Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Steven Puri On Doing Deep Work In A Distracted World (#060)

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Steven Puri On Doing Deep Work In A Distracted World (#060) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've ever experienced this.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone listening has experienced this.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is sometimes when you're in the office and uh, you know, like the joke from the old movie about your boss comes by and is like, Swami, where's the TPS report?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, oh, I should do the TPS report, right?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this is what I've heard from a number of our members.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: They said, as strange as it sounds, sometimes the hardest thing of my day is knowing where to start.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I look at my task list and I'm like, oh, there's 17 things on here.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which one do I start with?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that one sounds too big.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes there's almost like a paralysis around that, which leads to procrastination, which leads to, I always put that load of laundry in, or, you know, I didn't wash the dishes from dinner last night, things like that.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you stall because it's hard to get going.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things in the new version of Stuka that we're working on is you have an assistant who looks at your task list and says, hey, you know what, this priority thing you're working on yesterday, you're almost done with that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you finish that?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because it'll feel great to cross that off your list.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: That the discipline thing in terms of like becoming a master, it applies from the first moment you sit down and say, let me get it going.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you do that and you're dedicated to it, many people have written, you know, the 10,000 hours of mastery and the many theories on this, but it starts with the first step, and that step is the hardest.
• 1:11
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• 1:15
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• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: How did a software engineer become a studio executor?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate that you've looked that deeply at my bio.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the funny story.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: My father, engineer, Assam, you know, uh, Bonares Hindu University, right?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Came, did his master's in this country, started working at IBM, met my mom, who is a software engineer at IBM.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I am the son of a chip designer and a software engineer, right?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Born in a company town, an IBM company town in New York called Poughkeepsie where they have a big installation, right?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I learned from a young age to be a software engineer.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's what my mom taught me.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Went to USC in Los Angeles, and I'm telling you, this was just the luck of the draw.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was in LA at the same time that film became digital.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a lot of friends who were in the cinema TV school.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: USC has a very strong cinema school.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I was there and just happened to be someone who understood how to speak to an engineer, but also was personable enough and creative enough to speak to a director or a writer or producer and say, you know, what are you looking for?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sort of be a go-between, a producer behind between those two.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that is how I got into film because film went digital and I understood digital.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: So uh you also went to Stanford and uh you did a uh I did the Leaders in Tech program there, which was awesome.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, leaders in tech program.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so what did you learn uh out of that program, which you continue to use even today?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll tell you one of the practices, one of the um the principles they have is this idea that you can sit without a topic and conversation organically grows out of this.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you do these particular kinds of exercises where there is no assigned agenda.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the things that arise out of that are sometimes surprising, sometimes very mundane, but sometimes they're absolutely revelatory.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And probably my biggest takeaway was this I realize that being um an executive, I'm very goal-oriented.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, conversations have a purpose, actions have a purpose, there's a goal, all that stuff.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes in these explorations where you didn't have a goal, you discovered things you wouldn't have if you were very goal-oriented.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not gonna say that that's something I apply every day, all day long, just having, you know, goalless conversations, but I do appreciate now when it is that kind of creative exploration of what is it that we're thinking, what is it we're talking about, as opposed to what do we have to get done.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's probably my biggest takeaway from the Leaders in Tech, which which I loved.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, one of my very good friends from Leaders Leaders in Tech was in town this week.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: We just had dinner.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's a CTO of Contra, which actually this is a very similar name.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're a freelance marketplace uh for engineers and designers and stuff like that.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me a little more about that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: So it's interesting that you're saying uh having an agenda-less conversation and uh that uh touched you uh deeply.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so what does it do to lead us?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can say that I have been lucky to have leadership roles in film, which is where you are taking a very creative pursuit and making a business out of it, right?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like the joke goes, it's not called show art, it's called show business.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I've also you know run a couple of tech companies.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've had one exit, I've raised like$21 million of venture capital.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: I've had two failures.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I learned more, probably more from the failures than the success.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And in leading those teams, I recognize that when you are, you know, a CEO or a team leader, there's a lot of what you do that is goal-oriented.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are metrics assigned to that goal.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like we have to get this kind of growth rate, we have to get this kind of profitability, the unit economics need to be that way.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But that there are those times when you sit back and you say, you know what, let's just brainstorm what this could be.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what do we think are the problems in the world?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: What do we think are the movements in the world?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And those conversations, they they go far and wide, and they often don't have a conclusion in one session.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you don't sit for 30 minutes and say, we've solved, you know, what direction the world is going, but it's an ongoing conversation, and it's it's important to balance the two, to say, hey, we have a goal, we have metrics, how are we going to do that?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: As well as, hey, when we look to the horizon, when we look at the blue sky, what do we see?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that do to people?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: And how does it uh connect people to the objectives that you probably started off the conversation with?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: And uh how what kind of a bonding does it do with people?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you touch upon an interesting thing, which is the last three companies that I've run have been remote, and that affected my life a lot.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was true.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I I experienced with the first one was, oh my goodness, there's a global talent pool.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can't be constrained to just the people who are like at half hour driving distance from your office.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's an amazing designer in Montreal, oh, there's a great front engineer, you know, in in India.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that opened up the world of talent, you know?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, there are the mundane advantages of, you know, you don't have to commute every day and lose an hour or two of your life just sitting in traffic and you know, things like that.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you also save money on office space.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the interesting thing when you when you say that is that experience of going from a very um, you know, in-person sort of experience to a remote experience, I looked around and during the pandemic, a number of other companies were forced to do that, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the world was suddenly forced into how do you work when you're not sitting next to each other in an office?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that encouraged me to build tools, as you know, you know, to help with that.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the deepest things that I found was it is that feeling of I belong to something.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there isn't a feeling like I remember when I was my very first job was at IBM.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was a little, you know, code monkey at IBM when I was tiny.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember there was something exciting about going to the office and like seeing, you know, my mentor who is always you know correcting my code for me and teaching me new little tricks.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And just that thing of like being there and and seeing people, there is something to that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also the need for you know, focus time for deep work when I don't want to be waving at people and having people drop by with coffee and you know, that that sort of thing.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the team spirit, what I've noticed in my company and a lot of other companies now is that the team spirit, the cohesion, how it feels like a team, is something that many people are seeking for.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there are definitely some CEOs, some very prominent ones that are like, you know what, we're gonna get that back by everyone's in the office every single day, you know, from 8 a.m.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: to 8 p.m., and we're going to do it that way.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there are others that have learned from the pandemic and said maybe there's a hybrid solution.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe we're in the office part of the time, maybe it's a few days a week, maybe it's a few days a month, maybe we do retreats every month where we all get together and we do something that you know renews our bonds in person.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And understanding how that applies for your organization, I think is super important.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it is that that whole spectrum.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I can talk more about that, but that was a long answer to your question.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So uh as a tiki, when you entered into the film business, uh one of the things that the film business comes with is uh not everybody is employed, you know, there's no uh discipline to come and you know check in at 8 a.m.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: in the morning.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh what are the learnings that you had out of that industry, uh which uh you believe uh builds the flow state that you talk about?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you asked that question.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was perfectly teed up.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for saying that because this is one of the real uh you know, they talk about when you're a fish, you don't really understand the concept of water because you're like, it just is, right?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're not like I'm in water, I'm not in water, because you're always in water.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I learned when I got back into tech after my film career was in tech when the pandemic happened and people had to confront, oh, we can't sit next to each other, we might get each other sick, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to be working from home or working remotely.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I noticed was in my film career, film already for decades has had the full spectrum of work from home, hybrid work, in-person work.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that happens in film is most films, and I did a couple TV shows, but mainly film, most films begin remote.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're writers, creators sitting alone in their apartments, their homes, or in coffee shops or something like that for days or months at a time, working on something.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then once it gets the project gets to a certain point, you start to have meetings, and maybe there's like a studio executive like myself interested.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you have a meeting every week or two weeks where you sit, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it starts to become that rhythm.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then as the project gains momentum, you set up a production office and you probably go in a couple days a week.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly there's a production designer there designing.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me tell you what this looks like, you know, and you have a director and you have, you know, costumers, you know, what would these people wear?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you start to have that rhythm of like, well, it's hybrid.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm I'm writing at home because we're still doing script notes, you know, we're trying to get Swami to star, but he has notes, so I have to rewrite his role, right?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you're doing that as a writer, and then you're also spending a couple of days in the office answering questions because people are talking about, you know, what did you imagine here?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: The director wants to dig in with you, and then you're on set.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is completely synchronous, all day long, you know, like RTO, here I am for several months, right?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you couldn't be more on in the office than than that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then as you go into post-production, it goes back to there's an editor alone in a room with an you know an editing setup, and people come in and out of that thing until finally the movie's kind of done, and then you're just going to screenings and and that whole spectrum exists in film.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wow, there's a great template for how things you know could work here.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: That maybe not a lot of other tech CEOs had that experience being a senior executive at film studios or having been a producer in film.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was really applicable to me to see what do you do at each stage of that remote to hybrid to in-person to hybrid to remote that keeps the team feeling energized and together and gives enough time for deep work.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because let's be honest, when you're on set and it's$125,000 a day to be on set, you're not sitting in your trailer doing deep work for three hours.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the time for that is really hard.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's the early days when you're sitting there going, like, you know, if you and I were writing a script together, that you and I would cloister somewhere and say, Oh, what happens next?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think should happen next?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, there are a number of writers I worked with that had very specific ways in which they did their deep organ places.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, for example, uh, when we did Independence Day, uh Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, with whom I'd started my first company when I was doing visual effects, they had this house down in Puerto Rico.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, in Puerto Varta, where they loved to write.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that was like their special place.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they would go down there and it was really hard to reach them, and they could do deep work, right?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: They would go write the entire movie there to the point where when they were going to write, I think it was Godzilla, that house that they would rent had been rented out to someone else.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Roland called his his uh agent, his um, his attorney, and said, just buy the house.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Just buy the house.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I need to go down there with Dean.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have to write this.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Just get me that house.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he did.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: He bought the house and became you know his Puerto Vallarta house.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, same thing with like Alex and Bob, Alex Kurtz and Bob Orsi.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing guys I worked with for four years.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they did Transformers One and Two, Mission Impossible Three, Fringe, the TV show, Star Trek, you know, all this stuff.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they would go, we had an office at DreamWorks.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: They would go across the street and have their assistant rent them a hotel room at the Universal Hilton, and they would go there and just not answer the phone, just take the phone off the hook and sit there in this hotel room for several months and write the next Transformers movie.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was their way of doing deep work, just saying in this period of time, it is complete, it's so remote, we're not even gonna talk to anyone.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I loved seeing that.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was seeing that.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I try to respect now more the creative process that I've seen how you know deep work works.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Given that uh experience, what can the evolving office that you talk about learn from that industry?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because uh, we are all increasingly working in a hybrid or a remote uh kind of a world.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so what can you learn from that industry and start applying it in this new evolving office ecosystem?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is exactly what I looked at as I developed my platform.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking to myself, there are so many smart people who've written, you know, the the books that everyone reads on these.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go read all those books.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, Chin Sent Mahai, who wrote the book on flow, and Cal Newport and James Clear and go down the list.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're like really smart people have written on this.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if you read all those books, let us be super honest.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: They boil down to a handful of principles, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And each person illustrates it with his own examples or her own examples, they have their own phraseology, but they come down to simple things that are true.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're true of humans.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think is very interesting, what really inspired me to create something was okay, those principles, how have I seen them work?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about film, right?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed that that is true.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can do the things everyone tells you, time box.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give myself 45 minutes to get to inbox zero, right?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the more you tell yourself 45 minutes, you magically get it done in 45 minutes.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's weird, you know?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that little thing, you don't wander off, right?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: We schedule time for deep work.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like my calendar, you can't book time with me from nine to noon.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Every day, nine to noon is my deep work where I actually do the thinking that is the more valuable thing in the day.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And these principles are very true.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we encourage those, we help those, and when you use the suka, you do that.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the the ingredient of community that I thought was kind of a new thing, which I hadn't seen done so well, which is the Nike Running Club was a good example for me where Nike can sell you, Swami, a pair of shoes, right?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can lace up your shoes and go for a run, right?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: All on your own.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yet a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you are part of a group of people who are also high performers, you run faster, you run more regularly, you're more accountable.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: There is something about the energy of a group.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I practice yoga, which you know, you and I have talked about.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's how I met my wife, she was in my yoga class, and I could practice yoga here at home alone.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I go to a studio to practice because there's something about being around the energy of a room of people who are all of a certain mindset, a certain energy, and they want to feel in their bodies a way, feel in their souls a certain way, and you're in that room, and it is a more magical experience than me sitting with an iPad watching a YouTube video of someone telling me, you know, to do down dog.
• 18:50
  unknown: Right.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that was something that I wanted to build.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we built into the sukka, is say, hear all the tools you need, all in one, right?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Helps you time box, block your calendar, block your distractions, turn off your phone, all that stuff.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, you can be part of a community.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: You can see people around the world also working.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can't hear them.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not distracting that way.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it's almost like if you're in a coffee shop and you look up, and every now and then you're like, oh wow, this whole room is full of other writers writing the next great screenplay, you know, or uh, or if you're in study hall in college.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that was something for you.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Where I used to go to the library to study, not because I would chat with everyone, but just every now and then you looked up, you're like, oh man, we're all studying for finals.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is cool, we're all in it together.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that feeling we're all in it together is why the Nike Run Club has a hundred million members.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's why you go further more regularly when you're with people who are also trying to do something great with their lives.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: So uh talk to me about uh the inspiration for the Suka platform and uh uh and you call it the coffee shop experience.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, we do call it the coffee shop.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So so tell me a little bit about that.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you, when I decided that I wanted to be very focused in my life and get more done, and I realized you know I wanted to accomplish more things in less time and feel better.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: I told you, I read a bunch of books because I'm like, this is not a new problem.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: People have solved it.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was very informative reading the books.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Looked at a lot of the apps out there because there are apps that help you track your time.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: There are some great apps that play music for you, you know, Brain FM, Endel, like there are a lot of options for this.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't find one that pulled together all of these things in one.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Just said, you know what?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here is one button.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to open your music app and do your website blocker and have a phone, you know, distraction app so you don't open WhatsApp or TikTok or whatever on your phone.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Although TikTok you can't get in India right now, right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, Instagram or whatever.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: So there were all these different things.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, what if you had all of these with one button?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: So when I go to start my day, click that button.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: My music starts.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: I can choose, you know, we have over a thousand hours of different music, all ambient, you know, scientific best practices, 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, no vocals, you know, like that.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can also listen to streams or surf or wind or rain or whatever you want.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it puts your computer in focus mode, it locks your phone to the whole thing, so you can work.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then adding to that was this sense of community we talked about, which is oh, the coffee shop, which I really thought the coffee shop was a great mental model to say, I've worked in coffee shops, and there's something kind of fun when you're like around other people, not chatting, but just like we're all doing something with our life, you know?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, there's this one coffee shop in West Hollywood that I loved when I was.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: In film.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's the coffee being the corner of Fairfax and Sunset Boulevard.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's right across from the director's guild.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go there on weekends to read scripts because as an executive, people are always trying to get you by their projects, right?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you end up with a stack of scripts you have to read.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go there, and it was a very popular coffee shop with writers.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I love the fact that I would be there reading and I would look up and you would see the full spectrum of writers in that room on their MacBooks, you know, tapping away.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you would have, you know, in one corner, like the old weird guy who's written like five studio movies, and everyone's like kind of afraid to talk to him because it's like, oh my God, he's here.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the guy who wrote Cape Fear.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'd have sitting next to you two guys that just got off the bus from Iowa that are writing their first, you know, TV series.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it was fun to be in there because there was everyone trying to do something with their life.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that that is really that was the inspiration for me, saying, like, how can I make an all-in-one app that's very affordable that takes all these principles?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Very nice.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Very uh brilliant inspiration and great uh analogy that you picked up from to build this platform.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so one uh question that I had as you spoke uh as you worked in the film industry, uh, there's this whole aspect of deep work uh you know, remote work which you spoke about.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what did you learn about mastery and excellence uh in the remote world versus uh a world where I come to an office where I'm sitting with lots of people?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: So what did you learn of out of these guys when they were really masters of their craft, right?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, how did they build the excellence in this one word?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I've noticed, and I've spoken to hundreds of our thousands of members of Suka.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: That one word is discipline.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, here's a funny thing.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've ever experienced this, or anyone listening has experienced this.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is sometimes when you're in the office and uh, you know, like the joke from the old movie about you, your boss comes by and is like, Swami, where's the TPS report?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, oh, I should do the TPS report, right?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's given to you.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I've heard from a number of our members.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: They said, as strange as it sounds, sometimes the hardest thing of my day is knowing where to start.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: I look at my task list and I'm like, oh, there's 17 things on here.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which one do I start with?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that one sounds too big.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes there's almost like a paralysis around that, which leads to procrastination, which leads to, oh, I should put that load of laundry in, or, you know, I didn't wash the dishes from dinner last night, things like that.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you stall because sometimes it's hard to get going.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things in the new version of Sukha that we're working on is you have an assistant who looks through your task list and says, Hey, you know what, this priority thing you're working on yesterday, you're almost done with that.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you finish that?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because it'll feel great to cross it off your list.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that the discipline thing in terms of like becoming a master, it applies from the first moment you sit down to say, Let me get going.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you do that and you're dedicated to it, many people have written, you know, the 10,000 hours of mastery and the many theories on this, but it starts with the first step, and that step is the hardest.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: I always thought that uh the uh you know, the masters of the film industry, uh the fact that you worked so closely with them, uh there's a real feeling that they just are not disciplined, right?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they look for they look for the uh moment and you know lots of time gets wasted.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: So is discipline a reality?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is it true?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you this.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: I saw this true both in tech now and in film.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna sound a little crazy, but but it's my experience, and I can give you a thousand examples of this.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: The most successful people that I know were not necessarily the most raw talented.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: They were the most tenacious.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: There were writers that I worked with back when I was in film that I see now are still making movies and doing the stuff.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they were maybe not the most talented ones that I knew, but they're the ones who could take a hundred no's and just keep writing the next screenplay and just trying to make their screenplay better or trying to make their TV series better.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was at South by Southwest this week.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a writer-director that I knew 10 years ago.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: He had his premiere.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought to myself, I a friend who's his agent was like, Hey, do you want to come to this premiere?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be in Austin.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, he really stuck with that through the hard years.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: He was just, he was so tenacious, and he was not the most talented.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: He will tell you himself, he's not the most talented writer, he's not the most talented director, but he was tenacious.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen the same thing in tech.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all the overnight success of like suddenly everyone's driving this or taking a that or ordering this SaaS product, whatever.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was years of just like refining and failing, refining and failing and iterating.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Most people give up.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're like in six months, oh, this isn't Instagram.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't go to a billion-dollar acquisition with 14, you know, employees.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a failure.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'll move on to the next thing.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like I'm building the Amazon of India.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, you know, it didn't work out this month.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll choose something else, right?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: But man, the people who are just like, no, I'm gonna keep trying to get it 1% better every day, that compounds.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the ones that I've seen win.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the mastery, I know the writers and the directors that I worked with, the ones who are making student movies, you look at their early films, they're not always genius material, but they kept at it, they kept honing their craft because they were like, I'm just going to make another.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, how does that uh I would say skill or that tenacity or the tenacious uh capability that you talk about?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: How do you make that come alive in the Sukha platform?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll tell you, Sukha is a tool, it is an assistant for you.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's it wants to give you the reward of feeling great.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this the concept of sukka.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's a happiness of self-fulfillment.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: I am executing the thing that I'm great at.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in my lane doing the thing I'm great at, and it feels really good, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that hopefully becomes a reward.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was um Huberman who was talking recently about the way our brains have changed because now we get dopamine simply by scrolling.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can lie on your back on the sofa and scroll, and you get the reward of feeling good with no effort other than this, right?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrible.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes doing things that develop that dopamine reward requires some time.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: So with Suka, we do a lot of gamification.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: We do a lot of things to make you feel like I'm making progress.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is my points for today, this is how well I block distractions and stay on task.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we try and make it fun.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll tell you, I'd be lying to you if I told you Suka is the end of the road.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Suka is the assistant, the tool to make you get there faster.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it is ultimately up to you to say, I want to do this.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, this is one of the best things I ever heard from someone who is in in Suka, one of the members.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: I asked him one day, hey, listen, I want to understand why do you pay us?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I work here and I'm inside the bubble.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really see Suko from the outside like you do.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell me why do you pay us money?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Minimal amount of a few dollars a month, right?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he said this.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: He said, at 3 p.m.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can be playing with my children.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or at 6 p.m.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can say, where the hell did the day go?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference is, did I open Suka in the morning?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: He said, That's why I pay you, because I want to be playing my children at three o'clock.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: He has been with us for over a year.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: I also saw that uh Lenny uh has given you a recommendation, right?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so what was his take on Suka and what did he find exciting about platform?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Lenny came in really early.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's an early version called Centered.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh you know, this idea, and Lenny really locked onto it because he understands, like he may be a technically a product manager, right?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: But he understands the world of distraction very well.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he has thought deeply about how do you be good at what you do.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: In his case, he's a PM.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, my wife is a head of product for a bank here, and you know, it's a different world when you are doing stories and epics and you know, than uh when you're sitting and coding or you're sitting and writing a blog.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: But that I think was really his connection of saying, like, this is a real problem in the world of how do we do great things if we're just distracted all the time.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Contraminds is a podcast dedicated to decoding people, minds, strategy, and culture.
• 31:33
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• 31:41
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• 31:44
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• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And now back to the show.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm connecting the point that you said, which is to build tenacious capability, distraction and uh ensuring that you're not distracted is also uh a mindset that you need to build, and that's uh very, very important.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, what does distraction uh do to uh uh you know you getting worse or better?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, what does it do in your experience?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll tell you the research on this is that when you are distracted, when you change what you're thinking about, it can be either to something totally distracting.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: I opened up YouTube for a minute, right?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or it can be, well, I decided I'm gonna go work on this other thing I need to do for a few minutes and come back to this first thing.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, like multitask.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Which I used to multitask a lot.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I learned, and I think you know, Cal Newport talks about this.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people talk about monotasking, was that our brains really do not multitask.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're not like a multi-threaded processor.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: We really are monotaskers that context switch and say, okay, let me store where I was with this, reserve that in my mind, burn some mental brain energy holding that in memory while I go to do this other thing, load the context for that, work on that, and then store that context and come back to the first thing, right?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: It actually burns a lot of time.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the research shows that when you do that, it takes you about 22 minutes, 15 to 22 minutes to actually get back into a state of focus, a state of flow.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just jump in between these things.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when I noticed that in my own life, that was one of my inspirations with Suko to say, like, what is everything we could do to encourage someone to say, I'm going to stay on this thing and then show them the reward of saying, wow, you you know, you finished this 30% faster than your estimate.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because you just stayed on this.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't jump around and then answer some emails and then you know, go check WhatsApp or whatever.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: You literally just did this.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't that feel great?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's noon, you're done.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and we really, I mean, for me, one of the things I really want to do is give people that sense at the end of the day of wow, I did something, I feel great, as opposed to where did the day go?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, like I felt like I was busy all day, but I didn't really cross anything off my to-do list.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: I've been there and it feels terrible.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: So uh one of the questions that come come up to me, Steven, is you are full of questions.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is great.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: So no, because I think you are uh making me think and uh you know ask a lot of questions.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so clearly, uh, is it not something like Slack?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because Slack does that to me.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I you know I can be in my community, I keep talking to people.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but does Slack uh really uh help you uh you know move away from distraction?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Does it build community?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh does it make you more productive?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think you've got a view of productivity which is very different from uh what the world thinks is production decent.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about that?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, okay.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna play this game with you.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make the argument, like I'm Stuart Butterfield, and I'm telling you why Slack is great for your organization.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna make the argument from the other side, the Cal Newport side, of like this is a massive waste of your time.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this is fun.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, this is not exactly what Stuart or Cal would say, but it's generally the sense.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Stuart would say, listen, before we came along, you know, because he had that company Tiny Spec that uh making games, and Slack was their internal messaging tool, right?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and eventually became the product, and their games died, right?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I think he would say, listen, you had email this clunky sort of like ping-pong game back and forth with you know asynchronous kind of replies, and it's really pain and slow, and da da da.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: We made that so frictionless.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Swami, I'm just about to release this report.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have that new number?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, it's 16% for last month.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, great, thanks.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put it in like a report, right?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: How beautiful I've made your work experience, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as we do that, you we start to build community because you and Swami and Tony and you're all sort of chatting about things, and you know, and it's it builds a team spirit, right?
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh more so than like sending an email distribution list of like, hey guys, who who did something fun this weekend?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know what I mean?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like very okay, so I would respect that that is a true point of view.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's more frictionless, fast responses, have a little sense of fun and community, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on the opposite point of view, I would say, listen, Slack is basically iChat dressed up in a business suit.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if this were a business tool, it would not give you animated emojis of Godzilla dancing, and it wouldn't allow you to post gifts of like, you know, tennis matches or ping pong matches.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it is full of tools basically just to abuse you and waste your time and have long conversations that you would have in iChat, but now you can pretend you're doing it and you know work.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a massive distraction, and really you should limit the amount of time, just like you know, Cal talks about like this is the time to do email, time block every morning.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: I do an hour of email, you don't get a response from me the rest of the day.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Similar thing, just like Slack is just a slipperier, slipper, slip, slipper slope of how to get caught up in messaging that becomes wasting your time.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: How's that for two points of view?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: So uh how have you uh how have you plugged that in a the Suka platform uh in terms of the mental model, the concepts?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so how have you uh ensured that uh this problem that you talk about uh is plugged in your center?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you uh an answer you would not expect.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So something I learned in my film career because I I was very lucky to work with great writers.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: I worked with a number of the writers who get a million, two, three million dollars of script.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're further along in their careers, they've established themselves as masters of this, right?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: And something that I noticed that they do was very applicable to me when I developed Suka.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is gonna sound crazy, but go with me for a moment, and I'll explain why it's connected, okay?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about movies for a moment.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the biggest budget movies that have crazy explosions and CG creature thing, you know, all this stuff going on, right?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you boil them down to their their heart, their soul, right?
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to say, Swami, I know you need 200 million dollars to go make uh you know Star Trek.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you two million dollars.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell the same story in a way that's compelling if you don't get to have photon torpedoes and and spaceships and Klingons?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about some of these movies and you do that, you do that sort of exercise of, well, what if I only had two million dollars?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: You find that most of these stories boil down to stories of family.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you a couple examples.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: When we did uh the reboot of Star Trek, you know, Star Trek had kind of died, and then Alex and Bob said, I think we have an idea with JJ of how to bring this back.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you watch that movie, which you know made a bunch of money, brought the entire franchise back, that movie is simply the story from the Bible of Kane and Abel.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk and Spock are going to kill each other.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: They are two brothers who are going to kill each other.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if you watch that movie, they lose the movie until they have that fight on the bridge where they decide to get over their stupid animosity and team up, and then they win the movie.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if you took all the photon torpedoes out, it's a story you could tell with two brothers who are farmers.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you look at Mission Impossible 3, you look at, you know, a bunch of these other movies, they're basically you're diehard.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: These movies are basically a story of divorce.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: People understand that there's something uniquely relatable about oh, you know, my my parents are having an issue.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, many of us have divorced parents or our best friends are divorced, or we're divorced, you know, and it is a it is a model that you understand of like mommy and daddy need to get along, right?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when you look at uh true lies, Mish Muscle III, Die Hard, blah, blah, blah, many of those movies, if you take out the bombs with the red LED counters and the planes and all that stuff, right?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: You end up with it's a story of divorce.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about a man and a woman who need to come together and they'll win, or they don't, and it's a tragedy, and they lose.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I say this to you because that model I saw these great writers do where they would say, I need to make sure that I know the$2 million version of this movie before I can write the$200 million version, right?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's easy to add photon to a prego.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to add Godzilla.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what is it before that?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: That is really when I was developing the suka.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, what is the simple model of this?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: What is the thing that everyone understands that has already been established?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to be smart, I just need to say, how does this work in real life and how can I make that beautiful and online?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that is why I call it the coffee shop.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think most many people have the experience of going to a coffee shop and either quietly sitting or thinking or reading or pulling out their laptop and work on their laptop or working on their phone or doing something.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it is not like you're going to a networking event where you know you and I are chatting, exchanging business cards.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is simply it's sometimes nice to be around the energy of other people.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you you can maybe chat with some.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you go to the register and you chat with the girl making the coffee, or you chat with the guy in line behind you.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a social element that's okay.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were to go up to every person at the cafe and be like, How are you doing today?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing today?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone would be like, That guy's got to go.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't understand the decorum, the rules of being in the coffee shop, enough, you know?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that was my model, is to say, as you're working, just like if you were in the Nike Run Club, like you could talk to people, but you it's not a social hour.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: In Suka, you can work your stuff on your break.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can see other people, is there group chat?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can go in there, see what other people are working on.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Swami finished his dissertation, whatever.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Post that, hey, Swami, I don't know you.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm, you know, in Austin, Texas, you're in India, you're in Mumbai.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's your dissertation on?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's on, you know, this sort of like esoteric thing.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's really congratulations.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: I saw you just posted, you finished it, you know, and that kind of feeling of like, oh man, you ran six miles today.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: I saw your Strava.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that was awesome.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: It feels great when someone sees you for what you're doing.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I wanted to give people the ability.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you a true story.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: A couple months ago, there's a guy in Sukha, one of the members, and he posted that he finished his dissertation.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: He was coding.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's a, I think by day, he's an administrator at a school.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: But at night, he's been working on his PhD in some sort of engineering.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know exactly what kind of software engineering.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he posted in there because every, you know, now and then we finish something, you can post once a day, like, oh, I finished this thing.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And all these people around the world said, Hey, Roy, congratulations.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've been watching you for months in the coffee shop, you know, working away at this.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: And like, your discipline paid off.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Today is the big day.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I run the platform.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know these people do not know him.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're all around the world.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: But they felt a sense of like we're in this together.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: So when he ran the Boston Marathon, they may not be in Boston, but they're all in the Nike Run Club.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Roy, we saw you finish the marathon.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome, man.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's lovely and that feels great.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that makes you run the next marathon.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the points that you made is this whole uh you know feeling of uh you know being as a community is really what you're talking about.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um generally what I find is the number of employees in companies, you know, it's so large.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's a lot of indifference that starts to set in, right?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: This you become cynical, you're not very uh motivated.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: So so clearly uh if I were to take the platform and want to apply it in an office environment, uh how would you apply that?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is actually what we do because we've been approached by a number of engineering managers, and I know that with small groups, 10 to 20 people, it seems to work where we set up a private group for them so they can have their own group chat, they can you know talk amongst themselves and feel like it's not you know outsiders like listening on their company talk.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it gives them a way of like having like you know productivity scores where they can look at each other and go, like, oh Swami, you had a great day today.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't get distracted at all.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was distracted three times by you know WhatsApp or whatever.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it allows them to post what they're working on and in a way that feels warm and friendly and it builds a camaraderie more than, hey, I finished my Jira ticket and I post it to Jira and I'm you know, I'm going out now.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's no emotion to that, but there is when it's like, oh, that big bug that came down the platform.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: I worked on it for four hours, I hit complete, it posted the group chat, and everyone in the group chat was like, Thank you for fixing that.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: We got so many complaints this morning from customers on that.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that that organizational sort of like tool to say within my team, this makes us feel connected, makes us feel proud to be here.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: That I've seen work.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: It may work for larger companies.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't done that yet.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's mainly been uh like a company in the Netherlands, for example, is I think 22 people, which is the largest group that we've done.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so clearly, uh, you know, you can use this within the company, you can use it individually if you're remote.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you get a feeling of being in a community, and the concept of productivity and therefore feeling that I'm uh you know I'm a part of a larger group.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: Key.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you define happiness and fulfillment uh if we start practicing something like this?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you this, and this is something that I learned as I I wouldn't say I mastered yoga, but I would say my yoga practice feels to me something that is now part of me as opposed to this like if I play basketball, it's it's comedy.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there's no part of me playing basketball that makes me feel like, oh, I was built to do this.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrible.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know the idea.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: But like with yoga, when I go into class, I fall into that flow state.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know anything.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: For that 60 or 90 minutes, like there is no world around me.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: It just feels like this is me doing the thing that is so beautiful that I do well.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Builder.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want to offer that feeling to everyone for whatever they do.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whether they are a writer, they're writing like there are a couple people writing books.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: I see them on you know the little cameras writing books.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: There are bloggers, there are obviously a lot of coders, a lot of engineers, developers, and there are a bunch of like UI, UX designers.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: People who basically are at home, have a couple of hours of knowledge work to do, right?
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that idea of like of suka, that feeling of like I'm doing the thing that I'm great at, and it feels great.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that I know comes from, like you said, actually doing things and having discipline.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you can get a short-term dopamine hit by saying, Oh, I just scrolled on Instagram for an hour, but at the end of the hour, you feel bad about yourself.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like I wasted my time.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: I gave Mark Zuckerberg my eyeballs and my attention, and an hour of my life that let's be you and I talked about this.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: The scarcest commodity is just time.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are all going to die.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is the one certainty.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when you give that hour of your life to Mark Zuckerberg, he's happy to get it and he sells it to advertisers.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: But you never get it back.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that's a that's a fantastic way to uh you know, move into my rapid round.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, here we go.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: So the first question that I have for you is uh, what does success mean to you?
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna have my first child this November.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you a big part of how I decided to do this is at some point my child is gonna be like, this is what my dad does.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted my son, we're gonna have this November, and I'm hoping to have a girl in two years, Satya.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want them to feel proud about that.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought about oh, my daddy made Die Hard Nine, or my daddy was on the Wolverine sequel, and my you know, but it's just that's not success.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: It may be a job that a lot of people are envious of, like, oh wow, you're an executive vice president at the studio, whatever.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: But really, it's the same as making soap.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here's this year's soap, it smells this way, it is this star in it.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, success is someday my child is gonna go, you know what my dad does, and it's really cool.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very nice.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what's one piece of advice that you got which you really uh you know value even today?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you, this is gonna sound so simple, but I found it so true, which is in many democracies we have a set schedule for voting, right?
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, every two years in this country we vote for this kind of office, every four years we vote for that, every six years we vote for this.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, we vote every day a hundred times a day for the world we want to live in.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: The way we treat the mailman affects how he is going to treat the next person, and you just all day long you are voting for how you want the world to be.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not every two years or four years or six years.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's yes, we have you know presidents and prime ministers that come and go, but it is how do I treat, you know, the child whose baseball you know cracked my window?
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't mean to do that.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: If he does it every week, you know, we're gonna have a talk.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, by going to him being like, hey, you know what, this is what happened.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: You did this, this is the result, this is you know how we fix it.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you treat that in such a way where that affects how he's gonna go forward and take risks in his life or her life.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that was it.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's that we vote every day, hundreds of times a day, for the world that we want.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: What does work-life balance mean to you?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, right now I I'm working a lot because I know as we get, as my wife gets more pregnant this year, there'll be more and more, you know, visits to OBGYNs and you know, things like that.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: So right now I'm working a lot to get a lot of feedback from our members trying to make this platform more beautiful every day, 1% more beautiful each day.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know come November I'll be, you know, not sleeping a lot.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't give you a good answer on work-life balance right now because I am working a lot so that I can have life later in the year.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: A new little life, little one.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh when you think back and looked at some of the craftsmen that you worked with in movies, yeah.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what do what does work intensity mean and what does work-life balance mean?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'll tell you the the intensity in my mind is really goes back to those ideas of discipline and tenacity.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the writers with whom I got to work, where I was honored to work with them.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like I became smarter because I worked with them.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: They were tenacious about learning and you know, reading, not just going to see other people's movies, but getting the screenplay and reading it on the page.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: What did that look like on the page that it could become that?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, or what did it look like on the page that we could get Swami to star in it?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: What does it screenplay look like that gets Brad Pitt to do the movie?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the discipline of saying I'm gonna sit down every morning for three hours and write.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think this Ron Bass, he has a practice where he says, in the morning, I write for several hours before I even talk to my wife.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because he said, once I start talking to my wife, my children, I hear their voices and I can't hear my character's voices anymore.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he said, when I wake up, I just go to my little work, you know, his work area, his office.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, that's when I write.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then once I feel like I've gotten out my writing for the day, I can go and interact because now those voices have already spoken.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, with the work-life balance, I think everyone needs to strike it for themselves.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, I acknowledge it this year.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: My work is heavily loaded in the first six, eight months, and then the back half of the year will be a lot of life.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that's up to everyone else.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing I saw with the great writers and directors do is they're tenacious, they have a voracious, you know, sort of hunger for learning, and they're disciplined every day.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every day, nine to noon, I sit here and I work quietly.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: How do I stop being dyspector?
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, I don't know if you know Nir Aale, who uh writes a lot about internal and external triggers and has written some brilliant stuff.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he and I have spoken a few times while he's been in Singapore.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you I know you say that question with a smile and you laugh as you you ask it, because it is about mastering your internal triggers.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what are the things like we talked about?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes you look at your task list and it looks so long, you don't know where to begin.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you go to do the laundry or you go to wash the dishes, right?
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because your internal trigger is like, I can't do this.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes there's the external trigger of, oh, that notification on my phone from WhatsApp.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: I should see what they've said.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think part of the solution, and you know this, part of the solution is you make a decision to, you know, lock your phone while you work or you know, do whatever.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the other part is, you know, tools, and I make one tool, but there are other great tools out there, like Freedom and Forest and stuff like that.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_00: You find the tool that works for you and assists you.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do it um solely by a tool, but it sure can help.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_02: What does AI too do to this world of distraction?
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: What does AI do?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: To this world of distraction and focus.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know what this the sad part is AI because it self-optimizes so quickly?
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the distractions we talk about, you know, the ones we were just laughing about, the oh my, you know, my push notification on my phone just came up, right?
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine how that gets better and better and better now.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right now it's kind of a joke.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh, my phone's dinging, you know, like it's done that for 10 years, right?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: 10, 12 years.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when it knows exactly the right moment?
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not dinging where I'm not going to answer it.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's learned me and knows exactly the weak moment.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you know what?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: Before Steven goes to bed, that's the right time to show him shoes that he's going to buy.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I get the push notification for shoes at the moment where I'm like, oh, I'm tired, but I yeah, you know.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a dark answer, you know.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope AI, you know, it's better mouse and a better mousetrap at the same time.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: But swab me, I can't tell you, yeah, it's coming hard.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_02: What would be your advice to an 18-year-old in an university today?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: It would be two things.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: One thing is that, and this is my dad speaking, okay?
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: It is that if you understand the first principles of the thing that you're passionate about, that will always serve you.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, now with being a software engineer, developer, there's a lot of vibe coding, right?
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of like, well, we just I want to have an app clone Airbnb for me, and it clones Airbnb for you, right?
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, lovable V0 bolt to all these things, right?
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: That is great in that it makes it gives you a lot of leverage to magnify your own efforts.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't have to go write the whole thing.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: But fundamentally, you should understand like the framework by which that's done.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it helps magnify your efforts.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need a team of 10 people to build something.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you and your partner can do it, right?
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that is one thing, which is whether it is philosophy, whether it is, you know, linguistics, whether it is, you know, coding, whatever that thing is, design, go back to the first principles and learn why these things are the way they are, because that will serve you down the road.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: Even if later you use the tools to magnify your effort, you'll understand what they're doing.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're just saving time, right?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the second thing I would say is as it regards the thing everyone's talking about right now, which is understand the different generative AI tools that are available in your area, which for a lot of people it's LLMs, right?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this large language model helps me to write or code or write things, whatever.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it is image generation, video generation, like I'll tell you, I was in LA a couple weekends ago and saw a bunch of friends, some of whom are still in film.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it has absolutely reached that point where they're like, most of these screenplays, you look at most of the Marvel movies, they could be ridden by a computer.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not surprising.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, here's what Iron Man does, here's his flaw, here's how the enemies always try to get him.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here's what the Hulk does, here's his flaw.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: Dream up a character that does this thing that annoys them, is going to destroy the world with some unique weapon, and then you know, right.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna be long.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the writer's guild and you know is trying to hold off as long as they can saying, well, you know, it has to have a certain percentage of human input.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, is something copyrightable if it doesn't have human input?
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's changing so rapidly where you know you need to understand how these tools work, whether it is generative text, image, video, whatever the thing is, or even like if you're uh working on DNA or a protein synthesis or some sort of drug discovery, understand how it is iterating through those thousands of different molecules to say here might be the one that helps with this kind of brain plaque, you know.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: So those are my two first principles, and understand how AI is going to affect your business.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two things I would say to an 18-year-old.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: What did failure teach you?
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, humility.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be super honest.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: I sold my first company in my mid-20s.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was brilliant, I thought I was way smarter than I am, not that smart.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: I just work hard, right?
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: But man, so I mean, like failing.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, can I tell you?
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: When I left my job at Fox, which was a pretty well-regarded, you know, prestigious job, and I said, okay, I see what's happening in my studio.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's all just sequels and stuff like that.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to be the guy at 40 years old, 50 years old making diehard nine, right?
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, I'm gonna go back into tech and build something.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of my friends in film, they were all watching.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what's Piri doing?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: How's it going?
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is this gonna work?
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: What's he doing now?
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Has anyone spoken to him?
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was that kind of scrutiny.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that failed.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: I raised, I raised three million dollars of that, which I lost.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt really bad.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had like three quarters of a million of my own money in and two and a half plus of uh-ish of other people's money.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: I felt terrible at losing their money, felt terrible at failing.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I was so embarrassed and so ashamed, I moved to New York.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: I just had to get out of LA because everywhere I bumped into someone, they're like, oh, how's it going with your company?
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it went bankrupt.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for asking.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel miserable.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I moved to New York, and one of the lessons was humility.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, okay, this is what this feels like.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried as hard as I thought I could.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: Did not work.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: And another was, and this was given to me by a friend of mine who actually he was an IIT guy who now runs a large business.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, he did all the stonework for the Indira Gandhi airport and the Mumbai airport and the Bahrain and the Causeway in Saudi Arabia.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's done huge, done very well for himself.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: But he gave me this advice when I was going to close the company.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: He said, while it's fresh in your mind, sit, sit, take out a pad of paper, not a not a not your phone, not your computer.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Take a pad of paper and a pencil.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, on that pad, write what you learned.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: He said, It's going to go away.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: You will forget in six months, you will completely forget in a year or two.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: Write the things you want to remember for next time.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I keep from both of my failed companies, I keep that paper and I look at it every now and then as I proceed forward, like with the Suka company, and say, Am I making these mistakes again?
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that is what I what I learned from that failure.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: So fantastic conversation.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having me.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic conversation.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_02: I must tell you that uh the nuggets that you shared uh were really, really uh, I would say authentic.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_02: There was a lot of honesty and integrity that I could see and spontaneity.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_02: That was something that was uh that was something oozing out of the conversation that we had.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it was lovely, and I really love your platform.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's the reason why I thought this conversation made a lot of sense.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm sure people who want to look at uh building mastery, uh wanting to build productivity and focus need these kinds of tools, and you've really thought through it uh from industries that are really diverse and adjacent.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that is really what I can see in the product.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: I wish you the very best, and thanks for taking time to talk to me.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is such a pleasure to talk to you.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me on.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if I can help with any in the future, you know I'm here.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contraminds.com.
• 1:04:31
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• 1:04:37
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• 1:04:43
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• 1:04:45
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• 1:04:48
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• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening and stay safe.