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The Third Object: Art, Play and Stoic Judgement
13 Plays1 month ago
Artist‑entrepreneur Joe O’Connell (Creative Machines; Second Sky) shows how to design third objects that spark real connection—and why leaders should practice stoic judgment in a world of unstoppable forces. We cover Gen‑Alpha unplugging, AI as a creative copilot, and a rooftop sculpture in Japan that turns shadow play into community.
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Transcript
Fascinating Family Histories and Influences
00:00:04
Speaker
The voice of growth, mastering the mind and market. My grandfather had been friends with ah Thomas Edison's younger son. People working together to make cool stuff.
00:00:19
Speaker
The intermediate steps are always a little cloudy. You have to know your own origin story, I think, to plot your own trajectory. There's very few rules that hold up in all circumstances.
00:00:34
Speaker
It's going to be harder than you think it is but you're going to discover resources you didn't know you had.
00:00:44
Speaker
But within that you can achieve anything.
The Multifaceted Identity of Joe O'Connell
00:00:48
Speaker
Joe O'Connell, you have a list that can describe you as being an artist, as being a business leader, as being a pioneer, inventor.
00:01:03
Speaker
a curious person. i mean, you've got a lot of things that really define you. How would you define you? To me, it's all one thing, and it's kind of a continuation of childhood, as most of our lives really are.
00:01:17
Speaker
I grew up in North New Jersey in Montclair, in a family of makers. um We were cooking, gardening, sewing, making mechanical things, motorized things, LED lights, lasers, everything. And my grandfather had been friends with ah Thomas Edison's younger son.
00:01:38
Speaker
We were near his West Caldwell library. um a manufacturing of inventions where he invented the light bulb, the motion picture, I think the nickel cadmium battery, the list just goes on and on.
00:01:51
Speaker
And we were surrounded by all these little shops that were, you know, key suppliers to say Bell Labs, where they invented the first transistor and the satellite. So I grew up in this milieu of making things that would then, you know, have a...
00:02:09
Speaker
generally a good impact on society. And it wasn't until my twenties that I realized that, cause I had two sisters who did that with me, that there was any reason why women wouldn't also be makers and leaders, et cetera. Cause my mom and grandmother were really strong people. my dad never said that to be a better man, you would put women down.
00:02:32
Speaker
So that sort of, um, working in a great fraternity of um people working together to make cool stuff. And the house was just filled with books and inventions and like crazy contraptions that the family had worked on together. So that's basically what I've done for the rest of my life.
Understanding Origins and Education's Role
00:02:52
Speaker
That's great. that Origin stories are always interesting because you you can look backwards and see where somebody came from. And for the most part, you can look forward to see where they're going.
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah. And you have to you have to know your own origin story, I think, to plot your own trajectory, even to plumb the depths of where, even if you don't consciously realize it, where you think you're, where you're really gonna be in 10 years.
00:03:17
Speaker
It's really still playing out a lot of your childhood. Yeah, so actually let's go there. Let's just kind of delve a little bit into your childhood and then we'll come back to the the present time.
00:03:28
Speaker
Was there a a moment in your childhood where you realized that the tinkering, the building, the making, and all of that was going to be your career trajectory? Was there any doubt that that was going to be what you're going to be doing?
00:03:45
Speaker
No, I think I always knew that the intermediate steps are always a little cloudy. So when I went to university, I thought, well, I will study engineering because engineers design and make things. And I think it's definitely taught better these days.
00:04:00
Speaker
But back then i was like, oh, I'm not learning to make things. I'm just learning to use spreadsheets and I'm learning to. optimize aspects of design and all that's very valuable. But at the time, then I switched to physics, and engineering, mathematics, and then philosophy, anthropology, sociology. I still kept with the full physics curriculum through my graduation. And then in my graduate work,
00:04:26
Speaker
did more anthropology, history, sociology, literature. I had a really well-rounded liberal arts education, but it was all in service to becoming a maker.
00:04:37
Speaker
I would say the one metaphor that stays from childhood, and I still see it when I visit my parents' home where I grew up is the kitchen and the dining room. Like the kitchen is where you make stuff and or the basement.
00:04:51
Speaker
And then the dining room is where you share it with with other people. And I still feel that way. My my business now, Creative Machines, which is probably one of the world's largest art design and production facilities run by a single artist.
00:05:07
Speaker
is, um has like kitchen areas and dining room areas.
Cultural Values Reflected in Spaces
00:05:11
Speaker
um And people just love coming into the kitchen. And I think our society has moved in that way. This idea that the kitchen is a social space, not just a behind the scenes space.
00:05:22
Speaker
I remember as ah as a kid and even now, my mother where I grew up, the front door, just like my house here, but the front door was literally in the kitchen. So you open the door and that was the kitchen.
00:05:38
Speaker
And she always hated that because she had to keep a meticulously clean kitchen, right? it is We didn't have ah ah like a little entryway or ante room or whatever. It was literally the kitchen.
00:05:51
Speaker
And she always hated that. But then the more time they passed, the more I realized that my own culture and my own upbringing was all about the kitchen. Yes. And especially in Mexican culture, food is big. Oh, yeah. And and you know you're never actually able to escape that.
00:06:09
Speaker
You know, even if you're like not even hungry, you're going to eat something. And so that's an interesting metaphor is, you know, the kitchens where you make things and then the dining rooms where you share them. Now, as an artist,
00:06:21
Speaker
And I've been to your facility and you mentioned there that you've got those interplays. Where do you see your art being shown and and exhibited the most? Help our audience understand where your stuff is.
00:06:35
Speaker
So we make, ah mostly we make large scale public art and that goes into like and Civic plazas, street corners, um public private developments, but in the public areas of those.
00:06:51
Speaker
In museums, typically in the in the public spaces in and around museums, we've got a lot of pieces in universities and hospitals. Again, in the in the spaces that are not behind the scenes, but are public facing.
00:07:05
Speaker
So that's kind of like, I guess, if you will, the dining room. We have um have work on seven continents. We actually have two little sculptures on their way to Antarctica right now. Wow. And always in always in public spaces.
00:07:19
Speaker
That's amazing. Is there one particular project that is notable or memorable for for you, not necessarily because of its scale or for for whatever reason, it just kind of you remember this one.
00:07:33
Speaker
It's tough, we've got probably over 100 pieces in public space. um One of the more, and I'll just mention one or two interesting ones. Piole Kabuto was a piece we did on the roof of a luxury shopping mall in Himeji, Japan.
00:07:53
Speaker
And it looks straight across at Himeji Castle, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And that particular project exemplifies how we work with clients and the public and obey the rules, sometimes break the rules a little bit and ah create interactivity. So we had this wonderful group of Japanese clients. And I remember doing the sketch um late at night. You know how they go through different, and they like will drink something from everything in the liquor cabinet. That's sort of a Japanese tradition. And I forget whether we begin or end with beer, but like you go through all the different alcohol families and so on a cocktail napkin, I have the sketch and it is a, it's the clause of a, of the Kuogata beetle that um is revered in that culture.
00:08:44
Speaker
area a lot of people have them as pets and it was used to adorn the helmets of the shogun warriors who fought for the emperor of himenji castle and he would look out and see who was doing well because he could tell them apart by their helmets But the the other side, and so there's a lot of rooting in history and the client's own personal history in this.
00:09:07
Speaker
But then I spent a ton of time in the mall itself and I was watching young people and every little square centimeter of space is privately owned and controlled. Everything is very dense in some Japanese cities.
00:09:21
Speaker
But they were up on the roof where there was some landscaping lights that were accidentally mis-aimed and they were aimed so that the kids could be playing in the lights and it would cast their very distinct shadows on this huge white wall that faced Himeji Castle, almost like broadcasting images.
00:09:41
Speaker
And so the kids were like doing shadow puppets with each other, like one would get behind the other and put like horns. or teeth coming down to bite the other's head off. And then the others would quickly realize that by getting closer to the light, they could get bigger um in the image.
00:09:57
Speaker
And they were that was the one place where I saw unstructured play. And I thought this this is kind of a core of a lot of the work we do is unstructured play that leads to great social benefits, if you will. So we made the sculpture of the Kuwagata beetle. You can crawl up into the pinchers of the beetle.
00:10:14
Speaker
And then we made these custom light fixtures that then project even more distinctly than those those landscape lights, project your sckulp your image right up on the wall where it's visible from Himeji Castle.
00:10:27
Speaker
So that particular project had had like everything all in one. And then it all had to come apart into five tiny pieces to go up in the tiny elevator they had that went to the roof. Wow. So that kind of sums up a lot of our stuff.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a remarkable story. I think that There's a lot to unpack there. I mean, first of all, unstructured play is so important. I remember as a kid spending hours upon hours just doing nothing or playing with little cars or um running around
Creativity and Play in Changing Times
00:10:58
Speaker
the in the desert. I grew up in the in the desert here and you know it's like the wet desert, so there's not just sand. I mean, we're talking about ah mesquite trees and cretosotes and such.
00:11:08
Speaker
And so I remember just having that unstructured play and just using imagination. And I think that as a society today, especially with the advent of these things, yep it draws away from that social interaction.
00:11:23
Speaker
And of course the pandemic also created some challenges. i have ah a young nephew who is, he's what, eight now? And he was sort of brought into that world with the pandemic in full swing. He was four or five, right? And so he he is he's a great kid and he's really,
00:11:44
Speaker
um I think sees the world in a different way because the way that he grew up. And so I really liked the fact that you're doing that kind of stuff with the, you know, that particular piece of art.
00:11:55
Speaker
Tell me about your experience during the pandemic. um Did it change your thoughts about life priorities and what society needs and what you could do based on the childhood you had?
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think it did for me. You know, I kind of like have this, ah pendulum, if you will, between wanting to go back to a simpler time, nature, you know, being uh, an outdoorsman, you know, that whole aspect of being really close to nature.
00:12:31
Speaker
and living a more um so slower lifestyle. And then the other side of the pendulum is hard driving entrepreneur, you know taking these crazy ideas over the edge, leading teams and all that. So the pandemic in a weird way caused it all to come together and in stillness.
00:12:51
Speaker
And that pendulum stopped in the middle. And because I had to be ah kind of on both sides, but it wasn't we wasn't swinging, we were forced to be in that one space.
00:13:03
Speaker
And in some ways it was ah an amazing time and others it was more challenging because I had just entered into a and relationship where we were ah blending families and all of a sudden my partner had to be, because I was sort of going to work, quote unquote, she had to be the homeschooler an instant of four kids.
00:13:22
Speaker
And that drew a lot of, of, um, pressure into the already ah you know new vessel of moving in together and all that. So it was a challenge.
00:13:33
Speaker
But as we said, and when I was working with Spark Partners, my previous consulting company, the pandemic just accelerated all these trends that were happening already.
00:13:44
Speaker
Yes, it wasn't sui generis. It was really just things coming, things accelerating and happening at the same time. So let's actually talk about that with respect to trends.
00:13:56
Speaker
What do you see are trends that are in support and that you're part of growing into? In other words, are you aligning with certain trends that you see in the market with your business and your own personal artistic space?
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it you mentioned that experience of the pandemic where the quiet and immersion in nature and then the more social working with other people at a breakneck speed kind of came together, stopped being such a dichotomy.
00:14:30
Speaker
In our own work, I think we started to recognize, again, the value of human connection in spaces. A lot of times we say we make the third object, like let's say there's you, me, and although right now we're sitting across from a table, usually when people wanna have a conversation, they'll go to a movie or they'll have something to eat or they'll play a game together.
00:14:52
Speaker
We make those third objects in those spaces that facilitate human interaction. And for the first half of our company, we made most of our money doing science and children's museum exhibits and I no longer believe that those are what the world needs. We kept getting asked to do more complicated exhibits that would require less maintenance, and could they turn on and off at the beginning and the end of the day automatically with a switch? And i'm like, then you have an empty museum with a lot of expensive objects in it, and who really wants to go there? Because they have an expensive object in their pocket, you know, that's technologically sophisticated.
00:15:33
Speaker
And um so that's where the idea for not for profit Second Sky, which is really not a very creative idea. It's an adventure playground, community center. It takes advantage of it's also a personal training, family fitness, sports coaching, art.
00:15:52
Speaker
And sometimes people say, well, what's your lane? And I'm like, these are things that groups of people want to do together. It's like the same lane that humanity has had for 100000 years. And when people are still doubtful, I say what we're trying to do in one, about one and a half acre space is just do what, say, a European civic plaza has, which is like three generations eating, socializing, drinking. You've got people on a date. You've got business people doing deals. You've got three generations of families. You've got kids running around. There's usually a little construction project in the middle going on. And it all just works. You know, there is no lane because people come in groups and people want
00:16:32
Speaker
that overlap. so we're we're, that project that we're doing came together as a not-for-profit venture during the pandemic when I could just see what we were going to need emerging from the pandemic, both from our own family, our son and his friends and what they needed.
00:16:51
Speaker
But now, and I hadn't really planned it this way, every time we get an inquiry for Children's and Science Museum exhibits, I say, well, we could make those for you, but let me tell you about Second Sky. Maybe what you really want is consulting and a starter kit to create a more fully immersive community center that also has food and beverage events that gets parents really involved rather than just sitting on the side drinking a cup of coffee while their kids play with these expensive toys.
00:17:23
Speaker
um So it's sort of turning into a business opportunity because I think that's what the world needs in the areas that we provide stuff for.
Vision for Community and Dining Spaces
00:17:31
Speaker
And again, this is, i was in a meeting trying to get our CFO. There's little issues with the building code and the the idea that we have a cafe that serves a certain number of people, but the space available for it is much larger than the number of people. And they're like, no, no, no, this is a restaurant of 12,000 square feet.
00:17:50
Speaker
You're gonna need 500 parking spaces. i'm like, no no, no, no, you don't understand. they're going to take their food and go to a much more dispersed thing. and they're like, this is an unusual, this is highly creative. And I'm like, no, this is actually the least creative thing I've done in my entire career.
00:18:04
Speaker
This is like the little cafe alongside the fountain and the public square or around the fire, you know, in a hunter gatherer society. This is the least creative thing ah we're doing. um And that doesn't mean that we don't have technology you know,
00:18:20
Speaker
you know, we're not also doing robotics and lasers and stuff where it's appropriate, but it's mostly getting people together in nature. And that all started for me during the pandemic, even as I wasn't realizing it. And as it's starting to come together, I realized, oh, basic I basically recreated my childhood home because we had a big backyard with a garden that we spent half the time in We had the basement where we're always tinkering and making things. We had the kitchen and the dining room where we're always having long conversations over food. And I'm like, oh, that's basically my not-for-profit Second Sky.
00:18:53
Speaker
But it made me who I am, you know? Yeah. And that's interesting that there's, so we really track trends or kind of what's happening and we're emerging into this really interesting time when AI is becoming more prevalent and more part of the human ah conversation and situation.
00:19:14
Speaker
But there's another parallel trend that's also at play. pun intended, is you're you're seeing a lot more of the gen alphas.
00:19:25
Speaker
How old is your son? He's 21. Okay. So this is definitely not that age, but the gen alphas are like 10. Yeah. Like my my little nephew is like eight. So that's sort of gen alpha.
00:19:37
Speaker
A lot of the gen alphas are already showing some inklings of wanting to unplug. Yes, I've seen that. Wanting to go yeah, this this thing's really cool and i can and um i know i grew up with this thing. I know how to manage everything. I can do anything in this, but I'm going put that down. I'm going to go play.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. And they're they're they're craving for that. longing for it. And I think even um in the early twenty s those kids. So when our son and his friends were in their teens, they'd be playing like multiple online games on their phone, switching between their console and their phone.
00:20:12
Speaker
And then it's, hey, let's go to Creative Machines. And they'd be playing in the car and talking about all these virtual things. And then we get there, they throw the phones down and then You know, they would be building cardboard forts and jousting and flying around on the cranes, or we'd have these giant drums out in the yard that they would run around in, avoiding the nails.
00:20:31
Speaker
And there was not a thought or interest in the incorporation of virtual characters in that real experience. And I know at the time i was going to a lot of meetings with people in their 50s who said, oh, the future is merging the digital and the and the physical. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm watching a bunch of like 12 year olds and it's not what they want. And they're going to be the ones buying or not buying your stuff in 10 years.
00:20:57
Speaker
So I see that. Yeah. I've always said that if you really want to understand how to how to really build a business that lasts, look at what 12 year olds are doing. Look at what 10 year olds are doing. What what what is interesting them?
00:21:08
Speaker
If you look at what's happening in and just sports yeah slash eSports, right? Yes. My my sons are are into that. And so that is the prevalent thing. And as we know, eSports now is bigger than the NFL, baseball, ah soccer, you name, you stack them all up. It's amazing. And it's bigger than that. There's all these shadow thing. Like a lot of times I think people don't pay attention to the numbers.
00:21:36
Speaker
The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood, but we still have Hollywood stars, you know. um And I didn't know that stat, but it makes sense. If esports are bigger than live sports, it's just a matter of time before they...
00:21:51
Speaker
take more of a center stage position. for sure. And and right now, therere what's interesting is you ask our sons, like yeah they were here, ask them who some players are that are popular or really, really good.
00:22:04
Speaker
They'll know people. I don't know people that are good players, but they know these people because they they follow them and they do these these Twitch things and they're yup literally watching people play games.
00:22:15
Speaker
And my sons would do that too, is they would sit there and play a game It was crazy. They were playing a game with people on the game while watching somebody else play a game that's recorded. Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:26
Speaker
And I just couldn't put my my head around that. The closest thing that comes to mind or the first time I had this weird deja vu experience is I went to the World Series of Poker with my roommate, his brother was playing in it and people were saying this is going to be like live and televised and really interesting.
00:22:43
Speaker
And I get into the smoke filled room with a bunch of slouchy unattractive, middle-aged guys hunched over their cards. I'm like, this will never play on TV. Yeah, I guess money's involved.
00:22:53
Speaker
But Texas Hold'em is a pretty boring game. There's not a whole lot of psychology and bluffing. It's really just grinding out the numbers of probability. And it was not very interesting to watch them. So I imagine...
00:23:04
Speaker
the game, the e-sports gamers are maybe more interesting to watch in person or get to know his personalities. right It's not like, you know, someone who does a little, as their particular dance after they score touchdown or someone who's so amazingly graceful, you know, in basketball or, you know, does some amazing thing every 10 minutes in a soccer match.
00:23:26
Speaker
Like what is the per, how does the person get involved and versus how much are you just really seeing into their brain? it's It's crazy. It's a new frontier. We haven't figured it out yet. Yeah. newfo and And I think ah the entrepreneur of the future or actually the entrepreneur of the current yeah who is devising new business opportunities is going to look at these trends and stack them on top of one or another to uncover what could be an interplay. And so let me go let me go there a second for you yeah with you.
00:23:57
Speaker
At what point did you, and then i I know come kind of a little bit of the story, at what point did you go into taking it from an art idea to a making money idea? How did that transition happen for you?
Art, Business, and Funding
00:24:12
Speaker
Well, we got started. So I started the company with a mission statement that wasn't really art or exhibits. It was creating objects and environments to foster creativity, human connection, um individual empowerment. I can't remember the exact words.
00:24:27
Speaker
And then the first business opportunities were interactive museum exhibits because the U.S. Science Museum and Children's Museum industry was going through maybe a decade-long growth spurt.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so that gave us business opportunities to build design and build exhibits. And we always tended more toward the like, I never want to do an exhibit that explains like Newton's three laws or whatever, like one, two, three.
00:24:52
Speaker
Even back then, i was like, there's there are trillion dollar companies developing these little things that will fit in your pocket or be next to it that'll do a better job.
00:25:02
Speaker
So let's concentrate on physical, social, embodied, somewhat open-ended experiences so that was like for the first decade and a lot of that then led into the the nascent form of like interactive public art that sort of coalesced after that because it used a lot of the same materials some of the same principles of giving people a little bit of a stage to exercise creativity when they come up to an art piece through changing colors or
00:25:34
Speaker
um gestures or interesting physical motions with the art piece. And then that also then dovetailed with the whole selfie thing. So we, you know, it's ah it's guided by a mission, but the specific things we create are guided by what there's a market for. And it always has been, you know, i talk to artists all the time who say,
00:25:57
Speaker
your art is just so compromised because it has to be for the public and paid for by corporations. And I said, well, you know, there's a reason Michelangelo moved in with the Medici family.
00:26:08
Speaker
um Art requires money. yeah And throughout the grand sweep of things, Most art history is actually public art, meaning like municipally commissioned art for display to support certain civic goals, um, and to appeal to a wide range of people to communicate a particular message.
00:26:28
Speaker
This 19th century idea that you've got the lone artist in their garret speaking truth to power and working out their psychological demons or their identity. Well, it's fine form of art, but it's actually the minority of art that's produced. And we still think that's what art is.
00:26:42
Speaker
Right. um So I have a little retort, but I actually like the fine art world because you can do things there that you couldn't do in the public art world. Yeah, that's for sure. Any time your career, have you ever thought about quitting and doing something else?
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah, I just started and um a page in my journal called Career Change like a year ago. And I think the smart way to do it is to work from the inside out and say, why am I doing what I'm doing?
00:27:07
Speaker
Like rather than throw away my company and move to another city or something like that, I'm like, well, I've got this toolkit. Is there a way I could rethink it from the inside out, from the ground Yeah.
00:27:20
Speaker
And I think there's actually a parallel. So um Esther Perel's podcast on relationships, she says, I'm married to the same man, but we essentially broke up and remarried three times. um The same thing can be true of a relationship. Sometimes you have to restart it.
00:27:35
Speaker
And so the way I've been thinking about it in a career is how do I really want to behave? What are some of the bad habits I've gotten into? Mm-hmm. And some of those bad habits were like resenting clients that didn't let us do what we wanted to do. Well, the answer there is find different clients, educate those clients in the middle and just, you know, politely don't take those clients that are going to be that way. And then so and then once you do, stop complaining about it.
00:28:01
Speaker
um I don't get to play enough and play is something I'm talented at and it's one of our human superpowers. Well, take jobs where you can play. And and when I went through this whole career change thought, I basically ended up with the same toolkit and kit of parts and physical company and most of the same staff, but just a way to completely rethink what I'm doing.
00:28:23
Speaker
so That's brilliant. And that that's really... You know, this podcast is about the market and the mind.
Philosophies for Life and Business
00:28:31
Speaker
Market, all things business, strategy, operations, hr all the stuff you hear about, right? Yeah.
00:28:38
Speaker
And we collectively put that as the market is the moniker. And then the mind, of course, is really vast. You're talking about mindset. You're talking about intent. You're talking about self-reflection.
00:28:50
Speaker
We happen to use the stoic principles as the sort of thing we lean on because it's It's something that's helped me out. Stoicism alongside some meditation and more mindfulness things.
00:29:03
Speaker
And it sounds like what you did there is definitely a reflection. um a lot of Stoics, you would take ah a long walk. And you know I actually did a stillness series where we talked about stopping and just listening to your inner voice.
00:29:19
Speaker
Sounds like you did that. I would say, yeah, um stoicism is probably the most rediscovered philosophy around the world by successful people, because in the end, it's probably.
00:29:33
Speaker
broadly speaking, the one philosophy that works. You can't change the market. Or just to take a slight diversion, the sports that I most find an affinity for, um kiteboarding, paragliding, kayaking, you're always dealing with forces that are much bigger. You're not gonna change the direction of the wind. You're not gonna change the currents or the temperature of the water, the choppiness.
00:29:55
Speaker
where the thermals are, you can't change any of that. You don't have a little engine to overpower it either. All you can do is adjust the angle of various things under your control. And with that little bit of control and a respect for those bigger forces, you can go anywhere you want.
00:30:11
Speaker
And so that's... like so I love reinterpreting stoicism in any different way. Like, well, you're not responsible for how other people do. The only thing you can control is how you feel about things and what you do.
00:30:24
Speaker
Let's stop being a baby and reorient every thought to not how much do I hate the world and how X or Y is corrupt. But what does success mean for me?
00:30:36
Speaker
How can I use these forces to become more happy, successful, generous in my own self? Yeah, I just see stoicism rediscovered. And i tell me, Manny, how you came to it and discovered it.
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it was sort of a trial by fire you in a way. So I started my company in. in sort of circumstances that were not ideal.
00:31:01
Speaker
We had just moved back to Tucson, my ex-wife and I, and we had lived in Albuquerque. We lived in Arbor, Michigan, and we kind of came back and i was building a new division of a company.
00:31:17
Speaker
and we had a year to do a certain amount of business. Well, that year came to pass and the financial crisis was in full swing, 2009, right? And so we decided just to pull up you know and kill the the endeavor, which was a mutual thing. And so I found myself in in in Tucson with no job in a very dark time in the economy.
00:31:41
Speaker
And I figured, well, what the hell, start a company. and my ex-wife had a job at the university. We had some stability, but we had two boys, two little kids. So it was a lot was going on around me. And there was a pressure cooker of of some internal things of wanting to provide, right? yeah Especially as men, I guess. i mean, just a broad brushstroke. Nothing wrong with that. yeah We want to provide. We want to protect. We want to provide. And I felt very powerless because I was being thrown around. is These were my words at the time. Thrown around these...
00:32:14
Speaker
markets and these situations. And so I didn't know what to do. So I poured myself into my work. And so that was a whole thing. And then eventually I grew my company and that started moving quickly.
00:32:26
Speaker
And then I, during the middle of that, got divorced and had that whole experience. And so I just felt as though I was the little Bob ah in the ocean, just kind of bobbing around.
00:32:40
Speaker
And rather than realize that there was magic and beauty to that, I was i had a mentality that was more frustrated and, I had a a temper about it. I just, I didn't. yeah and And so long story short is I ended up closing my company.
00:32:59
Speaker
And ah so I found myself in this situation where, and it was not like a nice glide path. it It was like crashing a plane into the side of a mountain. yeah But it was it was it had to happen that way.
00:33:12
Speaker
Because after that I emerged and i emerged a better person and I had full capacity and I really owned all my mistakes, which was hard to do. It's a hard big giant frog to swallow, you know?
00:33:26
Speaker
And I realized that, you know, and I had my partner at the time was really into meditation and and I kind of scoffed at it a little bit to begin with because was just finding my own way.
00:33:37
Speaker
But eventually it came around that I was like, you know, there's power there. There's something there. And and I began to to really look at that. And then I bumped into some content on stoicism.
00:33:49
Speaker
And then i that was it. started reading about it. And now that little bob bobin on the in the ocean just floating around has really transformed into an experience I had when I went sailing California.
00:34:02
Speaker
San Diego, which when you have that sailboat at the right angle, you have the the sail trimmed perfectly. You have this magic moment where it's like that. Everything connects and you are riding the waves.
00:34:16
Speaker
You're riding the wind. You're only in control of that rudder a tiny bit. yep yep And if you go too much, that's it. But at the same time, like you said, with your your example, you're not in control of anything.
00:34:29
Speaker
You're in control of this much. This much is what you have control over. But within that, you can achieve anything. And yeah so much of your experience parallels my own. I don't think there are enough resources for men in the culture to to not get frustrated and whiny, and we think we have to control everything. I don't know where that comes from in the public narrative about being a man.
00:34:55
Speaker
It's so much better, and it's still consistent with being a provider and a protector, to be aware of where you have control and that almost any situation can be turned positive or negative. It's like we have a little switch every second and you just got to keep flipping that switch where it's appropriate.
00:35:15
Speaker
um I wish there was a little bit more resources like that. So for me, a lot of my turn to stoicism and the methods I've learned have come at hard times. I remember um The company was almost bankrupt. My wife was away on a long trip. We were not getting along.
00:35:32
Speaker
I was there with our son and i was we're always playing and joking around. He says, Dad, how come you're so silly? And i said and i thought our company might be bankrupt in the next week. I said, because sometimes silly is all you have.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then I realized play is one of our human superpowers. um the ability to find a narrow way out through a difficult situation or to turn a bad to a good or to detach from yourself and see the humor in something that your first temptation is to see glumly.
00:36:05
Speaker
And so also because I had asthma, I developed some breathing techniques that I now, like 20 years ago, I now realize our breath work. There's so much more available in terms of knowledge of how to go back and forth between your physical and mental states.
00:36:21
Speaker
And then whole story I don't have time for, but you know we I met a guru in India, which sounds so stereotypical, but on a trip about a year ago,
00:36:34
Speaker
And with her, I started learning. She's so down to earth. um She'll say, oh no I don't know anything. but Why would you think I'd know about that? Or don't ask me that. You already know the answer to that. But in specific areas, she gave me a lot of meditation advice.
00:36:48
Speaker
And rather than saying, OK, I got that mastered, I am still on the first lesson. And I still say to her, I'm still working on that first meditation. um You know, in the same way Picasso might say, I'm still learning to paint the bowl I was trying to paint at age five. You know, you can stick at one thing and it is the hardest thing.
00:37:09
Speaker
ah Meditation, I used to think is just sitting there with your hands in some weird pose. I do it actually in the car when I'm stopped at a light. i don't really have, i don't find a certain benefit in doing 10 or 20 minutes solid at the beginning or the end of the day, but I'll do it for two, three minutes throughout the day. And I find it's one of the hardest things to do.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's very difficult. It's very difficult. And there is a lot of power though, if you yeah figure out how to do it throughout the day, sometimes ah Like right now, I'm doing ah mini version of it. I can feel my feet.
00:37:42
Speaker
I can feel them interplane. can kind of like just feel them one to the other. And I can feel my elbows on the table. I can feel my my hands squishing each other here in front of me.
00:37:54
Speaker
And sometimes I do this and it's a superpower. Because if you're in a tense situation, if you're doing a deal with somebody or if you're just if you really want to be... at a ah position where you can really absorb a lot and produce a lot. Yeah.
00:38:13
Speaker
Meditation is, it's just such a superpower for sure. Yeah. Even just like when you're in a tense negotiating or other situation, whether it happens physically or psychologically, you know, your view narrows down and you're not able to take in alternatives and bigger perspective.
00:38:32
Speaker
You're just focused on the one thing that you think is a threat. I don't know if that's actually the eyes narrowing down. I know actually a lot of our field of view is somewhat psychological. It's not just nerve cells in the retina because it goes through a whole lot of processing.
00:38:46
Speaker
And that's one of the little unconscious exercises. Like when I feel trapped in any way, i always try to pay attention to the periphery because that's where an alternative may come from, or at least situational awareness will come from.
00:39:02
Speaker
It's interesting how a lot of the advice that I think is the best in business, and for me, and a lot of it comes back to judgment. There's very few rules that hold up in all circumstances from business gurus.
00:39:17
Speaker
It's which rule the right one to use in this place. Um, but a lot of it comes back to almost physical intuition and awareness, like the situational awareness you would have in sailing.
00:39:27
Speaker
What's the wind doing? What's the angle of the sail? How much is the boat keeling over? How much vibration I feeling through the rudder? Those are all very physical things. But if you are a future, like to be a really good CEO or manager, you have to not know just what's the future, but you have to see, you have to be making predictions about the future.
00:39:49
Speaker
unsupported by information because almost by definition, the information isn't there. You have to be like Wayne Gretzky skating to where the puck will be. 100%. Yeah, not where it is. And physical analogies, which meditation can key you into, I think are often the best guides for that type of business intuition.
00:40:10
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. There's this whole...
Impact of AI on Business and Art
00:40:12
Speaker
there's this new sort of thinking that AI is going to replace CEOs and high level managers.
00:40:21
Speaker
Okay. Now I firmly believe that that AI is going to have a significant oh yeah major change in the way we do business. I believe, and this is my guess only, that we'll have 30 to 40% unemployment.
00:40:34
Speaker
Some people are saying 90. I think that's a little bit too much. I think that's too high. I think 40 is probably okay. But um okay is whether it's good or bad, I don't know. But ah there are people saying that CEOs will be replaced because you can load into this model all of the decisions that have ever been made by all these amazing CEOs.
00:40:54
Speaker
And the the agent will percolate this and deliver everything. the solution in a manner which is consistent with a thousand decisions that had been made. There's a to be said for that.
00:41:07
Speaker
And I think there's power there, but I think the CEO of the future will have a an agent like that at their disposal where they'll be able to say, okay, agent Bob, yeah here's the situation. What do you think?
00:41:22
Speaker
And then from that, they can say, you know what? That's a really good thing. as is, or they can say, you know, I'm going to modify it a little bit, or you know what, forget it. I'm going to go out on my own. Yeah. Um, one of the things that One of the profound benefits of AI, I think, is the way it can help us quickly shift gears. So just to give, I'll just give a few examples for my company. Our vice president tends to be direct and brusque.
00:41:51
Speaker
Sometimes that actually benefits because I tend to be a little more loquacious and seeing more sides of things. But what she's been doing lately is when she needs to send an email that's a little more persuasive and nuanced,
00:42:03
Speaker
She says, I could get into the mental state, you know, take me five minutes and, you know, I can be that person. I just um run it through ChatGPT and I say, change the tone of this and then I review it and then I send it out.
00:42:16
Speaker
And for me, um in a typical day, I will use AI occasionally to modify things like that or to review. um a section of a contract, not to do something I couldn't do, but because the time spent shifting gears also sometimes have to be very creative and free thinking.
00:42:38
Speaker
And it'll it takes me a certain amount of time to move from CEO mode to artist mode, just like shifting between like first and fourth gear in a car. You know you you burn out the clutch.
00:42:49
Speaker
And AI will let me quickly adopt the persona that I may not want to spend a whole lot of time in. No, I love that. So that's one of the uses. I'm trying to think of, I don't want to get into every detailed little use. What I have very little patience for is the exuberance some people have for Um, AI is going to make all my travel reservations for me.
00:43:16
Speaker
And I know I actually, we kind of have to, to be an early adopter and gets the best deals you do. And I use it for shopping things, but I'm, I'm always telling these people, look guys in another month. They're keeping stats on who's doing the shopping. All of the travel sites are going to realize that there's a rising proportion of AI doing the shopping and they're going to employ AI to fluff and fool and figure it out. And it's just an agent's arms race. It is. And the people who are going to be left behind are the people who are still doing it the old fashioned way. This is no real progress.
00:43:48
Speaker
It's an enormous energy cost and it's just another example of first adopters and the wealthy screwing the poor and creating additional stratification. No time and money is really going to be saved.
00:43:59
Speaker
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? No. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a it's a brilliant way of seeing certain things. okay What it purports is that as you start to learn about something,
00:44:15
Speaker
you you're you're you're thinking of how good you are like spikes, like crazy. so oh yeah so you So you start playing trumpet or you start learning a language and you're like, oh, i can I can do this. I got this. And so you think you're at this high level, but then as more time passes, you realize and that's that's called the Mount Stupid.
00:44:36
Speaker
Yes, yes. And as more time passes, you realize, oh, rats, this is crazy. I don't know anything. And you drop to the valley of despair. Yeah, yeah. And then it's a slow climb. Slow climb. So I think a lot that's happening today is people are like, oh, I can use AI for this, AI for that.
00:44:53
Speaker
But if you really start to think about it, there's a lot you don't know about what you don't know. Right. And it's going to get you in the end. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's just take the one area where I do have some expertise, which is artistic creation and look at what AI is doing there. um Because it's not I'm not really an expert on business processes, even though I use it.
00:45:14
Speaker
um You know, in the history of representational arts, when photography first came out, people said, oh, it'll be the death of painting. Well, what it did is it spurred painting to become a whole lot more creative and playful, and it created photography as a legitimate art form. So you ended up with two art forms where you could have argued that at that time, painting was a little bit stagnant. Yeah. um There was recently, um i don't do murals, but I get involved with them. There was recently a situation in which
00:45:47
Speaker
a um A group commissioned a mural and the one they went with was designed by AI um to honor some local people. And there was a lot of uproar about that.
00:46:01
Speaker
And they instead chose a look, they replaced the ai I would say AI assisted, not generated mural with one created by a human artist who was local.
00:46:13
Speaker
And if you had shown the two artworks to me separately and I didn't know the origins and I have some expertise in evaluating visual arts, I would have had to say that the AI produced piece was more competent, even slightly more original.
00:46:30
Speaker
And the human mural creator was actually more of a derivative style. did not serve the needs of the mural and that you had to get probably too close to see the detail.
00:46:43
Speaker
It wouldn't work from a distance and close up. and And I think what that points to is that AI image generation is like, it's sort of like a decently skilled, but maybe not top form artist.
00:46:59
Speaker
It's really very good at doing B plus work. um And a lot of a lot of art is B plus work. Like if you go to the Academy of Arts in Florence where Michelangelo did David and afterward, and you see the work in the back room of the Mannerist that followed him, and then you look really closely at some of his sculptures.
00:47:21
Speaker
There are parts of Michelangelo, and Michelangelo was an A-plus artist for his choice, his timing, the way he directed the course of Western art. his originality, just so much about what he did is is A+. plus But the mannerists who followed were technically better at depicting like the faint veins in the arm, the exact angle of the ankle and stuff like that. and And it's almost sacrilege to say this, but if you look closely at some of his sculptures, you can see where the technical artistry fell behind his brilliance as an artist.
00:47:59
Speaker
And i think we have to grapple with a situation where a lot of practicing artists don't have the same level of proficiency as AI. And again, if you if you evaluated these two next to each other, the human artist, humans are not immune to copying either. Right. Only they're going to copy the last 10 things they saw or as AI is going to learn from 30,000.
00:48:22
Speaker
similar images. It was actually a better project that the AI did. Yeah. And and the thing is, is ah it goes back to the stoicism. you can you can fight it. You can be angry at it. You can shout at it. You can throw rocks at it.
00:48:34
Speaker
Or you can just figure out how to dance with it. Yeah. You can figure out how to how to make make a art with It's made us better. So we are about to install a really big figurative um art piece in Phoenix.
00:48:48
Speaker
And we did use AI tools. We ended up drawing almost all of it ourselves, but we used some AI tools. And AI is built into Photoshop and Illustrator now. There's nothing being created digitally that doesn't have some AI in it anymore.
00:49:03
Speaker
um to create these giant um murals related to regions of Mexico from which the people in those neighborhoods ah feel a strong affinity.
00:49:15
Speaker
So the AI made it quicker to draw. and quicker to show things to the community. And we spent the time that we saved doing huge, extensive work with that community.
00:49:29
Speaker
The project would not have been as collaborative or involved as much of their input if we didn't use the AI tools. Because we were it would have taken us like three weeks to draw a scene, and then we're not going to change it. you know Whereas if we can come up with four variations in AI, go meet with a group that's doing folklorico dancing and say, you know, how does this speak to you? Yeah, but the hat should be like this. we're going Okay. Okay. Yeah.
00:49:50
Speaker
It just, it just made a better product in the end. It's a tool. It's amazing. So let me ask you a question. If I had a magic phone that I could hand to you right now, and you could call Joe O'Connell at 18 years old and tell Joe something.
Reflections and Advice Across Ages
00:50:11
Speaker
but would you tell Joe? Well, that's a good question because I talk to a lot 18 year olds. I guess I would say it's going to be harder than you think it is, but you're going to discover resources you didn't know you had.
00:50:25
Speaker
So just don't be so anxious. It'll probably work out. Um, maybe another thing I'd say, although I was already taking that advice, cause I did a lot of journaling is the sooner you really know yourself, the sooner you'll be able to turn your gaze from your navel and out to the world.
00:50:45
Speaker
And, and, and the sooner, the sooner, you know, yourself, the sooner you will stop self sabotaging and unpredictably derailing things. And you can concentrate on being in the world.
00:50:57
Speaker
That's brilliant. One last question. That same phone, going to turn the dial and you're going to get to ask a question of 75 year old Joe O'Connell.
00:51:13
Speaker
Did you do the right thing? I'm 57 now and facing a bunch of life and career choices. um Do you have any regrets that could have been avoided at 57? Because you got to live your life. You know, I think it was Plato that said you're you're you're sort of living your life, working backward from your death to not have regrets and have left a legacy and had a full life.
00:51:37
Speaker
And I used to pray all the time, let me have no regrets, not make me be good, do this, or, you know, I want this girl to like me or I want to make money or whatever. It was like, may I have no regrets and let fear steal no more of my life from me.
00:51:52
Speaker
So this there's things I just don't know. um Should I make radical changes in my life and in my work? and like break things and then think I'm gonna rebuild them or should I modify them?
00:52:04
Speaker
And it all depends on how long you're gonna live and what the future holds. That's very right. And I won't know until I'm 75. Yeah, we'll see. But that's the human condition, making decisions in the absence of complete information.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah, and then making mistakes, right? we talked about this in the pre-meeting. Making mistakes. Yeah. What was, oh yeah. So judgment is probably the number one business skill and life skill, because it's very hard to say one business leader rule that applies in all situations at all times.
00:52:35
Speaker
So it's the judgment. It's like, which rule do I slow down? Do I speed up? Is now the time to be blunt? Is now the time to be circumspect? Is now the time to invest? Is now the time to hold?
00:52:47
Speaker
um So judgment is the most important thing. Judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from having lived life without the benefit of judgment. Or, you know, experience can come from other people, which is why we're doing this podcast and why we both listen to lots of podcasts.
00:53:03
Speaker
Very true. Very true. Thanks for your time, Joe. This has been a brilliant opportunity. yeah