S1:Ep90 From Die Hard to Transformers: Hollywood’s Playbook for Executives to Create Impact and Drive Success in the AI Era

Hollywood creates leaders under extreme pressure. In the AI era, executives face similar stakes.
My amazing guest Steven Puri from Austin, Texas shares Hollywood’s playbook for leadership, storytelling, and impact in AI-driven business. See also S1:Ep80.

Steven has an extraordinary background in Hollywood, having worked as an executive and producer on some of the biggest blockbusters of our time – including Die Hard 5, The Wolverine, Transformers, and Star Trek.

Steven has collaborated with major studios such as DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, and Sony, and raised more than $21M in venture funding across three tech start-ups. After decades of turning big visions into reality on screen and in business, Steven shifted his focus to solving one of today’s most pressing challenges: how we work.

As the Founder & CEO of The Sukha Company, he now helps remote workers overcome procrastination and distraction, bringing more focus, energy, and well-being into the flow of daily work. From Hollywood blockbusters to the future of remote productivity, Steven’s journey blends storytelling, leadership, and innovation in a truly unique way.

Steven is a Diamond Executive Member of the AI Game Changers Club - an elite tribe of visionary leaders redefining the rules and shaping the future of Human–AI synergy.

🔑 We discuss how executives can:

• Lead when stakes are high and variables are unknown
• Use storytelling to align teams, reduce silos, and build trust
• Balance bold action with long-term strategy in AI-driven environments
• Adapt fast when the “script changes” due to AI disruption
• Cultivate imagination and creative vision as a leadership advantage
• Unlearn outdated leadership patterns to thrive in the AI era

This conversation bridges Hollywood, leadership, and AI-driven transformation, offering practical insights for executives, founders, innovators, investors and decision-makers shaping the future of business.

🔗 Connect with Steven Puri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-puri/

🌏 The Sukha Company: https://www.thesukha.co/

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Guest And Mission
• 2:35 The Attention War Stealing Your Team
• 5:00 Flow States And Designing For Focus
• 8:40 From Mechanics To Meaning In Leadership
• 12:40 Naming Sukha: What People Really Buy
• 17:30 Rituals, Deep Work, And Team Cadence
• 21:20 High-Stakes Decisions Without Fear
• 26:00 Film-Tech Parallels And Consumer Insight
• 29:20 Storytelling As A Leadership Tool
• 35:00 Creativity’s Default Mode Advantage
• 41:00 Community, Accountability, And Human Energy
• 48:00 Transform To Lead In The AI Era

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host Annie. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation, and most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch, nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence, and building resilient teams. My incredible guest today is Stephen Purry from Austin, Texas. Together, we are going to co-create Hollywood's Playbook for executives, uncovering how leaders can increase their impact and drive success in the high-pressure, fast-paced AI era. Stephen Purry has an extraordinary background in Hollywood, having worked as an executive and producer on some of the biggest blockbusters of our time, including Die Hard 5, Devolvering, Transformers, and Star Trek. Steven has collaborated with major studios such as DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, and Sony, and raised more than 21 million in venture funding across three tech startups. After decades of turning big visions into reality on screen and in business, Steven shifted his focus to solving one of today's most pressing challenges: how we work. As the founder and CEO of the Silka Company, he now helps remote workers overcome procrastination and distraction, bringing more focus, energy, and well-being into the flow of daily work. From Hollywood blockbusters to the future of remote productivity, Steven's journey blends storytelling, leadership, and innovation in a truly unique way. I'm honored to have Steven as a part of the Diamond Executive Group of the AI Game Changers Club, an elite tribe of visionary leaders redefining the rules and shaping the future of human AI Synergy. Welcome, Steven. I'm incredibly happy to have you here in the studio. I've been looking forward to today's conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 2:19

Thank you for having me here, and thank you for everyone who's listening. And you touched upon something in the beautiful intro, which is always nice to hear someone else talk about you, right? So I was listening to that, and there's something you touched upon that we didn't talk about in a previous episode, and I'd like to lead with that thought now, which is yes, most of the audience listening right now are leaders, you know, either mid-level or leaders of an entire organization, and similar goals. How does my team, how does my division, how does my company win? Right. And let me point out that there is one force in the world that is stealing your team away from you. And it is remarkable to me that Laura, my wife, whom you know, she was at Apple, and you know, she's now in banking. She and I have a lot of friends who are either at one of the Facebook companies, the meta companies, or used to be at TikTok or Twitter. And it is interesting that the trillion-dollar companies right now, their business model is to steal your life, to steal the attention of your team. And it used to be 10 years ago that in the United States, you know, Zuckerberg and these guys would be called to Congress and they had to kind of like lie and obfuscate what they did. And now they're very confident about yes, our business model is stealing people's lives. And by the way, next quarter, we're going to use these techniques to try to steal more of their attention, right? So when you think about your team, there's a tug of war for your team. On one side, you have trillion-dollar companies who have the money to pay the best behavioral psychologists and put them on staff, the best UIUX designers, the best engineers, and say, listen, could you just help us tomorrow steal a little more of everyone's lives, of their productivity, than you did today? Right? The other side of that rope and that tug of war is your individual contributor, your IC, who's trying to do something for their lives and hopefully for your team, right? Now, is that a fair tug of war? It's not. But you have to acknowledge that is really what's going on. And if you want to create conditions for your team to do great things, you need to say, okay, what can I do to help them block out these distractions? Going back to a flow state, you and I have both experienced flow states, you know, this hyper-productive, concentrated state where the world falls away, distractions fall away. And I recognize that one of the reasons I first experienced it on that flight was because the Wi-Fi was out. There was no distract. There was no email, WhatsApp, Slack messages. There was nothing to distract me.

SPEAKER_00: 5:15

Incredible that you mention it because you know, flying is my favorite thing because it feels like if I'm coming closer to the source.

SPEAKER_01: 5:27

Right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 5:30

So when we think about leadership, and you say, oh, there are some fantastic books and there are wonderful speakers on how to be an inspiring leader and how to set goals for your team and OKRs and KPIs and all these things, right? All those are true. They're they're mechanics, right? So if you want to talk about, oh, this is how you achieve flight, right? I imagine that we're going to be in this heavier-than-air steel contraption that takes us from one country to another. You can talk about, well, this is how the wheels work, and this is how the wings are shaped, and there's the mechanics of it. But there's also the amazing fact that you are in this huge steel contraption that's going from country to country, right? So if you want to inspire and really be a leader and you want to have a team that is inspired, they need to feel at the end of the day they did something that was meaningful because that is what gets you going for the next day. I'm gonna tell you a story about my company, which is I have a very strange name for my company, right? The Suka Company. Unless you speak Sanskrit, you don't know what that means. And the way that came about is I mentioned Laura, my wife. We met in yoga, New York, Manhattan. She's at the equinox to my left. So when we got married a couple of years ago, I had a working version of this company. And we had early members. So when you do a lot of yoga with your wife, where do you go on your honeymoon? You go to Bali, right? It's an amazing place to be alone doing yoga on the beach, you know, things like that. So we were going there, and I said to her, you know, the next two weeks, no one from my company is gonna bug me to you know, approve a purchase order or do anything. They know I'm on my honeymoon. So I hope that in this time of being not distracted, the universe speaks to me and I find a name. I need a real name for this company. And all the names I've been thinking of were really bad. They were like very descriptive. Flow state app, you know, distraction blocker. Laura, being a great partner, was like, I wish that for you. I hope the universe does speak to you. Right. So we get there and I said, if you don't mind, I think what would really seed my unconscious is if today I spoke to maybe two or three of our early members and just asked them, what's your favorite thing? And then maybe over the next 10, you know, 12 days, that turns into something interesting. Like Amazon is not called like bookstore, you know, like Nike is not called shoe seller, right? So Laura said, you know, go for it. I'm going to the pool. I will see you at dinner. Right. So I put in the group chat in our in our app. I said, Who has five minutes, 10 minutes to talk? Couple people did. I asked that question. Hey, Eppie, thank you. You know, what's your favorite thing? Is it, you know, we have all this scientifically designed flow music? Is it the pomodora timers? Is it the you know, this, that? The third guy I spoke to, who's still a member, I see him in there every now and then. We were going into the wrap-up where I was like, oh, you know what? I I promised 10 minutes. I want to be respectful of your time. Let's wrap up. Thank you for everything you told me. And he said to me, Steven, you ask the wrong questions. Okay, you know, hey guy that I don't know. Thanks for that. I was like, I'll take the bait. So what's the right question? He said, You should have asked me why I pay you. And I said, We don't charge an exorbitant sum. Like it's a portable product, but okay. Why do you pay me? He said, The past year or two, I find I have two kinds of days. At three o'clock, I can be playing with my kids. They're two and four right now. Or at six o'clock, I can be down to myself and feel where did the day go? I was busy all day, but I didn't do the big things that moved my team forward. He said, I realized the difference is did I hit play in your website when I started work in the morning? So I pay you because my kids are not gonna be two and four forever. And I was like, wow, okay. That's that's really interesting. And right, it was a way better question. Very profound, right? So I go to dinner with Laura and I was like, I talked to this guy who is more articulate about what I'm doing than I am, and I told her what he'd said. And she's like, Yeah, that's really good. You should you should employ him, you should have him do copywriting for you, right? So that night we're going to bed, you know, as you do when you're, you know, on your honeymoon in your little spa robes, brush your teeth. And Laura looks at me. She said, You know, you wanted the universe to speak to you about your company, how to capture what it is you're doing. She said, the universe spoke to you through that guy. In yoga, we hear all these Sanskrit terms: prana for your life force, you know, karma, dharma, your duty. She said, he described you sukha, that feeling of self-fulfillment of being in your lane, doing what you're meant to do, and being good at it, being in control of your day. She said, that's what you should call your company, the happiness company. So I looked it up on my phone. The Sukha Company was available because God knows who you know was looking for that. For$14, I bought the website that night. And that is really my guiding principle is to say, for both individual contributors and leaders who want to be in control of their day, who want to block the distractions. Like we we have the feature where you can block your phone. You pick up your phone and your little smart assistant says, Hey, Steven, do you really need to be on your phone? Sometimes that's all I need is that little nudge to say, who do I want to be? Do I want to be the guy at three o'clock has done meaningful work for my team? Or do I want to be the guy at six o'clock who's like, oh, I suck. I'll get up early tomorrow and try and finish my work from today, you know? And the same thing with like websites. Are there websites that distract you? Are there?

SPEAKER_00: 11:25

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 11:26

Like what what what websites distract you when you're working?

SPEAKER_00: 11:31

Well, I don't think they do. Oh no, but I approach this process in a different way. Um yes, of course. Uh, otherwise, you know, I would hang all the time between the websites and nothing would be done.

SPEAKER_01: 11:46

Which a lot of people do, and that's what makes leaders afraid is they're like, are these websites stealing the time you should be working? Well, that's amazing about the discipline. Not everyone has that Emmy.

SPEAKER_00: 11:59

No, but you know, it's a work on purpose where you learn sort of certain principles and apply them in your life. But it's also about prioritization, and time is our most valuable resource. Right. So every second of your lifetime, you have to think how you are spending it and what you are prioritizing, what you are focusing on. So I couldn't agree more. It's definitely crucial and it's amazing that you created this solution, which can help so many in this world to focus on what really matters.

SPEAKER_01: 12:39

And there are wonderful. Let me just say, I created one solution to help teams get into flow. There are wonderful other platforms out there that do this. The question is really are you as a leader ready to say to your team, I believe we could do great deep work this way, let's do it. Or do you want to just continue doing what you're doing? You know, how I don't know how many companies you've been part of, Amy, where the stand up, you just go around, you're like, This is what I did today, this is what I'm gonna do later, this is where I'm blocked, and then the next person, this is what I did, this is what I'm gonna do, this is what I'm blocked, you know, and it becomes this like mechanical, uninspired way of thinking about your day as opposed to what you really want. Like you as a leader, you want someone to walk into the staff meeting and say something where everyone stops talking. And they go, we should do what Emmy said right now. Like that changes the trajectory of our company. That's what you want. And that doesn't come from nine minutes in between Teams meetings. That comes from saying, hey guys, like let's every day or every other day let's budget an hour where we're going to do deep work. We're going to do the things that move us forward, not the things that you know are shallow work, as Cal Newport would say. You know, no one gets a gold medal for returning all their slack messages.

SPEAKER_00: 14:03

Exactly, exactly. And Steven, in movies like Die Hard Five and The Wolverine, the stakes are always life or death. And characters must deliver under extreme pressure. Yeah. So what lessons from those high-stakes environments can executives apply to create real impact in today's intense AI pressured reality?

SPEAKER_01: 14:26

Well, what it's a funny thing in film, which is films generally begin with a producer, right? So the producer will find a script, an idea, a book, a game, whatever. You know, writers will write it. And then the producer has to find a director. Now, the joke in film is that you are hiring your own boss. Because once the director comes aboard, they kind of run the show because they're like, well, this is the cinematographer I want. This is how I want to shoot it. This is, you know, my crew. And then you go off and do it. So it's this funny thing of like, you're kind of the boss until you hire your own boss, right? So when you've hired a good director, they're accustomed to making, like you said, decisions that sometimes the implications are millions of dollars on a decision, and you have to make them multiple times a day, right? And what I've seen is that the more comfortable and confident you get, the less fear factors into your decision-making process. And that's obvious if you're saying, like, well, you know, we could do this thing, but it might rain later. So should we move to the indoor set? Like, that's one kind of fear. But there's also fear of how you look. And if you're afraid of going back on a decision you made where you've learned more and now you realize what you were deciding before has changed, you have to not be afraid to say, hey, I know I said we should do this, but based upon more thought or more information, we should actually do something different. Like that really comes from separating fear out of the equation, you know? So that's one of the things I've seen very effective at those high stakes, kind of you're on set and you're making million-dollar decisions, you know, several times a day, is you're okay being wrong. You're okay taking other people's input and factoring it in because you're all trying to do the same thing. And it's not about, well, you said this and now you said that, therefore you're dumb. You know?

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

Exactly. I couldn't agree more. And a film director orchestrates talent, timing, complexity in environments with many new unknown variables. What parallels do you see for executives leading diverse teams in AI-driven high-paced environments?

SPEAKER_01: 16:47

This is one of the funny things I noticed is between film and tech, right? Because I started in tech, I got into film for 15, 20 years, and then I went back into tech. Is people on either side think the other business is completely different, right? It's this foreign thing where we're running a business that makes computers or makes software, or we're making, you know, TV series or making movies or, you know, or YouTube videos or whatever, right? And the reality is that you ultimately, unless you know, you're a very small shop, a sort of preneur, but suppose you have a team, you have an organization, you ultimately are doing the same thing, which is you're saying, we're going to take our best guess at what this kind of consumer wants. And we're going to assemble a team that we think are when we'll create the components of that, which can be designers, UIUX designers to create an interface. It can be writers to structure a plot. You can hire engineers to make it, which are, you know, crafts people, right? You can hire marketers. You can also, but the team has to be assembled around here is very clear guess on what the consumer is going to want. And you can do a lot of things. You know, there's market research. There's also, you know, the famous quote from Henry Ford, you know, if I did what people asked for, we would have faster horses, you know, or Steve Jobs. No one ever asked me if, you know, like there are some visionaries that are like, no market research would have created this breakthrough, right? Totally. Um, but there there is value in market research because sometimes you do uncover things that do inspire a new idea. So uh to go back to your question about what can leaders do that, you know, learn from these high-stakes things, we talked about separating out fear, right? You have to be able to go back on what you even like in this country, Elon Musk, who is loved by some, hated by many, right? One thing he does well is he changes his mind. You know, things don't go the way he thinks they're going to go, and he quickly pivots into the next thing. He doesn't hold on to that. So there is a value in that, and there is also a value in just saying I need to rely upon my team in this area where we're making guesses, right? So two ideas.

SPEAKER_00: 19:07

I love this. And here I'm thinking about storytelling, which becomes an important part of the story. So, what storytelling secrets from film can executives use to reduce silos, enable efficient communication, build trust, and drive collective business success towards the North South.

SPEAKER_01: 19:29

That is a great question because here's the here's the deal we as humans relate to each other through stories. Stories are what we tell our children, stories what we tell each other about truths about the world. It is how we reveal that, right? So there are individual stories, right? I mean, you tell me like how you created this you know group and what you want to do with it. There are group stories, the myth. The Greek and Roman myths, right? And they all are there to express a truth. Whether you believe that, you know, Zeus, you know, or Neptune existed and they did this thing, or Aphrodite was this, you know, woman, right? This goddess, there is a truth that's being expressed to that story. So if you as a leader want to express truths to your team, stories are a way that we're trained as people to understand truth, right? So what is a story? Successful stories are generally this there is some heroic force that has a goal, and often you're gonna find to reach that goal, there's an opposing force, and it's a clash of values, right? And the best stories, by the way, whether film or you know books or whatever, the opposing force, the villain, is not crazy, is not an idiot. The best ones where the villains are very smart, and you'll notice that when they articulate their point of view, why they are opposing the heroic force, 95% of it makes absolute sense. But then there's 5% that just shifts their worldview into something that is villainous as opposed to heroic, right? So whether obviously, you know, in the Star Trek canon, which is one of the great sci-fi in the Star Wars canon, another great sci-fi thing, or whether you look at action movies, you look at you know dramas, that construct of there is a heroic force, there's an opposing force, and they have a clash of values. That is a great way to explain to people, you know, your team, you know, why you're doing what you're doing. So in your case, it may be about cleaning the oceans. In your case, it may be about creating new drugs that are going to cure some horrible affliction. It could be about, you know, as we joked in the first episode, creating the best romantic comedies for everyone to enjoy. But there is your force because you have a mission that you're on as the heroes. You know, you and your team are the heroes of the story. And you need to clearly define the opposing force because no hero can be greater than the villain. Like if you're a very weak villain, the hero is also going to be weak. No matter what they do, is not impressive, right? That's why you often in these movies you think about how great the villain was. Oh, that was incredibly well played by this character, right? By this actor, you know? Because unless the villain is great, whatever the hero does is inconsequential, right? So to bring this all the way back to your question about, okay, as a leader, how do you use stories to inspire and lead? You need to understand that when you tell a story, you need to express it in the model that people are trained from movies, TV series, books, comic books, everything in the world is presented in this way, which is you need to express this is why we're the heroes of the story. Here is the opposing force. We have a clash of these values. This is why it's important that we win. The outcome that we need is save the world or save, you know, our country, or, you know, whatever that may be. Um, and then people plug into that because then you've given them a why, which, you know, like Simon Sinek has made a whole career out of just talking about why. Um, the why is often more important than the what. The what is secondary. Why are we doing this is what drives you, and then what you do is how you express the fact you're inspired to do the thing.

SPEAKER_00: 23:41

And this is brilliant, and it is so deep, and it is exactly the step-by-step explanation to how to use and apply then storytelling in order to reach your results and move forward together as a team, as an organization, and reach your goals. Amazing, Steven. Hollywood thrives on imagination, dreaming big, turning the unknown into possibilities. In action films, every move has ripple effects. Yes. It just mentioned the villains and the heroes in leadership. Every decision can reshape culture and business outcomes. So, what strategies help leaders balance bold, decisive action with long-term strategy for business growth.

SPEAKER_01: 24:33

Let me give you one fun story because I know we talk about a lot of principles, and sometimes the stories are the most memorable part, right? So you are leading a team, and you need your team to be creative, to create something new, right? So this is not a team of accountants where you just want them to check their work, right? That's a different business, right? But you actually're creating a new marketing campaign, you're creating a new product, you're changing a product feature, like that sort of thing, right? And you need great creative ideas. I'll tell you, when I was 20, I had a great lesson demonstrated to me. So I was coming out of USC in Los Angeles, and my first job in film was at a company, an ad agency that did trailers for movies. So our two biggest accounts were Warner Brothers and Buena Vista, which is essentially Disney. We would get in rough cuts of movies coming out that winter, the next summer, you know. And my job at that time was I would get the movie in and I would assign it to a writer or producer. So I would call you up and go, Andy, hey, we got this comedy in with Julie Roberts. You did that great uh job for Sonny last year. Could you watch this movie and then write a trailer, right? So I would be the trafficker in assigning all these things. So the company is run by these two guys who are very well respected in the business. They've been doing trailers for like 20 years. Everyone knew them. One of them is named Jeff. He's a friend to this day. And for the purposes of the story, he always calls me Stevie. He's the only person in my life who's ever called me Stevie, but it's just the way the story goes. Okay. So he comes to my office. I'm 20, he's 40 something, right? And he goes, Stevie. I was like, yeah. He's like, do you know Bart? I was like, oh, there's a guy in the vault, you know, that delivers tapes and stuff. Yeah, I haven't met him. He's like, uh, you ever yeah, you ever give Bart a trailer to write? I was like, Bart, the the guy who delivers coffee and like picks up tapes round down. I I haven't, Jeff. Where are you going with this? Right? He said, Stevie, I I have an instinct about him. Jeff, you're the boss. Done. Let me find something and see what he can do. So I found like a Warner Brothers B title, you know, they had like a month deadline. So if he took it home for a week, he can't do it, he doesn't want to do it, he can give it to a pro, right? We'll just do it in a couple days. So Jeff comes to my office two days later. Stevie, how's Bart doing? I was like, Jeff, I gave him the movie two days ago. Like, I'm not gonna stress him out and ask him. I'll ask him on Monday how he's doing. Okay, okay, that's fine. Uh-oh. What else did you give him? Jeff, he's never written a trailer before. Like, I'm not gonna give him two movies, he's gonna go nuts. Stevie, let me explain to you how creativity works. If you give Bart one thing to focus on, he's gonna stare at that with little beads of sweat coming down his temples. He's going to write the most obvious B version of that trailer you can imagine. He said, the part of your brain that does that weird creative thing of, huh, what does peanut butter and chocolate taste like? Hmm, you know, what can I do with a cell phone, right? He said, that's not the part that you think you're thinking with. And I tell you in the last 20 years, how many times I've seen Jeff proven right in film as well as in tech. And there's a great book on the neuroscience of this called The Net and the Butterfly by uh Olivia Foxcomon and um and Judah Pollack. And they talk about the default mode network and the executive mode. And the default mode, to be very reductive, is almost like the child that does one of those things like, hmm, what does a cell phone taste like? You know, which the adult would never do. The executive mode network develops later and it makes sure the slide deck has to be done for the meeting on Friday. I have to, you know, do the dishes and the laundry and you know, execute action. What's interesting is when the executive mode network is busy, the default mode network gets to do the cool things, the weird associations, right? So I don't know if you've ever experienced this. I have, which is sometimes the idea that I will have for a feature, a blog post, some engineering thing will happen while I'm walking, I'm doing the dishes, I'm showering, I'm driving, you know, something where the executive mode network is occupied, and the back of the mind goes, I have a cool idea. Have you experienced that?

SPEAKER_00: 29:06

Exactly. And you know, if the pole wouldn't fall down from the tree, the world would look completely differently. So that's exactly the point. And I love going out into the forest, into the nature, because that's exactly a space where we get aligned with those opportunities to open up to the information. Because I also like to compare it to the spring-in element when you are completely in your process, you are focused, you are super busy. It is so tight that there is no way something might come in between, something unplanned, something creative or whatever. But once you let it get more relaxed and there is more space, then there is an opportunity. You just open up the door to anything that might create that shift, that transformation, which is really the defining factor of your success. So I couldn't.

SPEAKER_01: 30:16

And when you think about that as a leader, many of the people listening to podcast, they are going to be in meetings all day long. So flow states may not be relevant for them because their job is to be continually in meetings. However, they have a team, which is why we talked about flow states to say, can you create the conditions where your team will do the great work that moves your division forward? Right. It's the same thing with creativity. Many of the people listening to this have a team of people that need to be creative, but they're actually meetings all day long. So with the team, when you say, Oh, I really need, you know, John to do this amazing bit of work here, and you understand that creativity happens when there are multiple things going. You may realize you can't just tell John, John, spend two days, focus on this one thing and do something great. You need to say, hey, you know what? Here's some things you can work on. When you're working on one, I recognize you may have the idea on the other thing. So you balance these things out. We just need to have ideas on them by this time, right? And then let their creative mind focus on one, focus on the other, and go back. So that's what you can do as a leader. That's really the application of this is to say, as you're leading creative people, recognize that multiple projects sometimes are helpful as opposed to hurtful.

SPEAKER_00: 31:33

This is invaluable. And I appreciate that you highlight this part. So success in film depends on adaptability when the script or that changes. What can executives learn from this about navigating disruption successfully while AI reshapes industries and business models?

SPEAKER_01: 31:59

Well, let me be humble here in that even the smartest minds around AI are still guessing how well AI will integrate into our life or take over our lives. Okay. So I I am not a guru. I don't have a crystal ball. I have an opinion. I will share that opinion, but I want to be modest and that it is just an opinion, which is there is absolutely with the current version of LLMs, which a lot of people say AI, but they really are talking about just LLMs, like the that kind of large language model, as opposed to the you know, generative AI for images or you know, machine learning, deep learning sort of stuff. So as it relates to LLMs, yes, there's a lot of stuff where we as humans are just doing the same kind of prediction engine work, like pattern matching, saying, oh, I have to write this blog post. It kind of needs to be like this. We have a new feature for the website I need to, you know, write. So that can be absolutely helped. You know, you can get a first draft or you can revise a draft AI. I don't see yet that there is that amazing creativity where you do have those new ideas. You know, like we were joking about the Henry Ford and the Steve Jobs, and you know, some of the visionaries that say like no one could have predicted this based upon past patterns. And that is what LLMs are, is they're matching you know, the pre-training that they have. So a lot of those jobs, yeah, will go away, should go away. I don't know a lot of people that just love like doing spreadsheets endlessly, and that's a great job to have an LLM do. Um, and hopefully it does free you up for more creative work. But yeah, there's gonna be a tremendous shift, like going into the industrial age where suddenly farming was not an incredibly valuable skill as opposed to being close to an industrial city where you would go get a factory job. That's what we're going through right now.

SPEAKER_00: 33:58

Interesting, exciting times and uh scary too. The first generation to go through all the possible variations from the world where there were no mobiles, no computers, basically nothing like that. And we were developing our imagination, our soft skills. We had more chances for communication as well, and today the world is completely different, and there is such a huge gap between different generations, and we are playing on the same playground, but we are truly different, and our behavior differs a lot. Yeah, that's really interesting, and that's something leaders need to keep in mind as well, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 34:49

Yeah, and there's there is a human element to this. I'll tell you a story that involves a bit of again, film and and Hollywood and writers, but I think it's universally true, which is as we were developing the Suka, our postshade app, right? The idea of Suka is it gives you and your team ability to block distractions, websites, phone, beautiful music to get you into flow, time result, right? However, it's a single-player game. You play it with no sense of there's anyone else. And because I run the company, I would talk to hundreds of individual members, and I knew them all, but I realized none of them knew each other. And I thought, is there something to do about that? Is there some way in which you would help them to know each other? So I asked, as I always do, I love talking to our members, to our customers, and say, hey, what do you think about this idea, this feature? And there was one woman when I was in this exploration who said this to me, it was so clear, where I'd phrase the question, you know, is this gonna be incredibly distracting if there's a way for people to interact with each other in this community, or would this be amazing? And she said this. She said, Stephen, listen, I can go to the Nike store, I can buy a pair of shoes. They will sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I put them on my feet, I go run. It works. But there are a hundred million people in the Nike Run Club around the world. Because when you run together, you run further, you run faster, you're more accountable. She said, the days that you don't have the motivation and your friends come by and pick you up and you go run feel great because you needed that. And the days when one of your friends needs you to pick them up, it feels even better when you're there for them. She said, You absolutely should do this. Like that's an important part of productivity of being on a team, is that you're there for each other. You're not alone. And it reminded me of this when I was in film. It's gonna sound a little crazy, but when you're a senior executive at a studio or an executive in general, you get a ton of submissions. People are giving you scripts, books, treatments, you know, short stories that they licensed, and they want you to buy them. So you have a lot of reading, right? Every weekend I'd have, you know, 15 to 20 scripts to read. I could read those at home. Right. But across from the director's guild in West Hollywood, on the other side of Sunset Boulevard, there's a coffee bean and tea leaf that's known as like a writer's clubhouse, this coffee shop, right? It's just one of a chain. When you walk in that room and everyone's on their, you know, MacBook writing away, you know, in the corner, there's, you know, the old guy who's ridden three studio movies this year, he's making a million dollars of script, right? But this is his habit from when he was young, coming to this coffee shop, and he still goes there to write. Whereas you have, you know, people on the other side of the table that just got off the bus and they're writing their first, you know, TV pilot. And there was an energy in that room. It wasn't about people talking, it was kind of a quiet room. It was an energy of being around people who are all trying to do something great, trying to write the next great movie, the next great TV series. I would go there to read, and I'm not a writer, but it was energizing to be around people like that. And that's something that is true in a team dynamic. And there is a lot of research on this. Some of it is under the category of social facilitation theory. You know, there's the coffee shop effect, the Hawthorne effect, all these things that essentially say, hey, when you can see other people working, trying to do something great, and they can see you, there's a measurable productivity boost, right? Because we are human. We are not AI. AI runs fine alone. The AI agent doesn't need to know there are other agents trying to do great things. But we as humans do, right? We benefit from that. It's not to say 24 hours a day you need to be around other people. There's value in you know doing solo work. But I don't know, in college, did you ever go to a study hall to study? Or did you always study alone?

SPEAKER_00: 39:04

No, we're doing both. But it was important to know how to do both as well, because I see that nowadays in the educational system, it shifts towards uh either one or another. So it is truly important to know how to do both.

SPEAKER_01: 39:24

And there, there is, like you said, there's value in I need to be absolutely alone to do this. And there's value in I want to feel connected to people. One of the things that I'm very proud of is I had noticed in our platform that there was a guy who was in there often at night or on weekends. And in his little bio in Succa, you could see he was the assistant vice principal of this high school in Missouri, which is like in the middle of the United States. One day, as everyone can do, is once a day, you can post into the group chat something you finished. Your most Important task, right? Because again, it's a group. So sometimes copywriters or bloggers will post, oh, I wrote this blog, and that's the thing they share. Or, you know, designer would be like, oh, I just redesigned a website and they'll share it, right? And you're part of a group. He posted into the site this spring, finished my dissertation. So people asked him, they're like, hey, that seems like a pretty big thing to post today. And he said, Yeah, I've been using SUKA at night on weekends to work on my PhD in engineering. But I'm still holding down my day job and I'm still a dad. Right. He said, so I find that at night, during the week, I have about 90 minutes at night that I can focus and still, you know, be present for dinner, but I'm done with my high school job and I can have some problems on the weekends. And that's how I did this. But he said, don't get too excited because I still need to defend my dissertation, right? Before you get your PhD, there's another step, right? So he said it's like two weeks from Monday. So that weekend leading up to the Monday, people in the group chat were like, hey, you know, Roy, you got this. Good luck. You know, you're gonna pull this off great. You're gonna do great, right? So on Monday, nothing. He wasn't there, right? People started asking, like, hey, anyone speak to Roy King? Does anyone know what happened with the dissertation? Right. There's Team Spirit. They were asking. Tuesday morning, he logged in and he posted, You may now call me Dr. King. And Peter went wild, right? And I know these are people in Japan, in Spain, in South America that do not know him, right? But there was a thing about being human where you want to celebrate other people who are doing something that you are proud of their achievement. And that is not a machine thing. That is a human thing. And that's something as a leader you need to understand is like when you have your teams celebrating each other, it's it's a huge motivational tool that's not like buying free lunch for everyone or having a great retreat where you do ropes courses.

SPEAKER_00: 42:09

I couldn't agree more. And this is such a brilliant story, so much inspiration in it, and also a great reminder that we are humans and we need to connect around our achievements. And it's not only about achievements, because whole the life its ups and downs, and it is important just go through this transformation together. Yeah. And I'm thinking about the transformation. So many films are about the hero's transformation. So, Steven, what is one thing that you believe leaders must unlearn to become impact-driven leaders in the AI era? How should they transform?

SPEAKER_01: 42:56

Okay, because things are evolving so quickly, the thing I would say is this is you have to be willing to say what worked yesterday may not work today. You have to be open to the idea that if we just repeat the thing that made us successful, it may not make us successful going forward. And that can mean staffing, it can mean how you market your product, it can mean you know who your customer is, like things are evolving. It's not like the 1970s, the 1990s, where things were pretty static. Here you have to be open to yesterday's lesson, may or may not apply today.

SPEAKER_00: 43:34

This is so deep, so wise. I absolutely love it. I love it.

SPEAKER_01: 43:42

I hope this is helpful for everyone listening.

SPEAKER_00: 43:44

Definitely it is. If you could share one lasting secret from Hollywood's playbook to amplify the leadership impact in today's business and life, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01: 43:56

I'll tell you this is I would love to share something that maybe in maybe your previous episodes have not been shared because you've had some amazing guests on that have shared some great stuff, right? So let me share something that I've never heard on your podcast, which is I saw the association that some of the top writers and directors had between physical spaces and mental spaces. I'll give you a story which I'd love to give that illustrates this. So I told you that uh when I met Roland Erach and Devlin, is they're going to do Independence Day, right? They had a practice of writing their scripts at this villa that they would rent down in Puerto Pierre Arta, Mexico. I have not been there. Apparently, there's a beautiful white marble villa in the hills of Puerto Arte. So Roland told his assistant Joey, you know, Joey, rent the villa. We need it for a month or two if you go right, right? Joey came back and said, it's rented. I mean, it was like an Airbnb. I guess someone else had rented it at that point. And Roland called his entertainment attorney, John Demer, who's a fantastic attorney, and said, John, buy the villa. By Monday, Roland owned a$5 million villa in the hills of Puerto Riarta. Where the renters went, I do not know, but they were not there on Monday, right? And he said, there's a room down there where in the morning the light comes in over the pool and it just inspires us. There's something about being there where we think about what's the movie that we would go see. And we don't think about, oh, what will the budget be? And what notes will the studio want? You know, what will the cast want? We just are inspired there. So they went down, and six weeks later, they came back with the script that became the third highest grossing movie in film history at the time. Right? That was their thing. And this is not to say that, oh, you need to buy a five million dollar villa, you know, to be in the right mental space, because they'll tell you later, Alex Kurtzfer and Bob Orsey, whom I know many people listening don't know who they are, they're the writers who wrote uh The Island, Star Trek 11, Transformers 1 and 2, Mission Impossible 3, um, the Zorro movie, like tons of Fringe, the TV series, Hawaii FIBO, the TV series, like tons of stuff. Incredibly talented. So it's a DreamWorks that was with them. So when they got in that time, the crunch of we have to deliver this script, they had their assistant rent a room at the Universal Hilton, right? Our offices, the DreamWorks offices, are at the Amlin compound, which is on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, right? Across Langership, there is a Hilton hotel that I'm just gonna say it's not a glamorous hotel, right? It's it's the hotel where when you have three children, you stay there the night before you go on the rides, right? So they would go rent this place. And I remember thinking, they're making a million, two million dollars per script. Like they could they could rent a villa in Puerto Rica or in Malibu or whatever they wanted, but this is where they would go. And I realized for them they had met back in school. And I think having, you know, like Alf Kurtzman on the edge of the bed with the laptop on his lap and Bob at the desk with his laptop in the room, it evoked dorm room. It brought them back mentally to, oh, we're these young writers who have to prove that we're great, that we deserve to be here. And that is how they would go when they had three weeks to finish Transformers 2 for$2 million. They would go back to dorm room because that was their mental association with we have to prove ourselves. So I share that, which is an off-beat observation. It's different than what I've put on your pod. But as you start to notice that in your own life or your IC's lives, if you are strict about that, if you say, you know what, I want to, I'm a copywriter, I need to write, you know, this, or I'm a blogger, or I'm a designer, or I'm an engineer. If you create a space where you do that every day, when you start entering that space, your brain falls into that mode. It says, Oh, I'm here. This is where we write.

SPEAKER_00: 48:15

And this is amazing. Your stories are so exciting and so inspiring that it is incredible. Thank you so much for sharing this.

SPEAKER_01: 48:30

I appreciate being here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 48:32

Thank you, Stu, and for all your wisdom, for all your brilliant recommendations and uh for sharing your life and professional experience, because this is absolutely amazing. And I I'm so grateful for this.

SPEAKER_01: 48:51

Thank you for having me. Thank you guys for listening. And if anyone has questions about anything that I have said, if they want to learn more about Cal Newport or Mihai Chent Mihai or any of these concepts around time blocking, um, my email address is very public. It is Stephen S-T-E-V-E-N at the Suka, which is T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A.co for company, the Suka Company. I am happy if you drop me an email, you say, I would love to learn more about flow states. I will email you back a blog link or something that will, you know, give you something to start learning. Um, it doesn't have to be about my company, it can be about anything. And I return all my emails in 24 hours if I'm not sick or traveling. So it's an open invite.

SPEAKER_00: 49:36

Amazing. Thank you for joining us on digital transformation and AI for humans. I am Amy, and it was enriching to share this style with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature, how we think, feel, and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing the winning mindset, and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. If this conversation resonated with you and you are a visionary leader, business owner, or investor ready to shape what's next, consider joining the AI Game Changers Club. You will find more information in the description. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections, and leading with heart.