Awake In Relationship
Awake In Relationship explores the art of intimacy, connection and community in the digital age. Build your social fitness habit with inspirational long form interviews featuring thought leaders on the frontiers of mindfulness, conscious relationships, community building, deep work and social enterprise. Fresh episodes drop twice a month on all major platforms.
Awake In Relationship
Getting into flow: Productivity and work that feeds your soul with Steve Puri
070 The road to original and impactful work can be long and lonely. The digital age has enabled more freedom, creativity and opportunity, but also epidemic levels of disconnection and distraction. It is estimated that 20 percent of North Americas are involved in some early stage enterprise or work online. Even more are opting for remote or hybrid work. When we are literally switching screens every 3 minutes new strategies and tools are needed to help us access our potential and do deep work.
In this episode of Awake In Relationship I speak with Steve Puri, CEO of The Sukha, a productivity app and community of remote workers to discuss hacks for getting into flow, the creative process and building healthy relationships and teams online and off. Steven draws on insights from a long career as a producer and studio executive at DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox for being more productive and getting to the real work that feeds your soul.
If you have been loving what you are hearing on AIR please rate, review and subscribe to get the latest content fresh to your device. Sign up for our newsletter at awakeinrelationship.com to learn about upcoming programs and events.
Do you have suggestions for guests or feedback on the show? Send us an email at awakeinrelationshippodcast@gmail.com
Credit: Music used in this episode intro by Grand_Project
Hello, dear listener. My name is Silas and I welcome you to Awake in Relationship. As any creator or entrepreneur knows, the road to original and impactful work is often long and lonely. 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. But this freedom also comes at a cost of distraction and disconnection at epidemic levels. The virtualization of work also means the virtualization of one's really important relationships with colleagues and coworkers. How do we stay healthy, sane and productive when so much of our day is spent motionless in front of a screen?
Silas Rose: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. This was a really fun conversation for me. Steven draws on insights and wisdom from a long career as a producer and studio executive at DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox. He's worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Steven Spielberg. If you're interested in the creative process and deep work, I think you'll enjoy
Silas Rose:Well. Steve Perry, welcome to Awake In Relationship.
Steven Puri:It is nice to be here. I hope we have some insightful and maybe fun things to share, yeah.
Silas Rose:I'm sure we do so. You've had this sort of long career, successful career, as a studio executive and producer, studio executive and producer. 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.
Steven Puri:For me, in many ways it's coming a full circle, because when I was young, my parents were both engineers at IBM. My mom was a software engineer, my dad was a hardware engineer. He's from India, she's from New York and you know how it is. Your mom's a great ice skater. You probably learned to ice skate when you were little so I knew how to code. It was this thing that was in my family. I'd go with my mom to the computing center. 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.
Steven Puri: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. 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. 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. It was an interesting application of my understanding of computers but moving into a creative area. So I ended up producing digital effects like the digital parts of people's movies. That was my entree into film. Is that is that sort of circle swung around. It was oh, they really need someone who can speak engineer as well as speak creative, lucky me. So I got to work with really talented people. I worked with Jim Cameron on True Lies. 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. I did Dead man with Jim and Johnny Depp and stuff like that.
Steven Puri: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. 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. And that led to me, roland and Dean, starting my first company together, for which we raised about $15 million to do digital effects. And you know, when you have an Academy Award winning movie right behind you, it's easier to raise money than not. You know, people are willing to gamble on you. 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. You know it's one thing in the 20s they're smarter than they actually are, better looking, they actually are. All those things that we later realized no, you're very lucky. And so I went into becoming a studio executive. I want to climb that ladder. As you know, went to dreamworks. I was an executive vice president for kurtz marcia dreamworks.
Steven Puri: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. 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. Just because you can model it financially, you don't need a script. You don't need anything to say. 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. The guy who wrote it was later kicked out of the Writers Guild for plagiarism. And I was just the guy there. People think it's a very glamorous thing. 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. You're not a hero trying to, you know, reinvent cinema. It pays well, you get a lot of access to a lot of things.
Steven Puri: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. And the only other thing I knew how to do sales was engineering. So it's like, let's find and then, a problem that can be solved through engineering and see how well I could do. And I had two failures. 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? You know, should I've just stayed in engineering and not gone into film? Would I be able to do this better? Like it was hard, it was embarrassing.
Steven Puri:You know I'm not going to lie. 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.
Silas Rose:So, essentially, you know you were kind of following your heart.
Steven Puri: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. 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. And I did the eight or 12 classes, or it was. I'll be honest, the day after the last little punch was punched. I didn't wake up that morning being like, oh my God, I have to get back to that. I wonder if they have a lifetime membership. You know, I was more like, I think, as good boyfriend.
Steven Puri: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. So some family friends were like you know, stephen, this is your culture, come and spend a couple weeks, we'll do this. 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. 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. I was like hey, what are you doing? 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. I was like for whom? He's like anyone who comes by, like there was nothing funny about this. He's like anyone who comes by. I was like when will you teach this yoga class? He said this afternoon. Okay, so if I go to lunch with my dad and our friends and come back here, you're going to teach yoga. He's like yes, so I go to lunch and I know this is terrible, but I'm kind of excited.
Steven Puri: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. It's so cool he's staying there. 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? So no one wanted to go with me and I was like, fine, I'm gonna go. I found the guy. He was standing in the clearing. One other tall German tourist with a beautiful DSLR was there and I walked up and the Indian guy said let us begin. At the end of that hour I wanted to call Allie and say I get it now. I understand the gift you tried to give me, but I wasn ready and it became a part of my daily life ever since.
Silas Rose:So it means bliss. I believe right, bliss happiness, self-fulfillment.
Steven Puri: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.
Silas Rose:So yeah, I think it's primarily focused on remote workers.
Steven Puri: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. 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? So, yeah, big fan of distributed work when appropriate what are the trends around that right now?
Steven Puri:well, you know, we had that shock to the system with the pandemic, right? Oh my god, we can't be under the same fluorescent lights 10 hours a day, five days a week. We'll kill each other. Zoom became a verb, all that's. There were a lot of verticals where remote work was a shock. 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. It's never really called that.
Steven Puri: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. It gets some money. You start to have a small production office where you meet a couple days a week with the customer. What are they wearing? I need to go to the costume houses. Oh, location scout. What does it look like? Oh, there are tax breaks in Montana if we shoot there.
Steven Puri:The rest of the week everyone disperses. They go to Montana to scout the week, everyone disperses. They go to montana to scout. They go to the costume houses. The writers go do the rewrite for brad pitt. Who wants to play it as a southern gentleman, you know whatever.
Steven Puri:And then you're on set and it's rto. It is all day and all night for months of time. You're working together and that goes back to hybrid and it goes back to remote. But no one in film would ever say each other oh, salas, we're in the hybrid part of this movie. You would say, oh, we're in prep, we're in pre-production, we're in the hybrid part of this movie. You would say, oh, we're in prep, we're in pre-production, we're in post, we're in development.
Steven Puri:And that's what I think is so interesting with remote work is that it is like a color on your palette. It is not to say that when the pandemic happened and maybe most people were painting with reds and yellows, suddenly they got blue. Everything needs to be blue from now on, forever. Oh, it's rather to say you know what, when appropriate, blue is a great color. 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?
Silas Rose: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,
Steven Puri:For some person, a coffee shop may be incredibly distracting. 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. You know, and it's really about you know, understanding your mind and starting to train your mind.
Silas Rose: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. I know a lot of people I work with and talk to, It's hard to do your best work when you feel alone.
Steven Puri: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. I'll tell you, I've never had a creative story conversation that has been as rich as when it's in person. If you and I need to sit down and go, okay, steven, you know what? There's something in the third act that we need. It's not connecting. I've never been on a Zoom or a Google Meet or something where I felt the same energy of creativity. If we're going to get this done, it's efficient. We don't need to drive anywhere.
Steven Puri:But I think there's some cases when I do want to feel like that weird intangible vibe of being in the room. 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. 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. 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. So it, it, it varies.
Silas Rose:You spent a lot of time around successful creatives, what do you think the secret sauce is? What are the habits that enable that kind of deep work?
Steven Puri:I so appreciate asking that. 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. 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? 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. 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. And that was one, that sense of chronotype which many people have written about very eloquently. That was one where I saw in practice routinely by great writers in particular and some directors.
Steven Puri: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. 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? And I remember the thing that stood out for me more than anything else about that meeting. 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.
Steven Puri:Right, this is a guy who's thought about this and Stephen proposed something. 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. 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. You know this other movie? What saw the coming through the wall and getting hit with the thing? Um, you know this other movie? What if it were this other thing? And a part of me inside said, oh my god, that's the last time we'll ever see that guy living again. Right, and steven was like, oh yeah, it's better, we should do that.
Steven Puri: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. It was just that was everyone's agreement. A better idea. What's wrong with it? So it was the coffee boy's idea. Let's make something great. Let's not make something that's necessarily mine, and at the mediocre level I saw a lot of that possessive of. I need to defend my ideas. My worth is that we use my idea, not what's best for the film. Is this tracking? Is this making sense for you?
Silas Rose:That suggests that there's a lot of openness. 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.
Steven Puri:I love talking about flow. You know that, yeah, so is there a formula? 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. Is that fair?
Silas Rose:Yeah, and maybe just for the uninitiated, maybe just define that.
Steven Puri:Yeah, let's do that. 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. So he, like prometheus, wanted to go up, get the fire from mount olympus, bring it down to the rest of us. 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. 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. And that's what these people figured out how to do to get into a state where they've aligned themselves with the current. 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. You have, you know cutler, near and clear and, like you know, newport of all research. How do you get into that concentrated state?
Steven Puri: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. There's not a sense of washing the clock, there's not a sense of distractions. They're there's not a sense of distractions. They're not like going to the bathroom or going to the fridge to get food, you know, whatever that thing is. They become very focused on the task at hand. And he said some of the conditions precedent that seem common. They have to believe what they're doing is meaningful. Not one of them gets in a flow and it's like stapling papers. Not one of them gets in a flow and it's like stapling papers doing something that I think is stupid. Right, they have to have skills that apply.
Steven Puri: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. So I guess michael jordan was that famous quote about when I'm in the zone, it's just me in the ball. You know, the whole world reduces down to this. 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. It's him in the nba, or it's picasso standing back and going. Is this half finished guernica? 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. This is obviously not something where I spend hours on, but it's a fascinating, fascinating concept.
Silas Rose:And again this implies this sort of congruence between the head and the heart Completely.
Steven Puri:Yes, and that's a beautiful thing. 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. 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? There are a lot of forces making sure you do not.
Silas Rose:I'm sure you're familiar with Stephen Pressfield's work The War of Art. Yes, there's always resistance.
Steven Puri:There's resistance and there are, are I mean, let us not kid ourselves in that tug of war for your life.
Steven Puri: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. 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? 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. Is that a cool trade for your life? 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. 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. So that, I think, is criminal.
Silas Rose:It is criminal and it's the greatest destroyer of creativity.
Steven Puri:It's hard enough to overcome your own insecurities, maybe your own inertia, your own laziness, your own insecurities. You know, maybe your own inertia, your own laziness, your own questions of you, know how confident you are in your abilities. And then to couple that with oh, by the way, there's some zero effort dopamine. There's a whole bucket right here. Just sit on the sofa. You just need to scroll and double tap and enjoy your dancing cat videos. Man, that's, that's. I hope you know this. I'm about to have my first child in eight weeks.
Steven Puri: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. I'm like dad, how can you do that? Like so many of your friends died of lung cancer. You have emphysema. What were you thinking? 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. And I view social media as pernicious as that and as criminal as creating products that create cancer.
Silas Rose:So, to be very practical again, I want to kind of return to those habits. How does a creative or entrepreneur insulate themselves and basically create the environment of focus where they can actually get to that
Steven Puri:I will tell you how this works for me and this is obviously. You know very much how I designed what I do you know every day which is I recognized problems. I'm very much a person who says you know what. Really think deeply on the problem before you try to solve it. I thought deeply about a problem that I have, which is I call the cold start In the morning. Tomorrow morning, at 9 am I'm going to do X, y, z I need to do. At 9.15, I'd be returning some emails or scrolling the news or something. 9.30, I'm getting going. I've wasted half an hour and the pain of that is felt six o'clock when I'm like I'm not done. I have to come back after dinner. I'll just try and finish up, or the lie you tell yourself. 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? So that was a real thing for me.
Steven Puri:So the way in which I looked at it was to say, well, why am I doing this? I'm not stupid. I may not be the smartest person on earth, but I'm not stupid. 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. 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? 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. 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. So I just see three things that I need to do and I noticed during the day.
Steven Puri:A second problem I have is if I hit something hard, oh man, I'm coding and like I keep having build errors. What am I? What's wrong here? You know I'm writing a blog post and just the muses are not singing. You know I, to get dopamine, will pick up my phone. It's almost like muscle memory. Let me see what's up. Oh my God, maybe Eric Garnet, what's up from France or whatever? I don't know who's around today. 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? So when I start my session in the morning with Suka, I just hit play and the music starts, and all that. There's a QR code. I shoot at my phone and I put it down. If I pick up my phone while I'm working, my smart assistant says hey, steven, is your phone helping you? And I get that one moment to go. Who do I want to be? Do I want to be the guy who's like done at three o'clock?
Steven Puri:playing with his kids? Or do I want to be grumpy guy at six? And same thing with the websites. 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. 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? And you get that choice. Who do I want to be? I think that's ultimately the best thing we can do. 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.
Silas Rose: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. Are you optimistic about AI?
Steven Puri:Well, let me say two things. 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. You know words and ideas. 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. 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?
Steven Puri:There's a great story I don't remember whose story. This is about the horse that could count and it was amazing. And they later realized the horse just had learned to move its hoof enough times until people went oh wow, we counted to nine. He had no idea what nine was. All he knew was stop doing the hoof thing when everyone reacted right. So that's kind of where we are.
Steven Puri:Now. 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. 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. We're talking about hey, man, you wrote that business plan better than I can. You made that slide deck really, really well.
Steven Puri:And then what is our utility? 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. 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. We can say that in a noble way read, some of the great authors study physics. I do all these things. We're going to pass along to them. Will those be ?
Steven Puri: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. Steven I hope that you are right. I hope that it does make that part of being human more and more valuable and doesn't wipe it out. 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. That's how I got into digital effects. Two guys ran it who were very they've been doing promos and trailers for 20 years very well, you know established in business. And one of them came in my office when I was a junior guy. There. My job was movies would come in rough cut from Warner Brothers or Disney and I would assign them to a writer-producer. Hey, silas, you did a great job on that Will Ferrell thing last year. Here's another Will Ferrell comedy Can you write this, right?
Steven Puri:He came in my office. He said hey, stevie, do you know Bart? And I was like I know Bart, there's a guy in the vault who delivers tapes. Yeah, he said, do you ever give him a trailer to write? And I said we're talking about the same guy who delivers coffee and picks up tapes. Right, he goes yeah, yeah, yeah, I have an instinct about him. I'm like Jeff names on the door, like you know, you're the reason why we're here. Let me give him something. So I gave him this warner brothers b title that had a long deadline case. He hated it or did a bad job, right?
Steven Puri:Jeff came to my office two days later he said how's bart doing? So I haven't bugged him. This is the first time he's ever written a trailer. I'll ask him on monday, okay, okay, fine, stevie, he goes. What else did you give him, jeff? He's never written a trailer before. I'm not getting two things. 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.
Steven Puri:It's always about the other thing. 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. You can imagine that's the part of your brain that does that. I don't know what about chocolate and peanut butter? What does a cell phone taste like? That's not the part you think that you're thinking with. So you have to give them something else to focus on. 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. That talks just about that default mode executive mode interplay. That I thought was very interesting about that kind of association. Is AI going to get to that chocolate and peanut butter thing, as Jeff would say?
Silas Rose:Words of wisdom. Well, stephen, thank you so much for this conversation. I think we got into flow here.
Steven Puri:This is a beautiful moment. Thank you for having me on and for those listening. I appreciate you guys listening. I hope in some way we're helpful.
Silas Rose:How can people find out more about the app and you?
Steven Puri:My address is very public. It is steven with a v at thesukaco, which is t-h-e-s-u-k-h-aco. 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. I happily return all my emails. I'll give you a link of something to read. It will not be long. I'm not going to write the history of my life. You're not interested in reading it. But that offer is open and if anyone wants to try getting into a flow state, pick a task. You have to do Something that takes a half an hour an hour, like a meaningful task and go to the website. It's free Seven days. It's free, no credit card T-H-E-S-U-K-k-h-a dot c-o and the SUKA app.
Silas Rose:I hope it helps you. I hope you do something great. Suka s-u-k-h-a dot c-o. Or check out the links at awakenedrelationshipcom. 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. I can sometimes be found on Instagram, Substack and LinkedIn. Send me a message. I really love hearing from my audience, and especially if you have great suggestions for future guests or topics to cover on the show. Thank you so much for tuning in, dear listener. Till next time, stay connected. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Awake in Relationship. If you liked what you heard, please click subscribe to get the latest show delivered fresh to your device, or sign up for our newsletter at awakeinrelationshipcom. Sharing is caring.