Flow State Secrets for Focus, Deep Work & Peak Performance

Nick Urban [00:00:01]: You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span. Things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Stephen, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Steven Puri [00:00:54]: Nick, you have done so many hardcore episodes about longevity and biohacking, all that. I. I hope this is one of the more entertaining and also actionable episodes. So let’s see where it goes today.

Nick Urban [00:01:05]: I’m looking forward to that. And it’s definitely going to be up there and we’re going to depart a little bit from the longevity side of things. Perhaps, maybe not, but I want to go into your background, how you got into this world, first of all, who you are. And then after that we can cover some of the other fun topics.

Steven Puri [00:01:22]: Okay, so here’s the reason to listen to this episode. From the many, many cool episodes that he’s done, Nick has me on. I am one of the few people you will meet that has been a senior executive at a couple motion picture studios. I worked on 100, $200 million movies, right. Also raised over $20 million of venture run, three startups, one successful exit, two failures. And what was interesting to me going between those two worlds was you see the patterns of high performance, you see the patterns of sustainable high performance and how we respect our mental states. And specifically, you know, Nick and I have been talking about flow states was a huge unlock. And Nick and I wanted to share some of those lessons and maybe some fun anecdotes.

Steven Puri [00:02:11]: Who knows, we’ll see where it goes.

Nick Urban [00:02:13]: Well, you mentioned deconstructing a lot of what you see common to high performers. Is flow state one of those areas that’s worth digging into a bit?

Steven Puri [00:02:22]: No, let’s end the episode now. We’re done. Let’s go home.

Nick Urban [00:02:26]: We could.

Steven Puri [00:02:27]: No. Okay, so flow states to be very serious. I wish I had known back in college what a flow state was, what some of the techniques are to drop into it and to set the table for this episode. Because I know there’s a portion of your audience that are like our flow Masters, they’re levitating three feet above their desks right now. I get that. And there’s another portion of the audience that, like, might have a passing understanding of it. They know it’s in the zeitgeist. More people are talking about it, but it’s never been clearly defined for them.

Steven Puri [00:02:58]: So let me do that. Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. So there was a Hungarian American psychologist, this guy, Mihaly Cszentmihaly, and he had a thesis. He’s like, if you talk to high performers in different disciplines about the concentrated states where they do the things that make them famous, the stuff we know them for. Strangely, they talk about those states in very similar ways. Even though some are athletes, some are artists, some are inventors, some are scientists, there’s something there. So he’s like, what’s up with that? Right? So he did the research for us, he did the interviews, and he wrote a book at the end of it called Flow.

Steven Puri [00:03:39]: It’s the seminal work on this. It is from whence we get the term flow state. And I think he said the greatest thing. He was like, a lot of people with whom I spoke have their own names for these. Like, there’s that great Michael Jordan quote about when I’m in the zone, it’s just me in the ball and, you know, different people words for it. But he said, I chose flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. We are all on the river, paddling to move ourselves forward, but if you align your boat with the current, it carries you, it magnifies your effort, and that. That is what these high performers have figured out how to do and to do repeatably.

Steven Puri [00:04:19]: And then you start to unpack what, you know, these high performance coaches, you know, are teaching. And so often they are teaching in their own words about how to get into a flow state. And Mihaly wrote, here are the characteristics. You want to know what I found? Here’s basically what everybody told me. When you’re in flow, you lose track of time. You’re not staring at the clock. You are in the work. Like, you almost, like, sublimate yourself for the thing that you’re doing.

Steven Puri [00:04:47]: And you do your best work in a. In a shorter amount of time. Distractions fall away. You’re not that interested in, you know, running to the fridge or what. Someone in the stands is screaming, da, da, da. Right? And he said at the end of it, these people often report a feeling of uplifting, of joy, as opposed to a feeling of depletion. Like, oh, that was so hard I have to go to bed now. It’s like, ah, I’m energized for the next thing, right? And you know, we live now in a world where luckily it’s, you know, the standing on shoulders of giants thing.

Steven Puri [00:05:20]: Since he wrote this stuff, which 40 years ago, I think a lot of people have said, oh, I’m going to spend my life digging into some portion of this. How does sound, how does music help you get into flow and stay there? What is the brain actually doing in flow? Like, can we stick people in FMRI machines and like watch their brains when they get into flow, which they actually did. You know, how do we block distractions? What really is deep work? So when you think about like how Newports work near, you know, Cutler, like, there’s a lot of stuff in the past, you know, 30, 40 years that builds on this and we can basically say, okay, how do I take advantage of this in the simplest way possible? Because I’m not going to spend my life being a flow state researcher. But man, I would sure love to reap the benefits of this practice that you, you don’t need anything for. You know, it’s not like a buy a lot of hockey equipment to go play ice hockey. It’s like you have the brain.

Nick Urban [00:06:13]: And I think like, you can look at people in Hollywood or in the big corporate boardroom and you can see how it applies there. But I think it also applies in many other contexts, like for example, athletes commonly reported. I had my experiences of flow state when I was younger, actually, just not much younger.

Steven Puri [00:06:31]: What was your first, what was the first time you caught yourself going, what was that?

Nick Urban [00:06:35]: Yeah, the first time I was in high school playing football and I was very engrossed in the game. I was playing the whole thing, offense, defense and all special teams. And yeah, I didn’t, didn’t leave the field for two years when I was in high school and I would just play and I’d train my entire week for the game, every single weekend. And then I’d leave the game and I’d feel great. I knew that I really tried my best and hardest. But then my partner at the time, I talked to her and she’s like, hey, what was that? I’m like, what do you mean what was what? And she was like, well, I was yelling your name as loud as I could. Everyone in the stands looked over at me and they wondered why no one in the field yelled even so much as glanced up in my direction and I was like, are you sure? I don’t think you call my name a single time, and lo and behold, I realized that you were so deep

Steven Puri [00:07:36]: in flow, you were like. There were stands where very close to that. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:07:40]: And I didn’t realize it, but that was the first time that I recognized when I’m very engrossed in something and performing at my peak, even though I wasn’t a professional athlete, that I went to, like, a different dimension in which I was locked in and impervious to distractions around me.

Steven Puri [00:07:56]: I love that. And I have to say, I respect the fact that you discovered that practice so early. I discovered it much later. And I’ll tell you my story of that, which is kind of an odd one, which is so. After I left film, I was vice president at 20th Century Fox, overseeing, like, Die Hard and Wolverine. And I had this moment of, I’m wake up 40, 50 years old, just making Die Hard 9D. All my studio really wants to make is, like, sequels, prequels, remakes, spinoff. What about the background character of Die Hard 5? Could we make a spin off where he meets Maleficent and the Battle Predator? Can we do that? Right? So I was like, I got to go back to something I know that I think is more meaningful.

Steven Puri [00:08:34]: So that was the only other thing I knew to do, which was engineering, right? Tech. So I got back into that, started researching and working on things. And so I. I’m in Austin, Texas, now. I’ve moved from California, and I was going to SF to meet with my team the next day. And Alaska Airlines runs that nonstop route. I remember getting on the plane, and the captain’s like, sorry, kids, WI fi is out. You know, we gotta fix later.

Steven Puri [00:09:02]: You see an sf, right? So we take off, I start working, and I’m thinking, I want on this flight to mock up an idea I had for a feature that I want to show the team tomorrow to go, hey, if you like this, you guys are much better designers than I like. Let’s finish this out and build this, right? So I started working on this, and about 15 minutes after takeoff, we started descending. And I thought, oh, man, we’re probably in Dallas. Like, there’s something wrong. They’re going to get us on the ground and go, hey, we have to switch aircraft the hydraulics or what? You know, something. I looked down. 2 hours and 40 minutes had gone by, and I had no idea. I actually didn’t know if the drink card had come by.

Steven Puri [00:09:41]: I didn’t know the name of the guy in the seat next to me, you know, but my designs were done And I liked them. I actually thought they captured what I was trying to show. And I had prepared myself for getting there, getting a sandwich in the hotel lobby, going up to the room and, you know, trying to finish the stuff for the morning meeting in my hotel room, which is a miserable thing, but we’ve all done it. Instead, I called a buddy from the Uber and I was like, hey, man, I have a free night in sf. Do you want to have dinner? And it was an amazing feeling being ahead of my day for a change and not chasing my day later, as we learned from these smart people. Steven, you were in a flow state, and that was my unlock, where I was like, ooh, is that repeatable? Are there techniques I can use to do that? And that was really the genesis for creating the Suka company, the company, the website that is a flow state website. How can you put these things together simply? And anyway, that was my unlock. And God knows what my college career would have been like had I had your Friday night lights.

Steven Puri [00:10:42]: Flow state.

Nick Urban [00:10:43]: We’re going to go into that. But, Steven, I keep coming back to your company’s name. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this. You probably are. But in Sanskrit, as far as I’m aware, sukha means like happiness. That comes from self fulfillment. And in neuroscience, Anandamide, the bliss molecule, also comes from a Sanskrit word, ananda. Like, was that intentional? Did you intentionally connect those dots?

Steven Puri [00:11:05]: Oh, Nick, you. They. You know, I want to answer that question. That’s such a great question. Thank you. And I’m going to tell you a story that’s very close to my heart. My wife, Laura, I met in yoga at a daily yoga practice. I married the girl on the mat to my left, right? So for 10 years, we’ve got, you know, we practice yoga together.

Steven Puri [00:11:30]: It’s a beautiful time, you know, each day. When we got married a couple of years ago, I was working on an early version of. Of this site that had a working title, right? Where I just thought, I’m lazy. I’m not going to have all these different apps that I run to get in a flow state. I’m going to have Brain FM over here and a pomodoro timer and a task list thing and, you know, this, and a productivity manager, a distraction blocker. I was like, I just want to have one site with a play button, right? So I had the working version of this and some beta users. So we get married, go off to our honeymoon. Where do you go when you’re doing a ton of yoga with Your wife, you go to Bali, right? So we’re going to go do, you know, yoga on the beach for two weeks or whatever and chill out.

Steven Puri [00:12:10]: And we’re flying there. And I said to Laura, I was like, you know what? I’ve been killing myself trying to come up with a name that doesn’t suck. And I’ve thought of every descriptive thing like flow state, app 12, distraction blocker 9. Like, all these just bad names. I was like, I aspire to something like Amazon. Amazon’s not called bookstore. Nike’s not called Shoeplace. Right.

Steven Puri [00:12:34]: The naming story of Nike is a really cool one. So Laura said, you know what? We’re going to be gone for two weeks. No one’s going to bug you. They know you’re on your honeymoon. Maybe your unconscious mind bubbles something up. Cool. Just relax into it, right? I’m like, okay, cool. So we got there and I said to her, listen, I know it’s going to sound weird, but I think what would seed my unconscious mind? Because I’m so inside the bubble of building this is.

Steven Puri [00:12:59]: Do you mind if I talk quickly just like two or three of our beta members and just say, what do you love about this? Just in one word. Give me something that can use in meditation to meditate on. Right. So she’s like, I’m going to the pool, but I will see you at dinner. Enjoy your zooms on day one of our honeymoon. Idiot. So I dropped in the group chat. Who has 10 minutes to talk? Talk to three people.

Steven Puri [00:13:20]: Ask the same question. Can you just tell me what’s your favorite feature? Is your film music? The smart assistant that keeps you on track and blocks websites? The feedback we give you. What is it? The third guy, I was going to the wrap up, I was like, hey, I want to respect your time. We said 10 minutes. It’s been eight minutes. I’m gonna let you go. Thank you. And the guy said to me, I’ll remember this forever.

Steven Puri [00:13:41]: Guy said to me, steven, you asked the wrong questions. And I was like, okay, guy that I do not know that well, that’s pretty bold. Okay, I’ll take the bait. What was the right question? He’s like, you should have asked me why I pay you. And I was like, okay, why do you pay me? He said, so the past year or so, I find I have two kinds of days. At 3 o’, clock, I’m playing with my kids. They’re currently 2 and 4. Or at 6 o’, clock that.

Steven Puri [00:14:12]: Where did the day go? I was busy all day. Maybe I’ll pick up early tomorrow morning. Kind of like, thing going on, that stress. I realized the difference between those two days is first thing in the morning, Daddy hit play in your website. So I pay you because my kids are not going to be 2 and 4 forever. And I was like, okay, you won that round. That is a question and answer on a much higher level than anything I was going for. Thank you.

Steven Puri [00:14:44]: Thank you. So I tell this to Laura. I was like, I met this dude. He’s more articulate about what I’m doing than I am. And I told her the story, and she’s like, yeah, that’s really good. So we’re brushing our teeth. We went to the spa, right? Getting. Getting ready to go to bed, have our little spa rose on brushing our little teeth, think we’re cute little honeymooners.

Steven Puri [00:15:01]: And she looks at me with, like, a mouthful of toothpaste. She goes, you know, you wanted to name your company. That guy told you what it is. It’s not. Doesn’t even be called flow state, something. He described what we hear in yoga when we hear all these Sanskrit terms, you know, prana, your life force and your karma and your dharma duty. He describes Sukha, that feeling of, you’re in your lane, doing what you’re meant to do. You could do it with ease.

Steven Puri [00:15:28]: He wants to be happy. That is what you should call your company. She’s like, call it the Suka Company. I’m going to bed. She went to bed. I looked at my phone. That website was available for $14. Purchased it from Bali.

Steven Puri [00:15:40]: Texted my partner, we have a name. And I went to bed. And that’s it. Thanks to a guy who’s actually still a member. I’m not sure if he wants me to mention his name, but I see him in there every, you know, every couple of weeks doing his little thing. He’s a writer, so maybe he’s more better with words than I am. I don’t know. But anyway, thank you for asking that.

Steven Puri [00:15:58]: Every time I think about Sukha and what we ultimately want to give people a feeling of, I’m in control of my life. I can do this with ease. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. Some people in yoga, mistakes, like Sukhasana, like, you know, they call it easy pose. But it doesn’t really mean that. It’s more like saying, to use the Michael Jordan example, when you see some of the things that he does, he does them with ease. Are they easy? No. No, they’re not.

Steven Puri [00:16:26]: But when you operate at that level, you can do it with ease. And that’s what I think is really beautiful, is we can get people to the place of like, I’m in control of my day, I’m doing my best work. And I feel great. Because I’ll tell you this, some of the writers and directors I worked with in my 20s, talented, some of them in the 30s, were like, I need to move to an apple orchard and just pick apples. Like, I. I’m so burned. I just can’t do what I’ve been doing for 10, 15 years. And that was remarkable to me.

Steven Puri [00:16:58]: The same way I hit that a few years later, I was like, I can’t make the Wolverine 4. Like, I just. I don’t have it in me.

Nick Urban [00:17:07]: Anyone who’s made it this far, let’s give them the playbook so that they don’t have to wind up in an apple orchard picking apples if they don’t want to. They can sustain and perform at their highest, at their peak level. And you mentioned one way of getting there already, that is audio entrainment. There’s also visual entrainment. There’s a ton of different things. But, like, in order to lay the foundation for flow state to even be possible, what are the prerequisites?

Steven Puri [00:17:34]: Let’s talk about some of the conditions, precedent you can set. Right? Because flow is. Can be elusive at times if you’re not in the right mental state or, you know, it’s not always available. But the. It’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more you get there. Right. And flow is especially valuable when we’re doing something where you can be immersed in the work.

Steven Puri [00:17:54]: So I know in our community, a lot of our community is there are like, engineers, designers, writers, where they can go deep and be like, oh, I’m writing this amazing chapter, my book. Oh, I’m creating a new feature for my thing. Oh, I’m designing a new website. You know, that sort of, that feeling of creation. But it’s also applicable because, you know, a lot of the flow writing is around athletes and artists. You know, it’s interesting and you hear that. And a friend of mine who created a Siri, he talks about flow, but never uses the word flow and how he comes up with his ideas. So aural au oral is a very valuable thing to understand, right.

Steven Puri [00:18:35]: How that environment affects your brain, and it actually is affecting your brain. Like I mentioned before, one of the things that was studied was, you know, when jazz musicians start to improv together in like, trios and stuff, you become one with the trio. Like, they’re in flow. Someone thought to stick them in FMRI machines and go, you know what’s interesting is as they get to that point where they feel like they are actually just improving as one unit, their prefrontal cortexes sort of shut down. Like the activity goes down measurably there, which is kind of that loss of self and the integration into the work. Right? So let’s talk about sound. Bunch of research says sweet spot for most people if you’re listening to music is sound that is 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, non vocal. You’re not singing along to blackpink, Brittany, whomever.

Steven Puri [00:19:31]: I’m not saying anything, Nick. No judgment. And you know, long melodic stretches. You know, you want something that allows your brain. Brain almost be lulled into the work rather than, oh, I love this part, you know. Now I will tell you this. For six, seven years I’ve been talking about flow states. There are always outliers.

Steven Puri [00:19:51]: I have friends, I’ve met people who are like, I know what you talk about, but 90s gangster rapper, you know, the wicked soundtrack is the only way I can get in a flow. And God bless if you are that self aware and that works for you, fantastic. Okay, I’m going to tell you something I learned in the course of building this, if you want to hear this. I started by saying, oh, there are some really concrete guidelines on flow music. Right? Scientific evidence based, kind of. I have a bunch of friends who are film composers from my old career who have time on their hands. Can you write a thousand hours of music along these guidelines for me? Cool. Right? So we have all this music.

Steven Puri [00:20:34]: So here’s the funny twist to the story. Buddy of mine, Julian, he does the sound mixing for a lot of the Lucas Arts, the Star wars games, right? He called me up like two years, two and a half years ago. He’s like, hey, man, I just got back from Nepal. Cool. How was it? Great. He’s like, yeah, my high school’s. My kid’s high school graduation present. Because he did really well in high school, I guess, got into good college.

Steven Puri [00:20:59]: And he’s like, what do you want? And he’s like, I want to go to, you know, see Mount Everest goes. So he’s like, we just came back and I have something for you. I’m like, what? He’s like, one day we’re in Kathmandu. It poured rain like so hard we couldn’t go out. But it was this delicious, lush, like warm summer rain, blah, blah. And I had my recording equipment, so I recorded like Two hours of rain in the holiest, right? He’s like, I got back. I don’t really know what to do with it. I was just kind of inspired because it sounded so good and I can’t use it in a Star wars game.

Steven Puri [00:21:32]: So he’s like, do you want it for your flow state thing? I was like, you know what? Who knows? Yeah, okay. So we threw it up there quietly in the middle of the playlists, right? Lo fi, up tempo, down tempo stuff, binaural beats. We got all this stuff, right? We can talk about that in another episode. So we stuck right in the middle of them. A playlist just called Himalayan Dream Raid didn’t really announce it much. It was like it became the third most popular playlist in our catalog. And I’m like, this was free. We have all this music that I paid all this money to my friends to create.

Steven Puri [00:22:05]: And Rain is like a huge hit. I was like, what’s up with that? Right? So I run the platform. I know everyone’s email addresses. A couple people listen to it. I email them saying, hey, would you spend a couple minutes talking to me? I would love to learn. What do you love about listening to rain? I will tell you this. It was so interesting to me the way if you really boiled down what the people who said yes, they’d speak to me. If you boil down what they said, it came down to this.

Steven Puri [00:22:32]: Sometime when they were younger, they had to work or study in a place that was rainy. And this brought them right back to that place. Oh, my grandmother’s house. I lived with my grandmother and she’s in Georgia. And at finals time, it was always raining in the spring. Oh, my family had a lake house and we would go there on. And it was interesting that it was like, oh, so you, without knowing it, developed a mental trigger around, okay, I got to do. I got to go deep.

Steven Puri [00:22:58]: And the rain was that trigger. So I say all this to tell you in as much as I set out going, well, all the smart people say exactly this. That was a great learning because it’s like cool rain now. We tried other nature sounds. We call them Naturescapes stream in Japan. Someone had recorded lake in Canada near Tony, my partner’s place. To be blunt, like, no real hits in there. Some people listen to them like, I think out of curiosity, but there wasn’t that thing.

Steven Puri [00:23:26]: But it did unlock. There was a woman, she’s a pretty well known blogger in the uk. She reached out to me on the support email and said, hey, I noticed you’re doing this rain thing, which is not musical. Can I ask something of you? And I was like, I’m so curious. Yeah. She’s like, I used to write my blog in this coffee shop. And it was like this cool sort of experience of imagining I’m in Paris in the 30s or whatever. She goes, I had a kid during the pandemic, I can’t do that anymore.

Steven Puri [00:23:55]: I can’t take like a two year old into coffee shop and be like the cool writer. Right. So she said, any chance you could put up the sound of a coffee shop? Michael, another partner of mine, he was like, I found someone in Vienna, Austria, who strangely recorded his local coffee shop. Just like an hour or something of the espresso machines going and little sounds of plates clattering and we put it up there, became super popular. And I realized it’s probably the same thing. Like, you know, in film there’s a writer’s culture around going to coffee shops and writing your next great screenplay sort of thing. I realized that is more than just screenwriters. That’s a lot of people who love to have that little murmur of I’m around other people.

Steven Puri [00:24:39]: Maybe because so many of us have become remote or hybrid now.

Nick Urban [00:24:42]: You know, are you layering anything into that audio? Because you mentioned earlier, 60 to 90 beats per minute is what you found to be ideal. But I don’t think that that’s the research.

Steven Puri [00:24:52]: We just basically built on the research and then said, let’s launch that. And then that’s when rain came up and then that’s when you know other stuff. But like Binaural. Have you done an episode in Binaural? I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Nick Urban [00:25:04]: No, I’ve. I’ve been playing around with it for like nine years or so and I find that found that when I first started using them, they would work the first couple times. But after like session three, four, five, the effect I felt from Binaural is just slowly dropped off. And then I play around with isochronic tones and other stuff, but I can’t stand the sound of a lot of other types of like audio technologies. Unless you have.

Steven Puri [00:25:30]: I love. You’re just hacking it all. This is great.

Nick Urban [00:25:32]: Yeah, you have to really have like other types of like music layered on top to kind of disguise the sound of some of them. Because the isochronic tones were like tough robotic sounds to like just sit there and listen to. Definitely not for fun.

Steven Puri [00:25:44]: Yeah. So interesting. So like you, I experimented with Binaural largely because members had asked about it. So I learned about it. I wrote a blog post saying what I’d learned. And you know, a lot of what I learned comes from people asking like, hey, I want this thing. So when of course we’ve started putting playlists up, I listened to them and I had a similar experience to you where sometimes I would feel something but I would question myself. Am I feeling this because I’m looking to feel it? Like, it’s almost like the placebo nocebo thing.

Steven Puri [00:26:14]: Like, I don’t really know if it’s different or I’m just like hopped up expecting it to be different. So I don’t listen to by. We have, I think three different binaural playlists now. I don’t generally listen to them because I’m just, I’m not sure. I just don’t know, to be honest. But some people swear by it.

Nick Urban [00:26:30]: So, you know, have you personally worn like an EEG or something to see what effect the different tracks have on you? And like correlating what you feel subjectively versus like what you see may not see, but like what’s going on in the brain in terms of like, it’s not the most precise, like high fidelity signal, but like, even with like a little at home device, you can measure and get an idea of what’s going on.

Steven Puri [00:26:53]: Yes. Super interesting you ask that. I have not done that because I’m, I’m not sure how I would create a control really, because I feel like I’m always aware of myself, observing myself, observing myself, you know what I mean? That sort of thing. So I thought about that. I was like, how much time will I spend trying to find some way of judging what the control is? However, there have been some members who have asked about that specifically. Things like, hey, I have an OURA ring. Could you grab the data from that in my work sessions and start to guide me towards like, oh, when you’re listening to this playlist in the morning, you always seem to have, you know, your variable heart rate is here or you’re, you know, you sort of like your brain function is here. And that I think is really interesting.

Steven Puri [00:27:37]: One of the things that we do is there’s a smart assistant that is starting to gather data private to you. We can’t see it, but your smart assistant runs and it’s getting enough data now to the point where it will tell you, hey, Nick, I noticed this example, right? Hey Nick, I noticed tomorrow morning we scheduled a coding session for you. I realize in the mornings you always code better to this playlist. Do you want me at 9am just to like meet you here and I’ll put it on for you, I’ll have you queued up sort of thing. Right. Which I think is where a smart assistant starts to become a value add as opposed to just an annoyance of like, I don’t need some other, I can hit play on my own thing. But to have somebody actually does that in the background and goes like, hey, man, tomorrow you scheduled, like you’re writing your blog post after lunch. I gotta say, every time you’ve tried to do that, you end up not completing it isn’t bad.

Steven Puri [00:28:23]: Maybe you’re in a carbo coma or something, but like, I’m warning you, don’t do that. And that to me is like, oh, thank you. Cool. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:28:32]: That would be especially valuable too if you were able to surface insights in which the user naturally would gravitate towards something and it might actually be impairing their ability to drop into that zone versus another playlist at that time for them perhaps would be more compatible. The other playlist that wouldn’t be as compatible could be used later in the day, for example, to like get into an alpha brainwave state and then like maybe towards the end of the day to like unwind and relax at the same time, but just to like curate it and sequence it properly for the user as well.

Steven Puri [00:29:04]: Yes. And that is one of the things that Tony, I enjoy right now is we’ve built some of those features so that you, private to yourself, have that memory, that storehouse of data that the more you use this, the more valuable it becomes, the more it goes, Nick, I get your patterns, man. I can guide you to your 3pm with your kids. Let me help.

Nick Urban [00:29:23]: You know, a long time ago I was researching flow and focus and the antithesis of focus was and is your general mainstream music. Because they engineered it in a way designed to hijack you, to hijack your brain, to make you focus on the music instead of what it is you’re doing, to want to share it in everything.

Steven Puri [00:29:46]: And.

Nick Urban [00:29:46]: And have you noticed, I’m sure you’ve noticed this, that what you’re building now, instead of hijacking your brain, you’re trying to protect the brain.

Steven Puri [00:29:54]: Okay, so again, that’s a real sweet spot for me and I appreciate your bringing that up. And I will go from music and actually say the thing that we are combating more than anything, and I think this is criminal, is how social media is designed now. Not around trying to connect with people, not trying to bring you closer to your family. But solely about, hey, man, I need to steal your life. And it’s really, it’s amazing because if you look at the largest market cap market cap companies right now, that is their business model. It is steal your life, period, full stop. And if you remember, like 10 years ago, Zuckerberg would be called to Congress for some awful, like, Cambridge Analytic or, you know, something like that, right? And he would be like doing his aw shucks routine where he’d be like, oh, Senator, Facebook is just here to show grandmas videos of the grandkids. That’s what we do here, right? And you listen to the shareholder calls.

Steven Puri [00:30:48]: Now, whether it’s Elon Mark, it is straight up, listen. We use our money to hire the best engineers, designers, behavioral economists, casino game designers. And we’re deploying these techniques to maximize time on site or time and app. And this is how we did stealing everyone’s lives this quarter. And by the way, next quarter we have some new techniques. We’re going to try to steal more of everyone’s lives. And it’s insane. It’s.

Steven Puri [00:31:16]: I mean, it is a crime on the level of like Mark calling you up and going, nick, hey man, I want your life. I’m going to sell it to these guys over here and I’ll keep the money, but I’m going to give you some dancing cat videos, buddy. Is that cool kind of your life? And that’s what it is. And I guess why I think it’s criminal is I operate from a place and I think you do too, which is why you put so much energy into people through the pod, through the things you do. I believe that everyone has something great inside them. And the question of this lifetime is simply, are you going to get it out or not? That old expression about the graveyards are full of greatness. People just didn’t release a thing. And I don’t know what it is for you.

Steven Puri [00:32:00]: It may be you’re going to write the next great American novel, you’re going to create an amazing app, you’re going to open an amazing restaurant, you’re going to write a great romantic comedy movie, whatever that thing may be. But ultimately you’re doing that is antithetical to Mark Zuckerberg having another 450 foot yacht. So, yeah, that is the thing we really address. And I’ll tell you, one of the things we did early on when we talked about, when I talked to people who’d potentially become members, I was like, what is the number one thing you struggle with? And it was the. And Huberman Did a great episode on this too. It was the fact that you can get zero effort dopamine. Now you just pick up your phone, you don’t need to do a thing. You don’t need to say anything impressive.

Steven Puri [00:32:48]: Do anything impressive, get anyone to pat you on the back. Nothing. You just open it and scroll and double tap and scroll. And that is insane. That is addictive on the level of sugar, nicotine, you know, like, it is amazing. And that’s really we combat. So when we launched Suka, one of the first things we did was say, hey, you, your phone is a big source of distraction, right? Probably. You know, for me, I’ll tell you this.

Steven Puri [00:33:19]: I noticed if I was coding and the build would fail, I was writing a blog post and I read the first two paragraphs. I’m like, ah, sucks. I need to rewrite it. And that feeling of frustration, I without thinking would reach for my phone. I’d be like, you know, I’m just going to quickly check my WhatsApp, see if, you know, Nick wrote back and boom. It’s never one minute. You never pick up your phone for one minute, right? 15, 20 minutes go by and the pain of that you don’t feel right. Then the pain of that you feel.

Steven Puri [00:33:43]: Just like that guy told me at 6 o’ clock when you’re like, man, I was busy all day, but why I didn’t get it done. And wow, I’m frustrated and you know that thing. And I know this is a long rant on the soapbox and I appreciate you letting me have this. Or at least you can edit this out later to be like, oh my God, Perry, he’s nuts. He’s going crazy. Right? But I do think that if we operate from a place of productivity is not the goal. We’re not here to say I want to be the most productive, the most healthy, the most. This the lowest variable heart rate.

Steven Puri [00:34:16]: You operate from a place of I want to be happy that happiness may be. I want to have a healthy container to live in on a healthy spirit. I want to realize my potential physically, spiritually, emotionally. Like, then you start to say, oh, well, what are the ways in which I can biohack, neurohack, you know, like productivity hack to achieve that right, as opposed to just doing it to do it right. And it’d be cool if more people release the greatness to add inside. Period.

Nick Urban [00:34:44]: Just be a better world designing and reverse engineering where we’re trying to go. So if I. If happiness is my end goal, of course that should shape what I’m doing now and what I’m going to do later today, that’s a big one. Like, actually just thinking of what it is that I want to accomplish. Because the current, like, productivity model that most people inherit is to just do more. And that chronic busyness, grind it out is going to yield the results. And productivity is really just about getting more done. And I think, I don’t know if you agree, the first and most important step of that is to pause and to see the big picture where you want to go, and then from there, reverse engineer what you’re doing so that you don’t get through a full day and accomplish a hundred things, but none of them actually move the needle.

Steven Puri [00:35:27]: I completely agree with you. And I’ll tell you this. I was on someone’s podcast a week or two ago, and they were really pressing me on. Okay, final thought. What is the one thing? If everyone listening could do this one thing, not two things, not four things, not eight things, one thing, what is it? And I would say it’s exactly what you said. The one thing you could do is in the morning, before you touch your phone, think, what’s the thing I could accomplish today that will move my life forward, not accomplish this year, not move someone else’s life forward? What’s the one thing? And when you have that, then begin your day, go over your oatmeal, go for the run, touch your phone, whatever. But don’t start your day at a very clear idea of, by the time I go to bed, if this is done, my life will move forward. And it’s astonishing you do that in 30 days, what you’ve done.

Nick Urban [00:36:16]: One thing I like to do is pretty much that same thing. But instead of doing it in the morning, if I’m able to, and sometimes circumstances don’t permit, I will do that at night so that when I’m sleeping, my reticular activating system and my subconscious can go to work figuring out a more elegant, better solution to that. I don’t always do it, but when I do, sometimes I’ll just wake up with whatever problem it is solved, or at least like a new elegant approach to try out.

Steven Puri [00:36:41]: Okay, so there is a book that has not come out yet, but if you ever read the Charisma Myth, the Olivia Fox Caban Book. Okay, so she has written that. She’s written the Net and the Butterfly, and she loves talking about these sort of psychological issues. She and I have a number of friends who have created companies with names that you would know, right? And she said, you Know what? The same way she addressed, like, charisma. And she said, charisma is actually kind of this. There’s this myth around. Charisma is an innate thing. It’s actually a learned series of behaviors and mannerisms.

Steven Puri [00:37:13]: And she sort of broke that down and showed you how Steve Jobs and Bill Clinton and all these people that are known to be charismatic, like, what they did. So the next thing she want to address is genius. And she has a book, I think, forthcoming, called the Genius Myth. And she wrote also the Net and the Butterfly, which is out. And she talks about, you’re going to love this because you do it and I don’t. And you’re on the right side of this one, okay? She said, it is astounding the way you understand the brain. You have this default mode network, which you can almost think of in reductive terms as, like, the child, where the default mode is kind of like looking around, like, I don’t know, what does this pen taste like? You know, things like that. And then as you develop the executive mode Network, it’s almost like the adult that oversees it.

Steven Puri [00:37:58]: It’s like, hey, I have to execute homework by 6pm so I can go to bed. I’ve got a board meeting in the morning. I’ve got to exit, right? And if you’ve ever noticed this, sometimes those weird great ideas you have happen when the executive mode network is busy. If you ever have great ideas while you’re showering, doing the dishes, driving, running, right, because the executive mode network is busy, and the default mode network, you could say, ah, that thing I was thinking about before. Now I can, in an unsupervised way, just bubble up weird stuff. The first time I saw this, by the way, I was like, what? I. When I was getting out of USC in Los Angeles, I started working in film at an ad agency that did trailers and music videos for movies, right, run by these two guys who are 15 years old or 20 years older than I am. Big reputations in the business for being promo guys.

Steven Puri [00:38:49]: They were like Mad Men of Hollywood. One of them, Jeff, who, for purposes of story, always calls me Stevie. He’s the only person in my life has called me Stevie. But that’s how the story goes. My job at this moment in time, when I got out was we would get in movies from the studios. Rough Cuts, right? Next summer, there’s gonna be a Will Ferrell comedy. We have a rough cut of it now. Help us write the trailer.

Steven Puri [00:39:11]: My job was to assign that to a writer, producer who would go Take the rough cut, screen it, start to write. What’s going to be that 92 minute, three minute trail you’re going to see? So I would call up. Go, Nick. Hey, man, you did a great job of that Will Ferrell thing last summer. We got another one from Sony. You want to do it right? So Jeff comes to my office. He goes, stevie, you know Bart. I’m like, there’s a guy in the vault name Bart as a.

Steven Puri [00:39:38]: Like a runner? Yeah, I think I met him in the elevator. Sure, yeah. Why? He goes, you ever get. You ever get Bart a trailer to write? Are we talking about Bart that picks up coffee, like, drives around Hollywood with, like, tapes and discs? Are we talking about the same Bart? He’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an instinct about him. Stevie. Jeff, man, your name is on the door. Like, you’ve got the huge reputation.

Steven Puri [00:40:02]: Like, okay, if you’re plucking him out of the chorus line, who am I to say anything, right? So Jeff leaves. Two days later, Jeff comes to my office. He’s like, stevie, how’s Bart doing? I was like, you know, I gave him this, like, Warner Brothers B title that had a long deadline. So if he doesn’t want to write it, he craps out. I can give it to someone else pro can knock it out, right? He goes, okay, okay, okay. He goes, what else did you give him? Like, Jeff, he’s never ridden a trailer before in his life. I gave him one thing. And Jeff, to his credit, says to me, stevie, listen, listen.

Steven Puri [00:40:39]: I’m gonna tell you how creativity works. It’s never about the thing. It’s about the other thing. If you give Bart one thing to focus on, he’s gonna stare at that movie with little beads of sweat coming down his temples, and he’s gonna write the most obvious B version of that trailer you can imagine. He’s like, the great idea, the peanut butter and chocolate thing happens because you give him something else to think about, and then he’s got the idea of the Will FERRELL Whatever, right? 20 years later. Like, I’ve seen Jeff proven right countless times, and a lot of it’s captured in that book. I was mentioning the net and the butterfly, where it talks about why that thing is. And it’s just.

Steven Puri [00:41:19]: It’s self awareness. At a certain point, you go, oh, I am in a. An activity where I need to have those kind of ideas flowing. They’re not going to happen. If I just stare at the pot, it’s not going to boil. I have to have something else do that. So it’s always about the other thing.

Nick Urban [00:41:33]: Okay, so I’m going to recap some of the things that we’ve discussed so far. An implementation checklist. So the first thing is to. We didn’t actually talk about this, but I assume to put yourself in the right environment, that’s conducive to flow state. And then once you. We’ll talk about that, what that is afterward. Once you get yourself in the right environment, then it’s to reverse engineer, think with the end in mind where you want to go. Then after that, it’s to use, I guess, to have two different tasks you’re working on at the same time, or at least that are occupying.

Steven Puri [00:42:02]: If you need to have that breakthrough idea to allow that part of your back of your mind freedom and it’s not being watched. Yes.

Nick Urban [00:42:09]: And then to listen to some kind of music or audio of some kind that can help get your brain and your body into the right space.

Steven Puri [00:42:17]: Very true. And let me pick up. I’ll tell you a funny story about the first thing you said, which is there is a relationship between physical space and mental space. And I first saw this, I produced the digital effects for Independence Day, which we won the Academy Award for the visual effects on the movie. It was a great thing for all our careers. I’m very grateful for the 1400 of us that made that thing. Right. So Roland and Dean and I got along very well, the director, writer, producer and I.

Steven Puri [00:42:44]: And we set up a company. We got along as well. We created a company. I raised about 15 million for that. And we did that thing. So here’s a weird thing is I learned that they had written all their screenplays at this vacation home down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. And when they were going to write the next one, Roland told his assistant, hey, Joey, you know, go, go rent the. We need the villa for like two months.

Steven Puri [00:43:07]: She came back later that day and was like, oh, the villa’s rented. Like, it’s like an Airbnb. Before Airbnb, it was just kind of like, someone’s got it already, you know? And it was around the office. Everyone’s like, what’s going to happen? And I was talking to Dean. I was like, dude, it’s a vacation rental. Like, rent a different one. You’re like, who cares? He goes, nah, you don’t understand. He said, there’s a room there.

Steven Puri [00:43:30]: It’s a white marble, like, villa up in the hills. He says, there’s a room there where in the morning, the light comes in over the pool and there’s something about that where we don’t think about our agents. We don’t think about cast availabilities. We don’t think about studio notes or budgets. We just feel empowered to write the movie that we would want to see. Roland the next day, called his entertainment attorney, John Deamer. Amazing guy. And said, john, buy the villa.

Steven Puri [00:44:00]: And by Monday, roland owned a $5 million villa in Puerto Rico to Mexico. I don’t know where the current renters went. I’m sure they were paid nicely to go find another rental, but it was that important to them. And they went off. And I think six weeks later, they came back with the script that became the third highest grossing movie in film history. And it was worth it to them to have that mental space in that place. And it’s not to say that you need a $5 million villa to do this later. When I was at DreamWorks, I was executive vice president, DreamWorks with Kurtzman Orsi and Alex Kurtzman and Bob Warsi.

Steven Puri [00:44:32]: For the guys who don’t know, guys and girls who don’t know, they’re the writers of Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek 11, Mission Impossible 3, Zorro, the Island Fringe, Hawaii 5o, like, tons of stuff. Right. And they had a different practice when they would be under the gun. We had a. You know, DreamWorks offices are on the Amblin compound at Universal Studios Hollywood. Right. There’s a portion of the lot that’s like Amblin. So we had a bungalow there.

Steven Puri [00:44:59]: And when it was like, two weeks, they have to deliver, you know, Transformers, too. They would have their assistant rent a room across the street at the Universal Hilton. And I’m just going to say, it’s not a luxury property. It’s where you stay with your kids, like, the night before you go on the rides, and then you get out. Okay, okay. And I was thinking, they’re pulling down, like, $1.52 million of script. They could. They could go to Bali and write for all they want.

Steven Puri [00:45:22]: Right. They go. And it hit me again. This is a trigger thing. They had met back in school, and I think there was something about being in that hotel room with Kurtzman on the edge of the bed with his laptop and Bob’s little MacBook at the desk that evoked for them dorm room, like back when they were writers who had so much to prove and they had to do this and they’re under the gun to create an episode of Xena or Hercules, which is, you know, that sort of thing. And that worked for them. Two weeks later you would have the draft of Transformers 2 because they just went to this hotel and treated it like their office. So there is, as you said, and I want to hang a lantern on that, a real bonus to you if you understand the relationship between mental space and physical space.

Steven Puri [00:46:09]: And if you have a laptop and you kind of work from anywhere and anytime you’re missing out on that. I used to do that when I work at home in the morning, I’d be in the kitchen. There’s beautiful light. I would work at the kitchen table. I’d work up here in my office during the middle of the day. I’d be on the sofa at the end of the day. And now I’m very rigid. If I’m going to code, I code here.

Steven Puri [00:46:30]: Because when I enter this space, my brain kind of falls in. It goes, oh, right, we’re here. We’re going to be doing this easy and by the way, free. The things we’re talking about here, they’re really about self awareness more than they’re about paying anybody anything.

Nick Urban [00:46:44]: Are there any other big gaps that we’ve discussed so far? If you were like just to give the checklist any other additions beyond what we’ve discussed?

Steven Puri [00:46:53]: Well, let’s go over it. I would say starting the morning, begin with your intention. Be very clear on what you can accomplish that day. The one thing that will move you forward, right when you go to work, be aware of your chronotype, which we haven’t talked about, but I’ll be succinct about that, which is chronotype is the concept. There are times of day you’re better at certain kinds of things. If you are self aware. If you spend a week or two kind of like writing down what you did and how you felt, you’ll start to see patterns of like, oh, I should be creative in the morning, I should be doing mindless paying of the bills in the afternoon, or whatever that may be for you, right? So start with an intention. Understand your corner type.

Steven Puri [00:47:32]: So you plan your day time block. Like if you need to do deep work, like meaningful work, it doesn’t happen in between zooms for nine minutes. You know that you don’t have the opportunity to drop into flow that takes 15 to 23 minutes to drop in. So if you want to do, if you need to do deep work, schedule it. Like, treat it as a meeting with yourself. It’s sacred time. It’s not like, well, when I have a couple minutes, I’ll try and do this like, oh, no, from 9 to 11 tomorrow, I’m going to write this feature, put it in your calendar. No one can book you over that.

Steven Puri [00:48:03]: Right.

Nick Urban [00:48:03]: So when you have those blocks, are you just having the full two hour block or are you breaking it into like a 60 minute chunk and then a break and then another 60 minute chunk? How do you sequence that?

Steven Puri [00:48:12]: Yeah, I’ll tell you with Tsuka, we built it. The. The heartbeat of Stuka is a pomodoro timer that’s customizable. So by default it’ll give you a 25 minute work session, five minute, you know, break. We encourage you to stretch, breathe, go for a short walk, drink water. You get points for doing things like that on your break. And it cycles palm or 25. 25, you do a longer break, so that’s customizable.

Steven Puri [00:48:36]: I personally found that at 25 minute mark, I’m usually in the middle of a thought and it’s annoying to break. So I actually do a 50 and 10, which seems to give me the same benefit of stretching my back.

Nick Urban [00:48:48]: 15 and then 10. 15 minute five, zero. Oh, five zero.

Steven Puri [00:48:52]: Yeah, yeah. I work for 15 minutes and I take two hours off. It’s a great life. It’s a great life, Nick. So anyway, those, yes, those are some of the concepts. Block your distractions, time, block your calendar. You know, these are we, we laugh, we call them gap, you know, like in accounting, they’re generally accepted accounting principles. We also call them gap, which gapp, which is generally accepted productivity principles.

Steven Puri [00:49:20]: So these are kind of inarguable and you know, evidence based practices.

Nick Urban [00:49:24]: Are you working on anything to like make sure you’re able to sustain high performance over the long term? For example, are you focusing on say the nervous system or something else to make sure that like not only do you perform at your peak, but then this doesn’t become a flash in the pan and then you’re back to the apple orchards.

Steven Puri [00:49:42]: After that, the apple orchard thing stuck with you. I see that. Yeah. Yes, A lot of this because we do not have a huge research arm that does this. So we ingest a lot of research from the people doing it. So when we see there’s a new or a revised best practice, we incorporate that into the Suka website saying, hey, by the way, if you want to try this, one thing we’re about to launch is there is a liminal coach out of the UK who does these wonderful sort of meditations. And we thought, oh, this is. Not only is this becoming more popular, but I tried it and I can say in an anecdotal way, I actually felt more focused after just a simple five minute pause.

Steven Puri [00:50:29]: Not a breathing, not a box breathing, not getting water, not going for a walk, but actually this like liminal meditation that he did. So I will probably be working on that later tonight or tomorrow, just building that as one of the options when you’re on a break to say, hey, I want to have a lim. Excuse me, a liminal moment with Mike Parker.

Nick Urban [00:50:46]: And what does that do? What benefit does having a liminal moment do towards your overall recharging goal?

Steven Puri [00:50:54]: It’s that feeling of when you re approach something after the right kind of break, you sometimes see things more clearly. You can get through the thing that was holding you back. You feel a different sense of energy or lack of burnout because you’ve had that little moment. So it’s really, that’s what we want to deliver. Like, we basically, our membership is all kind of high performers. Like the people who seek us out are going, I’m a good writer, I’m a good engineer, I’m a good designer and I, I want to bring out greatness. You know, we don’t have. It’s not like we don’t attract people on Twitter who just want to like tweet all day and hate on each other.

Steven Puri [00:51:31]: You know, like, that’s not really our crowd. They don’t come. So a lot of what we do is give those kinds of people who are like, I am looking to continually hack my life to be better. Here’s. Here are the latest tools we’ve found.

Nick Urban [00:51:45]: It sounds like one of the traps there would be. If you only time block and you push yourself really hard and you really optimize your productivity workflow, but you don’t take those breaks every once in a while to recover, then eventually, over time, it’s going to catch up with you, period.

Steven Puri [00:52:00]: I don’t need to. I’ve told too many long stories. Let’s just say, yeah, yeah, okay.

Nick Urban [00:52:05]: The other thing is that people will be tuning into this. Some of them will say, this all sounds great and I understand the value of flow, but my life circumstances make this impossible right now. And perhaps the single biggest reason, and it is completely valid is parenthood. How do you advocate parents implement this into their routine?

Steven Puri [00:52:29]: Okay. For those who are not laughing at home, because you know why he asked that I have a four month old downstairs and I was teasing Nick before we started that I’m so tired if I forget verbs. If you could just like cut those in later in post production, that would be great. Okay. And I’m Going to tell you because I love telling stories. I’m going to tell you a story to answer that. So we have a group chat. One of the things that I was hesitant about doing was the early version of Suka was a single player game.

Steven Puri [00:52:59]: You were kind of in it and you had no sense of anyone else. It’s like, to use an old analogy, it’s like Pac Man. There could be a thousand people being Pac man in the same room. You just wouldn’t know, right? It was just you. And then I was thinking, so many of the people you know with whom I speak, they don’t know each other. But I know so, so many cool people who do this. What if they could talk to each other? So I talked to a couple members. I was like, what do you think if we had like a coffee shop, like a group chat where you could say what you’re working on, people could ask about it.

Steven Puri [00:53:32]: I was talking to a couple members. One woman made up my mind where I said this to her. I was like, I just think it would be the most distracting thing ever. It would be actually kind of cool to feel the community. And she said, steven, listen, I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of shoes. They will sell me a left shoe and a right shoe, put them on my feet. They work. I run.

Steven Puri [00:53:54]: There’s a reason why a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run club. Because when you run together, you run further, you run faster, you’re accountable to a group. The days that you suck and your friends go by, they’re like, come on, Nick, let’s do this. You go, run. It feels great to have that uplift. And the days you go by and pick up your friend who needs it, feel even better. She’s like, you should do it. We did it.

Steven Puri [00:54:16]: We launched that so you can actually talk to people in there. And it’s my favorite things. You can post once a day something you’re working on. So you can’t spam it with like 50 things. But it’s like, here’s my most important thing of the day. Last spring, a guy named Roy King posted in there, finished my dissertation. And people in the group chat were like, hey, man, that’s kind of a mic drop, kind of, you know, my task of the day sort of thing. What’s up? And he said, oh, I am an assistant vice principal at high school in Missouri, and I’ve been working on my PhD in engineering.

Steven Puri [00:54:53]: I’m also a dad and a husband. He said, so I find I have maybe 60 minutes at night during the week, and maybe 90 minutes on the weekend when I can. In between responsibilities, like focus. He said, that’s what I use tuka for. I need that 60 minutes to be really focused so I can do this. And he said, but don’t get too excited because, you know, I still have to defend my dissertation. You go in front of the panel thing. I don’t have a doctorate.

Steven Puri [00:55:18]: My. My brother has two. I assume it’s really hard. So he said, that’s like two weeks from Monday. And what’s interesting is the weekend leading into that Monday, a number of people around the world that I know don’t know them. People in Japan, Spain, you know, South America, posted in the group chat going, hey, you know, Roy, we’re pulling for you, man. Like, oh, you got this, Roy. It was kind of nice to see, like, community coming together, even in a.

Steven Puri [00:55:41]: It’s not like we’re the size of Facebook. Like, we’re a small site of people trying to perform. And on Monday, there was nothing from Roy, our dad. And someone finally asked, like, hey, anyone speak to Roy? Is this like a bad sign that we haven’t heard anything? And no one had heard anything. And Tuesday morning, Roy logged in and posted, you may now call me Dr. King. And people went apeshit. And it was amazing.

Steven Puri [00:56:07]: And he said it was hard balancing being a dad with two kids. I only have one now, but, you know, two kids and being a husband and being a vice or assistant vice principal at high school. He said, but I wanted this and I did it. I think that’s amazing and that inspires me because you’re right, I have not slept much the last four months. I have an amazing wife. She handles a ton. But still, this morning at 3:50, I was awake feeding him, and I haven’t been back to sleep. I’ve been going all day.

Steven Puri [00:56:39]: It’s like my fourth zoom of the day. And I was coding and, yeah, it’s it. Everybody I have counseled or coached over the past six years who is a parent telling me how they need to use their time. Well, I understand that in 3D now, whereas before was in 2D.

Nick Urban [00:56:57]: What a story. Well, Stephen, do you have the time and the energy left for a quick rapid fire round?

Steven Puri [00:57:05]: Why would I come and miss that? Come on. I’m here. Okay. And I’m awake. I haven’t micro napped yet. Yeah, no micro naps.

Nick Urban [00:57:13]: All right, the first thing is, are you a fan of coffee and nootropics or no coffee and no nootropics?

Steven Puri [00:57:20]: For focus, I will tell you this. My very first girlfriend in life was School of American Ballet, New York dancer, moved to la, Inaugural company of the Los Angeles Ballet. And I remember one morning, it was like a Saturday morning, she got up and I could see through the bedroom door, like her in the kitchen doing the French press and all the fancy coffee stuff. And it hit me, that expression about don’t talk to me until I have my coffee in the morning. I was like, I never really understood that. But that is Susie. Susie is measurably different before and after she’s had her coffee. I quit caffeine that day.

Steven Puri [00:58:01]: I don’t caffeinate. This is. This is me uncaffeinated and on. No sleep. Can you imagine if I slept, Nick? Scary, right?

Nick Urban [00:58:07]: Or had caffeine or both.

Steven Puri [00:58:10]: Yes. So I believe. Loric. My wife was D1 ice hockey player. She definitely keeps us healthy. I do yoga usually around 5:30 in the morning and again at the end of the day around seven. That sort of keeps me high energy and clear. And yet I try to.

Steven Puri [00:58:29]: I don’t drink. No caffeine, nothing. A lot of water. But remember, not beer water.

Nick Urban [00:58:38]: What’s your most unpopular opinion about productivity?

Steven Puri [00:58:42]: That people think they’re being productive when they’re not. There are lots of ways to be busy that get you nowhere.

Nick Urban [00:58:49]: One person aside from Miel Csikszentmihalyi for all things focus.

Steven Puri [00:58:58]: This could be an odd one. No one said this one for you yet, but I would tell you Mahatma Gandhi. And the reason for that is, if you think about an entire subcontinent of people, they were trying to essentially escape slavery, domination. How strong the forces were. Both from one of the greatest empires the Earth has seen, the British Empire, as well as all the factions in India. All those forces pulling every direction. We should be violent. We should fight them this way, we should fight them that way.

Steven Puri [00:59:31]: We should do this. And to be able to one man without a gun, without a sword, liberate a subcontinent solely through being focused on exactly what his principles were like, that is like standing in the middle of a Katrina hurricane and saying, I can get us through this.

Nick Urban [00:59:50]: Yeah. And it’s also not just doing more and more things and checking off a huge to do list either.

Steven Puri [00:59:55]: Yeah, true.

Nick Urban [00:59:57]: Aside from the things we’ve covered already, what’s the smallest or a really small habit technique tool with the highest ROI for this whole realm?

Steven Puri [01:00:08]: Oh, I gotta say, I gotta say, it is the one about. Begin your morning with the intention. I mean, I would like to come up with something new to end the episode. I know I would and so would you, but it would not be honest. The honest thing is if you do that thing and when you wake up the morning to say this is what moves my life forward today and you do it, man, like it has an effect, it changes your life and it’s easy to fall out of that and like you said, get to doing a whole ton of things. I knocked out my to do list and I was busy and it you didn’t actually move your life forward.

Nick Urban [01:00:42]: Stephen, this has been a blast. If people want to find you online to check out suka to connect with you, where do you want to send them?

Steven Puri [01:00:50]: I appreciate that. If there is anything that I’ve said where someone has a question, it doesn’t have to be about the company I built. My email address is very public. It is Steven S T E V E n at Thesuka the happiness. You know T H e S u k h a.co for company, right? Happy to answer question if it’s you were looking for something on Cal Newport, something on Mihaly Cszentmihalyi. And by the way, Nick, hats off to your pronunciation, my friend. You know, if it’s something where I can refer you to some resource like happy to do that, I don’t have time to write you back the story of my life, nor do you care to read it, but you know, something like that. And if someone wants to experiment with flow, what I’d say is this is have a task in mind.

Steven Puri [01:01:35]: Flow, as we discussed, takes like 15 to 23 minutes to drop in. So if you want to experiment with the Sukha website, which is free for three days, just try it at obviously Thesuka. T h e S u k h a co try it. But when you come, you need to have something you want to work on because the magic is when you look up after an hour and you go, wow, that’s done. The magic is not hitting play. Listening to music for 30 seconds, being like, I don’t know, it’s music you won’t be in. Flow.

Nick Urban [01:02:04]: It’s been a blast chatting with you, learning about flow and some of your background and how the worlds that you’ve been a part of overlap and the lessons that you’ve been able to share with us.

Steven Puri [01:02:15]: This was great and I appreciate you built an audience of people who care about how to maximize their potential. That’s really cool.

Nick Urban [01:02:23]: More than just getting things done, it’s about maximizing and optimizing the potential across whatever that means, whatever is most important to them.

Steven Puri [01:02:32]: Cool. Thank you guys for listening.

Nick Urban [01:02:33]: All right, thanks everyone for sharing your time, your attention, and your energy with us. And until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their health span. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned at outlier. Com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.