Episode Transcript
Peter: Our guest today is Steven Puri, and it's kind of hard to sum Steven up in a single sentence, or even a paragraph. He's built cutting edge visual effects for blockbuster films like Independence Day, which won an Oscar for those effects. He's helped shape major franchises like Diehard as a Hollywood exec.
Now he's creating tools to help people focus better and live more meaningful lives. What connects all of this is Steven's work at the intersection of creativity, technology, and human experience. Whether he is producing stories on screen or designing software to help people reclaim their focus, he's asking big questions about how we work, what gets in the way, and how we create things that matter.
So in today's conversation, we'll hear about the lessons he's learned from being a teenage news anchor, a software developer, a film exec, and a startup founder. And we'll explore things like how studios manage risk on multimillion dollar creative bets, what it really takes to get into a flow state and stay there, and we'll hear what inspired Steven's latest venture, The Sukha.
So if you lead creative work, or want to do more of it yourself, this episode's for you. Steven, welcome to the show,
Steven: Peter. That is a beautiful introduction, and for those listening in their cars or at home or at the gym, I hope this is not only entertaining, but has some actionable tips about how to be more healthy and productive.
Peter: Love it. So I mentioned that you were a teenage news anchor and you sort of giggled a little bit.
Steven: You did your research.
Peter: I haven't heard much about your time there and I'm curious. That's, a formative time in our lives. I'm curious what lessons or skills, or anything from that time sort of set you up for later roles in film and tech, and in your life in general?
Steven: Well, I'll tell you, my life has been a series of very lucky breaks, like things fell in my lap, coupled with, "how do I work really hard to make something of this?" Right?
So the thing you reference, which a lot of places where I speak, they don't do their research as much as you did. So my hat is off.
I was in (Washington) D.C.. And there was a show, which was the top rated youth show on in the DC Baltimore market, which was a half hour news show. And sort of the shtick of the show was all of the hosts were in high school. So if you got people in DC or Baltimore, even politicians, like we had the mayor on, we had boxers, we had, you know, people in the community on,'cause you wanna be like 'down with the kids.'
It was the show where you'd be like, "oh, let's have, you know, the high schoolers ask us, what's going on with the metro," or whatever. So. I did that for six to nine weeks. Super fun. Probably the most fun thing when you're like in high school was: every now and then you go to a restaurant and someone'd come up and be like, "oh my God, I'd seen you on tv."
It, you know, it's flattering, I'm not gonna lie. It was kind of fun. Right? Especially when you're trying to, you know, figure out how to deal with your own acne, you know? So that was interesting. The thing it led to is this, and why it's an important turn in my life, which is, I was in obviously Northern Virginia, you know, Washington, DC area. I had never contemplated going to the West coast. But USC, which has a very strong journalism school, spotted me and said, "hey, if you wanna come to USC, we have the Annenberg School and would love for you to come out here."
So they were very generous with me and that led to suddenly I'm in Los Angeles. And what. You hadn't mentioned in, in those early years is, I happened to fall into doing this TV show, but I actually was a code monkey. Both my parents were engineers at IBM, you know? And when your mom's like a professional ice skater, you learn to ice skate, right? So I would go to the university computing center, sometimes with my mom, and she'd teach me how to code. And these are obviously antiquated languages now, but at the time it was like, "oh my God, we're doing this thing!" Right?
So when I was at USC, I was a Watson Scholar for IBM. Which meant not only money, but also I had a job whenever I wanted it. I could make money during school, programming. So I ended up, thanks to that TV show, which is one of those weird Forest Gump kind of moments, going to Los Angeles. And I was there when film went digital, and I happened to understand a bit of both, and that helped my career tremendously.
Peter: You started forming companies to do visual effects at that intersection, right? I'm imagining at IBM you weren't doing visual focused computer graphics, right?
Steven: Oh, good god, no. It was the division of IBM that did the DOD work, the federal systems division. So I was responsible for the program that said, "Hey. We have a contract that four years from now on a Tuesday, we have to deliver this submarine box or this F 14 box or this signal processor for a helicopter to talk to a carrier," right? "Let's go back in time and explode out everything to today where it tells us like tomorrow afternoon, if you don't order these three screws, you will not deliver that four years from now." That sort of coverage analysis. I tell you that because you're right, I did not go to USC, go to Los Angeles, with a deep training in how to make computer generated film.
But what did happen was this: while I was there and earning money at IBM coding, boring stuff, relatively, in my dorm, a lot of my friends, because USC has a great cinema TV school, arguably the best in the world, they're young Spielbergs and aspiring Lucases and you know Scorseses. So yeah, you go out on Tuesday night, you watch a movie, you all debate it afterwards at dinner and I developed a decent vocabulary of film.
So when computers suddenly could handle rasterizing an entire film frame, manipulating it in the computer, holding it all in Ram, and outputting it back to a film frame, that opened up a whole world. And not a lot of people sat in that Venn diagram: 'could speak to an engineer,' 'could speak to a director.' I sat right there and that's how I got into visual effects. It was like, "Hey kid, come here. You know how to do this."
Peter: Yeah, that's cool. So did you work for another visual effects company 'before you founded your own, or did you just say, you know what, I'm here.
Tell us a little bit about that journey from there to Centropolis.
Steven: I went to the West Coast office of a graphic design company that did a lot of like television, stuff like that, called R Greenberg Associates. And while I was there, learned a lot about graphic design, learned about computer generated graphics for film, right. And did a bunch of movies.
Did True Lies with Cameron, did Seven with Fincher. Did Sweetland Films stuff with Woody Allen. Did Jim Jarmusch movies. I worked with a lot of directors. So it was really interesting. I met Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, When they were coming off Stargate and they had this script for this B movie at Fox, you know, the, the big ambitions of the guys that have no money, right?
Peter: Yeah. Uhhuh.
Steven: And the original budget on Independence Day was $73 million, right, which now is laughable when you think about it. But at the time it was all Fox would give them. 'cause they're like, eh, "you're the Stargate Universal Soldier, guys."
But they asked me if I would come on production, if I would leave the company where we did all this work and say, "come work with us on the feature side, we had this idea of how to make this $73 million budget work. We have to set up, almost like within the feature, a digital arm with computer graphics engineers, both animators, renderers, lighters, technical directors, and all this."
So we did that and it was incredibly hard. And I'll tell you, one of the things I learned about studio life was... imagine you needed a pencil, Peter. And Fox gave you a form. They're like, "fill this out in triplicate to get your pencil," right.
You put in this requisition, three weeks later you call Fox. You're like, "Hey, that pencil." And they're like," yeah, we lost your form. Fill it out again." We were like the ugly stepchild.
And then if you remember, there was a trailer that came out, where the White House blew up. The Monday after that trailer played. Fox called. And they were like, "Hey, do you need anything?"
Of course we were like, "can we have the pencil? Remember like a month ago I filled out that req for the pencil?"
And they're like, "no, no, do you need..." and they named some like million dollar Silicon Graphics equipment.
We're like, are you kidding? And I realize now that's what happens when like the studio's searching for what's gonna be the hit and they lock onto you and then suddenly you are like the chosen one. And they were like, all we care is you make the release date. The movie's called Independence Day. It needs to come out on time.
And we realized now this could be a hit. And it ended up being the third highest grossing movie in the history of film.
That was an interesting process. Roland and Dean and I got along really well. When we were in post production, you know, which is, you know, 24 hours a day, going to Sound studios, visual effects studios, we would go just walking around the studio and we talked about, "why don't we just set up a company together?" So that's what we did. I co-founded a company with them and raised about $15 million of venture debt. And, super fun.
Peter: So you were at Centropolis, you ended up selling that, exiting at Centropolis. And then what was it like moving from that sort of specialist visual effects provider to, what I'm assuming are broader responsibilities?
Because you then became a VP at 20th Century Fox and then eventually an executive VP at Dreamworks. What was it like moving from "I'm focused on this" to, "eh, I need to, ... "I have a broader remit now. "
Steven: Do you remember your twenties when you were pretty certain you were so smart, you knew everything? You were invincible. Like ... you remember that?
Okay. We sold Centropolis to a German company called Das Werk, sort of like Liberty Media of Germany, right? And that was a great exit. We made a 6x return. I took two years off and of course thought I was really smart. And selling companies is easy. Wait for that 'cause we're gonna come back to how foolish that was.
So when I had my moment of like, okay, I feel like I've taken the foot off the accelerator, you know, working 120 hours a week to finish movies and stuff really burns you out. So I, had a great moment to do that. I thought, "you know what? I don't want to wake up, be 30, 40, 50 years old, be making the effects for someone else's movie."
Like, I've kind of done 14 movies at this point. I get it. And I was like, "how do I get to be the guy who helps make a movie, not make a piece of someone else's movie?" So I set my goal on, "I wanna go be like a chairman of a studio or some senior executive at a studio and, you know, learn that process."
And yeah, went uh, to Sony as a junior executive. Went to a production company at Dreamworks, ended up an executive vice president there with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, who were great guys. Who were actually, Bob sadly just died a few weeks ago, but, who were great guys and, you know, very talented writers. They're the guys who wrote Transformers, Star Trek 11, you know, Mission Impossible 3, The Island, Zorro, tons of stuff, right?
Peter: Yeah.
Steven: And then I went to Fox and was the VP overseeing like the Diehard franchise, as you mentioned, the Wolverine franchise, stuff like that. So that was kinda my goal of like, okay, how do I get a movie made?
Peter: And so for, for people that are transitioning from a more specialist role to a broad role, what are some things that you learned? What advice would you give to somebody who's in that first time, I'm in a much broader role now. Now what?
Steven: Okay. I did some crazy stuff, so I'm not gonna recommend other people do that. But I will answer your question 'cause you asked it, Peter. Okay. So what I'm about to say, kids don't try this at home. Okay?
Peter: Good, good. Here's what to avoid. Yes.
Steven: So I have a couple strong theses in life. One is we all have something great inside us and the question of our life is, will it get out or not?
Okay. That's one thesis. Second thesis: be around the smartest people you can find. it is better to go mop the floors for, you know, Steve Jobs or whomever, you know, you want to be around, than it is to be the executive vice president for A CEO where you're like, actually she's dumb, you know? So I applied that here.
When we sold Centropolis, I mentioned to you, I took two years off, traveled, it was really great. You know, I'd been president of a company in my twenties, thought I was super cool, right?
So I came back and I had a new mission going into, around my 30th birthday, I was like, I want to be this new thing.
Had lunch with a bunch of friends who were producers that I'd met and said, "Hey man, you know, I'm this hot shot. I wanna do this stuff." And several friends straight up told me, "you don't know what you're asking for. Like you think because you know Jim Cameron or Fincher or Mel Gibson," I'd done Braveheart, you know them on a first name basis and they recognize you, that, they're looking to you to help them make movies. They're not."
They look at you as, as a craftsman, right? The same way you would greet like a valet, right? You know Joe, but you're certainly not looking for him to run your company, right? Just park the car.
So I was like, wow, okay. Ego blow. Got it. So then what? They're like, there's a whole new world of people that you need to meet if you want to be involved upstream in developing ideas, finding writers, finding properties, packaging them with directors, with actors, like that is a new set of people you need to meet. A new vocabulary you need to learn. A new way of working.
So put your ego on the shelf. You should treat it like grad school and you should go be an assistant for two years, work one year for a seller, an agent or manager, one year for a buyer, studio executive. And several said, several friends said this in the same week over the different lunches.
Peter: Interesting.
Steven: I was like, they're probably not wrong.
Peter: Uhhuh.
Steven: Like it's hard to listen to. 'cause I thought I'm like this hot shot, but wow. So I went to do exactly that and I had to dumb down my resume, you know, because I went out on one interview and they're like, the top line of your resume is you're president of an effects company, that movie won an Academy Award. Like what are you doing trying to be an assistant here? This is ridiculous, right?
So I learned how to, you know, change my resume so the top line was intern and I just went and interned somewhere for free. Put it to the top line.
I learned in Hollywood, no one reads the second line. Because the second line was President of Centropolis, but the top line said intern, Summit Entertainment.
I went in on the next job interview, they're like, "ah, great. When can you start?" I'm like, "now, not working, available right now." And I got the job. So I worked for a year and a half for the seller of talent, essentially a talent manager who did like, Anne Hathaway, Kira Sedgwick, and Barbara Hershey, and we were on Toby and Kirsten's team. Stuff like that, right?
And then I wanted to go work for a buyer to learn that side of the conversation,
Peter: Right.
Steven: Right?. How do sellers talk and how to buyers talk? And I'm working for the president of Paramount and both those gave me a network, gave me a lexicon, gave me an understanding of how the business worked, that then launched my career. And that's how I ended up executive vice president and you know, all the other stuff. That was the transition.
And by the way, my dad, the first time he called me at work and I answered the phone was like, you know, "hey Peter's office." My dad was like, what happened? Like, he's like, you can tell me, did you get fired? Like, why are you the secretary? I'm like, number one. It's called assistant. Number two. I have a plan dad.
Peter: That's great. I'm curious when you got to those roles, right? Now, you are in the chair. What surprised you about the job?
Steven: I'll tell you, I learned in between the Dreamworks and the Fox experiences, how much leaders set a culture. It was the most marked difference I had ever seen in my young career. You could sum it up like this. Dreamworks was a studio still run by a filmmaker, the only one still run by a filmmaker. Right? It was Steven and Stacy when I was there. There was definitely a sense of: "tonight, Peter, go home, look at the movies you're working on and see if you can make them 1% better."
After four years there, and a bunch of success, which I'm very grateful for, Fox recruited me. Very appealing. Hey, we'll double your salary. Do you wanna run the Diehard franchise? You probably grew up watching Diehard movies. You could be the guy on Diehard five. You want Wolverine? We're gonna do a Wolverine. Right? Wow. It was hard to say no.
So I went there even though some friends were like, "dude, I don't think you're gonna be a culture fit. I don't think you're gonna like this." That culture was: "Hey Peter, could you go home tonight and make your movies 1% cheaper? It's called show business. It's not called show art.
There is a valid reason why..., you know, one of the two chairman, my bosses there came from that mentality. It's, it's a business. There are profits, there are, you know, margins, there are shareholders, there's Chase to report to, and he reports to Rupert. You know, like there are a lot of reasons for that, but two years there killed my soul.
Peter: Those two examples seem like... almost like they're stereotypes of the two competing forces in Hollywood, right?
Steven: Yes.
Peter: You have sort of the creative side that wants to make great art. You have the suits that want to cut costs and do the seventh sequel because the formula works and we know we'll put butts seats with that, right?
Steven: Yeah. My boss was proud that he was the guy who thought to put Alien versus Predator in the same movie.
Peter: So there's always that tension in Hollywood. I'm curious what you noticed the leaders doing. Was it, was it just that vision that you described, where on one side it's make the movie 1% better and the other side it's make the movie 1% cheaper? Because I think leaders, leaders want to set a culture and often they say, "I want the culture to be like this." And then it's hard to do. What have you seen them do that actually creates a culture or shifts a culture in a direction?
Steven: I noticed that there are really two things that a leader can actually do in that role. Which is you set a vision, you set a style. So you say, we are all here because we're going to cure cancer, make zero pollution vehicles, make movies for families, whatever it is, right?
You set a vision and hopefully that vision attracts the right people in your hiring process. You get people who want to cure cancer, make EVs, make Disney movies, right?
The second thing is the style where it is, "this is how we will treat each other. This is how we will treat our clients and,vendors and this is how we will treat our competitors."
And wow, that made a big impression on me because, you know, it is like Iago says in Othello, where he is talking about, you know, "good name in man and woman..." you end up seeing the same people again or again. Your reputation, like whether you honor your word, it will serve you or it will destroy you over time.
And I've made mistakes. I'm not saying this is like I've done everything right. I have not, I have definitely learned that through, "oh man, I did this, this worked out really well. I did that, boy was out a mistake. Man, if I could do that over, I do that differently." And I tried to, you know, apologize when appropriate, and tried to celebrate and share the things that I've done well. Um, that's probably, the successes my life have really come from that.
Peter: Mm, yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about risk, because studios are making these big multimillion dollar bets. And lots of businesses when they're imagining a new product or, an extension, or a project that they're gonna work on, they try to reduce risk by doing extensive detailed planning, right?
Everybody in a room. Map out every feature we're gonna build. And that doesn't work well. Like, we've developed a whole process called CAPED that helps us overcome this. And in previous episodes of the show, we described how Pixar, right, At least pre Disney, it's hard to know exactly what's going on in inside right now, the old Pixar, they used a, much more active approach to planning, where planning essentially was iterating on the film. A director would own a film with a writer and they would, they would iterate on it with these really rough cuts, right? Where like they're doing the, the voices, right?
Steven: This goes back to Disney. This is Disney from 50 years ago. They basically said "what worked at Disney in the heyday" and they modeled it with computers.
Peter: Ah, interesting. It's all full circle, right? And, then they'd bring it into the Braintrust meeting, right? Where all of the directors and anyone else that they thought would give good feedback, would give feedback.
Steven: You know this well. Yes.
Peter: And they would just hammer on the film, scene by scene and say, "the story doesn't work here." "I don't know why this character's doing this."
And none of those are edicts to say, go do this or that. They would say, "but you better fix this 'cause the story doesn't work yet." They would spend years in that process often. Often radically changing story and character. And, you know, Up started out with two princes in the air, right? That, that was the first version of Up.
Steven: You've done your research, man. Wow. I wanna benefit from your research. Wow.
Peter: So, and that was all because production's so expensive, right? You're gonna hire Tom Hanks to come do voiceover. You're gonna spin up these massive compute systems to do, you know, full frame renders that's really expensive. And so they wanted to do the cheap iteration first.
And they called that planning. That's all pre-production. It's all planning. Right? And I'm curious what you've seen studios do during that sort of pre-production approach to reduce risk and uncertainty during that really expensive, "Hey, we're spending six figures a day to shoot that production" phase.
Steven: I'm gonna actually answer a slightly different question, which is, "What have I seen the best creatives do?" It is, they recognize that it is not about them. For me, it's been a hallmark of mediocre writers, mediocre directors, where it's, "well, this is my idea and I must protect and defend it, right?"
And it is the people who are incredibly confident, who have established themselves, that can have ideas that die. It's fine. I mean, I remember the first time I was in a meeting at Dreamworks, you know, with Steven and the whole,... With Steven, there were always like 6, 8, 10 people there, right? And I'm not gonna give you the specifics of what it was he said, but imagine he said something like, "yeah, you know, the alien should be vulnerable to, uh, you know, coffee," or whatever, Right?
Okay, greatand everyone sort writes down, uh, "Steven wants, you know, alien coffee, da da da."
And then, the coffee guy will walk through the room and be like, "actually, you know what, that was, that was in Signs," or something. "Why don't you make it about the alien's vulnerable to this other thing?"
And in a mediocre meeting people are like, "oh, he contradicted Steven. And in that meeting it's like Steven goes "Oh yeah. Uh. Yeah, that's a better idea. Let's do that." And immediately just moves on.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Steven: And there's no, like "Steven's idea died." There's no coffee guy being fired and shown to the front gates of the studio. There's like, I want this to be great. Best idea wins, man. His idea is good. Let's run with that. And that's, that was really interesting to me to see when you're creatively that confident, say like, it's not about my idea, it's about the project. So that's when you talk about like, the Pixar process, that's the thing that's interesting where it's like, "hey man, if like the five of us could get together and watch this together, like I would love to know what you think could be better." Like, throw your ideas in. I'm gonna take the best ones.
Peter: Yeah. So key to that is a process that allows for iteration and feedback, right?
Steven: True.
Peter: You have to have something to show and you have to have people to trust to give you good feedback.
Steven: Which maps beautifully onto tech.
Peter: Some of that is in person. Like when I got started in tech, it was all, we were in the conference room. Eventually we, we acquired another company, sort of an acqui-hire. Uh, that was in Hamburg, Germany, that had been at Steinberg previously, another audio company. And then we got to experience a little bit of what it's like to do some of these things remotely and figure some of that stuff out.
And I know that film historically has had different phases where there's remote, there's in person, there's hybrid. Can you tell us a little bit about that process?
Steven: That is such a great question. Yes. Something that I noticed, and this is really what inspired my current company, was, when I left Fox and I said, "you know what, I want to go have more agency. I wanna create things I believe in, rather than just shepherding Diehard 5 through," which there was no good idea in Diehard 5, "what, what else do I know how to do?" Which is really engineering, right?
So I was like, let's go create a startup. Let's find some problems. Let's try and solve it. Right? So that's what I've been doing.
So the pandemic happens, Zoom becomes a verb, you know? And a lot of verticals are like, "ooh, what do we do?" You know, "we can't be in the same room without risking each other's health," like, we're now in this remote thing and, and it was very shock to the system in many verticals.
For me it was like, film for a hundred years has had remote, hybrid, in person, Exactly as you said, but it's not called that in a film.
It begins with writers, working from each other's, you know, living rooms and coffee shops, and one idea gets some traction and you suddenly have a production office and two days a week you're meeting with location scouts and production designers. And three days a week you're back in the coffee shop, you know? Writing and doing script revisions to try and get Brad Pitt to be in your movie or something.
Peter: Right.
Steven: And then you're on set. It's $125,000 a day. You know, it's, you're there all day and all night and it's...
no one calls those periods: "Well, I'm in the remote period of the film." "I'm in. I'm in the hybrid period." You know, it's pre-production, it's post-production, it's that.
So that was something where I was like, wow, I've seen some great examples of how to lead through these remote and hybrid periods and also be an IC in them and know how to contribute and how to, you know, navigate that.
So that's really what inspired The Sukha company, you know, for me it was like, "how do you bring this sense of doing great work to people who maybe are not sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights all day long with their boss leaning over, asking, asking them about TPS reports."
Peter: Which hopefully none of our listeners are experiencing. If you're experiencing that, please reach out, send your boss to our next leadership class.
Steven: Right. We'll send 'em with some flare,
Peter: Right? Yeah. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about Sukha. Like what I know about Sukha is, it's an app. It's focused on sort of creating flow states. But that's about all I know about it. So tell our listeners what they should know about Sukha.
Steven: This is true. It's just a simple web app. It's a website. I will tell you this. Necessity is the mother of invention. For me, pain, It was the mother invention. And I'm gonna tell you some things that I wrestle with and you guys may think I'm stupid and bad and awful, unless you're like, "oh God, I have that too," right?
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Steven: So there were a couple things that I had that were painful.
I'm gonna tell you one, I call now the cold start problem, which is, tomorrow morning at nine, I'm gonna sit down. I'm gonna start doing this thing and get this done, bang it out, and have this great morning. Then tomorrow morning at 9:15, I'd find myself still returning emails outta my inbox, scrolling through the news, let me just find what's going on.
9:30, kind of getting going. And I'd pay the price for that at the end of the day where I'm like, "Ugh, I didn't finish. I gotta go to dinner. Laura needs me to..." You know what? I'm gonna get up early tomorrow and get a jump on the stuff I didn't finish today, and then do tomorrow's work." Right?
You tell yourself that lie. It dominoes through the week and it's frustrating and you start to feel frustrated with yourself and down on yourself. Right?
I was there, I looked at that and I said, much like you would with a character in a movie, if you understand the character, you can kind of understand what the character will do and whether they will solve that by the end of the movie, and it's a success, or they will not, and it's a tragedy, right?
So for me, I was like, what is it at 9:00 AM, where I'm just not doing the thing that I know I should be doing? And I end up in this painful thing at the end of the day. And I was like, okay, so I'm procrastinating. Let's call it what it is.
Well, why am I procrastinating?
Well, I realized, I felt overwhelmed.
And the overwhelm was one of two things. It was, I look at my task list, I'm like, I can't get all 17 things. I have... They all need to be done. I'm not gonna get them done before my 11:00 AM you know, with Peter and Rich, like, "Ah!, where do I start?" And there was this paralysis around like, there are too many things.
Or there was one thing on the list that was just ridiculous. It was like. "Oh yeah, I know I need to write my book or finish the slide deck for two weeks from now to.., It's not gonna happen between nine and 11. How do I even start?" Right?
So that pain for me, Peter, was really the beginning of this exploration about, hey, a lot of smart people have written about these kind of problems. These are not new under the sun. And once you read, you know, Flow by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, and you read Cal Newport, who I got to meet. Nir (Eyal), whom I got to meet. James Clear, like a lot of these people, they have a lot of tips.
To be super blunt if you read all 12 of those top books, there is a lot of commonality. Like, they all agree on the principles. They have their own vocabulary, they have their own frameworks with cute, you know, like acronyms to remember their stuff, right? They have to sell you their book for $24.95. But there's a lot of agreement around that.
So I thought, how can you take all of these things, that are really like solutions to this problem and just put it behind one button? How can I open a website, have one button, and that one button gave me the tools to overcome this.
So in this case, we built a smart assistant. When I open Sukha, my website in the morning, hit play and yeah, you get focused music and you get Pomodoro Timers and all this stuff, right? Table stakes.
Well, one of the cool things is your smart assistant looks at your task list and says, "Hey Peter. Yep. 17 things. You're not gonna do them all. Which three are important?" And then it will pull out those three, or you can add something to it and as soon as you start working, it'll hide the other 14. Hmm. So in your field of view, you just have those three and suddenly it's a lot more accomplishable.
We found that actually with our members, there's a 77% better chance they'll finish all three if they can only see three than in the old days when they could see more than three, they would finish two.
Peter: Interesting.
Steven: Because, it's just like you can multitask and jump around. You start to... paralysis. Same thing if there's something on there, it's ridiculously huge: "oh, do that presentation for next June," whatever. No, you're not gonna get that done right now. So it'll break it down and say like, "Hey, instead of writing your book this morning, why don't you make your task 'outline chapter three?'"
Peter: Uhhuh.
Steven: And it becomes doable. So really that's what I built was, on this concept of flow states, which, you know, I'm happy to talk about, how do we just make it one button? Take all this great knowledge, say, here's one button, help me.
Peter: Uh huh Right. I think many of our listeners will be familiar with CsÃkszentmihályi and the research on flow. But for those that aren't, why don't you give like, high level, here's what a flow state is, here's what's required to get in it, and here's what's gonna get you out of it.
Steven: Let's do it. I'll try to be as concise as possible. Okay. So there's a seminal book called Flow by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, who we were talking about. He's a Hungarian American psychologist, and he said there is this concentrated state that high performance, high performers seem to get into.
And they do their great work in this, this state, right? The world falls away, time falls away.
What is it? How do they do it? Can it be quantified? Can I, you know, like Prometheus, bring fire down to the common people.
And you may know this concept under different names. There's the famous Michael Jordan quote "being in the zone" where he is like, it's just me in the ball. He's like, in other words, I don't see the scoreboard. I don't see the defenders. When I'm in that zone, I'm unstoppable.
And going back to the thing I said earlier, which is I have a strong thesis that there's something great in all of us. The question is just simply, are you gonna get it out or not? Are you gonna scroll and waste your life or are you going to say, let me dig down and show the world this is of what I'm capable, right?
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Steven: So Mihály wrote the book Flow after studying all these different disciplines, high performers, and said, I'm gonna call it flow because, I love this metaphor of, you can paddle and, sort of, your effort carries you forward. But if you're doing this in a certain way, it's like the river begins to magnify your effort, and that's a flow state.
So if you have ever been working, and it just had that feeling of like, you look up and time's gone by and you've done all this stuff and you haven't been distracted to go to the bathroom or get a snack or whatever, you've been in a flow state. And there are now conditions precedent that help that happen and that's really what we study. That's how I built my platform.
Peter: Uhhuh. What, what are a few of those conditions? I know there are several, but a few of the conditions that are required to get into a flow state?
Steven: Some of the things we high found, as you said. Number one, you have to have skills that apply. Like, Michael Jordan painting, or Picasso playing basketball, you're not gonna get a flow state. It's just not... you know?
You have to be challenged. So it's, not to use the same metaphor to death, it's not Michael Jordan playing with eighth graders, right? It's Michael Jordan playing in the NBA and being challenged to win the championship that you get into that state, right?
So you have to have skills, be challenged, you have to also believe it's meaningful. It's not brushing your teeth. It's not doing a TPS report that, you know, no one's even gonna use or read. It is something where you go, "wow, if I, if I bring this into the staff meeting, people are going to be like, this changes the trajectory of our company. This is a great idea. Everyone should run that direction. What Peter just said." Right? So it's that kind of thing. You have to believe it's meaningful.
There are some others, and there are also some sort of cheats or, you know, tips to get into flow states. One of the ones that, I mean, you obviously have an audio background, is there's an oral environment.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Steven: There's a lot of research that there's certain kinds of music that help most of us get into flow. Most of it is 60 to 90 beats per minute. Certain key signatures, like ambient non-vocal.
Peter: Yeah.
Steven: Yes, we all have the friend that only gets in a flow state when she listens to 90s gangsta rap. God bless. We all have that friend, but most,
Peter: We're not gonna, with a whole bunch of software developers listening, we're not gonna get into those debates right now. "What do you listen to when you're coding?"
Steven: People have their thing. And some people swear by binaural beats. . You know, like in our platform, happily, I have a bunch of friends who are film composers with time on their hands, like a thousand hours of flow music written to best practices.
Some of the members were like, "I'm into binaural beats," and I read about it, I learned, oh, I was like, I get it now.
So we launched binaural beats where you have, you know, a delta between your left and right channels. And you have to have headphones 'cause you have to be able to feed your brain two different channels.
Peter: Right. I'm a big adherent. Like, that's me. I, I have binaural stuff I put on what I'm trying to write and,
Steven: What delta what, what Hertz difference do you use?
Peter: I don't remember, because when I was researching this, I found, at the time it was like a subscription, and they had several, you know, like hour long mp3s that came with this subscription. And there was one for creative flow. There was one for more meditative states. And I just downloaded the whole thing and I've used them ever since because they work. It actually cured my insomnia when I got this stuff.
Steven: That is incredible.
Peter: I put those on and I could go into a meditative state, and now I can almost imagine having the headphones on, and I can imagine the feeling of, like, the meditative state one, and, I can go into a meditative state like that.
Steven: Isn't that amazing? It's really cool the way your brain can trigger that. And by the way, the, the tl;dr for anyone listening about this is, depending on how many cycles different your left and right ear are, there are research theories being solidified about whether it stimulates certain kinds of brainwaves. Alpha, delta, gamma, do you, and that some of them, as Peter said, that seems to encourage people in a creative mind. Or that seems to encourage focus. Or that seems to encourage, you know, like sleep, things like that. So experiment with your own, and this would be a little tangent, so flag me if you don't want to do this. Fair?
Peter: We'll cut it out later if we need to.
Steven: Exactly. So this is all gone, right? And the lottery tickets today are...
So what you said about how now your brain triggers into "Oh, right. I'm going to that place." I'll tell you something that I saw.
In film, and iIncredibly true now, I've seen across any kind of productivity, which is space. The way space is, you can train your brain to say, "I'm within this space now. This is where I do this thing." Right?
And I saw this originally back with Roland and Dean, whom you brought up. Roland and Dean had written their last couple movies at this apparently beautiful villa down in the hills of Puerto Vallarta. White marble, the whole thing. And they talked about, there was this room where, in the morning, the light came over the pool and just inspired them. And they'd written like Universal Soldier and Stargate, and stuff like that, right?
So when they were off to write Independence Day, Roland told Joey, his assistant, you know, "go rent the Village Joey," right?
Joey came back that day, was like, "it's rented." Around the office it was like, "oh my God, what's, what's gonna happen?" Right? Roland called John Deemer, his entertainment attorney, who was a fantastic attorney, by the way, "John, buy the Villa."
By Monday, Roland owned a villa in Puerto Vallarta. The renters who were there, I do not know where they went. I'm sure they were nicely paid to not be there. And Roland and Dean went down into that space and they wrote the third highest grossing movie in film history at the time, right?
That triggered for them that thing. But it does not have to be this high-end, like "I'm in this $5 million villa..." Like Alex and Bob with whom I worked? Yeah, they wrote God knows how many billions of dollars a box office, right? The Star Trek, and Transformers, they had met back in their school years, right?
Like Bob had been a UT student who dropped out, and Alex was at Crossroads. When we were at, uh, Amblin, which is the little Dreamworks area of the Universal lot, and they had to buckle down and write. It was like, "okay, the deadline in Transformers 3 is coming," whatever it was. They had their assistant rent a room at the Universal of Hilton across the street, which is not a luxury property to put it politely. But they would go hunker down there and get it done. And for them it was that mental trigger, which I think it evoked "dorm room," I think that's why that was their space, because it's like, "oh, we're those scrappy guys with Bob sitting on the edge of the bed with his laptop and Alex at the little rinky dink desk," because that was their mental space of getting back to, "someday we're gonna be these great writers and we're gonna..." you know.
So that can be applied. That is a free technique. You don't need my app, anybody's app. That is simply, you know what? Instead of using my house where it's like in the morning, I work at the kitchen table in the afternoon, I'm on the sofa in the morning, you know... Say to yourself, you know what? This kind of work is gonna be in the space, and when I enter the space, my mind is gonna clear and say, oh, you're here now to do the, you're here to code, or this is where I do my designs, this is where I do the thing.
Um, free technique it. I've watched it be true with so many writers and directors, so many designer, ui, ux people, you know, developers. It's awesome.
Peter: I love that technique. That's great. Curious, what have been some of the challenges as you've brought, Sukha to market?
Steven: It has taken me six years to get to the point where people share it virally. Like, we don't do any paid ads. We don't do any paid anything. That took a while to get that right.
I'll tell you, there are a couple things where I was like, I don't know if this feature is a good idea. I have a sense of it, but, ... I'll give you one example.
In the original version of this, we were saying what are the, what are the things that help people get into flow? Right? And one of the things, as you know, is it takes a few minutes to get into flow. You do not press a button and three seconds later you're like, ah, I'm in a flow state.
Most of the research, 15 to 25 minutes, right? Including when you're in a flow state and you get interrupted. It's another 15 to 25 to get back in, right? Okay. So block your distractions. So yeah, logically what you build, if you're in my shoes, you're like, oh, we have a little smart assistant monitor. You know what you're doing. And if you open Facebook and you can customize your little list, "man, if I'm in Facebook or CNN or Twitter, whatever, nudge me." You open up CNN and your assistant's like, "Hey Peter, do you really need to be in CNN right now?" And you're like, oh, actually no. I'd rather finish at five and be not stressed than surf the news right now, right?
So it does that. Super helpful, right? Single player game. I had a thesis. I was like, I'm speaking to so many members individually, they have no sense of each other. They don't realize there are thousands of other people in here all trying to do something similar. They're trying to all focus, they're trying to write their code, or do their UI designs, right?
So I had this idea, what if we had a group chat? What if we actually made this kind of social? My wife works in banking and I remember when Venmo came out and I was like, wow, they looked at Instagram, where like the atomic unit was the image, right? Or they looked at Twitter, where the atomic unit was that text and everything gets built on that atomic unit.
And they said, "what if the atomic unit was a payment?" "Hey, Rich paid the babysitter." And then Peter post a funny emoji of a dog, you know? Or, "Hey man, beautiful," whatever. Right? That was brilliant. I didn't see that coming. Laura didn't say it coming, but man, that took off like crazy, and I thought, "what if the atomic unit is 'what you got done?'"
So once a day you could post like, "Hey, I published my new website." People could be like, "oh man, hey, give us the URL, let's go see what you did." Right? So I was thinking of building this, but then I also thought, is that gonna be distracting AI?
Peter: Right, right. It's trade off, right?
Steven: Are people gonna be like, oh my god, this is terrible. So I asked some members, I was like, "Hey, I'm thinking of kind of,..."
I'm gonna tell you there was, she's still a member, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna name her right now. But I ran this by her and she said, "sure, I'll, I'll talk to you about that for a minute." So we zoomed and I said, "what do you think? Distracting, or like helpful?"
And she said, "Steven, this is how I would think about it if I were you. She said, "I can go to the Nike store and I can buy a pair of shoes. They will sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I can put them on my feet. I can go run, works great. There's a reason why a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club. Because when you run together, you run faster, you run farther. You're more accountable. The days you feel like a slug and you're on the sofa, you're in bed, and your friend's like, come on, go do this. You get up and do it, and you feel great. And even better the days when they need you to be the one to say, come on Rich, let's do this. It feels great to be that one who lifts someone else up."
She's like, "I would do it."
Can I tell you? It is my favorite feature in Sukha, more than the smart assistant, more than the music, more than the pomodoro timers, all that stuff. That is my favorite thing, is a sense of, "oh, this is a whole community of people who are trying to do something with their life."
That's really that inspired. Yeah. Really interesting. The power of social connection, that for years, most tech workers had in the office, whether they complained about it or not, right, or, or grumbled about it or not. There is a, there is a power to social connection on a team. There's a power to accountability, peer accountability.
There's a power to the "water cooler chats," right? Of sort of, cross pollination of ideas and information. And, I think that's really missing in a lot of, a lot of the tools, and a lot of the approaches today. So that's really interesting to see that play out in Sukha as well.
I appreciate you saying that. It is a risk I took and it now is my favorite thing. To feel, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, let's see who's in there chatting. Every now and then I'll post something and people will be like, oh, that's really cool, you know? Yeah, it just feels different.
Peter: There's the book Social, it describes the research that the default brain state of humans is not off, it's not resting it's "where are my people?"
Steven: Yeah. It's connection.
Peter: When we're at, at rest, we're seeking connection. That's the default state of our brain. So, very interesting.
Um, so. You strike me as a very centered, focused person, Steven. And I'm curious, our world is not a place that encourages that, right? It feels like we're actively discouraged from being centered and focused with all the uncertainty and stress of, sort of the political and economic climate. What advice do you have for our audience about how to stay centered and focused?
Steven: Okay, let me dispel your notion. Okay. I am medically diagnosed with ADD right?
I am absolutely the "squirrel!" "Shiny object!" Hey, you know, that is something I've wrestled with for a long time and took me until doing this to really go to a doctor and say like, this is how my brain works. And then be like, oh, you're like classic kind of ADD, not really presenting as hyperactive, but I believed multitasking was a thing.
It's not a thing, right? It's monotasking with context switching and burning your brain. Right? But like those sort of things to me were like super available. So I appreciate your saying that because it makes me feel like I've done some work and I'm getting better.
But I struggle with that every single day. Right? It is why I told you I think about, like, I only wanna see the three things I'm working on right now. Don't show me 17 things while I'm working, 'cause I will jump around and I'll get discouraged and stuff like that, right?
So I think a couple things have helped me. One, I have a daily yoga practice and I absolutely notice the days that I practice, the clarity of my thought is different. Full stop. There's something about that hour of just being unable to think about, "oh, well I gotta do those new designs in Figma," or "I wanna, I should probably do some little backlog grooming" and linear, like I'm on one leg trying my best not to fall down in front of other people. I just don't wanna be embarrassed. I just wanna have that moment of like, "wow, I feel centered today."
So that really has helped me. Uh, it's also how I met Laura, my wife.
Peter: Uhhuh. Double bonus.
Steven: Big fan, double bonus. Exactly. Big fan of the yoga. Um, it is also how I named my company. Sukha is a Sanskrit term. You hear in yoga. It's about the happiness you feel when you're self-fulfilled. When you're doing something, you're in your lane, you're doing something well and you can do with ease.
And that's my company name, The Sukha company. It's the Happiness company because that's ultimately what I want to do.
It's not, Hey man, we're the. Pomodoro Timer distraction Blocker 14 app, you know?
Peter: Right.
Steven: It is. I want someone to look up at three o'clock and be like, I feel great, and I'm done for the day. That's a nice feeling.
Peter: Yeah. Um, if Sukha is wildly successful,
Steven: mm-hmm
Peter: 20 years from now, how do you hope the world's different?
Steven: I hope, and it is such an interesting question to ask today, in June of 2025, as people are debating, will AI do my job? Will I work for AI? Are the robots going to eat me? I hope that Sukha enables people to do the thing that, to create the great thing that is inside them, right? And yes, maybe some of the AI tools are levers that help that happen the way.
I hope how AI works in our world is not that we're gonna go to Usain Bolt and say, "Usain, we have this, um, robot that runs faster than you. So why don't you just sit here and we'll just all watch the robot." But rather it's saying, "Hey, with AI, we actually examined your foot, and we have a shoe that's just 1% stickier. So we, you might be able to shave a second off your time." Because Usain would be happier about that and so would the spectators.
So my hope is that Sukha becomes that kind of application where it's like, it's a community of people who support each other, want to see each other succeed, share tips and enable each other to do great things.
And you know, I'm having a son this year as, uh, I think, you know, and how my children are going to look at what I did, I think will be more formed by Sukha than by any movie I worked on.
You know, the Wolverine, the sequel didn't change the world, you know what I mean? Like Transformers didn't change the world. But if, man, a billion people could feel like, "Hey, this tool helps me do great things, more focused, I feel healthier and happier."
Yeah. That's the thing I'm gonna tell my son that I did, and eventually my daughter. Yeah.
Peter: I think that's a good place to wrap it.
Steven: There we go.
Peter: Steven, thank you for your time today. Lots of really interesting stuff. I'm sure our listeners will find, both some, some fun stories, but also some things that will help them to be more focused, to make a bigger difference in their work and to have more ease and joy in doing it. So thanks for, thanks for being with us and thanks for everybody that tuned into this episode of the Humanizing Work Show.
Steven: Thank you guys for having me on and, uh, if I can help anyone please, you know, put my email in the show notes.
Peter: We'll, we'll put all your contact info in there. Uh, The Sukha dot uh, dot com? Is it dot com? remind me?
Steven: Dot CO. The Sukha Company, so T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A.C-O for The Sukha Company.
Peter: And we'll drop that in the show notes for everyone to check it out and uh, I know there's a free trial on there, so go, go check out the trial. Try it out, folks!
Steven: There you go. No credit card, no gimmicks!
Peter: Great. Thanks Steven.
Steven: Okay. Thank you guys.
