John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Growth. My name is John Hill, aka Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today, we have Lucas Fisher on the show. Lucas and I got connected fairly recently, and I was super excited to have him on here because he’s in a season of change. We don’t often hear about these kinds of stories whenever we’re looking at people in the space, but being able to pivot and being able to look for the right signals so that way we can stay on the path is a very important part of the skill set of being a founder and staying at the forefront of things. We’re going to dive in, talk to him about what he was doing before this, what he was seeing as far as the writing on the wall, and how he’s approaching his pivot.

Lucas, can you talk a little bit more about the work you were doing before you decided to make a change?

Lukas Fisher (00:00:47)

Yeah. I won’t give you the whole long backstory, but I ended up committing to copywriting—like direct response copywriting—as a skill set that I wanted to master early on in my entrepreneurial journey. I built a freelance business out of that: private clients, consulting, that type of thing. Then, about halfway through that journey, I had a demand foisted on me to mentor junior copywriters. I created a mentorship program and a separate company for all of that. That was my dual track through the last decade. That went really well. It was a great lifestyle, personal business. I created a lot of great results for people, both on the personal side and on the mentorship side.

Right around the 2022 timeframe—both prior to ChatGPT and then after ChatGPT originally launched—the world of direct response copywriting and specifically freelance copywriting, training junior writers, that type of thing, was a directly impacted industry, very heavily by AI. It was also already an industry under strain from 2020 and a lot of the stuff that happened as a result of the pandemic, people going remote, and a lot of worldwide global jobs opening up even more so than they previously were. That was an inflection point in my life and career where both of my primary businesses were directly affected by a huge technological change.

I played with it for a little while to see how I could pivot around in that space, but ultimately decided after basically one last hurrah in 2023 that it was time to shut both of those down because the nature of the business was not something I was willing to pivot into in that specific industry. Since the end of 2023, I’ve essentially been taking a lot of the skill sets, a lot of the systems, and a lot of the learning that I’ve had from that career into a few new spaces. AI is one of them. There are a lot of systems, implementation, and integration around AI stuff that is coming out of my industry, because the work still needs to get done at the end of the day. But also, there are opportunities around the higher-level skills like messaging, storytelling, and understanding target markets, demographics, psychographics, behaviorgraphics—all that stuff—and applying them to new industries. I’m in that phase where I’m trying to take stock of everything that I’ve been able to do, apply it in different areas, and see what best fits me, what best fits the goals that I have for my life, and how to navigate the sea change.

John SmallMtn (00:04:05)

Totally. Enough for people who were listening with intention, anyway. So, I have some questions around this. I met this guy one time, very early on in my journey, and he ran a graphic design agency. It was so funny because he wasn’t doing graphic design anymore. I said, “Hey, what caused you to change?”

He was like, “I can tell you exact the day.”

I was like, “Okay, what happened?”

He’s like, “We were doing stuff for Blockbuster, and the head of marketing for Blockbuster called me with questions about Adobe. I knew that I was on borrowed time. If the head of marketing is going to call me to ask about the tools that we’re using, we’re not really going to have the realm of providing value and being able to keep these customers.”

For you, was there a specific day? Was there a specific moment in time to where you were like, “Okay, I’ve got to go do something else,” or was it just a gradual buildup?

Lukas Fisher (00:05:12)

I think it was a series of moments. There wasn’t one single inflection point, but there were several huge events that cumulatively led me to the decision. Some of them were personal, but a lot of them were industry-based. I think the first one was a launch of a precursor software that was using GPT-3—OpenAI’s model prior to launching the ChatGPT public-facing user module. This was all API stuff, so it was SaaS. It was normal software, but it was using the GPT large language model, and it was called Conversion.ai. They’ve changed the name a couple of times.

It was the first GPT-based copywriting software. Everything else had been kind of this algorithmic, Mad Libs-style software where they had to program it with all sorts of templates and stuff, and it was essentially plug-and-play. You still had to be a copywriter in order to use it effectively; it was not usable by an average person.

That put the radar up. It was like, “Okay, this is actually a generative software, and I’m seeing where it’s going and what I’m capable of doing with it as an expert copywriter.” What I did was immediately pivot into training my junior writers using the tool, because I had the mentorship program. I was like, “Okay, everybody I’m training is getting a seat in this software, because I’m bought into the fact that this is going to be industry-changing.” That was 2021.

I ended up being the single largest non-enterprise user of that software because all of my mentees had a seat for a year. I actually got to talk with that company and help develop some of their tech, training, and all that type of stuff because of the user base. I felt like, “Okay, cool. This is the direction to go. This is good stewardship of my mentees because I’m teaching them the tools they need to do their job.” Like if I was a graphic designer, it would be teaching them Adobe. Same thing.

Then ChatGPT hit and opened up everything. It was a free software that was usable. Everybody looked at it like, “Crap, I can just type ‘write me an email,’ and this will write an email, and it’s better than what I can do.” I think that was an important point for the consumer especially, because most copywriting clients are not copywriting experts. When they see a software that can write better than them, they can’t see the gap between the software and the copywriter. They just see both things being better, and one of them is free.

That was important, but that wasn’t actually the inflection point of the ChatGPT point. The inflection point for me with ChatGPT was that it unlocked a previous historical moat between the native English-speaking copywriters and the non-native English-speaking copywriters that existed from 2020 all the way up to when ChatGPT was launched.

What had happened with 2020 was—and these numbers I’m pulling from my head, but I had actually pulled them at the time, so forgive me if they’re a little bit wrong or if they’ve changed—effectively, the pool of freelance copywriters available for hire tripled in 2020 due to people going remote, getting laid off, but also global freelancing in the Global South and in some of the East Asian countries, like Pakistan. There were tons of these areas that now could freelance. The effective pool tripled, which is going to create pressure for supply and demand.

The moat was that many of these places did not have native English speakers, so there was still that edge that someone who spoke native English would be able to serve the English-speaking market, which was by and large the largest copywriting market for freelancers. ChatGPT changed that. It made every single person on the planet a native English speaker because of its inherent capability of translating from other languages or taking broken or substandard English and translating it into native sounding.

That inflection point eliminated the advantage that native English speakers had overnight, and therefore truly created a massive amount of pressure against the freelance copywriters at the junior and intermediate level. Those two things were the really big, industry-wide, global changes where I was like, “Okay, something has fundamentally changed in the business model of both freelance copywriting and ethically training freelance copywriters.”

I can no longer say, “If you buy my program, within a certain amount of time, you will be good enough to charge XYZ rates because that’s the going rate for the level of skill that you’re going to come out of this program with”—in the same way that coding bootcamps were able to put people into junior coder roles.

At the same time, my freelance career and the mentorship program hit very, very large industry changes. Those were the two primary inflection points. I ultimately decided to shut down both of them at the end of 2023, just because things were moving much faster than even I anticipated.

John SmallMtn (00:11:46)

No, I appreciate that. I’m a copy nerd. I don’t put myself out there as a copywriter, but I think every salesperson, after they have the ability to converse well, should be thinking about how to write well because of emails, follow-ups, and all these things. I’ve been studying it for a long time, and I really appreciate it.

What’s funny is, as you’re talking about this, the moat, and everything, there’s a guy that I follow on LinkedIn—his name is Brooklyn Nash. Shout out to Brooklyn Nash. He runs a content marketing agency, and he did this experiment. He got someone from Fiverr—one of the commodity places to go find help and gigs—versus regular GPT, but then he also had one of his high-level copywriters take a swing at the same brief and the same situation.

What was flooring to me—because I was seeing everyone go around and be like, “Well, look, I hired this person off of Fiverr, and look what GPT can do”—was that they were drawing this false comparison. Mastery is in rare supply in any lane, but it was very apparent in these three examples the difference between the commodity copywriter, the GPT copy, and this higher-level master-of-their-craft copywriter.

Ultimately, you and I could geek out about that for days, but it gives everyone who doesn’t want to see any value in paying for good copy a very easy way to think that they don’t have to invest in it at all, right?

Lukas Fisher (00:13:22)

Yeah, but I also think—I go really deep on this stuff, so we don’t have to make this a copywriting podcast, but I think that point is important because there’s a level of nostalgia or taste-making that comes from someone who cares about the craft enough to study it and to get really good at it. Someone who is—like, I’ll put myself in this realm of a person who has mastered the craft and continues to care about the craft—we look at tools that are making things faster, and we see the gap between what was possible and what is currently capable versus what we could do as a master, as an expert. But I also think that that is a huge handicap.

The truth is, especially with copywriting—this isn’t true of art, but this is true of copywriting—ultimately, the only purpose of copywriting is to convince and persuade a person to take an action. That’s it. If a person takes an action, copywriting worked. There is a checkbox to it. Good copy versus bad copy is a quantitative thing, not a qualitative thing.

When we are experts about it, we look at it from a qualitative lens: “Dang, that is really good copy,” and we’ll appreciate good copy. The reality is it’s much more mercenary than that. Good copy is getting a click. Good copy is sending someone in the direction that you designed for it.

The thing that I noticed about it was good enough copy is what the vast majority of people need, and good enough copy comes out of the AI much faster and much cheaper than they can write it themselves or that they could hire a person for. That time delta is much more valuable, because, in general, copywriting is a numbers testing game. I’ve seen head-to-head top copywriter names—I’m not going to name them, but if you have studied copywriting, you will know their names—go head-to-head against an AI-written sales letter and lose. Not like they did a little bit better than the AI, but the AI wrote better than them.

It’s not because the AI is a quote-unquote “better writer” and knows more, although eventually it will have the entire corpus of every ad that ever worked and the ability to change. It’s the speed. It’s the speed to testing the copy, to getting the click or not getting the click. It’s always been the speed, but now AI is just infinitely faster than any person could be.

Even though a person who’s an expert at copywriting will objectively write better copy that is more palatable to a person reading it and could potentially make an argument for a long-term relationship with the customer being more valuable than the short-term click, at the end of the day, the vast majority of businesses only care about the speed, the click, and the mercenary nature of the copy.

That is actually the big principle-based thing that I saw before ChatGPT ever launched. I was like, “Crap, that’s why this software is important.” Then ChatGPT just made everybody a native English speaker. I needed to shut this down because it was not ethical for me to teach a junior writer and say, “You could have a career in this,” because your role as a junior has been removed. Nobody is going to pay you to learn anymore. You have to get good enough to justify intermediate/advanced rates, and you’re going to have to do that on your own. I can’t charge a high-ticket curriculum product with the understanding that you’re going to have to go off and do another two or three years of unpaid labor to get good enough to actually charge for it.

Again, long tangent, but that was the thought process behind it and the difficult thing for me to accept as a person who had dedicated myself to that lane. I was like, “I will be an expert copywriter. That is my craft, and I know that there’s value there,” to realizing that the craft was really more mercenary than I wanted to admit. I felt kind of elitist about it until I got to the point of going, “Crap, I can write a better email than this, but it doesn’t matter.”

John SmallMtn (00:18:10)

Right. Going back to the concept of testing, I would imagine that the first run from any high-level copy person is probably going to outperform the GPT, but the GPT is going to be able to iterate and make it better so much faster. All these people actually have the opportunity to be data-driven. A lot of people like to run with the data-driven idea, but they’re still just acting based upon their own personal preference as opposed to looking at just the data in a complete set.

Lukas Fisher (00:18:45)

Look up the difference between regular intelligence versus swarm intelligence or swarm tactics—from both a mathematical and chaos theory kind of perspective, but also just a computer science type thing. The way a swarm interacts with a problem is much different than a regular intelligence with a moat. The way they approach the problem is different, but when you understand a swarm, you understand how these problems are solved by these AIs. It is a brute force thing, which is not as efficient as an intelligence thing, but because of how fast and how cheap it is, the swarm always works. That’s a rabbit hole to go down, but…

John SmallMtn (00:19:26)

It’s so fascinating, because I keep thinking about my lane. I see everyone on LinkedIn and Facebook talking about how AI is coming for all sales jobs and everything. Part of me is like, “Well, maybe not.” But I’m also, after this conversation, kind of aware that because I do treat this as a craft and I do put a lot of time and effort into it, my appreciation of it is going to be different. At the end of the day, it is about conversion. What is going to convert the highest overall inside of a business?

I’m going to have to sit with that and make sure that I’m not trying to gatekeep my lane out of some weird “get off my lawn” mentality. I’m going to have to spend some time thinking about that. That’s fascinating.

Going from being excited about this AI tool and being able to help people quicker to realizing that there is no more edge and there’s nothing worth hanging out here for—can you talk a little bit about how you processed that? Were you depressed? Did you want to set the whole world on fire? Was there a mode of, “Okay, cool, I’m just going to become a prompt engineer and teach people how to prompt and stay in this lane”? How did you get to the place to where you were okay putting it away?

Lukas Fisher (00:20:49)

That’s a great question. I had about a six-month period of existential crisis, which I can break down in as much detail as you want, but it might not be interesting to everybody listening. It was about six months of an existential crisis, not just about me as a copywriter and the businesses that I had, but truly extrapolating out the “if this, then that” of what was happening and getting to a point of, “Crap, if this continues on the trend that I extrapolate it to continue on, it’s not just copywriting. It’s intelligence. It’s not just intelligence; it’s what we as people do productively with intelligence.” You kind of go down a “what is purpose, what is life, what is the value of work versus what we’re here to do” kind of rabbit hole.

Again, not for this podcast, but I sat with that for six months. I said earlier on that some of the decisions for shutting down my stuff were industry-based, and others were personal. I was also going through a personal transformation during that timeframe. To cut it super short, the thing that pulled me out of the existential crisis and started getting me thinking a little bit more in the moment about what was going on was also the thing that helped me deal with the personal stuff, which is to say: you have to find out who you are beneath the labels and the roles that you’ve put on yourself. So many people define themselves by the label and then have a crisis when the label’s gone.

You see this with elite performers. The Olympics are going on right now. Many, many gold medalists will be depressed in the next couple weeks because they won, and now what? Or that was their last Olympics, and they’re not an Olympian anymore. They’re a 32-year-old gold medal Olympic athlete, and now what, right? That type of thing happens to people who achieve. It also happens to people who identify with a label and then see that label taken from them. So maybe they’re not the achievement-minded person who has the rug pulled when they reach the top, but maybe they’re the person who just wants to live a life, and that life is no longer available or no longer the way that they expected it to be.

When you’re going through an existential crisis from a professional perspective and an existential crisis from a personal perspective, I had the benefit of having all of my labels stripped away from me almost at the same time or within a short window. I had to find out what’s left. What is still there when it’s just Lucas sitting by himself?

Not to get too woo-woo, but there is something there. I think everybody finds out that there is something there, and they find out it doesn’t have a label. If you want to call it your name, if you want to call it something else, you can pick one of the philosophies, religions, spiritualities, or whatever, but there is something there. When you recognize that even without anything, there’s still something, you can move forward with a level of peace that allows you to play with the circumstances of your life.

That answers the question of how you pull out of it, but it doesn’t answer the question of what’s next, because it’s a hyper-individual question. The answers come to the individual that finds that peace, because now they’re not looking at it through the lens of, “Okay, I’m a copywriter, but AI just took my job,” or “Okay, I’m a salesperson, and they’re saying AI is going to take my job, and now I’m worried.” It’s more of, “This is who I am at a core, and what is that core drawn to? What are the interesting things? What’s the value I add with just existing?”

Like I said, I could go a little woo-woo with that, but that’s how I pulled out of it.

John SmallMtn (00:25:19)

I don’t think that’s woo-y at all. I got to do—man, this is such an interesting thing that I’m realizing as we’re talking about it. A big part of the sales coaching that I was a student in for a very long time was about separating your identity from your role.

My coach was always like, “Man, you can have a bad day as a salesperson. It doesn’t make you a bad human.” I was wearing all my failure so heavily. I was in my first field sales role, struggling and failing. I was working a second job, and it just felt like everything was falling apart. Now, thankfully, coaching and I built some walls and some detachment between these things and everything. That’s one of the things I get to help people with: you can have the best price and the best product and still not win the deal. You can’t hang your value on your ability to convert. That took me a long time.

Then it was fascinating because, during COVID, I was struggling just like every other small business. I had to do a whole version of that again because a lot of the trappings around my identity had shifted a little bit. I’d left my martial arts school. I was struggling to figure out the business. I’m writing my book and doing all these things. It was weird because it was like doing that again, purposefully, at a much deeper level than just separating the success versus the effort and the job.

To your point, I know a lot of people who—I’m part of service military, and you are as well—and we see those people that never pick up any other identity other than being that guy who served. You see them at all the outings, and it’s like the guy who peaked in high school, who still goes to the high school events wearing the letterman jacket and all that stuff. I used to look at those people and be like, “Huh.” But now, through all this work, it’s like, “Ah. They didn’t have another container to put themselves into and didn’t do the work to just be okay being themselves.”

Yeah, this is probably a little crunchy for some people who were newer on their path and everything, but if you don’t do this work, my God, you’re going to bail the second it gets tough, and it’s going to get tough. Business isn’t easy. You’re going to have to figure some stuff out, and the first thing you’ve got to figure out is yourself.

I went from being this person who was always out and networking, always trying to be the sales guy that everyone thought I should be and who I thought I should be, to being this very okay, introverted guy, staying at home a lot and being really okay with it. Now I look back at that time and I appreciate it, but during the time, you’re just trying to keep moving forward.

When you’re going through that time, how did you do this? Were you journaling? Were you GPTing yourself? How did you work on this and work your way through it? Do you have any tips or tricks for anybody who might be hearing this and might be struggling with some of that?

Lukas Fisher (00:28:24)

Yeah, I worked on several different things. A few things I found worked were—I was having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. Part of that was the racing thoughts at night, unable to quiet my brain. What I did was, and I didn’t learn this from anyone, I just did it, and then it worked really well and kept working. But I would have a notebook on the side, next to my bed where I was sleeping, and I would essentially free-write and brain-dump onto that notepad when I crawled into bed.

I would go until I stopped. Sometimes that was a minute, and I would write five words. Sometimes it was an hour, but I would write and write and write. The only rule that I had for what I wrote was that I had to throw it away when I was done. Roll it up, ball it up, and throw it away. I don’t care how good the idea seemed. I don’t care how clear the to-do list was. I don’t care how insightful anything was. That was a piece of trash that I was dumping into the trash can. It was mentally me dumping my head trash onto a piece of paper, and then balling it up—literally rip it off, ball it up, throw it away.

That helped me a lot with sleep, but it also helped me recognize that it let me take my thoughts less seriously. I think that was more important than the sleep over the long run. I struggle with depression and PTSD. It is a thing that I have. If you allow the things that you think, the feelings that lead to thoughts, or the thoughts that lead to feelings to be true and real every single moment they come up, even though you have no control over them and they never stop, then that becomes a very difficult place to operate from. You feel trapped in your own mind.

But when you recognize that it’s just like air, it’s just like the breeze, and it goes back and forth, and it does depend on your mood, your sleep, how healthy or unhealthy you are—it’s just a natural phenomenon of your mind. If you take it less seriously, then it holds less weight, for me anyway. So that alone was huge.

It’s funny how frustrating it can be when something simple that you’ve heard from other people works so well that you get mad about it. Like, “This shouldn’t work as well as it works, and I’m frustrated that it does, because this feels bigger than something that this small thing could fix.”

Gary Halbert—talk about copywriting—he had this concept called roadwork. If you read his Boron Letters to his son Bond, he talks about doing your roadwork, which is basically just walking or running. John Carlton also calls it your—well, he calls it your “stupid human trick,” but that’s for a talent. There’s a thing that John Carlton also brings up, which is like, “a good animal.” All of that to say, those are just copywriters; it’s been said in other philosophies. If you treat yourself like a pet that needs water, food, and exercise, you don’t really think about taking your dog for a walk. You think about making sure that they’re taken care of, but we don’t do that for ourselves.

I found that walking a lot, making sure that I was hydrated, making sure that I was doing all those kinds of things—the very small, idiotically simple, frustrating things—were actually very helpful in the sense that, and I’ll say this too, for me personally, maybe different for others: I did not feel better when I did them. What I did was not feel as bad. So if I’m at zero, I had to recognize that zero was better than negative 10. Sometimes I did things that made me feel a 10 that weren’t good, that would put me back to negative 10 later. That took a minute for me to even recognize that that was powerful. I hate to be that guy who’s like, “Yeah, just journal and walk, bro,” but it works.

John SmallMtn (00:33:27)

Dude, thank you for saying that it’s infuriating whenever it’s too easy. My sales coach was like, “Hey, you need a journal.” And I was like, “No, I don’t, shut up.” I was mad about it. It was one of those things where I’m like, “Well, people should journal, but other people should. I’m probably okay.” I didn’t realize the hypocrisy in it. Then I started a journal because finally I was like, “Okay, I’m going to prove to you that it’s not that helpful.” Then it ended up being pretty helpful.

I was still doing it on the basis of it being a thing that other entrepreneurs do. I’m listening to The Tim Ferriss Show and all these business podcasts, and everyone journals, and everyone talks about what a game changer it is. So I’m doing it, and it’s helping. I’d stopped doing it because it was starting to feel like it wasn’t all that helpful.

Then during COVID, I started a journal again. I read this article, and this person was saying a PC and a Mac are the same bits of silicon and plastic. The thing that makes them different is how they are coded, the language that they use. That just got through all my walls and all my guards. I was like, “Okay.” So then I took your thing of the free-flowing thing, as well as trying to put it into a situation that is actually helpful. I combined the morning page thing, which is just free-flowing thought to beat back the critic, as well as—I’m big on questions. “You will improve based upon the quality of the questions you’ve asked yourself” is something a coach said to me. It was very frustrating at the time, but now I just see the greatness of it.

My journaling habit during COVID was just a stream of questions. Most of them I never even answered, but it was very helpful at seeing how I was painting myself into corners. It was also taking it off-road and doing it for myself, not for the people on the shows or to have a cool thing to talk about one day.

It is one of those things of like, “Okay, it is annoyingly easy.” It’s super easy to be like, “It’s not going to help me.” Both journaling and meditation, I think, are two of the hardest habits to really build, because how you realize your improvement there is frustratingly slow. If you go into it trying to do it for the improvement, you don’t get any of the greatness that comes from any of that stuff. You just have to choose to do it because let’s just see what happens. But if you’re doing it so you can be more mindful or more detached, you’re never going to get there. Which is just such an interesting thing.

I love that thing: it is frustrating to look back, because I tell everybody, “You should just journal,” and everyone’s like, “Ugh.” I get it. I hated that advice whenever it was being handed to me. But nothing has paid off as big as developing that habit and my meditation habit personally. It’s got to be for yourself; it can’t be for anybody else.

One of the things we were talking about as we were thinking about where to take the show is you were talking about how there’s so much cool opportunity in the form of business and what they’re made for and how they work. Can you talk a little bit more about why that’s so exciting for you?

Lukas Fisher (00:36:46)

Yeah. I remember this. One of the things that I’ve always struggled with was that I wouldn’t call myself a purebred entrepreneur or a natural. I wanted to be career military and, through a series of events, decided to go into the National Guard instead of active duty, and then figure out what I was doing with my life when I wasn’t career. So I stumbled into this thing—stumbled into marketing, stumbled into business, stumbled into copywriting—and just built it from there.

I think the benefit is that if I’m not a purebred, then I’m not the kind of person that all the courses and books and stuff are written for. I don’t resonate with the “go crush, dominate, and grind” personally. But I also don’t resonate with what I would consider to be the prime directive of the entire concept of capitalism and business, which is generate shareholder value, maximize profits. The system has the fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value within the organization, and the entire system is maximizing profit. But profit is made up. It is literally an abstraction from the concept of value and production that we have labeled as profit and put as a currency or put as a monetary symbol. It doesn’t exist in real life. It exists on a piece of paper and an abstract in people’s minds.

If the system is optimizing for an abstract that doesn’t exist in real life, naturally the system is going to optimize for the abstract at the expense of real life. Which is why you see a lot of stuff at the highest level where no value or productivity has been created, even though profit has been created. It’s the classic example of a venture capitalist who goes and buys 10 laundromats for a million dollars each. So he has $10 million worth of laundromats. Then he installs a digital card reader instead of a coin collector at each one. Now they are a software company that’s worth 20x. So it’s a $200 million laundromat business or whatever. No value has been created there, but profit has been created there because of the way the system works.

I noticed that, and I always was like, “There’s no room for a philosophy in this business world because nobody gives a shit.” At the same time, I started noticing that no, there are a lot of people who are in this thing because they are creators, producers; they want to provide value. They feel good when they make something or do something for another person that has value. But like I said, value and productivity is not the same as profit.

What I noticed was a little bit of a discrepancy between the people who could provide the most value or were the most productive versus the people who are the most profitable. I’m like, “Eh, that’s a feature, not a bug in this system.” That’s how the system is designed. Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets. People say the system is broken; no, the system is working exactly as it is intended. It is built for this.

But enough people with enough drive to create, provide value, and produce exist with the idea that there can be a different way of doing business. Because business is just a transaction between people. You’re improving on some sort of resource, whether it’s time, energy, or some sort of natural resource, and you’re providing that value and improvement to somebody else in exchange for something else. All that to say, a lot of technology now, communication, and all that has enabled a person who cares more about value and productivity than profit to actually make enough profit to survive and to thrive.

I’m fascinated by all the different ways that that is the case. When we talked before, it was like, there are B corporations—a corporation whose fiduciary responsibility is not to maximize profit and shareholder value, but instead to maximize the benefit that they are mandated to. There are 501(c)(3) organizations that are tax-exempt but have a productive or value-creation aspect to them where they are not profit-motivated. They are value-oriented; they are mandated to do something else.

Government, where—I am not a big government person, but I am a person that understands that government ultimately is just a group of people who’ve come together and decided that it would be better to operate together as a group and pool resources than it is to operate by ourselves in a state of nature, and taking those resources and applying them to the group in a better way. Like grants for small businesses who are creating certain types of things. The way that the Department of Energy or some of the departments will give easements for farms to have natural areas so that natural flora and fauna can come back in.

There are all these examples of things that are not profit-oriented at all that are massively beneficial for people, for everyone involved actually. That’s what gets me really excited: there is this undercurrent of people who want to create in that way. Technology has enabled those people to do more with way less and get further and connect with more people who are like-minded, versus in the past, it’s been very siloed. It’s been almost impossible to find and connect with people who believe the same thing or are doing the same things.

Between the internet, between some of the AI tools, between some of the technology that’s now spreading, there’s this layer of people who are like, “Damn, I can do that. I don’t know how to code, but now I can. I don’t know how to write copy and persuade someone, but now I can. I don’t know how to do chemistry, but now I can.” That enabling factor combined with the people who actually produce value and productivity is super exciting for me. That seems like the undercurrent of the future.

John SmallMtn (00:43:46)

I love that because the whole time that I was selling in corporate and selling for bigger organizations and everything, I would come in, and then I would leave. I liked the money, but I hated the zero-sum environment and that very old-school version of sales and take-no-prisoners and all of that stuff. Especially after being in the military, I’m like, we should not in any way, shape, or form be trying to make this into that, because they’re not the same. I’ll fight with anybody who wants to talk about that—that sales has got to be a war. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves.

But for me, that whole time I was seeing these people that I despised, and they were at the top of these things. Between that and sitcoms and everything else, I was like, “Well, if you’re going to go make a bunch of money, you’re probably going to be a bad person.” It wasn’t until I started to get into small business and meet really passionate people that were fueled by other things, and money was just a crowbar, right? It was just a lever. It wasn’t the end-all be-all. It wasn’t how they were keeping score. This was flooring to me.

This was when I was working with my sales coach; we’re doing a lot of awareness work, and a lot of the journaling was starting to come in. I’m competitive, but I don’t need to win at your loss. This always made me kind of an odd person out on sales teams and stuff. I can remember one time I didn’t make a pitch on a pre-approval to a widow who already had two credit cards. When I asked her about the cards, she was like, “Well, they were my husband’s. They’re just there for emergencies. I never use them at all.” Okay, cool. I’m not going to pitch you on the pre-approval. It didn’t make any sense to me, but as soon as she’s out the door, my manager’s in my cube, like, “Hey, why didn’t you make the pitch?”

I hated all of that. It wasn’t until I got to this smaller lane and doing the work that I do now, where it’s like, there are certain situations where being discerning of “is this a good fit?” really matters. That’s where I focus on the things that I focus on now. In certain situations, if you’re just selling a phone or a hard product, yeah, put it in their hands, sell it to them, enjoy the return policy. That’s what it’s there for. But if it’s all in creative work, or something that’s very complex or custom, there are stakes to bringing on bad fits. I was just selling in areas that didn’t really appreciate that for a very long time, but then I found it, and now I really appreciate it.

I love all the B Corp stuff. I love whenever nonprofits can find a way of not just endlessly needing donations. There’s a bunch of cool ways of getting it done.

Changing gears a little bit. We talked about a thing on the call about this, and I was so excited to talk a little bit more about it. This comes from awareness, but you said that a lot of people, they’re not even sure of their own purpose of why they’re doing the business that they’re getting into. I don’t want to ruin the conversation about this, but can you talk a little bit more about the awareness and the “help people within X do Y within Z timeframe” and where some of that starts to fall apart? I said, “What’s going to get you weird looks in a group of entrepreneurs if you’re just sharing your hot takes?”

Lukas Fisher (00:47:05)

Yes. My response to that was to literally try to put myself in a group of entrepreneurs mentally and say something that would make them feel awkward. Not on purpose, but like, what have I done in the past that made the conversation weird? I recognize that usually the conversation gets weird when someone says something like, “Yeah, I want to make a million millionaires.”

Or when I ask a question like, “Why? Why do you want to do that?” Or, “I’m building this business.” “Okay, why are you building that business?” The joke was that very often there isn’t an answer to that question.

Sometimes the first answer to that question is like, “Yeah, I’m building an agency.”

And I’m like, “Okay, well, why are you building an agency?”

They’re like, “Well, because I want to make a million millionaires.” That’s kind of their default thing that they’ve been trained to say. But if you go deep—meaning one more layer, if you ask why again, or if you ask why a third time—then ultimately people get really, really awkward because there isn’t an answer, or the answer is something that they don’t really want to say out loud, which is like, “I just want to make money, bro. I just want to be rich. I want to be filthy rich, and I want to spend it on all the shit that they told me I could never have, because fuck them, right?”

The conversation that we were having about this is like, okay, I’d rather work with that. I’d rather have that be the premise or that be the honest response, because I do feel like there’s a lot of hand-waviness to your purpose and your why behind business. It’s designed to impress people at these cocktail parties. Like, “I want to make a million millionaires.” Okay, you want to make a trillion dollars in value—why? Why?

Then I said, “Well, if you said a million millionaires because the guy before you said half a million millionaires, then you don’t actually want to make a million millionaires; you want to beat that guy. You’re competitive. That’s your why, right? You just want to be the best.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with looking at someone and going, “I want to beat you,” because I’m competitive.

Now, there is the tallest tower thing where, do you want to build the tallest tower by building the tallest tower, or do you want to build the tallest tower by tearing everybody else’s tower down? There is something to be said about that. But the awkwardness to that is that so many people either know and don’t want to say it out loud because it’s not polite, or don’t know—like, don’t actually know that that’s the thing that’s motivating or driving them.

I think both of those are kind of concerning. Because if you know and you don’t want to say, then you’re automatically hiding and lacking a level of integrity in your actions, right? I don’t care if it’s an altruistic motive; if you don’t want to share it with anybody because you’re afraid of being judged, then that is hiding it a little bit. But also, I think more importantly, if you’re hiding it from yourself, then you’re not engaging the power that you would have if you did have that awareness.

If you are just owning the fact that you are a super competitive dude, and every time you see someone doing something that you want to do that you think you could do better, you get motivated to go do that thing better, then cool, man. We need people like that. I would just encourage you to go build a tall tower instead of ripping everybody else’s down, right? But if you don’t, and you’re making it up because you want to sound good at the cocktail party, then you’re completely cutting yourself off at the knees, right? You’re not engaging with a reason why; you’re performing a reason why.

The joke was like, people watch the Simon Sinek “Find Your Why” video and then made up the biggest, hairiest goal that they could find so that they could have an answer at the cocktail party. I don’t want to shit on anybody. I think it’s fun to joke about the truth of the question. Why is it awkward? Because that why, that real drive, the real reason—if it’s honest—is your most powerful motivator. It will sustain you when other things will not. If you truly wake up in the morning and the first thing you see when you wake up is a million millionaires on the ceiling, and you pray to that every morning and go, “This is what I really want to do,” then great. But I haven’t ever met a person who actually thinks that.

John SmallMtn (00:52:06)

Man. First of all, most of my conversations before sales training included me asking “why” too many times and putting people under that kind of pressure. But then there was also this phase of my life to where I would meet people, and I couldn’t believe that that why was their why. I would hear some of these things because I worked in banking and finance, and I was meeting business owners and stuff like this before this. They would be like, “Well, I just really like helping.”

I’d be like, “Come on.” So if anything, I was so sold on the idea that you couldn’t be in a space like this just because you were passionate, you had a purpose, and you were very caring about it. I thought that was all a front.

But then doing all this identity work with my coach and everything—man, money is not motivating to me. Being at the top of the leaderboard isn’t motivating to me. Learning and helping other people—those are my biggest motivators. When I’m zeroed in onto those things, man, get out of my way. But if I was trying to do this on faulty scaffolding that someone else had sold me on, I wouldn’t be here. I would have flamed out a long time ago.

You’ve got to be really open and honest with yourself. Now, I think there’s something really cool about taking a wordless purpose or passion and encapsulating it into a goal; I think that’s really helpful when you’re working with a team and everything. But if it’s all on false scaffolding—something that we’re trying to sell ourselves on—it has no chance of actually helping a team stay motivated, because it’s not even real.

Man, such a cool conversation, dude. Thank you so much. Going to switch gears now into the rapid-fire questions, okay?

Lukas Fisher (00:53:54)

All right, let’s roll.

John SmallMtn (00:53:56)

And this is an interesting one; I was trying to think about the best way to talk about this. For someone who is starting today, and they’re thinking about marketing, messaging, copy, all of these things—what is the advice you would give someone who’s starting out now with all these tools and all these systems, as someone who’s spent a lot of time there and has ultimately moved away from making that their main craft? How would you coach someone who’s going out and starting today?

Lukas Fisher (00:54:23)

Okay, rapid-fire question, so I won’t try to go down a rabbit hole here. But immediately I ask, “Okay, what are you starting?” If you’re just starting quote-unquote “anything,” then it’s kind of like the Cheshire Cat asking Alice where she’s going. She says, “I don’t know,” then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

There’s also some silly truth to that. If you’re just starting out because you have this fire of “I need to do something different,” or “I need to do something, period,” then yeah, just go do shit. Like, do literally anything. Go grab a guitar and go busk on the street. If you’ve never done that before, that’s cool. I don’t know—go volunteer somewhere.

But if you’re talking more specifically about starting a business, or they’re a founder building a thing, then messaging and copywriting right now—the fundamentals of human communication and behavior have not changed. We are people who talk to people, and generally people like to talk to people, especially if the person they’re talking to has similar interests or has their best interest in mind. If you understand that there are principles of human communication and persuasion that exist, learning those is helpful.

I have this whole article that I wrote a long time ago where I basically said newbies should not learn the first principles. You’ll probably appreciate this as a martial artist: if you teach someone the fundamental of the punch without having them punch a thousand times, they are not going to be able to punch, no matter how good they are at describing the punch.

Knowing that principles of persuasion exist is helpful, and learning them is helpful, but only with the context of practice—lots and lots and lots of practice. As a founder who starts out right now, my recommendation would be to talk to as many potential customers or leads as humanly possible, with zero agenda other than figuring out what they care about, what they hate, what they’re currently doing, and what they wish they could do—but, comma, and then you fill in that blank. Those four things will make you as much money as you would ever want in any industry ever. All you’re doing as a business owner is solving other people’s problems, whether it’s a service, a product, or whatever. Those things are what people will tell you and care about, and then you can decide how you are going to help provide value to those people or not.

John SmallMtn (00:57:11)

I love that. Being a sales guy and carrying around the sales title and everything, I run into that whole, “Well, I don’t want to manipulate people,” and stuff like this. There’s this very tangled view of persuasion versus manipulation, and people will lump them all together and not want any of that. It’s like, well, if you’re not going to rise to the occasion and understand how people communicate—and this is about them and not about your own preferences—you’re dead in the water anyway.

Fundamentally, those are all the people that come to me 12 months too late, like, “John, can you teach me how to overcome this objection?” Well, if you had built something that people were actually asking for, you wouldn’t have all these objections, right? The whole process would be so much easier. But people get caught up in that. I love that.

Second question: What is the piece of advice that you see on social media that you can appreciate now, but you had to learn it the hard way yourself?

Lukas Fisher (00:58:16)

Man, I have a hard time narrowing down, so I’ll probably pick the most popular internet marketing social media dude right now, which is Alex Hormozi. He’s got this thing of putting in the reps and just doing a lot of volume. I think that is, in general, really good advice. It’s frustrating because it’s, again, too simple, and I think it lacks context. People who just do reps are not doing a process of what’s called deliberate learning, which is its own thing.

Intentional practice, deliberate learning—you can Google the specifics of it, but it’s a process of constantly being a little uncomfortable in the process, and that is the learning process. It’s not just doing the reps; it’s doing good reps that you suck at and that you progressively get better at. But that advice that is being given, and has been given, is generally the best advice, because what you get from it is something that you cannot buy or learn in a book, which is context. Context is the thing that will change the game for anybody who’s actually doing or building something.

John SmallMtn (00:59:27)

Yeah, well said. Going back to the martial arts thing, which kind of ties into the thing we were talking about a second ago—my teacher had this line that when you give a student a technique before they’re ready for it, it becomes a crutch.

You look at all these volume-driven things, whether it’s content, sales reps, punching, or anything else like this: there is a level of, “Okay, well, let me just go do 100 punches, and we’re going to be better at the end of it.” While that is true, you could do 10 punches and be really thinking about your elbow placement, your wrist placement, and all these things—like what’s another word I could put here as opposed to the word that is easily coming to mind, and all of these little things.

Intentional practice is such a game changer. But much like you, I see that stuff and I see people just talking about volume, volume, volume, volume, volume. It bothers me because I can appreciate the nuance of it as well. I’m a coach, and I’ve been coached, so trying to find the fastest way of improvement is part of how I approach everything now. That thing bothers me a lot because Anders Ericsson felt so misquoted by the whole 10,000-hours thing that he went and wrote his own book around the idea that it’s only 10,000 hours if you’re just autopiloting everything. It doesn’t have to be that long or arduous, but you have to care. You have to be thinking about it, and you have to create feedback loops so that way you’re not lying to yourself and everything. God, I could talk about that forever.

Last question, Lucas, and then I’ll let you get on with your day. Thank you so much for doing this. What is your word of warning for someone who’s starting today?

Lukas Fisher (01:01:13)

FOMO.

John SmallMtn (01:01:31)

What do you mean?

Lukas Fisher (01:01:33)

FOMO stands for fear of missing out. Fear of missing out is what will kill you today.

People are like, “The pace of change is so fast,” and the implication is that they’re trying to keep up. You can’t. It’s not that some people are and you’re not and you need to work harder; it is mathematically impossible to keep up with everything that is changing right now in the world, in technology, in business, in the industry that you’re in. It is impossible.

If you look at the sheer amount of information that is published on a daily basis, and then multiply that by how much that information changes previously published information and how much context you need to interpret that information for your circumstance, and then realize it’s going to happen again tomorrow with a greater quantity of information—you recognize it is impossible. Not just improbable, or not just that you’re not working hard enough, but impossible to keep up with the pace of change.

FOMO—the idea that you are missing out on something—will create a sense of extreme urgency and anxiety that will lower your cognitive ability in real time, lower your ability to recover from the effort that you put in, and lower your ability to process short- and long-term memory. You will get even further behind something that you could never possibly keep up with, and you will miss the things that you can actually do in the moment that will improve your circumstance.

Right now, we have an entire culture of keeping up with, trying to know, FOMO, and urgency that, if you get caught up in it, will kill you. Probably literally, but definitely figuratively from what you’re trying to do.

The fix to that, or the word of warning, is FOMO—don’t do it. The way to survive FOMO is to recognize that you are in a river. That river is flowing at a certain speed. You cannot control the speed of the river; all you can do is control your place in the river and get comfortable with how you are maneuvering in the environment that you find yourself in.

By understanding that, you stop fighting against the current. You stop trying to swim with it to go faster. Instead, you recognize, “Okay, I have to understand that I am flowing in this river. Now what?” You can make decisions from there. That’s the best advice I can give in answer to the warning.

John SmallMtn (01:04:45)

I love that. I’ve spent a lot of time fighting the current as opposed to just letting it go. The version that I heard of it was like: you’re on one bank, there’s the river, and you’re trying to go straight across the bank. There’s not anything all that bad about going with the current and having some energy for whatever happens on the other side of that river.

I read a lot of Alan Watts on my martial arts journey, and I read a lot of philosophy now. Yeah, just don’t fight the current. Kind of be okay with things being outside of your control.

Man, this is so cool. Lucas, if people want to stay up with you during this pivot and see what you’re going to be working on next, is there a place that they can keep up with you? Are you doing a newsletter, are you out in the world loudly currently, or are you keeping everything under wraps while you’re in the middle of figuring it out?

Lukas Fisher (01:05:36)

I’m not keeping it under wraps, but I’m also not making a specific point to publish everything that I’m doing. I think the best way to keep up with things would be either to follow me on Facebook directly—my name is Lucas Fisher, and I have one of those professional profiles, so not the page—or if you want to follow up with the reading, you can follow me on Substack: again, Lucas Fisher’s Substack.

John SmallMtn (01:05:44)

Awesome, dude. Thank you so much for this. This is one of those episodes to where I’m going to be humming the rest of the day. I hope that whenever people are listening to this, they’ve got some time and space to really sit with these ideas, because I think the longer you can sit with them, the more helpful they’re going to be. Thank you so much for coming on and doing this, man. I really appreciate it.

Lukas Fisher (01:06:06)

Likewise, I appreciate you having me on.

John SmallMtn (01:06:26)

Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a great day.