the idea that there's a place we can go to share ideas. We like Twitter used to be that there is no sort of common place to do that anymore. And all the predecessors to like Twitter and things like that are gone to your local newspapers, gone. All of these places where we used to go to share ideas are gone. The next layer, we don't have to talk a lot about politics, but it matters because it creates a sense of insecurity is we've spent really the last 50 years under the neoliberal regime. This idea that the purpose of government is to make businesses work easily, that it negotiates the power dynamic between capital and government. And neoliberalism said, hey, capital is the most important thing. Government just exists to make capital work and to keep boundaries clear. That whole regime, as we've seen politically in the U.S. and everywhere around the world, is breaking down. We don't know what happens in its place. Some people think Trumpism is the thing. Some people think fascism is the thing. It's probably none of those things. Those are probably all just chaos elements of undeterminedness. But if you're in business, insecurity is always a problem. So that missing piece creates insecurity. The other one that's really big, the next two are quite large. This one we've had for hundreds of years, and it's a weird little thing called the Westphalian order. And so the Westphalian order is simply the idea that the best way to organize the world is in nation states. And so we should organize power around the world within physical boundaries. We don't actually believe that anymore. We actually are now organizing the world in corporate boundaries. And that is a massive change. I'd say again, it's not about right or wrong or good or bad. It's just a massive change. And then finally, because of AI, the actual definition of what knowledge is, and whether knowledge is worth having is in total redefinition. So you've heard of, some people call this the, the name just escaped me, but sort of the, just the idea that words and print and all of that ruled for 500 years and the idea that words are the most powerful thing to define reality is in flux, right?

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Because... I've been saying for, not to interrupt, but I've been saying for 10 years that I feel like literacy might be on the downswing.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Because it's, and that freaks people out, but I say, well, I'm a musician and like, do I care if sheet music goes out of existence when anybody can record a performance on their phone and share that with me? Like, do I really need the sheet music? It's a bad encoding. Right. And now that the other, a better encoding becomes cheap and ubiquitous, then why would we keep the bad encoding around or the inefficient encoding around?

Nick Richtsmeier: Exactly. So I don't really have a,

Jonathan Stark: I don't really have a preference for whether or not people become more illiterate over time if the communication got better or if we could communicate directly with people's cerebral cortex and like transmit an emotion directly, for example, and not have to turn it into words first. And any musician will understand what I'm talking about because music is to transmit emotions that are not necessarily, there are no words for. Right. And so there's a whole reality that exists outside of the lexicon, outside of the dictionary that becomes invisible because of words, certainly written word. But anyway, I love books and I love writing, so I'm not really advocating for that. But anyhow, I just wanted to kind of pile on there.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. And so again, you think about people who are trying to get ideas out, people who sell knowledge, people who sell perspective, people who sell, you know, anything that's knowledge-based, the idea that we're now going, well, how important is knowledge really? How do you define knowledge? Well, it's not even about how I define it. It's how, it's the way in which it's being disrupted out in the world, right? So if I can, it's all of this sort of like, do we need to send people to university? Can't they just use AI? If I'm reading something on the internet, do I need to, does it matter if a human wrote it or is it just, do the words in the sequence is all that matters? This idea of what actually constitutes human knowledge, it really doesn't matter what my definition is. The point is we don't have one anymore. And it used to be words. And it used to be, if you could contain a core idea in words, in sequence, in a meaningful way, that represented a meaningful idea that deserved consideration.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, so let's pause here for a second.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yep.

Jonathan Stark: So, because this is like too good. Like, so I just want to keep having a conversation.

Nick Richtsmeier: Sure.

Jonathan Stark: So that reminds me, again, old guy, of free internet, way pre-internet, 20 years pre-internet, when I had to ride my BMX bike to the Warwick Public Library with a pack of full dimes and find a book about a thing I wanted to learn about and hopefully somebody else didn't rip the page out that I wanted and Xerox the thing and bring it home. And so it really, knowledge, in that sense, in that definition, the words definition, it was scarce.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: It literally was. It was a huge pain in the ass. I mean, imagine before books, right? But like, so my, you know, going to school uphill both ways in the snow is we had to go to the library and you had to borrow a book or read it there or Xerox it and bring it home and pay a fine when you forgot to bring it back. And now, I mean, the internet is like, it's crazy compared to that.

Nick Richtsmeier: Totally. And then you throw AI on top of it and it starts to bring into, it just moves the scarcity somewhere else.

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Nick Richtsmeier: It really is about where the inefficiencies are and where the scarcity is. And you move all that around and the basic work of running a business becomes really, really complicated when it used to be somewhat simpler. Because just these fundamental, again, I'm not trying to take a side on, we have to fight to keep the words. I'm not making a reductionist sort of, hey, the old way is the right way point. The point is, we are deep in the fog of unknown. And when we're in that fog, we live in a world that is very difficult to sell it because unknown is sort of the antithesis to selling.

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Nick Richtsmeier: No one wants to take a risk.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: Clamp down.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. So, was that all five?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yep, that's five.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. All right. So, what's your thesis about, where's the new scarcity?

Nick Richtsmeier: Well, the new scarcity is fundamentally trust and attachment. A lot of people talk about trust. I have a whole system on trust. We can talk about that. But really what underlies that, what I end up talking more about, is attachment. That we are human psychology, the way our brains work, the grounding layer of it is attachment. We have to be attached to place. We have to be attached to people. We have to be attached to ideas. We have to be attached to processes. And those attachments give us a sense of security or grounding or whatever your spiritual tradition uses to frame that. And that sense of grounding allows us to make context-rich decisions. I'm in a context so I can make a decision. Well, everything that's happened, everything that's been happening in the last 20 years, particularly accentuated by these five interregna, leads us to really detached lives. We don't have a sense of place. We live in this sort of contextless online existence. Everybody's business is contextless. It's just a business on the internet, which isn't an actual place. We know everybody's lonely and isolated and separated. All of the things that create psychological grounding, which invariably creates the opportunity for me to make risk-oriented decisions, which is what is required for economies to work, all of that's underwater. It's not gone, but we're in a bad way.

Trust and Attachment as Scarcity

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Jonathan Stark: Okay. I'll bet you people are nodding along to this. This maps... You're putting words, speaking of words, you're putting words to my lived experience, and that includes my experience of having a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old. So not just business, so also like normal personal life.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yep.

Jonathan Stark: And it makes me think about the IRL institutions that we participate in and the sort of old-school nature of those things. So is that what you think is... Do you think... I mean, nothing... I don't... I would bet against someone who said that we're going to go back to some old way. I don't think that's happening. But does the new way that you think, if you want to speculate, do you think the new way has components of the old things that sort of never go out of style, air quotes?

Nick Richtsmeier: That's right.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. So what are you picturing?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. So we can't do it the way we did it, right? We can't go to bowling alleys and put stuff on bulletin boards and... You know, like... Because... In part because those systems have been decimated too. So, you know, like a lot of my friends in marketing are like, hey, I'm pivoting back to direct mail. I'm like, the mail doesn't work. Like, that would be cool if we could pivot to direct mail, but the post office is completely falling apart at the hinges. Like, that system doesn't work. And one of the premises of the book is that the old inefficiencies were load-bearing. So you remove all the inefficiencies and now the house is falling down. So we don't...

Jonathan Stark: Let's not zoom past that one. The old efficiencies... The old inefficiencies were load-bearing. Okay. The old inefficiencies, meaning what exactly?

Friction as a Load-Bearing System

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Nick Richtsmeier: Meaning the fact that it was a little bit hard to reach someone made it worth reaching them. The fact that we had to think about what we wanted to think about. That we had to slow down and go, what do I want to focus on today?

Jonathan Stark: Oh, right, right, right. In other words, you couldn't just... It was like email was the first frictionless spam. So like before that, there was... It cost you money to spam people.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: So you had to be a little bit more thoughtful and intentional about what you were going to send. Yeah, and as a consumer,

Nick Richtsmeier: I couldn't just like... There's a real reason... It's not just Amazon's algorithms that what we go to Amazon for is trash. The reason why Amazon primarily we buy trash from it is because in a frictionless world, we will always smooth Brian our way to the least valuable options. Because friction allows us to consider our own wants, our own desires, our own resistance, our own preference. So if there's no friction, we'll just go to the Doritos.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, so you're basically saying people need to slow down and there's no friction to enforce that on them.

Nick Richtsmeier: Right. And so everybody's mad at themselves. They're mad at the people selling to them. So the world we have to create is to rebuild one's systems that allow for valuable friction. And you're seeing this all the time in business environments where, hey, if you want to work with us, we want to have a sit-down meeting first. And, you know, initially people resist that, but then they're like, oh, this must be serious. And then they decide to have a meeting first. That instead of prospecting by spamming the internet with posts and 27 AI-made YouTube videos, you call 10 people or email 10 people and say, hey, can I just have a chat with you and let you know what I'm up to and get your feedback. The friction of that email outreach, of the sitting down with people, of them speaking to you, right? You know, like you and I both know Blair Enns. He's doing an interesting program right now where they're literally sending daily thank you notes, handwritten thank you notes.

Jonathan Stark: Oh, is that what he's... Yeah, I saw the announcement about this, but I didn't read the post. Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: And he didn't frame it this way, but all of this is about introducing friction to show people that there's value here.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, OK. I was with you for the first half of that sentence. I do like the idea of introducing friction. Explain to me how that results in value.

Nick Richtsmeier: It doesn't necessarily, but it's a signal, right? Because now, because every time I go to the internet, I have no idea if anybody worked on this. When you started sending out emails, I knew that if I got an email from somebody, a human being sat down and worked on it. Now I don't know. I don't actually know if anybody put any effort to this. So therefore, I don't even know if there's any value here.

Jonathan Stark: Right. Am I the first person to read this? Am I basically the proofreader? Right. Yeah. Right.

Nick Richtsmeier: And but if there's friction, right, if there's these things that slow us down and things that cause us to be more thoughtful, slower thinking, then I at least have the option that there might be value. It doesn't guarantee it, but it's a signal.

Jonathan Stark: Right. So there's people out there, I think, probably like the Pat Flynn's of the world and Noah Kagan and those thought leader types. A lot of the folks in that group say something like, when you're starting out, do stuff that doesn't scale,

Nick Richtsmeier: which sounds like what you're saying. That, I mean, again, one of the things they tell me a lot is I don't have any original ideas because all the stuff that's going to work is thousands of years old.

Jonathan Stark: Agreed. Yeah. Don't tell me, don't predict the future for me. Tell me what's going to be exactly the same in 10 years. I'm much more interested in that. Because what's coming back is, oh, we have to do the, we have to come back to these old instincts, right? So yeah, do the thing that doesn't scale.

Nick Richtsmeier: I would agree with that. Yeah. So, okay.

Jonathan Stark: But I think we agree that we're not going back to like networking at the Chamber of Commerce on a Thursday night. But maybe you disagree. I don't know. We don't know, right? Because there's no systems. We don't know what's going to get built, but we got to build something.

Nick Richtsmeier: Sure. I agree. But there are certain, there are some really, there's some things that I won't go back to. I'll become a garbage man before I do in-person networking. Sure. So I do think, I mean, the power of the internet, I'm not, not the web and not social media, but the internet itself is this global communication network that, you know, over which you can send whatever messages you want.

Restoring Trust Through Human Contact

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Jonathan Stark: Totally. The tricky thing, which you're, you're so brilliantly pointing out, is that there's no trust layer to it.

Nick Richtsmeier: Right. So it could be that a future thing, I don't actually think this will happen, but it could be that the new thing that happens is there's some trust-based mechanism built on top of it. Please don't say blockchain, but something on top of it that air quotes, convinces someone that a human wrote this or, but see, I'm subscribed to a lot of newsletters. I'm a newsletter guy.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: And I know that Mike Montero, Bob Lefsetz, I know those, those people are writing their own material. That's not coming out of an AI. And you can tell, but those guys are both brilliant, brilliant writers. I don't even like everything they write, but they're such good writers, I read it anyway. Like I don't agree with them, but their writing is so good, I read it.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. I mean, the challenge, I don't, I obviously would never debate your lived experience. The challenge is increasing evidence shows that you can't tell, that the average reader cannot tell the difference.

Nick Richtsmeier: Okay, fair enough, fair enough. And I think the other piece of it is, what we're talking, the signal you've offered is they have a level of brilliance that is very difficult to ape.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: And that's not the average business owner.

Jonathan Stark: Fair enough. Okay, yeah, yeah, all true. So what does the average business owner do? I'll throw out some examples, you can tell me if you think they're good or bad, but these are things I've heard of people doing. I think, again, I think Pat Flynn or Noah Kagan, or might've even been Hormozy or whatever, you know, all these people talking about this stuff. You know, when someone new signs up to your mailing list, record a video answer and send it to them. Or when someone new follows you on social media, record a video and send it to them. Or like Blair is doing, you know, send thank you notes to people, handwritten, like clearly handwritten, not auto pen, blah, blah, blah, stupid. Like stop trying to optimize everything for scale.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: Especially my audience, who only needs about eight to 10 clients a year.

Nick Richtsmeier: Exactly.

Jonathan Stark: So you're just, we're not selling sneakers here. We don't need to reach the mass market. It's like, who are your ideal buyers? What could you do to delight them? And this kind of sounds a little bit just like, I mean, it sounds a little bit like have awesome customer service, basically. Like have an amazing customer experience. How would someone create an amazing customer experience in 2026?

Nick Richtsmeier: Well, handwritten notes would be amazing.

Jonathan Stark: Right, right.

Nick Richtsmeier: Things that are friction, friction full. For the seller. Yeah, and in some cases for the buyer. That part of what the buyer is doing is going, a little bit of friction lets me know that you're a real person. Because there's very little, the evidence is shifting here, that the smooth brained path through a buyer's journey is what people are looking for. Cause they fall out of those buyer funnels all the time. Read this and then click here, and then read this and then click here. And then, you know, like all of that sort of funnel, funnel metrics kind of stuff that was the heyday of 2017. People are incredibly distrustful of that because it all feels like online manipulation. And so they'd rather be forced into an actual phone call. It's like people who don't want to have an AI scan them for an interview. Because they're trying to decide if they want to even be hired by you.

Jonathan Stark: Well, how can they decide that if they have to go through an AI screening process first?

Nick Richtsmeier: I'm sure that exists,

Jonathan Stark: but this is the first I've heard of it.

Nick Richtsmeier: Oh, no, I mean, it's in mass. Most of the part of what's happening on the employment side, I know that's not necessarily the purview of this podcast, but like part of what's happening on the employment side is you can't get a job without an AI screening, an AI screening interview, where you sit and talk to a robot and they listen for keywords to see if they're going to allow you to talk to a human.

Jonathan Stark: Uh, could employment have been more dehumanized?

Nick Richtsmeier: The answer is yes. I mean, it's ugly. It's so ugly.

Jonathan Stark: It's like Elysium where Matt Damon has to go to a robot parole officer who threatens to kill him for being sarcastic. Was that sarcasm I detected?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, exactly. Yes. So I strongly believe that if we intend to build trust, if we intend to help everybody move from the back of the brain where we're animalistically reacting to the front of the brain where we're actually going, do I like you? Do I want to work with you? Do I want to hire you? The only thing that does that is friction because it pulls me out of my reactivity. And if I never get pulled out of my reactivity, I'm just going to be an animal looking for.

Jonathan Stark: Oh my God, mic drop. Yes, that's doom scrolling. That's TikTok.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Selling When People Are Scrolling

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Jonathan Stark: They're not paying attention.

Nick Richtsmeier: No.

Jonathan Stark: No.

Nick Richtsmeier: We know that almost 50% of social media traffic is bots, but even if you're actually getting humans, they might as well be bots.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, they're not paying attention.

Nick Richtsmeier: No.

Jonathan Stark: And I'm not even into this. Like, I don't want to come off like I'm some superior entity.

Nick Richtsmeier: No, I do it too, totally.

Jonathan Stark: But I know when I'm like thumbing through, I don't have TikTok, but I have to control myself to not go on YouTube shorts. And I can feel it sucking me in.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: I had a podcast interview before this, not to go off topic too much here, but I had a podcast interview before this and the guest's sound wasn't coming through. And I was like, maybe something's wrong with my headphones. So I clicked over to YouTube to see if my volume worked, like if I could hear a video. And it was like gravitational, it was like I was trying to leave the earth's orbit to get back to a live person. who is sitting there trying to debug his microphone. It is incredible how seductive it is.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: And the other thing for business owners, sorry.

Nick Richtsmeier: Oh, go ahead.

Jonathan Stark: For business owners, when I'm doing that, like going through these shorts and seeing like, you know, whatever, comedian, comedian, comedian, martial arts fight, you know, what, you know, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: I'm not clicking through to somebody's website. I don't even know who most of these people are. Occasionally I'll see so many videos from like one particular comedian that I'll notice that maybe they're coming to my town, but I don't go.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: There is, I, anyway. Okay, so I'm preaching to the choir with you, I know, but I just wanted to share that particular experience because I think, listener, if you notice that gravitational pull and you notice how you act as the viewer, you can pretty easily convince yourself that there's no way in hell you're gonna get a client from someone engaging in this animal behavior.

Nick Richtsmeier: I love the way you put that.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, I mean, you can't sell club sandwiches at a cocaine fair.

Jonathan Stark: Nice.

Nick Richtsmeier: You just can't, right? I mean, you could be, have the best club sandwiches in the world. It doesn't matter.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, ice cream in Alaska. So what are some examples of, that you've seen, ideally things that have had a chance to play out a little bit, where people are adding friction into the marketing and sales process?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, so we did this with a software company and it's been an interesting experience. It's evolutionary, we're still experimenting with it, but it's interesting to do it in software because obviously you would think, well, if anything should be optimized for digital, it should be software.

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Nick Richtsmeier: And we, all their data said, if we try to play by the rules and do demos and get people onto demos, and then a certain number of people do demos, and then those people eventually do a free thing, and then those free people eventually buy the license, we're gonna lose, like we're gonna run out of money. And take too long, sales cycle too long. And it just, it's too noisy, right? That whole system is so overrun. So we did some work and we were like, hey, like a lot of companies, you need probably six to eight really, really good clients in the next 12 to 18 months. How do you find those six to eight or six to 10 or whatever clients in the most effective way? Well, the obvious answer to that is from their existing relationships. And what those clients don't want is some trashy demo, right? What those clients want is because they're not ready to trust you, they don't trust you, they don't think that what you're, they don't think your website's telling the truth, they don't think your case studies are real, they don't think any of that's real. So what they wanna know is, here's my lived experience, here's my problem. I want you to listen to my problem and I want you to explain to me how you would fix it. And so what we did is, the front end offer is in a demo, it's a 30 minute meeting with their head of client success. So the head of client success just sits with people and says, hey, what are you guys trying to solve for? They answer an eight question questionnaire, provides some initial data and they basically get free analysis and they go, huh, that's interesting. What else could you help us with?

Jonathan Stark: How do you even get people on the phone for that?

Notice Meetings and Relationship Networks

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Nick Richtsmeier: Well, again, you start with relationships.

Jonathan Stark: Oh, right, right. So are you talking about, in this particular case, it kind of sounds like you're just, you're not just, I shouldn't say just, you're activating a referral network.

Nick Richtsmeier: Kind of. That is one of the potential outflows of it. And I get a lot of like, well, this is so simple, it's stupid, you know, kind of reaction to this, but.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, well then do it.

Nick Richtsmeier: You know, I've worked with dozens of individual founders working through a similar strategy that says, okay, so we're gonna have a notice meeting.

Jonathan Stark: I'm like, well, what's a notice meeting?

Nick Richtsmeier: I said, you're gonna take 10 people that you kind of know, that you maybe used to work with or used to have, that they're not paying attention, they don't know what you're doing, they don't know what your current offering is, they don't even know you quit your job, they don't have a clue, right?

Jonathan Stark: Right, right.

Nick Richtsmeier: But once upon a time, they liked you.

Jonathan Stark: Uh-huh.

Nick Richtsmeier: And you're gonna take those 10 people and you're gonna reach out to them and say, hey, I've been out of touch, would you be willing to just find 30 minutes and let's catch up? I'd love to hear what's going on with you.

Jonathan Stark: You're preaching to the choir with that. Yep, keep going.

Nick Richtsmeier: And then you actually do that.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: You sit down and you take an interest in what's happening with them.

Jonathan Stark: Yep. And then five minutes before the end of the time, I'm like, oh crap, I've been talking this whole time, what's up with you?

Nick Richtsmeier: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Stark: And then you say, hey, I'm working on XYZ, it's a, I'm, you know, I need a lot of feedback, I need, is there anybody that you know who's interested in ideas like XYZ that I should be talking to? And then you go talk to that person.

Nick Richtsmeier: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Stark: And guess what? You will spend less time and be 10,000 times happier having those 10, 20, 30, 40 conversations than you did pulling your hair out trying to figure out what you're gonna post on LinkedIn tomorrow. I can't emphasize this enough. Like, it is old school, but it's got the friction thing that you, and I've done this. I know people who do this. And it works. This is their main thing. It does, right, so here's the objection that I get from people. Here's the objection that I get from people. Let's dismantle the objection together because we both agree. The objection I get is I don't wanna spend all that time if it's not gonna work. Why would I talk to someone who's not, you know, my brother-in-law, or it wouldn't be your brother-in-law. It'd be like my boss from two jobs ago, my manager from two jobs ago. They work in-house, they're not my buyer. Why would I talk to them? There's two reasons why you would talk to them. Number one is you are overconfident and you're not actually ready to talk to anybody.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yes.

Why Friction Polishes Ideas

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Jonathan Stark: Yes. And so this whole thing of you're gonna post or you're gonna use internet marketing or whatever to bypass the fundamental flaw, which is the idea isn't ready for prime time. Because the idea hasn't gone through a friction process. Your idea, the thing you're thinking about going to market with, the thing you're thinking about selling, the way you're thinking about selling it needs to be shaved down and rubbed up against and scraped. And the only way you do that is by butting it up against people.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, friction.

Jonathan Stark: Right, friction polishes it.

Nick Richtsmeier: Right.

Jonathan Stark: And you need friction. You need practice saying it because you're gonna get to the end of the first 10 of those meetings and go, God, what was I saying? Why did I say it that way? Right, and who better to say that with than your brother-in-law or your ex-boss or whatever.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: So the first reason to do it is because you're way less ready from prime time than you think you are. Yeah, and I think people are nodding along with that because they have had this experience of being like, what the hell did I just say at the end of that call? I don't even know what I said. Yes, along with that kind of 1A corollary is along the way, you're gonna stumble upon some ways of like, oh, this is how I wanna say that. And then go put that on your website.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: That's a much better way of testing what to put as your headline on your website than running a bunch of AI simulations over it.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, and PS, people read the mom test. Great book.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, and then number two. And then number two is because you don't know. We have no idea. And the way that, and what you're gonna find out is the 10 people who need you the most are one degree of separation from you.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, I've written at length about this. It is shocking how connected people are. And we've lost it completely because we think connection is somebody's name and a hyperlink on the internet. That's not connection. Connection is attachment. Yeah, it's a trust network.

Jonathan Stark: Yes, and for a brief period of time before the algorithms cut into it, the internet was a trust network. That's when it was so fun.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah, that is when it was fun.

Jonathan Stark: Right, because if somebody knew somebody you knew and you found them in their friend list or whatever list, that meant something. Well, how did we meet?

Nick Richtsmeier: Right, friend of a friend.

Jonathan Stark: Friend of a friend, yep.

Nick Richtsmeier: And some of that is because I practice what I preach.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, how did that, okay. So how did the Philip think? So Philip, the dear listener will recognize the name Philip Morgan.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: He and I were in a mastermind, that's overstating it. We were in a Slack room together in the mid-10s and it was great, it was great. And we've stayed in touch, we're totally aligned. We were co-hosts on The Freelancer Show. Great guy, very interesting. So I get a text message from Philip, hey, there's this guy, Nick. I think you guys would totally jam. And he was right and it worked. But how did, you must have done something.

Nick Richtsmeier: Sure.

Jonathan Stark: To encourage Philip to send that text message.

Nick Richtsmeier: I totally did, I totally did. So this again is why we're not throwing babies out with bathwater. I have a newsletter, I write a newsletter, I put ideas in that newsletter. But I don't have any illusion that if I get a thousand more people on my newsletter, I'm gonna make more money. I write a newsletter for proof of life and proof of position. So. So, Philip has, over time, pinged a couple things on my newsletter. He would share it, he would – and there's people who are in my community who only know me through Philip. I've only probably talked to Philip a couple times, but he's shown an appreciation for my work. And so, I wrote a book, and it's a pain in the butt to get a book out in the world. And so, I started thinking about, well, who might like my book? And I thought of, among many other people, I thought of Philip. And so, I said, hey, Philip, I'm writing this book, you've liked my stuff before, would you be up for having a call? He's like, sure. So, we got on a call, he shared a little bit about what's going on with him, got updated on what he's working on, where his frustrations are. He did what almost always happens, he said, okay, now tell me about your book, tell me about the book. He said, well, I love your ideas, I want these ideas to get out in the world, here's what I can do. And he introduced me to you, and a couple other people. Great. It's so – right, it's like, duh.

Jonathan Stark: There's a key piece that might be invisible to people who don't do this.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. And here's the piece, get ready for it, it's totally genuine.

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Nick Richtsmeier: Right?

Jonathan Stark: Yes.

Nick Richtsmeier: You're not tricking anyone.

Jonathan Stark: No.

Nick Richtsmeier: You're just connecting with people and having interesting conversations with them, and then they love your stuff and they want to amplify it.

Jonathan Stark: It's just completely normal. There's this – I fear that someone listening is going to be like, okay, now how do I game this?

Nick Richtsmeier: It's like, you can't game it. Yeah, I talk about this a little bit in the book, and I hate that little saying, but I just – we're brushing past – we have to sprint past a lot of stuff, so I want to let people know that if they want to dig into it more, there's available resources. But that – the reason why we want to game it is because it's vulnerable, right? Reaching out to Philip and being like, hey, do you want to like me? Is like, you know, it feels like I'm in the seventh grade again, like it kind of sucks. It's not the best feeling in the world. But when we are coming full circle to all of the ideas we've talked about today, when we're in a trust, massive 40-year trust deficit, and if you want to sell, and I want people to read my book, then I have to lead not with automation, but I have to lead with vulnerability. So I start the vulnerability train and say, hey, would you be willing to talk to me?

Jonathan Stark: Right, because he has to take a risk to introduce you to me.

Nick Richtsmeier: Exactly.

Jonathan Stark: And there's no reason why he would do that if I didn't take a risk first.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yep. If you do social capital at risk, but you're not willing to do it, but do you want me to

Jonathan Stark: do it?

Nick Richtsmeier: Right.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: And so I think part of – it's – sometimes we overcomplicate all the time, you know, I probably overcomplicate it talking about the internet and all of these sort of social political changes. The fundamental thing is we really don't like vulnerability. And the internet was a really good place for a period of time to be able to feel like you could be incredibly productive and never have to feel vulnerable. And the loss of that is painful for people.

Jonathan Stark: Oh, man. Imagine just growing up on the – I don't want to ask how old you are, but like, did you grow up on the internet?

Nick Richtsmeier: No, no.

Jonathan Stark: I'm – I'm answering. I'm 47. So I like, you know, I was like, bee-bom, bee-bom, bee-bom in like the seventh grade, you know? So I'm like a little in the middle.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. And I tell people all the time, and this is an honest-to-God truth, I – when I first wrote that piece about the internet closing, part of the reason why I wrote it is because I was in a legitimate grief process for myself, because the internet changed my life. I was a kid – miserable kid from a tiny town who felt completely out of place everywhere, and then I discovered the internet. And then there were different layers of that over the first 15 years of my adult life, where it was like, oh, that's possible, oh, I could meet those people, oh, I could be in that conversation. The internet changed my life. And so it just isn't what it was.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. It's – the glory days are gone. I said something similar on social media, I'm like, there's a local store near us – I know we have to wrap up, but there's a local store near us that was – they had an – it appeared that there was an event going on. They were setting up for something in the parking lot, and I was curious what it was, so I went to the website. Nothing about it. There was nothing about it on their website. And so my wife was like, well, it's probably on Instagram. So I went to Instagram, and sure enough, there were like, you know, 15 posts about this big event. And I was like, I'm like, the web is dead. Not the internet. I was like, the web is dead. If a local business isn't updating their own website about something that's going on – and the reason why is because only old farts like me would think to go to a website because everyone's going to social media. Which it does – I mean, again, there's huge problems with that. I mean, like, my wife works at the high school in the athletic department, and so they're constantly under pressure to have to get the information out about the game and who's playing and what happened. You know, like, and there's 17 – it's a big high school, so it's like 17 different teams. And I watch all of the chaos of like, where did we post that? Did we post that? Did we post it to the team channel? Did we post it to the athletics channel? Was it Twitter? Was it Facebook? Was it both?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: There's no source of truth. It's chaos.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: I don't even get me started on the public schools around here. Like, and the messaging. It's like impossible. Anyway, we're going to go for another whole hour if we get out of this rabbit hole. This is absolutely great. And not only the book, you know, the book's coming out on – we're recording this on – in August. Book, I think it comes out on September 15th?

Nick Richtsmeier: That's right. Yep.

The Damn Rules and Closing Thoughts

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Jonathan Stark: All right. So, is this your first book?

Nick Richtsmeier: It is.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. So, a couple of things about that. Like, ladies and gentlemen, if you're not convinced already that you should read this book, I don't know what to tell you. But in addition to that, I've seen the cover and it's gorgeous.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: It is. I don't – I don't want to go down this rabbit hole. Maybe we'll have a follow-up conversation. But it is beautiful. And I look forward to getting the hard copy, which I almost never do, getting a hard copy of a book. But I'm going to be first in line for this because this has been fantastic and I really appreciate you coming on.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. I got to give a shout out to Kyle and his information's on the website and you can find it who literally designed that cover and did a carved print of the – and then digitized the carved print. So, we really wanted to exemplify the spirit of friction.

Jonathan Stark: It stands out like incredible.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. He's – he's a genius and it's so cool. So, yeah, I would love it if you guys pick up the book. It means the world to me and I think it's a conversation we can all be a part of, so.

Jonathan Stark: Fantastic. So, where should people go to find out more about you and, you know, any special websites for the book or anything like that?

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. So, probably easiest place to find out all the different things I'm working on is just nickrichmeyer.com. You can get the spelling, I'm sure, in stone notes or whatever. If you search The Damn Rules at almost any book website, you'll get it. Thankfully, there's no other The Damn Rules books. So, The Damn Rules by Nick Richmeyer on any book website or if you don't want to have to go through that, we have a website for that too, which is damnrulesbook.com. So, a bunch of different ways you can get it.

Jonathan Stark: And tell them about the podcast.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. And so, we work through a bunch of these ideas as well on the podcast called Damn's Given and you can find out more about that at damnsgiven.com. Awesome.

Jonathan Stark: All right. Well, thanks again, Nick. That's great.

Nick Richtsmeier: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan Stark: All right, folks. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly.