Getting into flow: Productivity and work that feeds your soul with Steve Puri

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Hello, dear listener.
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My name is Silas and I welcome you to Awake in Relationship.
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As any creator or entrepreneur knows, the road to original and impactful work is often long and lonely.
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The digital age really has opened up so much more creativity and opportunity to do what you love, to make money from any place in the world on your laptop.
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But this freedom also comes at a cost of distraction and disconnection at epidemic levels.
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The virtualization of work also means the virtualization of one's really important relationships with colleagues and coworkers.
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How do we stay healthy, sane and productive when so much of our day is spent motionless in front of a screen?
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In this episode of Awake In Relationship, I speak with Stephen Purry, the CEO of the SUCA, an app and community of remote workers, about getting into flow, being more productive and building relationships in teams teams online and off.
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This was a really fun conversation for me.
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Steven draws on insights and wisdom from a long career as a producer and studio executive at DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox.
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He's worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Steven Spielberg.
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If you're interested in the creative process and deep work, I think you'll enjoy
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Well.
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Steve Perry, welcome to Awake In Relationship.
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It is nice to be here.
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I hope we have some insightful and maybe fun things to share, yeah.
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I'm sure we do so.
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You've had this sort of long career, successful career, as a studio executive and producer, studio executive and producer.
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I'm really wondering about the kind of journey from that kind of path into creating this app, the Suka app, and focusing on productivity.
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For me, in many ways it's coming a full circle, because when I was young, my parents were both engineers at IBM.
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My mom was a software engineer, my dad was a hardware engineer.
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He's from India, she's from New York and you know how it is.
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Your mom's a great ice skater.
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You probably learned to ice skate when you were little so I knew how to code.
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It was this thing that was in my family.
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I'd go with my mom to the computing center.
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She'd let me submit jobs on the tail end of her stuff and to the computing center she let me, you know, submit jobs on the tail end of her stuff.
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And when I went off to school I knew that was a strong suit of mine, like math and science and you know that sort of thing, and I happened and this is one of those like random bits of luck or the universe just saying like hey, kid, you know, look over here, kind of things.
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So I was going to the university of Southern California in LA, which has a great cinema TV school, around the time that computers became powerful enough to manipulate film.
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So it was the rise of non-linear editing systems like Avid Sound, like Pro Tools, silicon Graphics for images, and I thought that was fascinating.
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It was an interesting application of my understanding of computers but moving into a creative area.
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So I ended up producing digital effects like the digital parts of people's movies.
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That was my entree into film.
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Is that is that sort of circle swung around.
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It was oh, they really need someone who can speak engineer as well as speak creative, lucky me.
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So I got to work with really talented people.
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I worked with Jim Cameron on True Lies.
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I worked with David Fincher on Seven, I did Braveheart and Immortal Beloved with Mel, worked on the DreamWorks logo, worked on even Jim Jarmusch films.
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I did Dead man with Jim and Johnny Depp and stuff like that.
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And in the course of doing that I met Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who had done some B-sci-fi movies like Stargate and stuff like that, but seemed like great guys.
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And I produced the digital effects for Independence Day, which won the Academy Award, which is great the whole team I mean it takes a thousand people to do anything like that and I was very, you know, proud to be part of it.
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And that led to me, roland and Dean, starting my first company together, for which we raised about $15 million to do digital effects.
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And you know, when you have an Academy Award winning movie right behind you, it's easier to raise money than not.
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You know, people are willing to gamble on you.
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So we did that, sold that, and then that's when I went fully into creative, where I said, okay, I think I've done what I wanted to do in my 20s.
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You know it's one thing in the 20s they're smarter than they actually are, better looking, they actually are.
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All those things that we later realized no, you're very lucky.
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And so I went into becoming a studio executive.
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I want to climb that ladder.
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As you know, went to dreamworks.
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I was an executive vice president for kurtz marcia dreamworks.
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That was the transformers star trek era as a vice president at fox um running diehard and wolverine franchises and other action movies, and that had a sort of crisis of meeting.
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You know, there was definitely a moment on Die Hard 5 where I was like this movie will absolutely get made, no matter how awful the script is.
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Just because you can model it financially, you don't need a script.
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You don't need anything to say.
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If you put out a poster that said the words Die Hard, how many people just go to see Bruce play John McClane and the script is awful.
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The guy who wrote it was later kicked out of the Writers Guild for plagiarism.
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And I was just the guy there.
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People think it's a very glamorous thing.
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You'd be like, oh my god, you're running Wolverine, you're running this franchise, and you're just the guy or girl there for a couple of years in the chair moving the studio priorities forward.
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You're not a hero trying to, you know, reinvent cinema.
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It pays well, you get a lot of access to a lot of things.
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And that was when I took the turn back into well, I want to do something where I feel like I'm making the world a little bit better.
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And the only other thing I knew how to do sales was engineering.
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So it's like, let's find and then, a problem that can be solved through engineering and see how well I could do.
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And I had two failures.
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I tried two companies before a suit company took off and you know those were harsh awakenings, a lot of like dark nights of the soul, of like am I any good at this?
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You know, should I've just stayed in engineering and not gone into film?
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Would I be able to do this better?
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Like it was hard, it was embarrassing.
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You know I'm not going to lie.
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There's some ego in that of like leaving a you know senior executive studio job and all your friends are watching and you fall on your face.
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So, essentially, you know you were kind of following your heart.
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It's true, and you know, you and I talked about this before we recorded which is I discovered yoga in a very strange way.
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My ex-girlfriend Allie, who's still a very close friend of mine and my wife's she had been the director of marketing for YogaWorks years ago and when we were together, gave me a yoga mat, you know, and a little class card, the way you know friends do like, go try this.
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And I did the eight or 12 classes, or it was.
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I'll be honest, the day after the last little punch was punched.
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I didn't wake up that morning being like, oh my God, I have to get back to that.
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I wonder if they have a lifetime membership.
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You know, I was more like, I think, as good boyfriend.
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I did what I needed to do and then, two years later, I was in India with my dad and we were in Ranthambore, which is a it's a national park, huge, I mean the size of Connecticut, I don't know Rhode Island, it's huge and within it the reason it's kind of famous is it has the Royal Bengal Tiger Preserve.
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So some family friends were like you know, stephen, this is your culture, come and spend a couple weeks, we'll do this.
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So we stayed at this hotel that was within the preserve and the deal that they made with the minister of the interior was they would put this luxury hotel in with just yurts scattered in the forest, so it never broke the tree line, you couldn't see one yurt from the other, it was just very integrated in.
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So when my dad and I were walking to our yurt one day, I saw in the clearing this guy, this Indian guy, standing there, his white dhoti, totally alone, being curious, walked out there and walked up to him.
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I was like hey, what are you doing?
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He said oh, I lead a yoga practice, which I thought was semi-amusing in that he's standing alone in a forest in India.
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I was like for whom?
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He's like anyone who comes by, like there was nothing funny about this.
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He's like anyone who comes by.
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I was like when will you teach this yoga class?
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He said this afternoon.
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Okay, so if I go to lunch with my dad and our friends and come back here, you're going to teach yoga.
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He's like yes, so I go to lunch and I know this is terrible, but I'm kind of excited.
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I'm talking to eight full Indian relatives and friends being like oh my God, there's this guy in the forest, he's going to teach yoga.
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It's so cool he's staying there.
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And they were like the friends you had that live in LA when the outer towers come, like we should go to Disneyland, and they're like we've been to Disneyland, you go to Disneyland, we're going to stay home, right?
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So no one wanted to go with me and I was like, fine, I'm gonna go.
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I found the guy.
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He was standing in the clearing.
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One other tall German tourist with a beautiful DSLR was there and I walked up and the Indian guy said let us begin.
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At the end of that hour I wanted to call Allie and say I get it now.
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I understand the gift you tried to give me, but I wasn ready and it became a part of my daily life ever since.
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So it means bliss.
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I believe right, bliss happiness, self-fulfillment.
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It's that when you were at ease with what you need to do, and that's why I named the company the way I named it.
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So yeah, I think it's primarily focused on remote workers.
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I find that remote work like I run a remote company, I've done a couple of remote companies there are a lot of distractions of sometimes isolation or loneliness.
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In terms of social media, which seems like it's a connector, but it actually seems like it actually encourages disconnection and I was like how do we actually use this in a way that brings people to a happier place?
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So, yeah, big fan of distributed work when appropriate what are the trends around that right now?
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well, you know, we had that shock to the system with the pandemic, right?
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Oh my god, we can't be under the same fluorescent lights 10 hours a day, five days a week.
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We'll kill each other.
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Zoom became a verb, all that's.
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There were a lot of verticals where remote work was a shock.
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The funny thing about film that most people don't realize is film, for a hundred years, has successfully managed remote work, hybrid work and brisk press work.
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It's never really called that.
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Like you, a film begins with writers writing alone or writing in their writing partners living room, right at a coffee shop, right, and then at some point, hopefully, one of those ideas gets some traction.
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It gets some money.
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You start to have a small production office where you meet a couple days a week with the customer.
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What are they wearing?
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I need to go to the costume houses.
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Oh, location scout.
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What does it look like?
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Oh, there are tax breaks in Montana if we shoot there.
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The rest of the week everyone disperses.
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They go to Montana to scout the week, everyone disperses.
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They go to montana to scout.
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They go to the costume houses.
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The writers go do the rewrite for brad pitt.
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Who wants to play it as a southern gentleman, you know whatever.
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And then you're on set and it's rto.
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It is all day and all night for months of time.
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You're working together and that goes back to hybrid and it goes back to remote.
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But no one in film would ever say each other oh, salas, we're in the hybrid part of this movie.
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You would say, oh, we're in prep, we're in pre-production, we're in the hybrid part of this movie.
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You would say, oh, we're in prep, we're in pre-production, we're in post, we're in development.
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And that's what I think is so interesting with remote work is that it is like a color on your palette.
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It is not to say that when the pandemic happened and maybe most people were painting with reds and yellows, suddenly they got blue.
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Everything needs to be blue from now on, forever.
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Oh, it's rather to say you know what, when appropriate, blue is a great color.
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And when cal newport writes about like deep work and you know near talks about triggers and stuff, and you you say, okay, well, how do I do the things that really bring out for me the the greatest contribution I have in the world?
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That's a really interesting reframe, because I tend to think of, you know again, apps, and no offense to your app, um, but spending more time on a screen, uh, in my mind seems to take away from the creative process, but, if I understand it correctly, that isolation can be a productive time,
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For some person, a coffee shop may be incredibly distracting.
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I'm like, ah, there are people talking next to me and then the barista keeps coming, Whereas for someone else it is like that sound of the coffee cups or anything is flow music to them.
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You know, and it's really about you know, understanding your mind and starting to train your mind.
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So, essentially, I think remote work is the future, for better or worse, and it really does enable a lot of freedom for a lot of people, true, but I think there is a downside that relates to loneliness.
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I know a lot of people I work with and talk to, It's hard to do your best work when you feel alone.
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I will qualify what you said, because I generally agree with you, but I will say this there are some things that I find I need to do, or my team needs to do, or teams I've worked on I've needed to do that are actually best in person.
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I'll tell you, I've never had a creative story conversation that has been as rich as when it's in person.
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If you and I need to sit down and go, okay, steven, you know what?
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There's something in the third act that we need.
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It's not connecting.
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I've never been on a Zoom or a Google Meet or something where I felt the same energy of creativity.
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If we're going to get this done, it's efficient.
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We don't need to drive anywhere.
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But I think there's some cases when I do want to feel like that weird intangible vibe of being in the room.
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It's the same reason I do yoga in person, even though I know I could do it at home with an iPad and a YouTube video of someone doing yoga.
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I know that's possible, but it doesn't affect me the same way as 30 people around me all trying to do something together.
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So I feel like there's so much with remote and hybrid that is advantageous, but there are a couple activities that I actually just want to vibe together, you know.
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So it, it, it varies.
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You spent a lot of time around successful creatives, what do you think the secret sauce is?
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What are the habits that enable that kind of deep work?
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I so appreciate asking that.
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Let me share a few things that I've seen, because you're right, I've been very lucky to work with people who are very creative and have developed the mental techniques to get great creative things out right.
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So one thing I noticed and this was first early my career was there's a screenwriter, or there is a screenwriter Ron Bass, rain man, my Best Friend's Wedding, a bunch of stuff in the 80s and 90s, early 2000s, right, and he was infamous for not talking to his family in the morning, going to be the dad who's like hey, he wants pancakes and did you do your homework?
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He's like when I start talking to you, I lose the ability to to hear my character's voices in my head and I need to have that time, whereas in the afternoon he could do story breaking or studio notes or you know collaborative sort of work, and it was so interesting to see that replicated or reproduced in other people, whereas a sense of oh, I'm a really high performer and I know how my brain works, like in this period of time, my chronotype says I should do this, like this is how I work, whereas in this other period of time I'd be worthless if I tried to do it.
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I should do something else, like Ron Bass, like writing dialogue in the quiet wee hours, working with people in the afternoons, things like that.
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And that was one, that sense of chronotype which many people have written about very eloquently.
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That was one where I saw in practice routinely by great writers in particular and some directors.
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Another idea is this, one about the loss of ego, where I got at a certain point in my career to dreamworks and you know, the first time I'm in steven spielberg's conference room in a story meeting on a project that I'm on, where it's like steven and stacy were running the studio at the time, the president of dreamworks is there, the my counterpart, two writers and you know as much's like okay, this is day 700 or whatever.
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I'm exaggerating day 60, being here, there's still a little moment of I'm in Steven Spielberg's little Adobe conference room having a story meeting, like wow, how did I get here and how does this work?
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And I remember the thing that stood out for me more than anything else about that meeting.
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There were many parts of that meeting that were like other story meetings I've been in, but there was one thing that really jumped out at me and it was this At a certain point in the meeting and I'm going to falsify the details out of respect for Stephen and people in the room, right, but let us say we're working on an alien movie, which Stephen has a lot of experience making huge alien movies.
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Right, this is a guy who's thought about this and Stephen proposed something.
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Oh, I think the alien's weakness should be blah, blah, blah and he should come through the wall and then be confronted with the thing.
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Right Within three minutes, someone I'm going to call the coffee boy, sort of passing through the room, makes a comment, goes well, you know, I feel like we saw the coming through the wall and getting hit with the thing.
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You know this other movie?
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What saw the coming through the wall and getting hit with the thing?
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Um, you know this other movie?
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What if it were this other thing?
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And a part of me inside said, oh my god, that's the last time we'll ever see that guy living again.
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Right, and steven was like, oh yeah, it's better, we should do that.
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And the conversation just moved forward and I started to notice that, among the most talented people that I worked with, they adhered to best idea wins, not my idea wins, and that was so interesting that in that meeting no one blinked.
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It was just that was everyone's agreement.
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A better idea.
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What's wrong with it?
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So it was the coffee boy's idea.
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Let's make something great.
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Let's not make something that's necessarily mine, and at the mediocre level I saw a lot of that possessive of.
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I need to defend my ideas.
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My worth is that we use my idea, not what's best for the film.
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Is this tracking?
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Is this making sense for you?
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That suggests that there's a lot of openness.
00:20:47.080 --> 00:21:00.800
Yeah, and some people have that, naturally True, but I think for most of us it has to be cultivated, and this might be a very good segue into the meat of the conversation which is getting into flow.
00:21:02.415 --> 00:21:03.539
I love talking about flow.
00:21:03.539 --> 00:21:11.856
You know that, yeah, so is there a formula?
00:21:11.856 --> 00:21:24.798
Um, let me say this, because I'm sure there's a portion of your audience that are flow masters, that are in their cars or at home nodding, you know, and they know the answer, and there's probably a cohort of listeners that we could lay out what we're talking about first.
00:21:24.798 --> 00:21:25.299
Is that fair?
00:21:25.701 --> 00:21:31.009
Yeah, and maybe just for the uninitiated, maybe just define that.
00:21:32.194 --> 00:21:33.297
Yeah, let's do that.
00:21:33.297 --> 00:21:54.759
So there was a Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who had a very strong thesis that high performers in these various disciplines athletes, artists, inventors, performers in these various disciplines athletes, artists, inventors, scientists they got into those concentrated states where they did the work that made them famous, that moved the world, and they described it in very similar ways.
00:21:54.759 --> 00:22:00.179
So he, like prometheus, wanted to go up, get the fire from mount olympus, bring it down to the rest of us.
00:22:00.179 --> 00:22:10.905
So he did this, he did the work for us to study that and talk to these people and at at the end he wrote the book Flow, which is the seminal work on this, which is from whence we get flow state.
00:22:10.905 --> 00:22:28.175
And he said I think the most beautiful metaphor that I can use is this sense of we're on the river, paddling ourselves forward, but if we align our boat with the current, it carries us further and faster, it magnifies our efforts.
00:22:28.175 --> 00:22:33.237
And that's what these people figured out how to do to get into a state where they've aligned themselves with the current.
00:22:33.237 --> 00:22:43.993
And obviously you and I know, since mihael wrote this book decades ago, a lot of people have researched different aspects of this and written incredibly smart things.
00:22:43.993 --> 00:22:49.269
You have, you know cutler, near and clear and, like you know, newport of all research.
00:22:49.269 --> 00:22:51.276
How do you get into that concentrated state?
00:22:51.757 --> 00:23:02.962
But he he wrote that and some of the experiences he said are very similar, where he said these high performers lose track of time.
00:23:02.962 --> 00:23:05.522
There's not a sense of washing the clock, there's not a sense of distractions.
00:23:05.522 --> 00:23:06.615
They're there's not a sense of distractions.
00:23:06.615 --> 00:23:10.980
They're not like going to the bathroom or going to the fridge to get food, you know, whatever that thing is.
00:23:10.980 --> 00:23:13.122
They become very focused on the task at hand.
00:23:13.122 --> 00:23:16.740
And he said some of the conditions precedent that seem common.
00:23:16.740 --> 00:23:20.002
They have to believe what they're doing is meaningful.
00:23:20.002 --> 00:23:24.163
Not one of them gets in a flow and it's like stapling papers.
00:23:24.163 --> 00:23:28.964
Not one of them gets in a flow and it's like stapling papers doing something that I think is stupid.
00:23:28.964 --> 00:23:30.067
Right, they have to have skills that apply.
00:23:30.087 --> 00:23:41.263
And he said uh, if you are doing something that you're not able to do, you're not going to get into flow, and if you're able to do it, you also need to be doing it at a level that challenges you.
00:23:41.263 --> 00:23:46.659
So I guess michael jordan was that famous quote about when I'm in the zone, it's just me in the ball.
00:23:46.659 --> 00:23:48.606
You know, the whole world reduces down to this.
00:23:48.606 --> 00:23:55.816
He said you know, it's not michael jordan playing a high school exhibition game for his kids, you know high school sort of thing.
00:23:55.816 --> 00:23:58.521
It's him in the nba, or it's picasso standing back and going.
00:23:58.521 --> 00:24:01.288
Is this half finished guernica?
00:24:01.288 --> 00:24:09.561
An execution of this idea I have my head about, like it has to be something that really challenges you, and there are many aspects to it.
00:24:09.561 --> 00:24:17.327
This is obviously not something where I spend hours on, but it's a fascinating, fascinating concept.
00:24:18.355 --> 00:24:24.067
And again this implies this sort of congruence between the head and the heart Completely.
00:24:24.607 --> 00:24:26.632
Yes, and that's a beautiful thing.
00:24:26.632 --> 00:24:35.404
Uh, between the head, the head and the heart, completely yes, and that's that's a beautiful thing when you're doing something where your head and heart are aligned and you know you're doing something meaningful that expresses who you are.
00:24:35.404 --> 00:24:47.539
I've, I've, personally have a very deep thesis that we all have something great inside us and the question of this lifetime is are you going to get it out or not?
00:24:47.539 --> 00:24:52.240
There are a lot of forces making sure you do not.
00:24:54.010 --> 00:24:59.037
I'm sure you're familiar with Stephen Pressfield's work The War of Art.
00:24:59.037 --> 00:25:01.476
Yes, there's always resistance.
00:25:02.652 --> 00:25:08.734
There's resistance and there are, are I mean, let us not kid ourselves in that tug of war for your life.
00:25:10.258 --> 00:25:18.882
On one side of that rope are trillion dollar companies who are not embarrassed to say that their business model is stealing your life period full stop.
00:25:18.882 --> 00:25:34.045
That is their business model and they have the money to pay the best behavioral psychologists and put them on staff, the best UI UX designers, the best engineers, with the sole goal of saying could you just try and get more of people's lives wasted here?
00:25:34.045 --> 00:25:49.015
It's almost as if Zuckerberg called you up and just said hey, silas, could I have your life Because I'm going to sell it to these advertisers and I'll keep the money, but hey, buddy, I'll give you some dancing cat videos.
00:25:49.015 --> 00:25:50.615
Is that a cool trade for your life?
00:25:50.615 --> 00:25:59.761
And it sounds ludicrous to say that clinically, but it's exactly what's going on, and that means you're never going to release the thing.
00:25:59.761 --> 00:26:08.448
You're going to die with the great thing inside you, which is totally fine for Elon and Mark and Evan and the guys who are on these platforms that are just attention magnets.
00:26:08.448 --> 00:26:10.813
So that, I think, is criminal.
00:26:11.674 --> 00:26:16.304
It is criminal and it's the greatest destroyer of creativity.
00:26:17.549 --> 00:26:21.814
It's hard enough to overcome your own insecurities, maybe your own inertia, your own laziness, your own insecurities.
00:26:21.814 --> 00:26:28.298
You know, maybe your own inertia, your own laziness, your own questions of you, know how confident you are in your abilities.
00:26:28.298 --> 00:26:32.501
And then to couple that with oh, by the way, there's some zero effort dopamine.
00:26:32.501 --> 00:26:33.682
There's a whole bucket right here.
00:26:33.682 --> 00:26:35.163
Just sit on the sofa.
00:26:35.163 --> 00:26:39.267
You just need to scroll and double tap and enjoy your dancing cat videos.
00:26:39.267 --> 00:26:46.112
Man, that's, that's.
00:26:46.112 --> 00:26:46.551
I hope you know this.
00:26:46.551 --> 00:26:47.753
I'm about to have my first child in eight weeks.
00:26:47.773 --> 00:26:58.257
I really hope that my kids generation looks at my generation with social media the way I look at my dad's generation with smoking.
00:26:58.257 --> 00:27:00.962
I'm like dad, how can you do that?
00:27:00.962 --> 00:27:03.973
Like so many of your friends died of lung cancer.
00:27:03.973 --> 00:27:05.395
You have emphysema.
00:27:05.395 --> 00:27:07.317
What were you thinking?
00:27:07.317 --> 00:27:18.500
And my dad's point, to be fair, is hey, man, the movie stars were all doing it and the tobacco companies were releasing studies on how healthy tobacco was and we didn't know that was a thing.
00:27:18.500 --> 00:27:27.345
And I view social media as pernicious as that and as criminal as creating products that create cancer.
00:27:28.529 --> 00:27:31.859
So, to be very practical again, I want to kind of return to those habits.
00:27:31.859 --> 00:27:43.663
How does a creative or entrepreneur insulate themselves and basically create the environment of focus where they can actually get to that
00:27:45.811 --> 00:27:49.576
I will tell you how this works for me and this is obviously.
00:27:49.576 --> 00:27:57.670
You know very much how I designed what I do you know every day which is I recognized problems.
00:27:57.670 --> 00:28:00.058
I'm very much a person who says you know what.
00:28:00.058 --> 00:28:03.599
Really think deeply on the problem before you try to solve it.
00:28:03.599 --> 00:28:09.953
I thought deeply about a problem that I have, which is I call the cold start In the morning.
00:28:09.953 --> 00:28:14.381
Tomorrow morning, at 9 am I'm going to do X, y, z I need to do.
00:28:14.381 --> 00:28:20.417
At 9.15, I'd be returning some emails or scrolling the news or something.
00:28:20.417 --> 00:28:21.915
9.30, I'm getting going.
00:28:21.915 --> 00:28:29.928
I've wasted half an hour and the pain of that is felt six o'clock when I'm like I'm not done.
00:28:29.928 --> 00:28:30.951
I have to come back after dinner.
00:28:30.951 --> 00:28:33.103
I'll just try and finish up, or the lie you tell yourself.
00:28:33.103 --> 00:28:39.375
I'm going to get up early tomorrow and finish today's work before I start tomorrow's work, and this is dominoes through the week, right?
00:28:39.375 --> 00:28:40.837
So that was a real thing for me.
00:28:40.857 --> 00:28:43.862
So the way in which I looked at it was to say, well, why am I doing this?
00:28:43.862 --> 00:28:45.183
I'm not stupid.
00:28:45.183 --> 00:28:48.071
I may not be the smartest person on earth, but I'm not stupid.
00:28:48.071 --> 00:28:57.615
And you asked a couple of whys and I got to oh well, I feel a kind of like overwhelm or paralysis or something to get started.
00:28:57.615 --> 00:29:03.923
Either there's something I have to do that's really big how am I going to make a dent in that before you know my noon podcast here?
00:29:03.923 --> 00:29:11.383
Or you know there's so many things on my to-do list and I said the way I solved that was when we were building.
00:29:11.383 --> 00:29:19.116
The suka company said you know what I want to have a little smart assistant that helps me just choose the three top things, hide everything else while I'm working.
00:29:19.116 --> 00:29:23.595
So I just see three things that I need to do and I noticed during the day.
00:29:23.655 --> 00:29:31.340
A second problem I have is if I hit something hard, oh man, I'm coding and like I keep having build errors.
00:29:31.340 --> 00:29:32.352
What am I?
00:29:32.352 --> 00:29:32.875
What's wrong here?
00:29:32.875 --> 00:29:36.378
You know I'm writing a blog post and just the muses are not singing.
00:29:36.378 --> 00:29:40.659
You know I, to get dopamine, will pick up my phone.
00:29:40.659 --> 00:29:42.375
It's almost like muscle memory.
00:29:42.375 --> 00:29:44.015
Let me see what's up.
00:29:44.015 --> 00:29:47.176
Oh my God, maybe Eric Garnet, what's up from France or whatever?
00:29:47.176 --> 00:29:48.896
I don't know who's around today.
00:29:48.896 --> 00:30:00.857
So what I developed for that with Tony, my partner and Michael is what's the easiest way to actually give me a moment, just a moment, to say do I want to do this?
00:30:00.857 --> 00:30:05.332
So when I start my session in the morning with Suka, I just hit play and the music starts, and all that.
00:30:05.332 --> 00:30:06.236
There's a QR code.
00:30:06.236 --> 00:30:09.018
I shoot at my phone and I put it down.
00:30:09.018 --> 00:30:17.018
If I pick up my phone while I'm working, my smart assistant says hey, steven, is your phone helping you?
00:30:17.018 --> 00:30:19.214
And I get that one moment to go.
00:30:19.214 --> 00:30:20.137
Who do I want to be?
00:30:20.137 --> 00:30:26.916
Do I want to be the guy who's like done at three o'clock?
00:30:26.936 --> 00:30:27.859
playing with his kids?
00:30:27.859 --> 00:30:28.663
Or do I want to be grumpy guy at six?
00:30:28.663 --> 00:30:29.806
And same thing with the websites.
00:30:29.806 --> 00:30:41.138
Like if I open a website that I've said is distracting for me like could be youtube, could be amazon, could be for some people it's espn or nfl, but not me really and you still pop up.
00:30:41.138 --> 00:30:46.798
If you're on there for five seconds, you get a pop-up that says, hey, it looks like this is distracting you, is it?
00:30:46.798 --> 00:30:48.554
And you get that choice.
00:30:48.554 --> 00:30:50.240
Who do I want to be?
00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:53.319
I think that's ultimately the best thing we can do.
00:30:53.319 --> 00:31:08.159
So those are some ways I've found to combat the attention merchants that try very well to take you away from doing the thing you're meant to do.
00:31:08.921 --> 00:31:34.084
You know, with social media, those algorithms came for our attention, our focus, and it really seems like you know the direction that AI is going in, It's coming for our interior life, I'm not a techno-optimist, but you're much more embedded in that world.
00:31:34.084 --> 00:31:36.038
Are you optimistic about AI?
00:31:37.250 --> 00:31:38.992
Well, let me say two things.
00:31:38.992 --> 00:32:13.134
Thing is, I know right now ai sprang as a public consciousness really around large language models lms right, chat, gpt, gemini, anthropic, claude, and you know all these, and what's curious about them is they are really more like google autocomplete than they are like intelligence, because in essence, what they're doing is, if Google autocomplete says you type these characters, the end of the word is probably these characters, right, what they're doing is doing that with words and thoughts.
00:32:13.134 --> 00:32:14.378
You know words and ideas.
00:32:14.378 --> 00:32:28.439
Every time someone types, hey, it looks like it is blank out, so like 40% chance, the word's rainy, try rainy and see if steven likes rainy, you know, if he doesn't try sunny, you know, and they're just doing probability.
00:32:28.439 --> 00:32:37.083
You know probabilistic, sort of like weights, and that's not really that scary to me because it's it's like uh, do you remember?
00:32:37.123 --> 00:32:39.275
There's a great story I don't remember whose story.
00:32:39.275 --> 00:32:42.733
This is about the horse that could count and it was amazing.
00:32:42.733 --> 00:32:50.721
And they later realized the horse just had learned to move its hoof enough times until people went oh wow, we counted to nine.
00:32:50.721 --> 00:32:51.996
He had no idea what nine was.
00:32:51.996 --> 00:32:55.800
All he knew was stop doing the hoof thing when everyone reacted right.
00:32:55.800 --> 00:32:58.258
So that's kind of where we are.
00:32:58.471 --> 00:32:58.590
Now.
00:32:58.590 --> 00:33:15.137
The deeper question you're getting at because I know how you think I suspect I know how you think about these things is, yeah, we are moving towards a world, but there are a lot of things that we do, a lot of things knowledge, work that will be done better here.
00:33:15.137 --> 00:33:25.444
We're not talking about having, you know, lotus 123 and google sheets, microsoft excel, do our spreadsheets for us and calculate compound interest, like we've had that for 30 years plus right.
00:33:25.444 --> 00:33:30.201
We're talking about hey, man, you wrote that business plan better than I can.
00:33:30.201 --> 00:33:33.638
You made that slide deck really, really well.
00:33:34.310 --> 00:33:35.837
And then what is our utility?
00:33:35.837 --> 00:33:43.817
And that is a I would love to say I'm smart enough to tell you where it's going to go, but I can tell you that I think is absolutely terrifying.
00:33:43.817 --> 00:33:50.913
As I think about what is it we, laura and I, want our children to learn, like we fundamentally want them to learn to think.
00:33:50.913 --> 00:33:59.171
We can say that in a noble way read, some of the great authors study physics.
00:33:59.171 --> 00:34:00.212
I do all these things.
00:34:00.212 --> 00:34:01.314
We're going to pass along to them.
00:34:01.314 --> 00:34:02.736
Will those be ?
00:34:03.938 --> 00:34:16.233
Silas Obviously obviously there's a lot of utility with those tools but, I really feel like it's going to put a premium on real creativity.
00:34:16.233 --> 00:34:17.315
Steven I hope that you are right.
00:34:17.315 --> 00:34:23.228
I hope that it does make that part of being human more and more valuable and doesn't wipe it out.
00:34:23.228 --> 00:34:33.677
I'll tell you a funny story, a short one because we're wrapping up, but my first job when I segued out of usc into film was actually at a trailer company.
00:34:33.677 --> 00:34:35.181
That's how I got into digital effects.
00:34:35.181 --> 00:34:42.994
Two guys ran it who were very they've been doing promos and trailers for 20 years very well, you know established in business.
00:34:42.994 --> 00:34:46.681
And one of them came in my office when I was a junior guy.
00:34:46.681 --> 00:34:46.822
There.
00:34:46.822 --> 00:34:54.056
My job was movies would come in rough cut from Warner Brothers or Disney and I would assign them to a writer-producer.
00:34:54.056 --> 00:34:58.300
Hey, silas, you did a great job on that Will Ferrell thing last year.
00:34:58.300 --> 00:35:00.358
Here's another Will Ferrell comedy Can you write this, right?
00:35:01.250 --> 00:35:01.911
He came in my office.
00:35:01.911 --> 00:35:04.119
He said hey, stevie, do you know Bart?
00:35:04.119 --> 00:35:07.516
And I was like I know Bart, there's a guy in the vault who delivers tapes.
00:35:07.516 --> 00:35:09.757
Yeah, he said, do you ever give him a trailer to write?
00:35:09.757 --> 00:35:14.356
And I said we're talking about the same guy who delivers coffee and picks up tapes.
00:35:14.356 --> 00:35:16.581
Right, he goes yeah, yeah, yeah, I have an instinct about him.
00:35:16.581 --> 00:35:26.838
I'm like Jeff names on the door, like you know, you're the reason why we're here.
00:35:26.838 --> 00:35:27.400
Let me give him something.
00:35:27.400 --> 00:35:28.967
So I gave him this warner brothers b title that had a long deadline case.
00:35:28.967 --> 00:35:29.670
He hated it or did a bad job, right?
00:35:30.532 --> 00:35:32.777
Jeff came to my office two days later he said how's bart doing?
00:35:32.777 --> 00:35:34.621
So I haven't bugged him.
00:35:34.621 --> 00:35:36.215
This is the first time he's ever written a trailer.
00:35:36.215 --> 00:35:39.570
I'll ask him on monday, okay, okay, fine, stevie, he goes.
00:35:39.570 --> 00:35:42.581
What else did you give him, jeff?
00:35:42.581 --> 00:35:44.409
He's never written a trailer before.
00:35:44.409 --> 00:35:45.612
I'm not getting two things.
00:35:45.612 --> 00:35:55.498
And jeff said, to his credit, one of the first things was really valuable in my life, said stevie, let me explain to you how creativity works.
00:35:55.777 --> 00:35:57.802
It's always about the other thing.
00:35:57.802 --> 00:36:09.324
If you give Bart one thing to focus on, he will sit there and and stare at it with little like beads of sweat coming down his temples and he will write the most obvious B version of that trailer.
00:36:09.324 --> 00:36:13.315
You can imagine that's the part of your brain that does that.
00:36:13.315 --> 00:36:16.742
I don't know what about chocolate and peanut butter?
00:36:16.742 --> 00:36:19.574
What does a cell phone taste like?
00:36:19.574 --> 00:36:22.681
That's not the part you think that you're thinking with.
00:36:22.681 --> 00:36:25.251
So you have to give them something else to focus on.
00:36:25.251 --> 00:36:37.112
I've seen that proven right countless times across film and tech and there's a book on the neuroscience of it called uh the net and the butterfly by olivia fox and uh judah pollock.
00:36:37.112 --> 00:36:41.179
That talks just about that default mode executive mode interplay.
00:36:41.179 --> 00:36:47.739
That I thought was very interesting about that kind of association.
00:36:47.739 --> 00:36:52.382
Is AI going to get to that chocolate and peanut butter thing, as Jeff would say?
00:36:54.630 --> 00:36:55.355
Words of wisdom.
00:36:55.355 --> 00:37:03.170
Well, stephen, thank you so much for this conversation.
00:37:03.170 --> 00:37:05.518
I think we got into flow here.
00:37:06.469 --> 00:37:07.913
This is a beautiful moment.
00:37:07.913 --> 00:37:10.237
Thank you for having me on and for those listening.
00:37:10.237 --> 00:37:12.201
I appreciate you guys listening.
00:37:12.201 --> 00:37:13.664
I hope in some way we're helpful.
00:37:14.190 --> 00:37:16.932
How can people find out more about the app and you?
00:37:19.074 --> 00:37:19.996
My address is very public.
00:37:19.996 --> 00:37:26.922
It is steven with a v at thesukaco, which is t-h-e-s-u-k-h-aco.
00:37:26.922 --> 00:37:39.193
If there's any reference I've made to the crazy Hungarian guy or Cal Newport or whoever and someone wants to read more, it doesn't have to be about my company.
00:37:39.193 --> 00:37:39.954
I happily return all my emails.
00:37:39.954 --> 00:37:40.856
I'll give you a link of something to read.
00:37:40.856 --> 00:37:41.538
It will not be long.
00:37:41.538 --> 00:37:42.960
I'm not going to write the history of my life.
00:37:42.960 --> 00:37:44.483
You're not interested in reading it.
00:37:44.483 --> 00:37:50.697
But that offer is open and if anyone wants to try getting into a flow state, pick a task.
00:37:50.697 --> 00:37:55.391
You have to do Something that takes a half an hour an hour, like a meaningful task and go to the website.
00:37:55.391 --> 00:37:56.637
It's free Seven days.
00:37:56.637 --> 00:38:01.476
It's free, no credit card T-H-E-S-U-K-k-h-a dot c-o and the SUKA app.
00:38:01.817 --> 00:38:02.378
I hope it helps you.
00:38:02.378 --> 00:38:03.298
I hope you do something great.
00:38:03.298 --> 00:38:08.516
Suka s-u-k-h-a dot c-o.
00:38:08.516 --> 00:38:13.376
Or check out the links at awakenedrelationshipcom.
00:38:13.376 --> 00:38:30.918
If you enjoyed this conversation and the content I put out here at Awakened Relationship, it'd be wonderful if you took a moment and shared a glowing review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:38:30.918 --> 00:38:36.534
I can sometimes be found on Instagram, Substack and LinkedIn.
00:38:36.534 --> 00:38:38.237
Send me a message.
00:38:38.237 --> 00:38:48.835
I really love hearing from my audience, and especially if you have great suggestions for future guests or topics to cover on the show.
00:38:48.835 --> 00:38:52.320
Thank you so much for tuning in, dear listener.
00:38:52.320 --> 00:38:55.431
Till next time, stay connected.
00:38:55.431 --> 00:39:09.467
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Awake in Relationship.
00:39:09.467 --> 00:39:19.923
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