Season 2 of the Damns Given Podcast (formerly Working/Broken) relaunched last week, where we're taking a look at issues worth caring about, for those of us still giving a damn about trust, humans, and the society/economy we make. You know... you guys.
Where to find it: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube (video)
I wanted to start season two with Digital Minimalist, José Briones, and it was the 100% right decision. There's a moment in the episode where says something I haven't been able to shake.
He's talking about why simply switching to a dumb phone wasn't enough. He reduced his screen time on his devices. And then he just... moved everything to his laptop. The hunger didn't go anywhere. It just shifted containers.
"I had a lifestyle issue," he says.
And I started to think... what are the business costs, the revenue lost, the opportunities missed, the connections ignored... all from being lulled by these devices into an anti-thinking life.
We spend a lot of time in this episode doing what I think the best conversations do — getting beneath the symptom to the disease. The symptom is that you're on your phone too much. The disease is that we have been methodically and intentionally re-engineered to be extractable.
Jose lays out the timeline clearly. 2014 is the year things turned. Screens got bigger — not because you wanted a bigger screen, but because a bigger screen is an entertainment device, not a communication tool. And around that same time, the algorithmic shift happened. The feed stopped being chronological. It stopped showing you what your friends were doing. It started showing you what would keep you on the app longest.
Shoshana Zuboff called it surveillance capitalism. Cory Doctorow calls the process enshittification. Whatever you want to name it, the playbook is the same: give people something genuinely useful, get them dependent on it, then surveil the heck out of them, creating glass cages of selective information, half-truths and advertising... then monetizing the dependency. Today, we have endless receipts for all this: Lawsuits. Settlements. Governments moving. And social media companies, for the first time, are scared.
I'm inviting 16 people to join noted content guru Ben Steele for a five-week intensive using "writing as thinking" to get back your attention, refocus your voice, and give any leader the tools they need to break through the noise in this economy made by attention extraction.
The social media conversation is loud right now. Everybody's talking about going analog, buying records, ditching their phones. But, I think, we're often addressing symptoms, not root causes. What we're actually losing, José argues, isn't just attention. It's the ability to tolerate friction.
He watched a guy at a Nuggets game have a full meltdown because his QR code wasn't scanning. Not because he couldn't get in — there was a whole counter for exactly this problem. But because his mental model had collapsed. If the device fails, nothing can fix it. Technology companies have spent years promising us a frictionless life, and in doing so, made us brittle.
The same thing is happening to memory. When you look something up the second you wonder about it, you never give your brain the chance to hold the question. The information comes in and immediately flows out, leaving no trace. There's a reason your memory feels worse than it used to. It's not just middle age coming after all of us, we're training ourselves to forget.
One of the things that all this automation has been good at is showing us the middle of the road. The big averages. What average writing sounds like. What the mean thinking of reddit is on any given topic. Advanced more agentic use cases for AI are expanding fast, but for most people, their uses are not that different than social media--a little skimming off the top, a bunch of Gemini summaries, a whole existence of getting the "gist" of things.
There is, of course, no wisdom in this. Wisdom—that discerning force that divines between benevolence and error—is never found in the average. For that, we have to push ourselves to the margins, to the untapped country, to the complex muddy intersections of our very specific context: the life we live, with the leadership capacity we have, in the businesses we run, in the communities they flourish, with the blindspots we have. Doing more here, growing firms, attracting talent, recreating our growth plans... all require deep integrative work. The kind of work our algorithmic, digital living has often trained us to avoid.
The biggest challenge I see leaders today face is the inability to swim in the complex waters of their current problems and opportunities. They glance across the surface like their business is one more social feed, one more LLM summary, one more "Hey Alexa..." efficiency play. And in doing so, waste piles up, opportunities are missed.
Trust is broken. It doesn't have to be this way.
I hope you enjoy this episode. José's ideas are practical, tested, and applicable for leaders who want to reclaim their path to wisdom from the quick fixes of efficiency.
Where to find it: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube (video)
Stay brains on, heart open, forward progress.
