And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d bear the pain of necrotizing ulcerative gingivo stomatitis. If you made me speak the words, you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s on the menu. Hey Tony, we’re serving. Takeaways from film work, so you flow and do your best work. Steven Pury brings lessons from his work in film, which is inherently remote and distributed to help increase your personal and team productivity. Time boxing, monottasking, focus music, dopamine management, and more, will all help you achieve and maintain a flow state. Steven is CEO of The Sua Company. On Tony’s take 2. Tales from the gym. Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. Here is takeaways from film work, so you flow and do your best work. It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome Steven Puri to nonprofit Radio. Steven is the founder and CEO of the Sua Company. Suka means happiness from self fulfillment in Sanskrit. The Suka is a focus app that bundles all the tools necessary to have a focused experience and a healthy productive workday. He has a background in TV and film. With names like Fox, DreamWorks, and Sony, and including computer generated visual effects for 13 movies, plus Independence Day, which won the Academy Award for visual effects. I know. See, you don’t have to, I, I, I’m, I’m certain that what I’m saying is truthful. You got this. The guy’s a firm right here, he’s validating everything I say and I know you gave it to me. I know it’s correct. The company’s at the suca.co and Steven is on LinkedIn. Steven Puri, welcome to nonprofit radio. This is great. I hope we have a very entertaining and hopefully helpful episode. Already. Well, you’re you may be the first guest who’s uh felt necessary to affirm the the facts in your bio. Just appreciating it. You’re giving the aha aha. We know, we know it’s I can come along if you’d like. I appreciate the validation. No, no, don’t, so. Um, yes, you sent me a very interesting pitch. Where should we begin? We’re not a beer, by the way, this is a very interesting pitch. Oh, you opened a can of, he says it’s water. Rambler. Rambler. It sounds like a beer to me, but he says, you know what, I was on a Zoom and knowing that I’m in Texas, it was like 10 a.m. last week, and a woman said, Is that a beer? I’m like, it’s 10 a.m. in the morning. She’s like, well, you live in Texas, so I don’t know. I was like, OK, fair enough. You know what, you win that round. That, that one’s yours. I’m older, I’m old enough that my, uh, the family car when I was born was a Rambler. Oh wow. We had an old Rambler, and then we switched to a Ford Torino, but right before you got that AMC, the bubble AMC. My mom had an AMC wagon, not a pacer. Now you. She didn’t have the pacer, but uh my mom eventually did get an AMC wagon, yes. Yeah, yeah, those were the days, carburetors, you know, carburetors, fuel that was those were the days when fuel injection was written on the car. It was part of the, it was part of the, it was the biggest feature fuel injected. We got to get one of those. Newfangled cars. Yes, one of the injectors when the carts went out. I know. OK, so you’re so curious because I remember you want to flow states. We’re gonna talk about work with all sorts of things. Where should we begin? Well, I want to let’s put together, uh, remote productivity. Explain how these things intersect for those of us who are not acquainted I certainly not acquainted with how films work. We’re all consumers of film, but nobody knows how they work. Happy to spell any of that out for you. So yeah, the quick summary of my career is, it’s somewhat Forrest Gump-like in that I had very lucky things drop in my lap. I would like to believe I’ve coupled that with some hard work to make something of those opportunities, right? So I was born, we’re talking about, you know, a few moments ago. The son of two engineers at IBM. So, you know, it’s like when your mom is a great figure skater, you probably learned to figure skate when you’re a kid, right? So I learned how to code. So I was a young engineer, went off to USC in Los Angeles, but made money working at IBM as a junior software engineer, right? Happen to be in Los Angeles at a great film school, you know, although I was not in the film school, USA is a famous cinema TV school. And I was there when film went digital, when computers became powerful enough to say we can manipulate film, right? So computer generated effects, nonlinear editing, Pro Tools for audio, all that sort of stuff like exploded, and I was there. Very fortunate. I spoke engineer and I spoke creative. So I started producing digital visual effects, complete falling ass backwards into, oh this is kind of cool. Oh, you could use my skills? Great. did about 14 movies as you know. Some better than others, but I did the effects for Braveheart with Mel, True Lies with Cameron, 7 with Fincher, like a bunch of look how he drops names. Mel, Cameron. These are amazing when you’re like 22 years old, it’s amazing opportunity. Most people would say Mel Gibson. You just say Mel. Did you not know who I meant? I did know who you meant, but it’s just, it’s just such a cool way of why you need it on the phone the other day with Cameron. Cameron and I were chatting, you know, rang me up, of course. I, I never called Cameron. I don’t need to. Cameron rings me. Send him to voicemail. Go ahead. Sorry, Mel and Cameron. OK, yeah, OK. So back to the point I was making. Oddfather, uh, which is the answer your question is, so I fell into doing film because film became digital and I knew computers. So I produced the digital effects for a number of movies including Met Roland Emrick and Dean Devlin when they’re going to do Independence Day, produced the digital effects for Independence Day for them. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects, which is super cool, you know, it takes a village to do that very remarkable part of that, right? And Roland Dean and I got along really well, so we set up a company going forward to do digital effects. So we raised about 15 million adventure. Went off, hired about 80 people, ran that for 4 years. We got an amazing offer from Das Berk, which is a big um media conglomerate in Germany. Bought us out when I was 28. Suddenly I have cash in my pocket. I’ve sold the company, and as one thinks in their twenties, you’re better looking than you are, you’re funnier than you are, more successful, you know, there’s a lot of luck involved in hindsight, and that is when I decided to get deeper into film. I said, rather than just making the digital part of someone else’s movie. Could I help getting it, uh, get a whole movie made and got on the studio track. That ended up, as you know, I was a vice president at 20th Century Fox, uh, so there I was running like the Die Hard franchise, Wolverine franchise, a lot of action summer movies. I was an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtz Norsey, which was the era of like Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek 11, Eagle Eye, like those kind of movies, um, and then. Uh, I had a moment where I was like, I don’t think anything I’m working on is actually that meaningful. You know, everything was kind of a, as you can see now in the box office, it’s like just all you can see are Avengers movies, spinoffs of Disney titles, Pixar movies, you know, Star Wars, you know, spinoffs, and I decided to get back into engineering cause it’s the other thing I knew and I was said I wanted to do something more meaningful. So I looked for things where I could contribute and one of the things to bring us to today was I’ve been very fortunate, as you said. To work with some really high performers who could do it sustainably, do it for a number of different causes, not just, you know, for movies or tech, but in a number of areas, and those lessons I share a lot today. It’s it’s why I built the website that I built, which is a flow state website. It’s why I lecture often. I’ve uh been lucky to to share a lot of the the things I’ve seen about how you can be sustainably a high performer. So a lot of this film work is remote work, that that’s how, that’s that’s the overlap between film and remote productivity. With the pandemic, it was a shock to the system, right? Suddenly Zoom became a verb. Everyone’s like, oh my God, we can’t work, right? Here’s the thing about film for 100 years. Every film has had remote, hybrid, and in person. Movies start with writers writing from their homes, their their writing partners’ living rooms from coffee shops. One idea gets some traction. You get a little production office two days a week, it’s like you meet with the costumer, what should they wear? You meet with the, you know, designer of the, the production designer, you meet with the location scout. Everyone goes off the rest of the week and works, you know, hybrid. And then you’re on set all day and all night for months on end in photography. It goes back to hybrid and then remote, but the funny thing is, in film you would never say this. If I were talking to you and you’re a producer, I’d be like, oh, Tony, you’re in the remote period of your film. You’d be like, what are you talking about, Puri, right? But if I said, oh, you’re in, you’re in development, you’re in pre-production, oh, you’re in prep, you’re in photography, or you’re in post, you’d be like, yeah, that’s where we are. We’re just code words for the exact same thing, that film’s done for 100 years. OK, that’s the kind of stuff we don’t know. Uh, we, it makes sense as you explain it. Uh, that’s why I came here very, very cogently, yes, but, uh, yeah, right, posts, we’re in post, yeah. You’re in. We’re we’re, I’m just, I’m just throwing out phrases to this, we’re in right now. We’re right now we’re in production, right? It’s we’re in production. Yeah, yeah, and this is actually principal photography. This is the, the leads, you know, this is not some second unit shooting backup footage. This is like we’re in, we’re we’re in principal production. You are the star of the series. If the podfather is in the episode, it’s principal photography. Along with the guest, OK, bringing principal photography right now. Excellent. All right. So you didn’t sound so much cooler than we’re on Zoom. I’m busy for that. I’m gonna be in principal photography. You have a way with words. Yeah. Um, well, you introduced me. This led you, uh, somewhere along your career, I guess you, uh, you studied the great minds of productivity. I got to work with. You name some of them on your website. It’s a good, I hope I can be productive without recognizing any of the great names of productivity because I didn’t, I don’t recognize any of the names in your. That section of your site, but tell me what you learned from drop some, drop some names like Mel and Cameron, drop some productivity names. OK, so I will tell you this I’m gonna introduce the names, not just as names, but as why they’re important, OK? So, yeah. There is a concept about flow states, which I know some portion of your audience who’s playing along at home or in their car, they’re like, I’m a flow master, I get it. Some maybe have a passing understanding of that, like they’ve heard it, they know it’s in the zeitgeist, but what is it, right? So let me explain to you why we’re talking about, for example, Mihai she sent me high, which is. He had a thesis. Wait, say his name slower. Mihai should say Mihai. OK, thank you. It’s that really long, uh, Hungarian name and yeah, on your, oh, the one on your site. OK, bingo, yeah, OK, so here’s the interesting thing about Mihai, right? Many interesting things. Here’s one. He had a thesis, he said, if you talk to high performers in very different disciplines, athletes, authors, artists, scientists. These guys and girls go into these concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous, the thing that moves the world, and they describe it in very similar ways, and he’s like, what’s up with that? So like Prometheus, he’s like, I wanna go up to Mount Olympus, bring down this fire and share with everyone. He did his research, he wrote the book called Flow. It is the seminal work on this. It is why we call it a flow state, and he said a great thing. He said, I chose this word. Because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. Which is we are all on the river, paddling to move ourselves forward. But if you will line your boat with the current. It carries you, it magnifies your efforts. You go further and faster. He said, that’s what these people have figured out how to do consistently. That I find fascinating because I’ll tell you my first flow state. I had never heard the word flow state before, but I had experienced where I was like, wow, what just happened? I did great work. I did it quickly, and I feel lifted up as opposed to depleted. And that was magical. OK, we are gonna talk about that in detail, uh, because, uh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna come to that, um, I, I think it’s something we’ve all experienced. I know I have, but how to crazy when how do you experience a flow state? Like what is it like for you? Well, I’m writing a, I’m writing a book on the type of fundraising that I do, planned giving fundraising. I’m writing a book. So there have been. A few times when I’m sitting and writing and I lose track of time, right? And and then I look back and it’s like it’s been 2 quarter hours and I would have thought it had been like a half hour or something and I, and then, and I look back and I’ve written, you know, 1500 words that’s a lot for one sitting. 1500 words, you know, so that’s what it’s like, that’s an example of what it, yeah, and it’s, it’s, it’s, it is exhilarating at the end. 2.5 hours, 2 1/4 hours. Where did it go? I, I had no idea. So, but I think everybody’s experienced these things, but I have another question that I that I find this fascinating. Were you listening to music or silence? No, silence. I find you have a, you have a tip on music. I know focus music. I, right, we’re getting, we’re getting ahead though. We’re right, OK, but I’ll answer your question. You asked me a question, so I don’t want to, you know, I, I have a, I have a background in improv. don’t say yes and yes and. So yes, uh, the, uh, the, the, the answer to your question, I, I find music distracting. Mhm Even if it’s classical music, it’s certainly if it’s Springsteen or Zeppelin or um Rolling Stones or anything I know the words do, then it’s highly distracting. But I’ve tried even classical, and then I, I, I get caught up too much of the music. So for me, music is a distraction, uh, and so it was not part of that. Those, those couple of times I’ve, I’ve been in that flow state, but, but I’d like to, all right, we’re gonna come back to that because I, I do wanna, I do want to come back to that. All right. So, um, so you’ve got, all right, you’ve got the, uh, the app, the Suka, the Suka app, right? And this just puts a lot of the, well, sua.co, yes, the sua, the sua.co. Don’t go to sua.co. I don’t know what you’re gonna find there, go to the, the original, you gotta go maybe not the original. You gotta go to the authentic, the real suka, the sua.co, the sua.co. That’s where the app is, which I’m sure encompasses all these things that we’re about to talk about because you have a lot of strategies, remote remote work strategies. You have a lot of passion for this. Well, I hope so. You’re devoted to, yeah, I hope, I hope you’re not devoted to something you don’t feel passionate about. That would be a horrible way to we’re gonna, yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna cut the mic because the guy talking about productivity is not moved by the work that he does. That’s, I think that’s a threshold. So that’s like in your screening somewhere like, do you care about what you do? Yeah, do you give a shit about what you do? Not really, but it makes me buttons. Yes, no, yeah, yes. All right, so you got some strategies, um, and some tactics. Strategies, tactics, tips, yes, ideas. What’s time boxing? Oh, great question. OK, so. I’m gonna tell you something to tell you something. The first thing I tell you is this, which is that highly concentrated state we talked about. You’ve experienced it, I’ve experienced it. We look up, you go, man, I wasn’t watching the clock, did great work, feel good, right? Your brain doesn’t drop into a flow state instantly. You don’t sit down and go, I’m in flow. Now, research, and there have been a lot of smart people have done the research. Anything smart I say on your pod is because someone else has done a lot of work, and I want to be very respectful of that, OK? So, research shows it takes 15 to 23 minutes for your brain to drop into that state where everything goes away, but the work, right? So if you get interrupted. It takes another 15 or 23 minutes to get back in, right? For that reason, if you want to do what Cal Newport would say is deep work, right, as opposed to shallower returning emails or paying bills, but the deep work, I’m writing my book, I’m doing my business plan, right? If you want to do that, you can’t do it in 5 10 minute increments. You can’t say, oh, between these two zooms, I have 19 minutes, I’ll go do some deep work. You need to block time. And here’s the thing is sometimes it feels weird to do that because people want to book meetings with you. You have to put it in your calendar, like it’s a meeting with you. It’s sacred time. Boundaries, exactly boundaries. And I’ll tell you, in this current company that I run, as well as the last company, when I became aware of this. We had a conversation with the team saying, hey, you know what? I would much rather that people came into the staff meeting and said, hey man, yesterday I had this thought, and everyone kind of looked and went, oh my God, what Tony said, like, It kind of changes like what we’re doing as opposed to remarks and staffing going, I returned all my emails and my, you know, slack inbox is empty. There no company wins because of shallow work, right? So if you want to encourage those kind of deep work, you have to say, where is this sacred time and agree upon it, which is to say you and I are working together and you say, you know what Steven, I’m really good 9 to 11 in the morning. Don’t slack, we have a deal. Don’t slack me at the time. Please don’t set client meetings at the time. Let’s just keep that sacred and let’s try it for a month and see what comes out of it. That idea of time blocking, excuse me, time blocking is really important if you want to do the things that move the world as opposed to. Homework The shallow work, uh, as opposed to the shallow work. Interesting. All right, um. All right, so yeah, devote time to yourself. You said 15 115 to 23 minutes to get into, yeah, so block an hour or two. Don’t block 15 minutes. Don’t block 30 minutes. Yeah, yeah, OK, OK. Monotasking Excellent one, and many people have written about this, which is, you know, there was a popularity, this idea of like, I’m a great multitasker, probably like became popular 1520 years ago, right? Yeah, I hated that. Yeah, exactly. So I will hate it with you and we’ll be bonded by this. As research shows, Multitasking, at least for most people on which we’ve done research, is actually just monotasking, where you do context switching. So it’s not actually that you’re like a computer that’s multi-threaded, where with one hand you’re painting, the other hand you’re writing a symphony, you know, and your eyes are driving, right? That is not actually what we do. It is sequential. It is to say, hey, I’m going to focus on my blog, but then I’m gonna get distracted and go over and like return some emails real quick, and then I’m gonna go over and do this other thing, right? Each time you do that, you’re monottasking. With the added burden of when you switch. You have to take where you are, the context of where you are in that blog, and save it in your mind, go, I gotta remember I’m at the 3rd paragraph or I was gonna write the thing about the thing that happened yesterday, right? Then you have to load in the context of the next thing you’re gonna do. Oh right, the emails. I had to return that email to Tony. So you are storing context, you’re reloading context, and when you switch back, you have to do the exact same thing. So you’re monottasking in the middle of that, burning all this brain energy trying to remember where you were with something. It doesn’t actually serve you. It serves you to start something and finish it. I’ve always thought that was that was the case that we, well, I, I’ve, I’ve seen research as we are, we are inherently poor multitaskers, and it always, it always just seemed like it was, it was you, you’re, you’re putting a finer point on it, but it always seemed like it was just sequential. Like people were just bouncing around and they’re calling it multitasking, but they’re just doing one thing at a time. There you go, because like you said, we can’t drive and send an email. And, and talk to somebody at the same time and paint and make dinner, yeah, yeah, yeah, so agreed. OK, all right, OK, so tell a story. I don’t want to just go through, you know, time bas boxing and tasking a good a story like. Tell us, tell, can you tell relate some of this to a film story that we’re gonna want to know like, well, I heard that about this. I’m watching and I just I’m gonna tell a story. You get your listen here we come, zip it up. And we’re gonna tell a story. I’ll tell you two stories. They both relate. Important principles about how to get the most out of your brain. With the story, right? OK. First thing you and I were talking about time blocking, right? And I brought the example of you saying to me, hey Steven, listen, 9/11 in the morning, golden time for me writing my blog or do we just block that out. Just don’t bug me at that time, right? What that speaks, what’s implicit in that. I you know your chronotype. Chronotype is the concept. There are times of day you are more adept at certain kinds of things. I’m gonna give you a film story the first time I encountered this. There is a famous screenwriter in Hollywood, Ron Bass, Rain Man, My Best Friend’s Wedding, like a bunch of stuff. He writes the kind of stuff that Hollywood A-list stars say yes, I’ll do that, right? He was infamous in Hollywood. He would not talk to his family in the morning. He would get up, not say hi to his wife, not talk to his kids. He’s like, listen, I’m not the dad who’s gonna be like, who wants pancakes, you know, like, who needs a ride to school? He said. Because when I start talking to you. I can no longer hear my character’s voices in my head. And this guy gets 1 to $2 million a script to write those words, right? Of course his family’s like, Dad, you go get that $2 million script. We’ll talk to you later. Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk to you. I’ll talk to you in the afternoon. But he was completely aware of his countertype, which is that 5 to 9 a.m. was golden dialogue time. In the afternoon he could do collaborative work. That’s when he would do studio meetings, meetings with other writers, he had all stable of writers he worked with, so he was intensely self-aware about his chronotype. So I share this with you as our first story, which is. If you want to determine your chronotype, you can do it for free. Grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Draw a little grid Monday through Friday, Monday, you know, afternoon, you know, morning and afternoon, right? Jot down for the next week in the morning. Generally, what did you do? Oh, I worked on blog posts. How did you feel, smiley face. Oh, in the afternoon I worked on business plan, applying for grants. How did you feel? I’m telling you, you do that for 5 to 10 days, you will see the patterns and you will start to say, oh my God, I should do all this kind of work in this time block, because that’s my prototype. And it’ll tell you because you’ll feel a certain way, right? So story number one. Happy with that, ready for story 2? That’s a good one. Yeah, yeah. OK, I got that’s a very good one here, so great. I’m gonna have to tell my mom. This is so cool. OK, so second story, and this is one about how you train your brain. To fall into certain states because of where you are, the the relationship between mental space and physical space. Again, first time I saw this was years ago. And right? we talked about Independence Day, right? So Roland and Dean, who co-wrote, Roland directed and Dean produced, but they co-wrote scripts together. They would go to this vacation rental down in Puerto Arta, some beautiful, I’ve never been there, it’s a white marble villa in Puerto Art, right? They would write there. They would rent it for 1 month, 2 months, and go ride. I asked Dean about this. I was like, what’s the deal? He’s like, there is a room. Where in the morning, the light comes over the pool, and in that room we don’t think about our agents, we don’t think about budgets, we don’t think about studio notes or casting problems. We Write the movie we want to see. When they were going down to write this one. Roland told his assistant, you know, Joey, go, go rent the villa. Joey came back and said, it’s rented. It’s a vacation rental, right? Someone else has rented it, right? Roland called his entertainment attorney that Friday and said, John, buy the villa. By Monday, Roland owned a $5 million villa in Puertota. Where those renters went. I don’t know. We don’t know this. They came back 6 weeks later. With the script that became the 3rd highest grossing movie in film history. There’s something about that space for them, and this is not to say you need a $5 million. I know everyone listening to the pod has $5 million lying around, they want to buy a villa. I get that, but for the one or two people who don’t have $5 million lying on their desk. I saw this later when I was remembering DreamWorks with Alice Kurtz and Bob Horsey. For those who don’t know, these are the writers who did Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek 11, Eagle Eye, Mission Impossible 3, Zorro, The Island, like amazing guys, incredibly talented, and When they got in crunch time. We were on, you know, the little Amblin compound, the dreaming compound is on the Universal Studios live in Hollywood, right? Across Lankershim Boulevard is the Universal Hilton. I’m just gonna say it’s not a glamorous property, OK? It’s where you go with your kids the night before you go on the rides, and that’s about it. They would have their assistant rent a room there when they were in crunch time, we have 3 weeks to deliver Transformers too. They would go work out of a hotel room over there. I thought to myself, these guys are also pulling down $12 million a script. They could go to Bali, they could go anywhere to go, right, they go here. What occurred to me is this. They met back in school. That hotel room probably evoked for them dorm room with Kurtzman on the edge of the bed, his laptop and Bob at the little desk, and that’s how they tricked their mind into where these scrappy writers who have to prove ourselves we gotta get this done, and it worked. So that is something I shared. It’s again free to exercise. Don’t work everywhere doing everything. It does not help your brain. If you have a particular place where you write. Your blog, where you work on your business plan, where you do grants. Do it always in the same place and your brain will start to fall in. It’ll recognize I’m here and it’ll say, oh, OK, this is what we’re gonna do. Oh, it’s time and place. Yeah, your best time. You wanted. I gave you your time, your best place. Well, I hope that’s not all, but yes, we got started. It was a key key it’s like, you know, it’s introspection, it’s self-awareness. Your best time and your best place. Yeah, let us aspire to be self-aware and, you know, change the world. It starts with awareness. I agree absolutely. Um, OK, um, you, you mentioned music and, uh, we said, you know, I, I don’t want to talk about the flow states, so, so, uh, focus music, I guess music, what’s your, what’s your advice around the flow states and how does music get involved? You said something interesting where you were talking about, uh, music didn’t work for you and you first did lyrical music, right? I can’t listen to Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones or whatever, right? Absolutely true. Lyrical music is very hard to focus to because you want to sing along. Second thing, you know the second kind of music you brought up? I remember, yes, yes, I remember, right? As a classical, I tried, I tried classical. Yeah, classical music is not like flow music. It is wonderful, and there’s some people who love it, right? But it is complex. My brother is a professor of music at UVA, like dual PhDs at Yale in musicology music theory, like listening to him talk, it is insane how much is going on in classical music, right? So I say this because, yes, there’s a lot of research on sound, the oral AU oral environment that helps you drop in. Now, the sweet spot for most people, and this may not be true for you, Tony, but for most people, is music that is 60 to 90 beats per minute. It is ambient, non-vocal, repeating music, certain key signatures more than others, and when I was creating, you know, the flow state website, you mentioned the Sukka, right? I was like, OK, great, there’s a ton of research on this. I have a bunch of friends who are film composers. Hey, could you write me like 1000 hours of music that is basically long rhythmic tracks that help you fall in and stay in flow, right? I learned something. After throwing up, we had all the music organized into the playlists, lo fi playlists, upbeat, down tempo, yeah. A buddy of mine, Julian, who does the sound for the LucasArts, the Star Wars games, right? It’s up and ran. He called me. He’s like, I just got back from Nepal. My, my kids’ high school graduation present, wanted to go to Nepal. I took her to Nepal. It was great, right? He’s like, one day while we were there. In Kathmandu. It poured rain, like this lush, delicious rain. I had some of my recording equipment. I recorded it. Do you want some? I was like, sure, for free. OK, let’s try it. Quietly put up a playlist in the middle of all the other playlists and just called it Himalayan Dream reign. Let’s see what happens, right? Can I tell you it is our 3rd most popular playlist in Sukan now. It is just rain in Nepal, and I can see I’m running the platform. I can see who’s listening to it. So I’ve emailed people and be like, hey man, I would love to learn. What is it about rain that you prefer over music? And it was so, it goes back to that mental spaces thing we talked about 5 minutes ago. If you were to be very reductive about what people told me, they would say, oh, there’s an association I had when I was young and studying. I’d be my grandmother’s house in Georgia. Oh, we had this lake house, oh, where I grew up, and it is that rain triggers them to, right, I’m back in school and I’m doing my homework. Really interesting. So then we experimented because of course, once I learned that I was like, duh, why didn’t someone tell me this? We found recordings of a surf. I do live very close to the beach, right? You know, I’m across the street from the ocean. Yeah, yeah, from the ocean, right? So I thought, OK, well, rain, got you. We put up a a stream in Japan, uh, this famous lake that has these indigenous birds in Canada, the surf, things like this, they became mildly popular, not as popular as the Dream rain, right? Plus Himalayan Dream Rain had a pretty good name. Then a woman reached out to me, one of our members, and said, hey, I had a baby during the pandemic. And she’s a writer, she’s a blog. She said, I used to before the pandemic, go to coffee shops to go right. It inspired me to be around other people and the energy of that. I can’t do that now. I’ve got a 2 year old or whatever, right? Any chance you could find a recording of a coffee shop. And lo and behold, someone posted this coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. Like 2 hours of you it’s like the espresso machines going yeah, yeah, we threw it up. We called it Cafe Ven. And we just threw up there’s like, hey, if you wanna pretend you’re in a coffee shop, if that helps you get in your group. It’s become almost as popular as the rain. So I share this for this sole reason, which is, I heard you, you said, I listen to silence. I can’t listen to the Rolling Stones. I don’t want to listen to classical. But for many people who are part of our our membership, sound is a really important trigger to help them drop in and stay in. That’s fascinating. All right, I love it. I’m very lucky where I get to do, you know. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate. I know the tales from the gym. Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. End quote. So I heard that said, uh, as I was walking out of the community center where the gym is one day, uh, I looked back, uh, it was, there were 3 women, and I don’t know which of the three, made that quote, but, uh, I, I, I bristled at it. I, I disagree. So Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. Let’s break this down. So first of all, I know exactly who Mary is. Mary is a substitute. Instructor. I’ve been in several classes where she substituted for the regular Tuesday instructor who is Danielle. Um, Mary actually plays, I think Mary plays better music than Danielle, but. Quote, too much heavy metal crap. Mary plays um Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, um, The Who, Bruce Springsteen. Billy Joel, I’ve heard her do, uh, bands like that, uh, the Eagles. She has a lot of, she has Hotel California’s often on her playlists. So that is not, I mean that, that’s rock and roll, that’s classic rock and roll. It’s certainly not heavy metal crap. Like to me, heavy medical, medical, to me, heavy medical is open heart surgery, but that’s a different Tony’s take too. Open um heavy metal. Music is, uh, like Metallica or Black Sabbath. OK, those are heavy metal bands. Iron Maiden, it’s another one. Nobody plays those. You couldn’t, you, you couldn’t have a fitness class to Black Sabbath, all right? So. This woman who, uh, I don’t know, she, she stylizes herself or, uh, recognizes herself as some kind of music critic, she’s off. She’s off on the genres. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Mary does not play heavy metal, uh, whether heavy metal is crap, that’s, um, that’s obviously also very subjective. It’s not my tastes in music, but It doesn’t really apply because the heavy metal, the crap, uh, is modifying heavy metal and heavy metal doesn’t belong in the sentence because Mary doesn’t play it. So that’s the breakdown of that music critic’s comment that Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. That’s Tony’ste too. Kate Sounds like you got some mean girls at the gym. Uh, she, I know, yeah, crap. She did say crap for, uh, my little town in public, in public, people typically don’t speak that way. Uh, I’m not talking about what they might say on their podcasts or, uh, in their private little clutches, but, uh. Yeah, um, crap’s a strong for the for the public, but she was, uh, she was adamant. She was an adamant. Faux music critic, purported music critic. She, she didn’t, she didn’t make the grade. We’ve got Beu but loads more time. Here’s the rest of Takeaways from film work, so you flow and do your best work with Steven Puri. Yeah, the experimentation, uh, you’re creating environments for people to enter flow states or even if you’re not in a flow state, but just creating the right environment. For others or us creating it for ourselves. It’s um Yeah, yeah, that, that it points to a bigger. Uh, uh, a bigger revelation I’ve had about just myself living at the ocean. I’ve always, I, I’ve wanted to live, well, I’ve been here 10 years now, so it’s not, it’s not recent. I, I left New York City. I, I’ve been in New York City about 15 years and I moved here about almost 10 years ago, but I had wanted to live close to the ocean ever since my grandma and grandpa Martin Eti used to bring me to the, to their. Ocean townhouse. They didn’t, uh, ocean home. They didn’t live near the ocean like I like I, I can walk across the street and be in the sand. We had to drive, but it was in Belmar, New Jersey back in the days when a, a blue collar guy could own two homes. They had a home in Jersey City and they had their, their beach. It was really a bungalow. It was a 3 season home you couldn’t use it. It wasn’t heated and didn’t have enough insulation for the winter in Belmar, New Jersey. But, but, you know, Grandpa used to bring us to the, me, my, me and my brother, uh, used to bring us to the ocean, and I thought, oh, I would, it would be ever since I realized what private property ownership means like at age 15 or 16, you know, from when I was like 5 years old when Grandpa Martignetti was alive and bringing us to this to the ocean, I wanted to live by the ocean and 10 years ago, you know, it was a dream realized and, and I would say I’m much. More productive, happier, content. Uh, managing stress better than the than the 15 years when I lived in New York City, which I loved. I, I didn’t, I didn’t leave New York. Some people leave a city saying, oh, I, I can’t stand in the city. I’ll never go back. I still visited a few times a year. Me too. I still like I met my wife in, in uh Battery Park in yoga. You met your wife from Battery Park? Yeah, that equinox in the Brookfield Place. OK, I don’t know that the Brookfield is a building right on Battery Park, you know, right across from the World Financial Center. There’s like that mall. Yeah, yeah, that’s the yoga in there. Yeah, I know. The, uh, there’s the World Financial Center too. Yeah, my wife worked at Amex, so she worked in the tower. OK. Yes, I married the girl on the yoga mat to my left from Battery Park. That’s outstanding. So your heart is in the city too. You can pick up on something you were saying though? Would that be OK? Yeah, it’s all anarchic, but yeah, go ahead. The thing I want to hang a lantern on is I feel like you were about to say something that’s very close to my heart, and I know I’m a very jokey guy and I, I have a great life and I’m very happy about stuff, but let me just say this in a very serious way, which is You were right when you were about to say. That there’s a fundamental belief that I have that is expressed in why I’m here with you today, sharing thoughts and banter, why I created the website that I created, which is, I believe that we all have something great inside. And the question of this lifetime is, are you going to get it out or not? And I think there are too many forces in the world, and Laura and I have friends that work at some of the meta companies or used to work at Twitter or TikTok. And there are two forces that Want to ensure you don’t, you don’t do that great thing. Their business model is straight up steal your life. And they’re very proud of it. They used to hide it. 10 years ago, Zuckerberg would testify in Congress and laugh about, oh, we’re just here to show grandmothers their grandchildren’s videos, and now, straight up, we’re here to steal your life. And by the way, next quarter we have these techniques we’re going to deploy to steal more of your life. And I think that’s criminal. I think that’s criminal on the level of Let me say this, I hope that my children, you know, I’m about to have my first child in 3 weeks. I hope that my children’s generation looks at our generation with social media. The way I look at my father’s generation with smoking. I’ve seen his friends die of lung cancer. He is emphysema. And you talked to my dad about it. He goes, you don’t understand like movie stars are smoking, James Dean, like it was a thing, tobacco companies were putting out studies how healthy it was for us. And I sure hope my children are like, yeah, we really want to do something with our lives. I we’re sorry that you wasted so much of your time watching Kim Kardashian’s, you know, ad for her underwear as if it’s content, and giving it 15 million likes, you know, like, we don’t know how you did that or why you thought that was good, but we’ve moved on. We’re, we’re in a better place, and that’s why I created Sukka. That’s why I talk about flow states is it is a way to say in that tug of war, we’re on one side of that rope. It’s $1 trillion companies paying the smartest designers and the smartest engineers to steal your life, and you are alone on the other side. It’s you pulling back. And you need allies. You need people who give you help. To not die with that thing still inside you. Mm. I’m letting that set That’s a fantastic analogy. That we, we look back on. Technology and and apps and the way. Our our parents’ generation look back uh look back on smoking. It was good for you. It was good for you. It was, it was glamorous, the same way you look at, you know, whether it’s Logan Paul or, you know, Joe Rogan or whatever, you know, they, they were looking at James Dean and, you know, Humphrey Bogart and. And now, like, I don’t know anyone that smokes. None of my friends smoke. Yeah. My God. Only one on fire. There are forces though, yes, there are, there are smart. Computer, computer engineers and, and savvy tech bros, yeah, we want your, you know, they, you’re, you’re saying they want your life, they want your attention, they want your attention, they want your time. And you’ll, you’ll, you’ll get. It’s negative rewards. I was gonna say you’ll get hardly anything back for it. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s it’s a negative reward system. You’ll get less back than you give them. You will be that 80 year old person sitting on the sofa talking about, I, I could have started that company. I could have saved the world. I could have cured cancer. I could opened the restaurant. I could have made the app, and that’s miserable to be that person, and it’s miserable to be around that person. Regrets, regrets. Yeah. Yes, you will have been distracted away from. Yeah, but you said, Steven, your, your, your best potential back to film, you know, in, in many films, especially the kind of films that I did, which are big summer action movies, right? First act, the world changes, something bad, hero has to accept the, the mission, right? And what is the top of the second act? The top of the second act is usually. Like the Allies, go around the Shire and get the other hobbits or whatever, you know, Lord of the Rings, but it’s, it’s that thing of like, gotta get the Avengers back together. Gotta get the League of Justice wherever the hell, you know what I mean? Like, do that thing, and it’s a very important part of when the world changes, you say, OK, I’m Batman, I have to go solve this. you have to know who your allies are. You have to assemble them. First, you’re your own best ally. First, the hero has to take the challenge for, for him or herself and then coalesce the allies. That is the end of the first act. But you got to remember, but, but you come first, that, that you are the first act. Top of the second act is, OK, now that I’ve accepted the challenge, what do I need? Whom do I need? Everything from here on seems so trivial, but I do want to continue with more with more uh works remote work strategies because I told you about. Let’s talk about chicklets. Well, what about chlitz? I’m kidding. You want to be trivial. Oh, OK. Um, all right, but to bring this to nonprofits, I mean, it’s all, it’s all subsumed in, in the work that so many of us are doing. Because we are managing remote teams and we are ourselves very likely remote, um. We Yeah, doing your best work and helping your teams do their best work. You, we, we all know we want, we want the, the, the people who work with us to strive to succeed, to be productive, to do their best work, and their best work might not even be with our nonprofit, it might be 3 nonprofits in their future, but, but we all have an. Uh, uh, a moral and, and, well, less, less important, we have a professional and more significantly, moral obligation to help those who work with us to do their best work, to have their best lives. Right? When you, uh, when you just said, Tony, I, I want to interrupt you for a second. Don’t be frustrated with me. More anarchy, yeah, go ahead. No, no, you go, you continue. No, no, I’m done. And that’s all I got. I’m, I’m very shallow. OK. Yes, and what you just said about leadership, I wanna hang a lantern on. Which is If you view leadership as making sure you tell everyone what to do and you measure their performance, you make sure the TPS reports come in on Friday, whatever it is, right? That’s management. Leadership is when you assemble a group of people, and you have that belief that each of them is something great, and your job is to help them express it. So that means you start with hiring the right people. Giving them the conditions, the inspiration, the goals to do that thing. And that I think is really powerful in an era when there is some remote work. Like many of us do, not the whole world, there’s obviously a pendulum that swings back and forth, but Those of us who do hybrid or remote. There is something about leading teams that is. In some ways better and more flexible, but also harder. And some of, I’ll tell you a lot of people approached me because I run a platform for people to focus, especially people who work remotely, right? So I get leaders, managers, whatever you wanna call them. can we talk about their concerns, and when you really peel the onion back, you’re going, why, why, why that, why that one? You get to, I’m afraid. What are you afraid of? I’m afraid if I can’t see Tony at 3 o’clock on Tuesday, I don’t know what he’s doing. OK, so that’s really what your pushback is. That’s your RTO mandate is really driven by, I’m afraid I don’t know if people are working. To which I usually share this. Listen, if you as a leader, do 2 things, just 2 things really well. You express your mission. Hey guys, we are here to cure cancer. We are here to clean up the environment. We’re here to make great romantic comedies, whatever it is. And you express the values. Of how you’re gonna do it. This is how we will treat each other, this is how we will treat our customers, this is how we’ll treat our competitors. You do those two things well, you will attract the right people because I’m gonna tell you this, if I’m trying to cure cancer, and I talk to you and you’re like, my mom died of cancer. I don’t have to you Tuesday at 3 p.m. to know what you’re doing. I know you’re moving the ball down the field. But if I hire some guy who’s had 5 jobs in 6 years and he’s surfing indeed for his next thing, I’d be an idiot to hire him. Steven, let’s, let’s move to, um, health, health and wellness, healthy productivity. You got, you got some tips there. What uh what what, instead of me introducing them all. You uh you bring us into them. OK, cool. Well, let me ask you this, in your, you know, illustrious career, you have dealt with burnout at some point, right? We’re just like, I’m tired of this, I’m frustrated, yes. Yeah, the last time I was an employee, which was 2003. OK, I, I’ve experienced that too, and there is something about Needing to produce, right? They can lead to burnout. There are ways in which we work. It’s the exact same thing with an athlete. There are ways in which you can train to be ready for the game, and there are ways in which you train where you’re depleted and you are not properly prepped, right? So this is one of the things that I obviously studied in creating a platform about how to have healthy high performance, which is very simple concepts, for example, Maintaining your own rhythm, you know, we talked early in this episode. About Your chnotype, when in the day you should do certain things. There’s also a sense of when you do block out that 3 to 5 p.m. when you’re great at doing whatever. Like I’m really good in the morning from like 67 in the morning until 9 or 10 for anything creative, writing new code, writing new words for the website that I’m really good in the morning, right? I suck in the afternoon, right? So. When you do say, OK, here’s my time block to do this. Something that we found is, uh, for those who don’t know what the pomodoro technique is, I’m just gonna explain it quickly, which is there is an Italian, um, ranchesco Carrillo who wrote about he had a uh cadence that he worked of working for 25 minutes and taking a 5 minute break, and he would repeat this several times and after like 2 hours, take a longer break, he used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. Amodoro is obviously the Italian word, I think you’re Italian, you might know this, you know, for tomato. So we call it the pomodoro technique. It is It was simplistic on a certain level, but it’s also very healthy to say, oh, you know what, I have not stood up for 25 minutes or 50 minutes. Let me stand up, do something like that, do a breathing exercise, stretch, look in the distance, which I think he made a joke about looking at the distance of the ocean. You know, these are all like real things, and they do help you to have sustainable high productivity, you know, there’s a The famous quote, I’m sure you know, Picasso talked about staying up all night and forgetting to pee or eat, but he finished Guernica, right? Yeah, OK, Guernica, I will never create anything in my lifetime as powerful as, you know, the horrors of war on that canvas, so I can’t criticize it, but if you do that all the time, stay up all night continuously, you’re going to burn out, right? Maybe that was a great way to get over the hump of. I’ve expressed this thing that I’ve had inside. But you do need to have a healthy cycle working, and this is just a really, again, it’s a free technique. Just set a timer. You don’t need my website, you don’t need anybody’s proper timer. You can use your phone. Like get up, go, go, get a glass of water, stretch your desk, something, breathe. Every 25 to 30 minutes. This is the Palmadura cycle. I actually personally I adapt it because I found after doing this for a while. After 25 minutes, I’m usually in the middle of a thought, and it was frustrating for me to have the timer go off after 25. I found my cycle is more like 40-ish. That feels better for me because I start, I get there, I capture it, and then I’m like, oh, let me go downstairs, get a glass of water, you know, stretch. So I do like usually 40 and 5. Now, are you allowed to do the Palmodoro technique while you’re inside your flow states? That’s what drives it. That’s our website, the suka has a big play button in the center. When you open the website, there’s a play button. You hit it. It starts a almodor timer. It starts your music. It is all, it is the heartbeat of our system is to say have a healthy flow session. I say hello. I say allow facetiously, I didn’t, but. Uh, I, I thought, I thought so a flow session can have some minor interruptions like stand up, look in the distance, or look in the distance is hardly sustainable but like. And you, you said you had a several hour flow state. Yeah, it was like 2.5, 22, 2.5 hours something like that, yeah, which, which is awesome, and that’s great, but if you were to do long flow sessions over and over and over. That’s not sustainable to do it every now and then, sure, go for it. You know, maybe you do stay up all night like Picasso and you go, oh my God, I finished the application for the Picasso was an outlier in a lot of respects. So yeah, right, right, I see. What about you mentioned on the, on your site, uh, dopamine management. How can we dopamine is a neurotransmitter, right? We need it to wake up along with um. norepinephrine, I think we need dopamine and norepinephrine to, to help our wake cycles, but dopamine management, how, how can we manage? OK, I will be vulnerable and tell you something that I do that’s really bad, which is I noticed that when I work. When I hit something that’s hard, oh, I’m coding something and the build keeps failing. Ah, I don’t know why. I’m writing a blog post and I just keep reading that second paragraph, and it’s, I know it’s bad, and I know it has to be written. I can’t get it, right? When I hit that block. My hand, like muscle memory. I didn’t even think about it. My hand will reach my phone and say, oh, you just check my WhatsApp real quick, see if Laura or Tony, you know, and it’s this little craving of like zero effort dopamine, and Huberman does a great episode on this as a matter of fact. Just to say, you know what, it’s gonna feel so good cause you get that little note from Tony with some funny gif, and then, you know, maybe he gave you a link to a YouTube video you’d love and you open the YouTube video and And then half an hour has gone by. By the time you actually look up, you go, oh yeah, that video led to another video, and then I got the email notification at the top of the screen and I checked the, you know. I’m super Super guilty about that. So, it was something that when I looked at this and I said, OK, so that’s part of why I don’t finish at night. What I did was super simple. It’s gonna sound idiot simple, is remember I mentioned to you the website I made, you play the music starts and stuff. When you hit play, a QR code pops up. I can tap with my phone, put my phone down. If I pick up my phone. The little smart assist my laptop says, hey Steven, do you really need to be on your phone? And it doesn’t stop me. But it gives me that one second to go, who do you want to be? Don’t be the guy who’s done tonight or do you wanna be the guy who’s like, Laura, we gotta get home from dinner early cause I gotta finish this thing after dinner and and it’s miserable. Oh, it’s 9:30 at night. Let me try and pick up my work and work until 1 in the morning. I don’t wanna be that guy. And that really was about craving dopamine. You know, And you not only do I, yeah, one of the things about social media is when you look at where do they look for design. It’s casinos, it’s gambling. Like variable rewards is a huge part of social media. They know the content that you want, Tony, and they deliberately stick into it stuff that you don’t want do not want, because then when you see the content you want, your dopamine hit is greater. It’s exactly like slot machines pay off the frequencies that they do. Oh, so there’s some, there’s some. Uh, some elements of our feed that are intentionally slightly off topic, 100%. So that when we get the 100% on topic, it gives us a spike. Google the words social media variable rewards, and you will learn the extent to which they study not just what you want in your feed, but what you don’t want. Because it heightens your addiction to get variable rewards. If every piece of content were what you wanted, it would be easier to put down, and they know. Damn. What’s that movie? Is it social, social networks? No, there’s a movie. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a what’s the film about, about this, about the social engineering that goes into that the name of the film Social Social networks. Social network, I think it was the Sorkin film about, you know, Zuckerberg and the irony that this guy was totally anti-social. Oh, OK, yeah, it’s OK. It’s not, it’s not that because it’s more, it’s more done in a documentary format, but social dilemmas is the documentary you’re thinking of social dilemmas it’s really smart. Yeah, yeah for those playing at home, worth watching. It’s a docudrama type, I’m not. OK, yes, social dilemma, social dilemma. Um, yeah, not only am I, you, you, you were, you were explaining the, um, What I would, I would have called a distraction, but you said dopamine management, you know, that, that hit. Not only do I know what you’re talking about, I, I do it. I do it with, like, it could be at 9 or 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night, and I just think, oh, it was this or like something in my work will remind me, oh, there’s this honeymooners episode. So I’ll go grab the, I’ll go grab, you know, on YouTube I can find the clip because I know, I know the 39 Honeymoons episodes, the classic 39 quite well. So I can find the episode that that maybe I’m not watching the whole episode, but I’m watching like a 5 minute clip because it’s got the line in it that I wanna hear. Yeah, Audrey Meadows give to, um, Jackie Gleason. I wanna hear her say it. It’s not good enough for me to remember it. I wanna hear her say it. So now I’ve lost 6, now I’ve lost 6 minutes. And then there’s another 100, there’s the one with the, oh right, there’s the fishing trip 10, I love that one. All right, there’s a little clip, and the next thing I know, I’m watching another episode. There’s the 3rd 1, and I’m watching the 3rd episode now it’s 11 o’clock and I’m too tired to keep working. You took the words out of my mouth. That’s exactly the recommender engine is so good that it’s like we know what Tony’s gonna click on next, and sometimes it’s not, he watched a honeymooners clip, here are the other honeymooners clips. They have a profile on profile where it’s like one of those 3 or 4 things will be a 100 m clip. The other 2 or 3 will be absolutely stuff that interests you, that’s totally a field because they have your profile. Yeah, yeah. And next thing I know, it’s like I said, it’s too late, it’s too late to keep working and uh and I’ve let myself down. Now I’ve, I’ve, I’ve disappointed myself. I, but I got the dopamine and I, I got like I got the dopamine high. I got to watch Audrey deliver the line, but then I got carried away. I didn’t, I didn’t stop at the 6 minutes. That is correct, and it is Those fuckers live in a world where the best paycheck, if you are a great engineer or UIUX designer, is to work for one of those companies who wants to steal your life. They will pay you more than anyone else. You can’t go work in aerospace, you can’t go work in, you know, so you want to go there, you could be making millions of dollars right out of the gate if you’re good. Forces are working against you. You, you gotta be, you gotta be accountable to yourself and then to your team. Yeah, to help, like when you talked earlier on about being self-aware, like, what’s the point of being self-aware? I believe the point of being self-aware is. You do get to do the thing that you’re here to do. It’s probably not scrolling. Leave it right there, Steven Pury. The app is uh the suka at the suka, S U K H Asuka.com. Connect with Steven on LinkedIn. Steven, well wide ranging but fascinating. It was really fun. Thank you for having me. I loved it. Thank you for your vulnerability too. You told some good stories, uh, and, and you shared your, your personal, your, your personal journey, your personal experiences. Thank you for that. You have done hundreds of these, and I am happy and proud to be in that canon. Thanks for being with me, with us. Thanks for being with us. Goodbye everyone. Next week, what we can learn from for-profits. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.