TECH TITANS: the Pursuit of Happiness with Adam Fichman, Owner at Lifted Logic

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're bringing you an episode of our latest show, Tech Titans. It features our greatest leadership advice distilled into shorter summary episodes. Adam from Lifted Logic joins us in this episode to share his journey to true fulfillment as a leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) So what did you learn? After you got a bunch of money, you realize that's not purpose. How did you go about giving your life meaning or finding purpose?

(Adam at 00:00:30) Okay, there was this concept. We were working with Docomo, and the true answer to how this kind of fell into place for me was they go, "Man, you guys..." I keep doing, like, "What do you want?" And I said, "Well, I'm chasing happiness." And they go, "No." I was like, "What do you mean, no?" They go, "See, that's very American." I was like, "Well, yes." They go, "What you're looking for is ikigai." I don't know if you've ever seen it before. If you Google it, it's like what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, what gives you...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Oh, yes, yes, yes.

(Adam at 00:01:01) Purpose, right? And that moves throughout life. You know, after you have your first kid, your purpose shifts, but that doesn't mean you truly feel like you're a systemically different person. I mean, I guess you kind of are, but I think I just realized this is gonna be a pretty fluid journey through my life of trying to find purpose. I think I'm still searching every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) I mean, what about you? You obviously have had so many accomplishments. How do you chase—are you chasing your purpose? I mean, obviously, you just had another kid. How's that work for you? Well, I could definitely say the end result is it's a constant work. But my background—I did software development for many years because my dad, who you met, he was an engineer, both software and hardware. So he'd take me to work with him, and I learned that. And then I did some real estate software that did pretty well. Not anywhere near, like—I think I made like a million dollars on it.

(Adam at 00:01:53) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) Yeah. And I was still like 21 or something. And so I learned how to manage money and do all of that. And then I started trying to figure out happiness in my late twenties. I started thinking about it and being more conscious. I feel like my brain sort of actually turned on at like 25. I started realizing that, oh, I'm not the only person in this world. There's other people, and they're going after other objectives, and we have to kind of figure out how everything works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) I had this realization—my mom died. So you met my stepmom. And so, out of nowhere, she had a stomachache. She went to the hospital. They're like, "You have cancer, but you've probably got like two years." She died like three weeks later.

(Adam at 00:02:33) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) And so I got to be in the room and hold her hand with my brother and my sister as she passed away. And at that moment, I was like, I don't know—something just clicked for me. And so there was a book I'd wanted to write about what I learned building my first tech team and then teams of teams. And so I was like, "I'm gonna go write that book." So I actually did it. I went and I did it after that day, and then I wanted to validate the book. So I was like, "I need to start talking to other CTOs. So let's use this podcast as an excuse to talk about book content." And so we did, and then it sort of turned into this thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) I thought what would happen would be that the podcast would get me a lot of relationships and I'd end up like CTO at AT&T or like VP of Engineering at like Brex—some big, awesome, cool job. But what ended up happening was, first, we started licensing the content for leadership training. Companies were paying us to license our podcast content. That went away in the pandemic because leadership budgets got cut.

(Adam at 00:03:34) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) And then people started paying because we had a six-month backlog of episodes. They started paying to come on right away. So they wanted to call us up, and they wanted to have someone on within two weeks and have it air. And they didn't want to wait six months. And so we realized people would pay for it and that they have marketing budgets. So we created marketing packages, grew that business to a million dollars a year, and then we were like, "Oh crap, there's only so many episodes you can do." And then we ended up talking to our sponsors, and they said, "Well, we want you to make us a podcast." And so we started a podcast production company, and we just grew that, and we're at the end of the first year of growing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) So that's my journey for the context. My mom was a big milestone, and then when I had the creator of the Internet—September or World Wide Web and then OSI, so many levels. So people rip me apart, by the way, on that one. Which part of the Internet?

(Adam at 00:04:26) Tim Berners-Lee, right? Obviously. I thought maybe Al Gore or something. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) I actually had people explain that to me. Apparently, Al Gore did the policy for it, but he did the technology. I got depressed. It's like, I think it was like 300 episodes into the show or something because I realized that I had set out to accomplish to talk to all these people, and I had talked to pretty much everybody I wanted to talk to. And then I started using my guests—I had on some really brilliant self-help people and stuff, and I just started telling them my story. And I'm like, "Do your thing that you do that's real expensive, but for free with me in front of this audience."

(Adam at 00:05:10) It's really interesting, you know, as you say that. I'm very open about my own mental health as well. And when I talk to kids, you know, they always call me. They're like, "Bro, you got hundreds of millions of dollars. Tell me that can't make you happy." And it's crazy. On one podcast I did for this high school collective, I literally used—I said, "Look, you won the lottery. You won $40 million. Are you happy?" They said yes. I go, "One of your parents just passed away. Are you happy?" And they say no. And I say, "Clearly, that shows there's not a causational effect of money and happiness." And so, you know, I think it's—I've never met anybody that truly went through that in the same way, and I've used that example a lot. So kudos to you. Those catastrophes in life and then having that—I know I'm gonna be on antidepressants the rest of my life. I know that. I know who I am, and I know what I'm gonna struggle with. But you're one of the few people I've ever met—the only one that has that story in the same way. So that's wild, man. I got goosebumps.

(Adam at 00:06:04) So if you had to get out of tech, if somebody goes, "Alright, man, here's a check—here's a couple hundred million dollars, whatever it is—but you gotta work 40 hours a week, and it cannot be in tech," what would you pick?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) Is podcasting tech?

(Adam at 00:06:23) Let's say yes, only because that'd be an easy answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) It is tech?

(Adam at 00:06:28) It is tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) I would invite successful people to my castle to have conversations about life.

(Adam at 00:06:42) You still got a podcast out of it, didn't you? You still found a way to still have a roundtable and talk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:44) Dude, it's because it's addictive. I'm very, very happy about the way that this turned out, but the reality is I get to talk to amazing people two or three times a week. And the—I just had a call before this. I only have one venture capital company that invested in us when we were leadership training, and then it failed. But the entity stayed the same because I was like, "I'm not collapsing the entity. You guys need to get your investment back. Let's pivot and do sponsorship and keep it going." And they were actually surprised. I was like, "Well, that's just what you've gotta do, man."

(Adam at 00:07:26) You know, my dad went through bankruptcy. I'm pretty open. You know, he is too, man. My dad was an entrepreneur. He went through bankruptcy, and, you know, he hit 50 years in business this year. And I went to a trade show with him when I was a young kid, and these people come up to me, and they said, "You know what? You have an amazing dad." And I said, "Yeah, I mean, I know that. But he went bankrupt." He paid every single one of his vendors back still. And I never thought twice about it. Of course my dad would do something like that. He never told anybody. He didn't make it a thing. He just told them. He was like, "Look, I can't pay you right now, and I have to do what I have to do. But I'm gonna—my name is the only thing I really have." I think it's—you obviously did a similar thing. Obviously, you didn't go through bankruptcy, but you still have a backbone. Again, this is still rare, man. I don't meet a lot—there's not a lot of people like you out there. I'm sure you know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) I give credit for it. I think it might be genetic or something. It's—I believe that, you know, I learned really early in business that you have to have a contract. You can't just shake hands. But it was me being, I guess, naive, but I am so interested in coming through on what I say I'm going to do that, you know, when I shake someone's hand and we make an agreement, I expect that to be carried out. But, you know, then the business stuff happens. But still, that's just—I don't know. I like being that person. It's easier to be that person because otherwise, you're the slippery, slimy salamander. You don't want to be the salamander.

(Adam at 00:09:05) I don't want any alliterations, none. How many of your CTOs that you meet with—you know, for me, I have a—I mean, obviously, my background's in business. I mean, I've been a programmer for 30 years, and object-oriented programming was always a part of my life. And, you know, everybody jokes I'm the only IT person at the company as well. But that's only because back when we started programming, we had to make—I had to make my own drivers. If I wanted to use something, I'd make it. But how many of the CTOs that you interact with have that strong financial background versus—you know, the new CTO doesn't seem to be the CTO of old. How much of that do you see as you're interfacing and meeting some of these CTOs now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) I see a couple of things. The first thing that I see as a trend is that the superhero jerk—that persona is dying, and it's become the...

(Adam at 00:09:57) The "I'm complex tech. I'm the only person that could ever know this, so you respect me."

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:01) Yes. Yeah. The one you walk in the room, and they're expected to just be treated differently. You get it. But, yeah, that being rude and being extraordinarily talented but not knowing how to interact with people—that became unpopular because the technology became more complicated and you needed to rely on more people. So then your ability to interact with people became incredibly important to achieve an objective. So that whole thing is one trend I see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) I see CTOs of all different shapes and sizes, all different skill sets. The ones—the trend line that I see of the ones that are most successful is self-awareness and then awareness of how the tech impacts the business. When they're in the company and they understand how the sales work and what people pay for and then what's being produced from the technology team, those two traits tend to be the most successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:09) There's a small subset of CTOs, and maybe this will answer it better—I'd say sub 5% that I talk to—that are at a level of significance and say that they still program. And what I've noticed that they do is they'll actually spin out, like, hire a senior vice president of engineering and have that person sort of play that role of a traditional CTO. And then they'll have an office of the CTO where they're experimenting, and they have a small team, maybe five to seven people, that are running experiments, figuring out things that they could do better. So when they sort of got that in-the-lab, hands-on type deal and they don't want to let it go, then they sort of spin that office of the CTO out and make sure that the other stuff's covered. But I see a handful of people that want to do that but don't know that that's an option, and they're kind of depressed because they had to stop programming to do all this other stuff, but they don't want to stop programming.

(Adam at 00:11:53) They got promoted to manager and then...

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:59) Those are a couple—did that answer your question?

(Adam at 00:12:04) Yeah, I mean, you know, I was on a panel. We get asked as technologists—I don't even know what the hell to call us. We get asked really ethical questions. I was on a panel within a year—I'm trying to think what I can disclose. It's for some government questions. I mean, you look at our politicians, right? They're old enough that none of us would actually ever hire them for our own companies. I got this 80-year-old that's looking for this tech job, and you'd be like, "Yeah, no." I mean, that's maybe illegal, but, you know, maybe it's experience-wise a little far out. But they're setting our laws.

(Adam at 00:12:32) And so I'm on this panel, and one of the questions came up about deepfakes. And I'm looking around the room, and I'm trying to listen to everybody. Here's basically the question: Ethically, if we could make a deepfake of an underage child and that gets created as porn, so nobody would be able to distinguish the difference between a 16-year-old girl—let's just say a 16-year-old girl—through a deepfake or through reality, what do you guys think? Should this be legal or illegal? And I'm looking around going, "How in the hell?" You have CTOs in this room and tech experts asking them ethical questions, not "How did we create something like that?" or "What do you think we should do?" Don't you think psychiatrists and psychologists should probably be the ones in here? You're asking tech people ethically and legally if we should be producing this. They're asking things like, "Is there a victim?" How am I qualified?

(Adam at 00:13:31) What I saw kind of going around the table was misplaced understanding of technology in our roles. For me, I kind of take on the—I mean, I am the CEO of the company, but I also am—obviously, it's a massive digital agency. So tech is in my everyday life, and so the lines are really blurred. I'm sitting next to somebody else that's been running Cat cables all day long with networking that probably is closer to an A+ certification answering ethical questions. And I just didn't know—is that the perception of the misalignments of what a CTO is now? And that's how we all ended up here? I thought for me, I'm here for video, and I've got a pretty good expertise on video and transcoding and distribution and, you know, had a pretty deep relationship with Pirate Bay back in the day. Totally different story.

(Adam at 00:14:17) But, you know, is that how CTOs are also being viewed company-wide, industry-wide, corporate-wide? Like, what is, when you have those interfaces? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's obviously still a lot of working CTOs, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Specifically on the ethics question, I haven't seen that a lot. Where I have seen it a little is companies that have controversial, like facial recognition companies and things of that nature. And typically, what they do is they have an ethicist on the team. It's like somebody who studied—I mean, ethics is like a field of study. It's like a whole thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:57) So to ask somebody that has no—you know, I mean, we all have our human, and it's all valid, like our human responses and everything like that. But if you're talking about, like, we're in the business world and we're making some decisions on specific strategy and we want the best information that's humanly available to us to make this decision, you're definitely going to want to go find the people that eat, sleep, and breathe it every day for their career. Right?

(Adam at 00:15:20) Right. I mean, maybe so much of tech is posturing anyway. Right? Hypothesizing. You know, it's like, hey, I know you don't really build mobile apps, but let's talk through this. Right? And maybe it's that extrapolation out there of just saying, like, okay, we think in a maybe a more procedural way about concepts we don't understand. So do you see the CTOs becoming less and less what we maybe would have described as traditional tech thinker?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) No. I think there's a certain portion of CTOs that are Harvard Business CTOs. I typically run into them when we're talking about companies that are owned by family offices or private capital because they'll run in their networks, and then they need someone who's smart on tech. And then they'll be like, hey, you know how to formally run a business, and you know tech. Can you come in and help me with my tech side of things? You know, I see that more. But I'd say the vast majority is creative people trying to solve a problem and really loving the problem solving. Like, for me, for the better part of seventeen years every day, I wrote code until year two of this podcast when it really started making money, and then I just kind of stopped because I found that the thing that helps me, the thing that satisfies me is getting to talk and think through problems and talking to other people like you that have solved problems and how you did it. So, you know, I talked to this guy the other day that put an electrode stent through the jugular up through the brain vessels so that you get the brain-computer interface without having to drill through the skull, and you can go home the same day. Right? And he's got this embedded in people. So having people come on, explain how they solve problems. And then, of course, the audience is always at the center of everything, and it's like, how do we bring value? So we separate the episodes into educate, elevate, and entertainment. Right? So we'll have some entertaining episodes that are more like that jugular one with the electrode stent. So we'll separate them up like that.