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The Insane Belief: Building, Losing, Rebuilding & Betting on the Future · Fractional Frequency

• Billie Tienda: Today's guest is Edward DeCoyne, entrepreneur, business builder, and founder of Orpical Technology Solutions, with more than four decades of experience turning ideas into scalable companies. Edward started his first company at just 18 years old from his bedroom with $500. By age 36, he had grown that company to 100 employees and a $24 million valuation, eventually going on to take four additional companies public. His journey has also included founding a bank, launching a NASCAR company, and navigating significant setbacks caused by circumstances outside of his own control. Today, through Orpical Technology Solutions, Edward helps organizations use AI and automation to eliminate repetitive work and operate more effectively. In today's discussion, we'll explore what decades of entrepreneurship can teach us about resilience, reinvention, and why the future of AI may actually be about becoming more human. So welcome Edward. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you, Jenna. Also I want to point out I you asked me to proofread it and I must have missed a zero because it it's a thousand employees, not a hundred. And the only reason why that's worth mentioning is if you if I you do twenty four million divided by a hundred employees, we'd all be doing very, very well. Wow, that's an impressive company. Yes, that is. We should have found you and worked with you. Yeah. What an incredible story to create that many opportunities for people. And so I'm excited to learn more about it. So let's start there with starting that company at the age of eighteen with just five hundred dollars. What I'd like to know first is what what sort of inspired the belief that you could build something with so little in the beginning. Well, I've always been entrepreneurial and and I've stumbled upon this in the past maybe six months. you know, you have you have your proje prodigies out there. Like I could If I practiced piano eight hours a day, six or seven days a week over a five year period, I'd probably be pretty good, but I would still never be that ten or twelve year old prodigy. And you can do that for music, you can do it for athlet athletics, art, whatever it may be. And I'm certainly n wouldn't consider myself a prodigy, but I was very entrepreneurial at a young age. That was actually my second company that I started at when I was eighteen. My first one was at thirteen and that was a ski tours company. But it was a legitimate business. We ran ski tours to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania and I did it in the beginning to meet girls and ski and ski for free. But by our third year it was going pretty well. So I've always been very entrepreneurial and s I didn't really have a belief that I could do it. I had a belief that it wouldn't necessarily fail. But I was smart enough to know even back then, I remember being eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old saying This is the best time in my life to start a business. 'Cause I live in my parents' home, I have a beat up old car, I have no debt, and there's nothing I can lose. So when you start with a little, you kinda not too afraid of losing that so to speak, 'cause there's not so much to lose. So I think the answer's twofold. One is an inherent entrepreneurial acumen that I've always had. I've always been more comfortable. I mean, I I could walk into a boardroom at twenty two, twenty-four years old and speak very comfortably, more so than if I went into a a bar and trying to speak to people strangers there. And then just 'cause at the time I really didn't have much to lose. Yeah. Yeah. I think another thing that came up in the Discovery conversation is this idea of delusional optimism or insane belief ⁓ that you can be successful. So tell us a little bit about that. What is what does that insane belief mean to you? Well it's funny, ⁓ you know I was always the youngest person in the room. And then quit you know, as time changes, you become now so often the oldest person in the room. So that belief is is twofold. One is what are you chasing? In the beginning it was chasing the Ferraris, the jets, the big homes. Never had a Ferrari, did fly on a private jet a few times, ⁓ did have a big home, but had nice cars, and the fun good thing about that is you realize that there's no real satisfaction in that. I mean the day the car comes home it feels good for a few days, but what never leaves you is the as an entrepreneur is the desire to create something new and better and solve new and better problems. So yes, do I want to have a nice car and a nice home? Of course. But it that's not the driving force. And for the entrepreneurs that it becomes the driving force, they tend to have the early success and then fall off completely. One th one thing that entrepreneurs must know whether you're eighteen or eighty is it will happen. ⁓ and I I've seen it it happen and what I mean by it is the thing will happen. The client will fire you, the illness will happen, the spouse will want a divorce, the competitor will come in, the bank will call its loan. And until the it happens and you get past it, you're not really in the state of where you can truly succeed because I've seen it numerous times where especially ⁓ it just happened to be in the the solar energy space and I saw some young people in their late twenties, early thirties driving $160,000 brand new BMWs, you know, I don't even know what it was, the X, whatever it was. And I said, ⁓ it hasn't happened yet. And when it happened, the car got taken away. So I think that that's part of it as well, just knowing that there's gonna be major bumps in the road and it's how you react to them and respond. It's like how you get through kind of like the failures or the challenges that will present itself. Yeah, and that's an interesting point that you just raised because again, I've been doing this for a long time. For full disclosure I'm sixty one. I act like I'm thirty one mentally. That's good. Yeah, no, it is I mean the age truly is a number. But I remember probably gosh, thirty years ago, which is pathetic for me to say, but there was When VC and Angel Invet well V C venture Capital was like Silicon Valley in New York and what's better and starting the different areas. I noticed something, and then other people confirmed this realization, that at that time if you were doing work on the West Coast in the Silicon Valley, and it was like, ⁓ yeah, that startup blew up and all your peers or advisors would be good, you got that out of the way. Now let's go into something bigger and better. Where on the East Coast it was viewed as a a failure. It's like, ⁓ that's so sad. I'm so sorry that happened. So there was a cultural difference around startups, venture back companies, realistically what can be expected. And I think at that time people on the West Coast realized that you gotta go through those things. You know, it's gate and some huge companies, if you study ⁓ they're completely different than when they were founded before they really took off and grew. I mean Years ago it was Twitter and today it's handshake. I mean people are raving ⁓ what a tremendous high value company and they're nothing compared to their business model was completely different, but they were able to make the adjustments. And so tell us a little bit about that when you're faced with this setback, ⁓ or it happens like you were saying. As an entrepreneur and leader of a business, what are some of the first steps that you take or considerations that you make to kind of pull yourself out of up out of that and then take the right next step. I've also stumbled upon a the realization, actually this was maybe a couple years ago, that you know, I actually came up with a a state a saying that all warriors are soldiers, but not all soldiers are warriors. All entrepreneurs are business people, but not all business people are entrepreneurs. To be an entrepreneur you have to be a warrior. Now I've modified that a little bit 'cause when you say warrior, it sounds like okay, you're willing to stab people in the back or step on anybody to get where you want. No, you you want to be a commander and a leader and be in control. So the troops want to run up the mountain and storm the gates behind you or with you, not shooting in the back 'cause they don't believe in you. But there is an entrepreneurial mindset that if it is present, the concern you raised, Aaron, there is a little bit less. Because You've become not numb to it, but you've come to expect it, anticipate it, plan for it, and realize that because as an entrepreneur you've had some either short term success or failures or even really long term, this too will pass. The difference between an entrepreneur and say a business person, excluding all other professions out there, is the willingness to accept the risk and know that that's part of it. And like You know, I was watching a show yesterday about these guys that jump off cliffs with these air suits and they fly. They don't jump off the cliff saying, Well God, I hope I don't crash. They jump off for the adrenaline and what they're going to accomplish and yes, many of them die. I ain't doing it. I'm not jumping off a cliff. So I think I was thinking last night that that's a good analogy where the entrepreneur will jump off the cliff. No way could die. But willing to accept that for the rewards where other people it's totally cool. You know, you don't have to jump off the cliff. But if you're gonna jump, you'd better you better be prepared to fly and not crash. Absolutely. I love these analogies. These are great. I really I I understand what you're trying to say once you get those analogies. Yeah, I've always used that, especially I also teach part time as a a college professor and I use analogies left and right just because brings It brings the story. I think that's my marketing background because facts never sell, stories sell. So if you make turn it into a story, it it tends to work. It's so true. I'm thinking about it one of our earliest major setbacks. ⁓ we had a deal that was just about to close and then it fell through, and it was just terrible that in that moment no one on our team said, Well, maybe we should give up, maybe we should quit. It was It was what are we gonna do now to recover and move forward? And some of the things we talked about were drastic, right? But it was not let's scrap this. And so ⁓ as you were talking, it reminded me of that sort of mantra we have internally that is we can fail, but we can't quit. And I think to your point, you if you've got that mindset, then you can overcome some of that. And if you don't, it'll just crush you fast. And it's it is a mindset, it surely is. Let me ask you question. And looking back at that situation. Are you happy it happened now? I am. Yeah. I mean I I had a business that was rock and rolling. We were printing money. We were making so much money it was unbelievable. At two PM and at basically two ⁓ five PM from one phone call we were almost out of business. Yeah, that w that sucks. Yeah. Yeah, we had we knew we were fat, dumb, and happy. We knew we had too much of our business with T V Guide. Rupert Murdoch bought T V Guide. I got a phone call from Tony Rizzo, who's the president, and said, Ed, I got some really tough news to share. We're gonna have to shut you down. I mean that we literally would have lost ninety percent of our business. Now because things in the corporate world move slow and because we had good relationships, we got a six month wind down window and not thirty days. Yeah. But but had that not happened, we would have never gone public. Because no company is going to no underwriter is going to take us public if you've got, you know, such a concentration of business. So what I thought was a horrible day was a great day. And that's again being entrepreneurial. Yeah, it absolutely is. What would you say? probably a number of those experiences in in the past, maybe not to that scale. That one sticks out. But Well I've had a good doozies. Yeah. A number of them, right? I used to have I had Kais curly hair, you know. Glowing locks. What ⁓ What would you say has changed about the way that you evaluate close partners and risk in general in in light of those learnings? Well, I mean that's a that's a wonderful question. And it really comes back to the foundation. This is not a sales pitch, talk about the company, but my name my company's name's Orbical. And how that came about is I had a very difficult situation with a partner. We were raising funds, we were committed to funds, we were spending funds. It was basically you raise this amount of money, we'll match it if you achieve this. Well, we did we raised the money, did what we were supposed to do, and then Lehman Brothers blew up. And so everything blew up. And my partner at the time was like, I guess we're gonna boogie. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude. I mean, we've got people that are counting on us and relying on us. So that that was a f a few year, you know, situation where if I don't believe in myself and the company, how can I expect others? So I put everything into that business. But the abandonment was very ⁓ I don't know, it wasn't really frustrating. It was just Moving forward thing I wanted things to change. So on the New Jersey turnpike, stuck in a traffic jam, I grabbed a piece of paper and I started writing kind of the words that I wanted to work with within partnerships like you were just asking. You know, I wanted people that were loyal, I wanted people that were optimistic, I wanted people to be passionate, I wanted there to be integrity. So that's how each letter of Warpical stands for something ⁓ in that. And in moving forward I also think maturity, it's so nice. I wouldn't want to go back, you know. It's just I mean, I think if I had the chance to go back, would I? And it's like I worked so hard, I went through so many things. But looking at things differently now, like right now, yeah, I want a very secure future for myself and my family. But what really gets me excited is the team members and and their ability. So the partnership as I've matured is significantly less of what can you do for me and it's what can I do for you because by me doing that for you then I will get things back and that's just part of maturity. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I like that each letter of your company name stands for one of those values. That's so cool. Yeah and once or twice a year once or twice a year people think that I'm the co founder of Oracle. Not Oracle. And I'm like, yeah, that would work out well. And then we'd be back to those Ferraris and Jets we were talking about. Back to the Jets. ⁓ yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well I know that January January first, two thousand, I had to make a choice. Do I because we we we'd sold the company, do I stay an entrepreneur or just invest? I'm thinking, you know, there's these little companies out there. Yeah, my Apple was growing and just a little company Amazon. You want to go through a bad experiment. Bug the numbers into Claude and say how much money would I have now if I just strictly reinvested everything? But you know, that's again my attitude towards that is never want the grass is not greener and never want for a past that never happened. Because joking about the Ferrari, okay, what if I really did get a Ferrari and I was driving on the New Jersey turnpike? And I was listening to a great song and I was driving a little bit faster than I should, and it was a little wet out, and I spun into a tree. So would I rather be alive today dealing with the challenges that I've dealt with or dead twenty years ago because I had a Ferrari, you know? I mean there's a few people like Chester Bennington, who I mean I'm a huge fan of Lincoln Park, and then Anthony Bourdain, I'm like, ⁓ what a great life you have, and then Kate Spade about that same time. And then some of the issues that went on with me in Delaware with Bo Biden. And it over it was weird because maybe over about a twelve month period of time, I was very envious of all four of those people. They're all dead. Wow. You know, it's an interesting perspective. Yeah. Be careful what you wish for, right? Absolutely. Yes. And you never really know the truth. Sorry, Aaron. I was like, you never know the reality of what these people are going through and what their life is really like. Like it you see I mean, not all smoke and mirrors, that sounds very negative, but meaning like it's very pretty, you know, on the outside, but what's happening on the inside is just suicide. So I mean there's obvious an issue there. Plus the other cool thing is I would miss everybody that I work with now. I'd miss my business partner now, I'd miss my clients now, I'd miss my team members now. You know, I mean so maybe we have a hundred lives or a million lives and do it differently each time, but I I don't look back. I you know, I think it's funny when you do the calculation. Two hundred and sixty eight million dollars, by the way, that was the calculation that So the next slide can get five Lamborghinis. ⁓ yeah. More than five, I think. Yes. We'll add some others. So Ed, you were talking a little bit earlier about the the values that you hold when thinking about who to partner with or who to to invest in a relationship with. I'm just sort of selfishly curious because so much of what we do is trying to assess talent and figure out who is really promising, who is really high caliber. As you assess people against those values for your own business, what are some of the tells or signals that you look for in the way that someone either communicates or behaves that tell you they're probably gonna align with your values? Well, there's you know, there's a balance there too, because as a technology company and I've been involved in technology actually more than I've realized. I mean, I've always been a a technology company, even though it was marketing, we were a tech company. And Because the technology was such a the coding and the language and the barrier was this like a a chasm between okay, I need this person because they're brilliant at technology, but they might it's like we've all heard of this, especially in the past. Don't let the programmers talk to clients, you know, keep ⁓ out of the conference room. And that's really changing now with how AI you know, how AI is working. Which is good because it levels the playing field and I think it brings What artificial intelligence is doing, I think, is bringing humanity back to the day-to-day operations of a company. So the things that we look for is I think the things that everybody needs to be looking for, more so than ever before, because we're only going to talk about tech right now for for this scenario, but you can't b hide behind the fact that you're a brilliant coder. You can be a brilliant coder, but you still need to have the other acumens or talents. Common sense, listening, commitment, all of those quote, soft skills for the past 30, 40, 50 years are more important than ever before, or at least they're rising to the surface again. And you know, we have something where we call, my partner coined this, the orbical standard. And if you're not willing to live into the orbital standard, I mean, as simple things, it sounds it's almost embarrassing to say, like run things through grammarly before you send it to a con. You know, get it into AI and say how what are the questions my client would see this or pick this apart. Because the other thing that AI is producing is it's compound it's not compounding. It's it's articulating or emphasizing where people are lazy. And s because it's like, well, I can take your document, I can put it into AI and say, Read this like I'm a chief technical officer, like I'm a chief financial officer, like I'm the CEO, like I'm an investor, like I'm an attorney. Come back with all these things and produce it back to the person that presented it, it's like, well, why didn't you think of these things? Because I didn't have to be a brain surgeon to do it. So to answer your question directly, people that are just committed to being exceptional. And one of the ways I really articulate that is, and I I speak with my college students about this, is the definition of a professional is that you are paid. So yeah, I know, it that sounds real flip fruity or whatever. Like yeah, everybody who works at McDonald's is a professional. Well they truly are. And I'm realistic, okay? I worked in fast food years ago. Obviously years ago. I was like sixteen. I faked my paper. I've actually faked my papers. I was fifteen. ⁓ was it after the business to find girls? And so you decided to go. Yeah, it was for free chicken. I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I got free chicken. We knew there was an ulterior motor. Yeah, I know there's always something. Yeah, free chick free chicken. But having people that are committed to the standard. It's interesting too, as I shared a book recently with my college students. It's by Tim Grover, it's a book called Relentless. And he talks about training Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And when I first read the book, I thought it was how to be like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Now I'm reading it differently and I sh I share it completely differently with my students. Now is read it to get the permission to not be great. Because there's a clear plan of what you need to do to be great. You know, Kobe Bryant would get up at five AM or after a game and Michael Phelps I mean the guy lived in Maryland, you know, four or five months out of the year it's f you know, freezing cold, had to get up at four o'clock in the morning, go swim laps, go to the gym, then get breakfast, then go to high school, and then do it all over. So there's a clear plan of what you need to do. So if you're not willing to do it, it's okay. Versus people like, ⁓ I'm trying to do it. So I view that differently, as opposed to a map of how to do it. It's almost a map of a permission of it's okay. But if you want to do it, this is what you have to do. So to answer your question regarding that is people that are absolutely committed to success. And that's kinda yeah, that's surprising. You know, I'm a I'm a child of the eighties and you know when the movie Wall Street came out With ⁓ Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, I went to my buddy, we went to Chi Cheese and I was underage, but we had fake IDs. And we went in and got a sh a shot of ⁓ tequila, actually. And I said to my buddy Pat, I will be a millionaire by the time I'm twenty-eight years old. And it was like eight years later. And I achieved that. But back at that time, the values were so screwed over. I mean, people doing cocaine to work ninety hours a week and things like that. Things have shifted much better, but almost too far. There's definitely a difference. And it's funny. I'm seeing people that I consider well not kids, but it's just joking to say kids, but you know, thirty five, forty year old people like, ⁓ the kids these days. And there's just a difference of the commitment to achievement. And that's what we look for is a commitment to achievement. I mean, either get on the bus and ride with us or get the hell out of the way. Yeah. I I would second that. I think there's definitely been a shift even in in our careers of what people are willing to put in to it to be successful or to make something successful that is greater than themselves. So it makes a a ton of sense. Somebody the other day you didn't want to drive twenty minutes for a meeting. It's like, ⁓ I gotta drive the meeting. I'm like, wait a second. If this was thirty years ago, you would wake up every morning, you'd shave, which I didn't do today. You would shave, you would put on a suit, you would drive anywhere between twenty minutes to an hour and a half, you go sit at a desk in front of your PC all day, you drive back home and do it all over again. It is a blessing for us to be able to do what we do, but it's also created a little bit of laziness. Yeah. ⁓ that's that's for sure true. I think back to the beginning of my career, my alarm would go off at five fifteen every morning and then I'd get up and drive to the train and sit on the train for an hour and fifteen minutes and then get to the train station. And then walk to my office building and get to my desk and now I walk upstairs. ⁓ I know. After I have my coffee. So it is a blessing, but it's also we found a great team, we have a great team, we've ⁓ not done a great job, I think, of hiring, to be completely transparent. When you first brought this topic up, I'm like, ⁓ God, you know, what am I gonna say? We're getting better at articulating that it's okay not to join or become. But if you join Orbical, here's our standard and you better be able to, you know, ready to go. And it doesn't mean working 90 hours a week. I mean, that's silly. I got no respect for that. But it means using the tools and the enthusiasm to go the extra mile, whatever that means. I love that. I've got one more question for you, Ed, before Jenna's gonna jump in with a couple of things ⁓ to ask you, and that is about success. You brought that up earlier and it just came up again. How has your definition of success changed from maybe the early days of building businesses to today? Well, it it's time changes. Time changes everything. You know, I mean, hell, we bombed Japan. We annihilated them after they annihilated us, and now for decades and decades we've been wonderful trading partners. And maturity changes the definition of success. I absolutely believe in my twenties and thirties it was about Me almost even to the having issues with family. You know, it's like, well, I got I gotta work. I'm gonna work. I'm not gonna go on that vacation. I mean, I'm embarrassed to say there's pictures of me on vacation in my thirties where I'm sitting there on, I guess, a blackberry at that time. So before success meant things. Now success means two things that are so much more important. ⁓ three, security. Definitely want security and to be able to do nice things. I mean if gonna go on a cruise, why not be in the suite versus being on an inside cabin? Not that that's wrong with the inside cabin, but why not be in the suite? If somebody's gonna be there, why not it be you? So security and then the sense of accomplishment versus the sense of obtainment. ⁓ it's like well I really did that because you can't take that away. You can take the Ferrari away. I mean I've had it happen to me more things than we'll get to on this. I mean I've had where my fancy car got repossessed. I probably would do it all over again 'cause I was sacrificing for the company to protect the shareholders and I was willing to make that sacrifice, but I've had to let go of the the tangible things that I thought were so important. And then what really gets me excited today is my team. At my age, mathematically I will be long gone and probably be little pieces of ashes dispersed on the inside of the Daytona tracetrack, which they'll sneak me on there someday and My team maybe not together but we go and and the ability to help them and then their families succeed is really awesome too. I think that's a really healthy perspective. But you almost have to go through the the first sort of iterations to your point to kind of come along with ⁓ maybe this isn't the most important thing in life. And you also have to identify there's people out there that talk a good game, but they don't mean it. Like, you know, we talked about earlier about the law of reciprocity helping other people. Ye you can't fake it. You're either really doing that or you're faking it because it sounds good. Or you really care about people. I mean, a sure tell if somebody doesn't care is when they interrupt you. I mean, Aaron, I did interrupt you a moment ago and I apologize. ⁓ But you see people that do that, like they're just waiting, like they're waiting for your lips to stop moving so they can jump on and they're not absorbing what you're saying. And You know, there's there's tells regarding that. But a lot of times age will you know, I mean my brother I'm the youngest of six. My brother's seven years older than me and I will he's so much better than me and so much more mature than me and has so much more wisdom than me. And I know that five, seven, ten years from now I will be at a higher level, but not near him, 'cause he's gonna still have those years ahead of me. So well shifting gears a little bit to AI, as you mentioned earlier, right? And I I agree with you How AI is basically bringing it back the the humanity piece of it, right? And you really are understanding or seeing or it's illustrating the EQ of people, right? And their really their ability to like use their resources. But I'm very curious to hear your perspective on when you work with companies today, where do you see the biggest disconnect on the hype with AI? and the problems that businesses should be actually solving with AI. There's a few things there. I believe the people in their and this is this seems like it should be just the opposite, because you turn on shows with an older couple and they don't know how to program the clock on their microwave or how to use a remote and they call their grandkids to do that. But from an experience level, I think people in their fifties, sixties and seventies are actually better able to embrace the dynamic change that artificial intelligence is bringing than somebody in their twenties. I mean my son's in his twenties. He doesn't remember not having a smartphone. ⁓ now his smartphone might have gotten more memory and it might have had better features, but it's pretty much been the same thing for a while. Where I go back to the days of a manual typewriter and whiteout to then be completely blown away that you could take one letter off it with an electronic typewriter and remove that and fix it to then computers and word processing or fax machines. There was for a period of time of about six years of do you have a fax machine? What's your fax number? ⁓ I gotta fax it to you. So people at a certain age have experienced these Momentous shifts where the technology has been growing but hasn't been shifting for about the past 10 years. So what I'm seeing at the collegiate level is students being petrified because they're being taught certain things, but they're not being shown how to necessarily use AI. In the business sector, I think that there's a lot of unnecessary overwhelm, and that's for two reasons. One is we're all on the same playing field. I mean, you take my business. Partner who is brilliant when it comes to technology and self-development. Now, if it was 2010 and we were using C or whatever programming language, and he decided to go on a sabbatical to the jungles of whatever and not talk to humanity for 18 months, and he came back, he could just really pick up where he started. I mean, sure there'd be some changes. You leave AI for 18 months and come back, it's completely different. But that's the advantage for people, is because Everybody can still get on the train. So even if you've never even fired up Claude or ChatGPT, you can be up to speed with the best power user within six months, which is an awesome thing. When it comes to businesses, it's that overwhelm or that confusion that prevents asking the right questions, which is sad as well, because the answers are right at your computer. Like earlier, the analogy I gave you, I don't know what a chief technical office. Is going to want to know or a CFO is going to want to know any those titles that I use, but I can ask and I can say to the AI, pretend you're this and then give me it back. Even for a small business owner. I'm a small business owner, I run a printing shop. What are some ways that I can better utilize AI? And through that self-learning, they there's no reason to be overwhelmed or intimidated by it. I I think that it's a great thing. Yeah. And you also mentioned this a little bit earlier too, but I think it goes back to there's an acclamation period and there always has been for anything that has been new and changed, but it seems to be that AI seems to have much more of like a fear factor to it. So I guess h take people say like history can repeat itself and we can learn from history. What would you say from previous technology revolutions? Like what do you think businesses are forgetting as they try to adopt AI and are trying to be like the winners of AI. Well I could list by name at least five people that were very successful professionals back in nineteen ninety one, ninety two, ninety three who said they will never have a PC on their desk. They will never use a computer. And it's the same thing all over. It's just coming at it much quicker. And So, like anything else, those that embrace will win and succeed, and those that don't or don't put the effort in it won't. I mean I say to my college students, take the time you spend on TikTok or other social media, still be on there, that's cool. But give me an hour a week. Just give me an hour a week for self study and constant reinforcement of AI. And if you do that over a course of a year, let alone four years in school, even though I do not teach freshmen, I like my seniors. But you'll just find yourself so much further ahead. And then it gets better. Back to also Jenna where it brings the humanity back. I mean w in my marketing class, what I share is screw the marketing, you can learn the marketing, you can learn all the fancy words. No psychology, sociology, and math. And the same thing here is The human element is being reinforced more than ever. So the people that might not have been might have been overlooked because they weren't the greatest technologist, but they were committed, they were there, they were willing to learn. It's really kind of a not a revenge of the nerds today, it's a revenge of the generalists. Yeah. I can totally see that actually. And so what do you think someone that perhaps let's say uses TikTok as their only source of news. What could they teach someone, let's say used a typewriter back in the day, right? Like what are some of the things that each generation could potentially teach each other that would help them through this transition that we're in? That's a question. I think in both parts the number one thing is listening. You know, I had a situation one time and this is a pro this is appropriate, but it's completely off off base. So we had a rather large, we were a call center, that's how we had a thousand people. We had multiple call centers. And there was a gentleman who, when I was maybe twenty-five years old, seemed like he was ancient, but he was probably seventy, which that's scary. And every day he would sit in the lunchroom and the way his shift worked, he would only be in the lunchroom with a few people. With like thirty or forty people, and he would sit there and eat his bologna cheese sandwich. And looked at him, I'm like, ⁓ my. Working in a call center at 70. And so there was the assumption there of who he was by how I reviewed it. And then after a while I got to know him a little bit better and his name was Herman. And then one day I just sat down with him. I said, Hey, you know, see you sitting here. I thought I'd just touch base and say hello. What an asshole I was. He was an admiral in World War II commanding the Pacific Fleet submarines. He had thousands of men under his direct control, retired with as a decorated officer, war hero, had a pension, didn't have to work, realized he couldn't be retired, loved technology, discovered that we used computers, loved to communicate, and wanted to get out of the house for twenty to twenty-five hours a week because his wife was driving him crazy. So what I'm sharing with you, and this is this is going to happen for every happened in the past is going to be more, but that's the context, is it has to start with listening. You know, there is a direct relation to artificial intelligence in a manual typewriter, but you can't have people like me saying, ⁓ you're getting all your news on TikTok. TikTok could be a great place to get the news if it's researched and balanced. So I would to answer your question, I would say listening. Yeah. I like that. I'm gonna get that put on a poster, Ed, that do not assume that you know why somebody has made the decisions that they have made in their career or in their life or otherwise. The number of times that professionals leaders do that is incredible. And they could take a leaf from your book on that. And they're usually wrong too about what they are assuming about this person and usually just like flabbergasted when they find out the truth. You just never know. Yeah, walk into a Mercedes or BMW dealership. Dress poorly with hoodies, and you won't get the time of day. The smart salespeople, they treat everybody the same. Yeah, as you should. As you should. Yeah, as you should. Well, on that note, what does the future of work look like to you, given where we are today? If if I answered that question, you should never post this. Nobody knows. I saw a documentary the other night, very, very well done on Netflix. And you had the camp of AI is gonna destroy us all and there's gonna be eighty percent unemployment to the camp that it's wonderful and we're all gonna live a better life. And I think they're both right. I really do. I think I don't think it's gonna ⁓ hopefully won't kill us. It could though, but so could a meteor. So you just deal with that. The future of work will be, I think if people realize that the human being is more important than ever before in the future of work because we can focus on the creativity. Now, when generative AI comes around, that's gonna be a whole new ballgame. So I can only imagine the future of what I know today. The best of the best will still be the best. The people that are the all-stars in sports In athletics, well I guess in in any area, but specifically here we're talking about business, they will be unaffected, surely. It will change how we live and I do believe strongly that from twenty thirty to about twenty forty-five, it will be the most chaotic period potentially in human history. Because it would almost be like if the three of us left the planet and I'm just gonna say today, not twenty thirty, and we got plopped down in twenty forty, we wouldn't even know how to live. You know, it's like, ⁓ my gosh, what's how how are people working? What's the technology? Is there guaranteed minimum income? What are the tax bases for the billionaires? How have robots affected sports? How have they affected manual labor? What is creativity? And so it's gonna be incredibly exciting. I'm actually while I'm I would maybe like to be younger, I wouldn't want to go backwards. I really hope I got another good twenty, thirty years to experience what's coming. But all that sounds nice and I didn't even answer your question because if I did well if I did, it wouldn't be fair. I do believe though, if for the listeners, be excited that humanity will always win. Humanity will always win. And if you are a great human and have all the positive attributes that a company or a client or whoever would look for, you'll do real well. Just like you would have done real well a hundred years ago or twenty years ago. And it's gonna be really I think the same in the future. Yeah. And I agree, right? Like a meteor could kill us, anything could kill us. I mean, right now we can't even eat salad and that was supposed to be good for us. So maybe in twenty forty we'll be able to eat salads again. Like you just don't know and it changes by the day. So you just gotta keep living, you know, you just gotta roll with it. So that's being an entrepreneur, pushing forward, you know, just push forward and believe be positive. ⁓ I never said it Any other time in any presentation, I just thought of it today with those airsuits, you know, with those air wings. You don't jump off a cliff saying, God, I hope I don't crash. Yeah. You know, you jump off saying, I really want to fly. And I think that that's really the entrepreneur and how we can embrace AI. Yeah, I agree. Just a couple more questions just to close. What's one lesson that failure taught you that success never could? Enjoy the moment because it's temporary. You're never going to be the richest, you're never gonna be the poorest, you're never gonna be in the best shape, you're never you know, but enjoy enjoy the process. That's one of the things I think maturity, and and not just maturity, I think even like Olympic athletes understand that. The goal was the gold medal, the process was the reward. And I think if you live into that it's pretty cool. I like that. I like that a lot. For someone that is going through a major business setback right now, what's one thing you'd want them to hear? listen to themselves and what I mean by that is one ⁓ thing that I discovered not too long ago that I've used is I think it's called the Solomon Paradox, where I have friends going through it. Marital issues or health issues or business issues. And it it's always so easy to kind of give other people's advice, but do you take your own? So what I've tried to do is start to write to myself. And I actually use a project on Claude that is I call it Ed number two. And instead of me saying Like, ⁓ I really need to get exercise. I position it where like I'm giving advice to someone else, but I'm actually giving it to myself. Because it kind of takes away the excuse at that point. Yeah, I learned about it. I do believe it's called Solomon's Paradox, where you can give great advice to other people, but it comes to yourself, it's not you don't take it. If you word it differently, it's not like I should exercise more or I should eat healthier or I should spend an hour a day doing whatever. It's you. But the you is you. You're talking to yourself. Yeah. ⁓ and I found that to be very helpful actually. That's a good trick. I'm gonna have to use that myself. I've been taking notes here, as we've been saying. I watched somebody Google it and it's not called Solomon's Paradox, and I'm just embarrassing myself. It's something like that. It's like a deer, it's like the New Age Deer Diary, almost, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well you're right. Journaling. Journaling's been around forever. Absolutely. That's really smart. Yeah. Yeah. Write it down. It makes you think differently. Well this has been so fun, Ed. Thank you so much for letting us pick your brain and learn from you. If folks want to learn more about you or your company, where can they find you? Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Edward DuCoyne, and the company is ORPICOL, O R P I C A L. So it's Not to be confused with Orbital. No. Or Oracle. Oracle. Oracle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can go to the website and you can find out what all the letters stand for. All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much.