Takeaways From Film Work, So You Flow & Do Your Best Work

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I'm glad you're with us. I'd bear the pain of necrotizing ulcerative gingivostomatitis if you made me speak the words, you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate with what's on the menu.

Kate Martignetti
Hey Tony, we're serving takeaways from film work so you flow and do your best work. Steven Puri brings lessons from his work in film, which is inherently remote and distributed, to help increase your personal and team productivity. Timeboxing, monotasking, focus music, dopamine management, and more will all help you achieve and maintain a flow state. Steven is CEO of the Sukha Company, On Tony's Take Two.

Tony Martignetti
Tales from the Gym. Mary plays too much heavy metal crap.

Kate Martignetti
Here is Takeaways from Film Work So You Flow and Do Your Best Work.

Tony Martignetti
It's a genuine pleasure to welcome Steven Puri to Nonprofit Radio. Steven is the founder and CEO of the Sukha Company, Sukha means happiness from self-fulfillment in Sanskrit. Mm-hmm. The Sukha is a focus app that bundles all the tools necessary to have a focused experience and a healthy, productive workday. He has a background in TV and film with names like Fox, DreamWorks, and Sony, and including computer-generated visual effects for 13 movies. Plus Independence Day, which won the Academy Award for visual effects. Mm-hmm. I know, Steve, you don't have to— no, I'm certain that what I'm saying is truthful.

Steven Puri
You got this. Exactly.

Tony Martignetti
You guys are validating everything I say in the bio. I know you gave it to me. I know it's correct. The company's at thesukha.co, and Steven is on LinkedIn. Steven Puri, welcome to Nonprofit Radio.

Steven Puri
This is great. I hope we have a very entertaining and hopefully helpful episode.

Tony Martignetti
Already? Well, you're the— you've maybe the first guest who's, uh, felt necessary to affirm the, the facts in your bio.

Steven Puri
Just appreciating it.

Tony Martignetti
You're giving the ahas, ahas. We know, we know it's true.

Steven Puri
I can hum along if you'd like.

Tony Martignetti
I appreciate the validation. No, no, no, don't. No. So, um, yes, you sent me a very interesting pitch.

Steven Puri
Where should we begin?

Tony Martignetti
We're gonna begin—

Steven Puri
not a beer, by the way, this is water.

Tony Martignetti
Very interesting pitch. Oh, he opened a can of— he says it's water.

Steven Puri
Rambler.

Tony Martignetti
Rambler. It sounds like a beer to me, but he says—

Steven Puri
You know what, I was on a Zoom, and knowing that I'm in Texas, it was like 10 AM last week, and a woman said, is that a beer? I'm like, it's 10 AM in the morning. She's like, well, you live in Texas, so I don't know. I was like, okay, fair enough. You know what, you win that round. That one's yours.

Tony Martignetti
I'm older than— I'm old enough that my, uh, the family car when I was born was a Rambler.

Steven Puri
Oh, wow.

Tony Martignetti
We had an old Rambler and then we switched to a Ford Torino. But

Steven Puri
right before you got that AMC, the bubble AMC.

Tony Martignetti
My mom had an AMC wagon, not a Pacer. Now that you're thinking Pacer, she didn't have the Pacer, but my mom eventually did get an AMC wagon. Yes.

Steven Puri
Yeah, those were the days. Carburetors, you know.

Tony Martignetti
Carburetors, fuel injection. That was— those were the days when fuel injection was written on the car. It was part of that. It was part of the fancy— it was the biggest feature, fuel injected.

Steven Puri
We got to get one of those newfangled cars.

Tony Martignetti
Yes, one of the injectors when the carburetors went out.

Steven Puri
I know. Okay, so you're so curious because I remember you want to talk about flow states. We're going to talk about— yeah, work with all sorts of things. Where should we begin?

Tony Martignetti
Well, I want to start it, uh, let's put your background together. Film, uh, film, TV, remote productivity. Yeah, explain how these things, uh, intersect for those of us who are not acquainted.

Steven Puri
It's sort of like—

Tony Martignetti
I was certainly not acquainted with how films work. We're all

Steven Puri
Happy to spell any of that out for you. So,

Tony Martignetti
yeah,

Steven Puri
the quick summary of my career is it's somewhat Forrest Gump-like in that I've had very lucky things drop in my lap. I would like to believe I've coupled that with some hard work to make something of those opportunities, right? So I was born, as we were talking about, you know, a few moments ago, the son of 2 engineers at IBM. Wow. And I grew up in New York City. So, it's like when your mom's a great figure skater, you probably learned to figure skate when you're a kid, right? So, I learned how to code. So, I was a young engineer, went off to USC in Los Angeles, but made money working at IBM as a junior software engineer, right? Happened to be in Los Angeles at a great film school. Although I was not in the film school, USC is a famous cinema TV school, and I was there when film went digital. When computers became powerful enough to say we can manipulate film, right?

Tony Martignetti
Mm-hmm.

Steven Puri
So computer-generated effects, nonlinear editing, Pro Tools for audio, all that sort of stuff like exploded. And I was there, very fortunate. I spoke engineer and I spoke creative. So I started producing digital visual effects, complete falling ass backwards into, oh, this is kind of cool. Oh, you could use my skills. Great. Did about 14 movies, as you know, some better than others. But I did the effects for Braveheart with Mel, True Lies with Cameron, Seven with Fincher, like a bunch of—

Tony Martignetti
look how he drops names. Mel, Cameron.

Steven Puri
These are amazing opportunities. When you're like 22 years old, it's an amazing opportunity.

Tony Martignetti
Most people would say Mel Gibson.

Steven Puri
No, you say Mel. Mel, did you not know whom I meant?

Tony Martignetti
I did know who you meant. But Okay, it's just, it's just such a cool way. Why do you need to do it? The other day with Cameron, Cameron and I were chatting, you know, rang me up. Of course, I never call Cameron. I don't need to. Cameron rings

Steven Puri
me. Send him to voicemail.

Tony Martignetti
Go ahead. Sorry, Mel and Cameron. Okay.

Steven Puri
Yeah. Okay. So back to the point I was making, Podfather, which is the answer to your question is, so I fell into doing film because film became digital, and I knew computers. So I produced the digital effects for a number of movies, including met Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin when they were going to do Independence Day, produced the digital effects for Independence Day for them. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects, which is super cool. It takes a village to do that.

Tony Martignetti
Very happy to be part of that.

Steven Puri
Remarkable. Yeah, that's good. And Roland, Dean, and I got along really well. So we set up a company going forward to do digital effects. So we raised about $15 million in venture. Went off, hired about 80 people, ran that for 4 years. We got an amazing offer from Das Werk, which is a big media conglomerate in Germany, bought us out when I was 28. Suddenly I have cash in my pocket. Great. I've sold the company. And as one thinks in their 20s, you're better looking than you are, you're funnier than you are, you're more successful. You know, there was a lot of luck involved in hindsight. And that is when I decided to get deeper into film. I said, rather than just making the digital part of someone else's movie, could I help getting it, get a whole movie made and got on the studio track. That ended up, as you know, I was a vice president at 20th Century Fox. So there I was running like the Die Hard franchise, Wolverine franchise, a lot of action summer movies. I was an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurt Zmenorski, which was the era of like Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek XI, Eagle Eye, like those kind of movies. Wow. And then had a moment where I was like, I don't think anything I'm working on is actually that meaningful. You know, everything was kind of a— as you can see now in the box office, it's like just all you can see are Avengers movies, spinoffs of Disney titles, Pixar movies, you know, Star Wars, you know, spinoffs. And I decided to get back into engineering because it's the only other thing I knew. And I said, I want to do something more meaningful. So I looked for things where I could contribute. And one of the things to bring us to today was I have been very fortunate, as you said, to work with some really high performers who could do it sustainably, do it for a number of different causes, not just, you know, for movies or tech, but in a number of areas. And those lessons I share a lot today. It's why I built the website that I built, which is a flow state website. It's why I lecture often. I've been lucky to share a lot of the things I've seen about how you can be sustainably a high performer.

Tony Martignetti
So a lot of this film work is remote work. That's how— that's the overlap between film and remote productivity.

Steven Puri
With the pandemic, it was a shock to the system, right? Suddenly Zoom became a verb. Everyone's like, oh my God, we can't work, right? Here's the thing about film. For 100 years, every film has had Remote, hybrid, and in-person. Movies start with writers writing from their homes or their writing partners' living rooms, from coffee shops. One idea gets some traction, you get a little production office 2 days a week. It's like you meet with the costumer, what should they wear? You meet with the, you know, designer of the— the production designer. You meet with the location scout. Everyone goes off the rest of the week and works, you know, hybrid. And then you're on set all day and all night for months on end in photography. It goes back to hybrid and then remote. But the funny thing is, in film, you would never say this. If I were talking to you and you're a producer, I'd be like, oh, Tony, you're in the remote period of your film. You'd be like, what are you talking about, Puri? Right? But if I said, oh, you're in development, you're in pre-production, oh, you're in prep, you're in photography, oh, you're in post, you'd be like, yeah, that's where we are. We're just code words for the exact same thing that film's done for 100 years.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, that's the kind of stuff we don't know. It makes sense as you explain it.

Steven Puri
I appreciate that.

Tony Martignetti
That's why I came here. Very cogently. Yes. But yeah, right. Post. We're in post.

Steven Puri
You're not in post yet. We're in production right now, baby.

Tony Martignetti
No, I'm just throwing out phrases to sound like I know what I'm talking about. You're gonna be in post.

Steven Puri
You're gonna send me a cut of this. No, we're in production right now.

Tony Martignetti
Right now we're in production, right?

Steven Puri
It's production.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. We're in production.

Steven Puri
Yeah. Yeah. And this is actually principal photography. This is the leads. You know, this is not some second unit shooting backup footage.

Tony Martignetti
This is like— we're in, we're in, we're in principal production.

Steven Puri
You are the star of the series. If the Podfather is in the episode, it's principal photography

Tony Martignetti
along with the guest. Okay, we're in principal photography right now. Excellent. All right.

Steven Puri
So much things you didn't think.

Tony Martignetti
So much. That sounds so much cooler than we're on Zoom. We're in principle. We're in principal. I'm busy for that hour. I'm going to be in principal photography.

Steven Puri
You have a way with words.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Well, you introduced me. So this led you somewhere along your career, I guess you studied the great minds of productivity.

Steven Puri
I got to work with.

Tony Martignetti
You named some of them on your website. It's a good— I hope I can be productive without recognizing any of the great names of productivity because I didn't— I don't recognize any of the names in your— that section of your site. But

Steven Puri
okay,

Tony Martignetti
tell me what you learned from— drop some names like Mel and Cameron, drop some Productivity names.

Steven Puri
Okay, so I will tell you this because I'm gonna introduce the names not just as names but as why they're important. Okay? So

Tony Martignetti
yeah.

Steven Puri
There is a concept about flow states, which I know some portion of your audience who's playing along at home or in their car, they're like, I'm a flow master, I get it. Some maybe have a passing understanding of that, like they've heard it, they know it's in the zeitgeist, but what is it, right? So let me explain to you why we're talking about, for example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is he had a thesis.

Tony Martignetti
Wait, say his name slower.

Steven Puri
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Thank you.

Steven Puri
It's that really long Hungarian name. And yeah.

Tony Martignetti
On your other one on your site. Okay.

Steven Puri
Bingo. Yeah. Okay. So here's the interesting thing about Mihaly, right? Many interesting things. Here's one. He had a thesis. He said, If you talk to high performers in very different disciplines— athletes, authors, artists, scientists— these guys and girls go into these concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous, the thing that moves the world, and they describe it in very similar ways. And he's like, what's up with that? So like Prometheus, he's like, I want to go up to Mount Olympus, bring down this fire, and share with everyone. He did his research. He wrote the book called Flow. It is the seminal work on this. It is why we call it a flow state. And he said a great thing. He said, I chose this word because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found, which is we are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you. It magnifies your efforts. You go further and faster. He said, that's what these people have figured out how to do consistently. That I find fascinating because I'll tell you, my first flow state, I had never heard the word flow state before, but I had experienced where I was like, wow, what just happened? I did great work. I did it quickly, and I feel lifted up as opposed to depleted. And that was magical.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, we are going to talk about that in detail because we're gonna, we're gonna come to that. Um,

Steven Puri
okay.

Tony Martignetti
I think it's something we've all experienced. I know I have. But how to create—

Steven Puri
When did you experience— when did you experience a flow state? Like, what is it like for you?

Tony Martignetti
Well, I'm writing, I'm writing a book on the type of fundraising that I do, planned giving fundraising. I'm writing a book. So there have been a few times when I'm sitting and writing and I lose track of time.

Steven Puri
Right.

Tony Martignetti
And then I look back and it's like, it's been 2 and a quarter hours. And I would have thought it had been like a half hour or something. And then I look back and I've written, you know, 1,500 words or so. That's a lot for one sitting.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
1,500 words, you know. So that's what it's like. That's an example of what it— yeah. And it is exhilarating at the end. 2 and a half hours, 2 and a quarter hours. Where did that go? I had no idea. So But I think everybody's experienced these things.

Steven Puri
But I have another question though. I find this fascinating. Were you listening to music or silence?

Tony Martignetti
No, silence. I find— you have a tip on music. I know, focused music. All right, we're getting ahead though. We're good. All right. Okay.

Steven Puri
But I'll answer your question.

Tony Martignetti
You asked me a question, so I don't want to— Be very quiet. I have a background in improv. No, don't say yes, and. Yes, and. So yes. Yes, and. The answer to your question, I find music distracting. Even if it's classical music, it's certainly— if it's Springsteen or Zeppelin or rock, uh, Rolling Stones or anything I know the words to, then it's highly distracting. But I've tried even classical, and then I, I get caught up too much in the music. So for me, music is a distraction, uh, and so it was not part of that— those, those couple times I've, I've been in that flow state.

Steven Puri
But that state, yeah.

Tony Martignetti
But I'd like to All right, we're gonna come back to that because I do want to come back to that. All right. So you've got the app, the Sukha app, right? Just the website. Well, sukha.co. Yes, the Sukha, the sukha.co. Don't go to sukha.co. I don't know what you're gonna find there.

Steven Puri
God only knows.

Tony Martignetti
You gotta go to the original. You gotta go— maybe not the original. You gotta go to the authentic, the real Sukha, the sukha.co. The sukha.co. That's where the app is, which I'm sure encompasses all these things that we're about to talk about because you have a lot of strategies, remote—

Steven Puri
A lot of passion for this.

Tony Martignetti
Remote work strategies. You have a lot of passion for this. Well, I hope so. You're devoted to— yeah, I just hope, I hope you're not devoted to something you don't feel passionate about. That would be—

Steven Puri
That'd be a horrible way to spend your life.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna cut the mic because the guy talking about productivity is not moved by the work that he does. I think that's a threshold.

Steven Puri
That should be in your screening somewhere. Like, do you care about what you do?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Do you give a shit about what you do? Not really, but it makes me money.

Steven Puri
2 little radio buttons. Yes, no. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Yes. All right. So, you got some strategies. Yeah.

Steven Puri
And some tactics.

Tony Martignetti
Strategies, tactics, tips. Yes. Ideas. What's timeboxing?

Steven Puri
Oh, great question. Okay, so I'm going to tell you something to tell you something. The first thing I'm going to tell you is this, which is that highly concentrated state we talked about. You've experienced it. I've experienced it. We look up, you go, man, I wasn't watching the clock, did great work, feel good, right? Your brain doesn't drop into a flow state instantly. You don't sit down and go, I'm in flow.

Tony Martignetti
No, right.

Steven Puri
Research, and there have been a lot of smart people who've done the research. Anything smart I say on your pod, is because someone else has done a lot of work and I want to be very respectful of that. Okay? So research shows it takes 15 to 23 minutes for your brain to drop into that state where everything goes away but the work, right? So if you get interrupted, it takes another 15 or 23 minutes to get back in, right? For that reason, if you want to do what Cal Newport would say is deep work, right? As opposed to shallower returning emails or paying bills, but the deep work. I'm writing my book, I'm doing my business plan, right? If you want to do that, you can't do it in 5, 10-minute increments. You can't say, oh, between these 2 Zooms, I have 19 minutes, I'll go do some deep work. You need to block time. And here's the thing is sometimes it feels weird to do that because people want to book meetings with you. You have to put it in your calendar like it's a meeting with you. It's sacred time.

Tony Martignetti
Boundaries.

Steven Puri
Exactly. Boundaries. And I'll tell you, in this current company that I run, as well as the last company, When I became aware of this, we had a conversation with the team saying, hey, you know what? I would much rather that people came into the staff meeting and said, hey man, yesterday I had this thought. And everyone kind of looked and went, oh my God, what Tony said, like, it kind of changes like what we're doing. As opposed to everyone walks in the staff meeting going, I returned all my emails and my, you know, Slack inbox is empty. No company wins because of shallow work, right? Yeah. So if you want to encourage those kind of deep work, you have to say, where's the sacred time? And agree upon it, which is to say, you and I are working together and you say, you know what, Steven, I'm really good 9 to 11 in the morning. Don't Slack. How about we just have a deal? Don't Slack me at the time. Please don't set client meetings at that time. Let's just keep that sacred and let's try it for a month and see what comes out of it. That idea of time blocking, time, excuse me, time blocking. Is really important if you want to do the things that move the world, as opposed to homework.

Tony Martignetti
The shallow work, as opposed to the shallow work. Interesting. All right. All right. So yeah, devote time to yourself. Yeah. So you said 15 to 23 minutes to get into.

Steven Puri
Yeah. So block an hour or two. Don't block 15 minutes. Don't block 30 minutes. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Monotasking.

Steven Puri
Excellent one. And many people have written about this, which is, you know, there was a popularity, this idea of like, I'm a great multitasker, probably like became popular 15, 20 years ago, right?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, I hated that. Yeah.

Steven Puri
Exactly. So I will hate it with you, and we'll be bonded by this. As research shows, multitasking at least for most people on which we've done research, is actually just monotasking where you do context switching. So it's not actually that you're like a computer that's multithreaded where with one hand you're painting, the other hand you're writing a symphony, you know, and your eyes are driving, right? That is not actually what we do. It is sequential. It is to say, hey, I'm going to focus on my blog, but then I'm going to get distracted and go over and like return some emails real quick, and then I'm going to go over and do this other thing, right? Each time you do that, you're monotasking with the added burden of when you switch, you have to take where you are, the context of where you are on that blog, and save it in your mind. Go, I got to remember I'm at the 3rd paragraph where I was going to write the thing about the thing that happened yesterday, right? Then you have to load in the context of the next thing you're going to do. Oh, right, the emails. I had to return that email to Tony. So you are storing context, you're reloading context, and when you switch back, you have to do the exact same thing. So you're monotasking. In the middle of that, burning all this brain energy trying to remember where you were with something—it doesn't actually serve you. It serves you to start something and finish it.

Tony Martignetti
I've always thought that was that was the case. That we well, I've I've seen research as we are we are inherently poor multitaskers, and it always it always just seemed like it was it was you you're you're putting a A finer point on it, but it always seemed like it was just sequential. Like people are just bouncing around and they're calling it multitasking.

Steven Puri
Correct.

Tony Martignetti
But they're just doing one thing at a time.

Steven Puri
There you go.

Tony Martignetti
Because like you said, we can't drive and send an email and, and talk to somebody at the same time.

Steven Puri
And paint and make dinner.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steven Puri
So totally agreed.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. All right. We're in alignment so far. Tell a story. Okay, so tell a film story. I don't want to just go through You know, time box— time boxing and monotasking. Okay. How does it come out? Tell a good— tell a film story. Like, tell a— tell— can you tell— relate some of this to a film story that—

Steven Puri
Here's some—

Tony Martignetti
That we're gonna wanna know. Like, whoa, I heard that about this. I'm watching Transformers and I just heard you—

Steven Puri
I'm gonna tell a story. Okay. You get to watch. Listen, here we come. Okay.

Tony Martignetti
All right. Zip it up.

Steven Puri
Go. And we're gonna tell a story. I'll tell you 2 stories that both relate important principles about how to get the most outta your brain. With the story, right? Okay. First thing, you and I were talking about time blocking, right? And I brought the example of you saying to me, hey, Steven, listen, 9:00, 11:00 in the morning, golden time for me writing my blog or doing it. Can we just block that out? Just don't bug me at that time, right? What that speaks, what's implicit in that is, you know, your chronotype. Chronotype is the concept. But there are times of day you are more adept at certain kinds of things.

Tony Martignetti
I'm

Steven Puri
going to give you a film story. The first time I encountered this, there was a famous screenwriter in Hollywood, Ron Bass, Rain Man, My Best Friend's Wedding, like a bunch of stuff. He writes the kind of stuff that Hollywood A-list stars say, yes, I'll do that, right? He was infamous in Hollywood. He would not talk to his family in the morning. He would get up, not say hi to his wife, Not talk to his kids. He's like, listen, I'm not the dad who's gonna be like, who wants pancakes? You know, like, who needs a ride to school? He said, because when I start talking to you, I can no longer hear my characters' voices in my head. And this is a guy who gets $1 to $2 million a script to write those words, right? Of course, his family's like, Dad, you go get that $2 million script. We'll make pancakes.

Tony Martignetti
I'll talk to you later.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah.

Steven Puri
Don't you worry.

Tony Martignetti
I'll talk to you in the afternoon. Yeah.

Steven Puri
But he was completely aware of his chronotype, which is that 5 to 9 AM was golden dialogue time. In the afternoon, he could do collaborative work. That's when he would do studio meetings, meetings with other writers. He had a whole stable of writers he worked with. So, he was immensely self-aware about his chronotype. So, I share this with you as our first story, which is if you want to determine your chronotype, you could do it for free. Grab a piece of Paper and a pencil. Draw a little grid Monday through Friday, Monday afternoon, morning and afternoon, right? Jot down for the next week in the morning, generally, what did you do? Oh, I worked on blog posts. How did you feel? Smiley face. Oh, in the afternoon I worked on business plan, applying for grants. How did you feel? I'm telling you, you do that for 5 to 10 days, you will see the patterns and you'll start to say, oh my God, I should do all this kind of work in this time block. Because that's my chronotype. And it'll tell you because you'll feel a certain way, right? So story number 1.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Steven Puri
Happy with that? Ready for story 2?

Tony Martignetti
That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Puri
That's very good. Okay. I got to see— that's a very good one here. So great. I'm gonna have to tell my mom. This is so cool. Okay. So second story, and this is one about how you train your brain to fall into certain states because of where you are. The relationship between mental space and physical space. Again, first time I saw this was years ago. Remember, we talked about Independence Day, right?

Tony Martignetti
Mm-hmm.

Steven Puri
So Roland and Dean, who co-wrote— Roland directed and Dean produced, but they co-wrote scripts together. They would go to this vacation rental down in Puerto Vallarta, some beautiful— I've never been there. It's a white marble villa in Puerto Vallarta, right? They would write there. They would rent it for a month, 2 months, and go and write. I asked Dean about this. I was like, what's the deal? He's like, there is a room where in the morning the light comes in over the pool. And in that room, we don't think about our agents. We don't think about budgets. We don't think about studio notes or casting problems. We write the movie we want to see. When they were going down to write this one, Roland told his assistant, you know, Joey, go rent the villa. Joey came back and said, it's rented. It's a vacation rental, right? Someone else has rented it, right? Right. Roland called his entertainment attorney that Friday and said, John, buy the villa. By Monday, Roland owned a $5 million villa in Puerto Vallarta. Where those renters went, I don't know.

Tony Martignetti
We don't know.

Steven Puri
But they came back 6 weeks later with the script that became the 3rd highest grossing movie in film history. There was something about that space for them. And this is not to say you need a $5 million— I know everyone listening to the pod has $5 million lying around. They want to buy a villa. I get that. But for the 1 or 2 people who don't have $5 million lying on their desk, I saw this later when I was, remember, at DreamWorks with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci. For those who don't know, these are the writers who did Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek XI, Eagle Eye, Mission: Impossible III, Zorro, The Island, like amazing guys, incredibly talented. And when they got in crunch time, we were on, you know, the little Amblin compound. The DreamWorks compound is on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, right? Yeah. Across Lancashire Boulevard is the Universal Hilton. I'm just going to say it's not a glamorous property. Okay? It's where you go with your kids the night before you go on the rides, and that's about it. They would have their assistant rent a room there when they were in crunch time. We have 3 weeks to deliver Transformers 2. They would go work out of a hotel room over there. And I thought to myself, these guys are also pulling down $1, $2 million a script. They could go to Bali. They could go anywhere to go write. They go here. What occurred to me is this, they met back in school. That hotel room probably evoked for them dorm room with Kurtzman on the edge of the bed with his laptop and Bob at the little desk. And that's how they tricked their mind into, we're these scrappy writers who have to prove ourselves, we got to get this done. And it worked. So that is something I shared that's again free. Yeah. To exercise. Don't work everywhere doing everything. It does not help your brain. If you have a particular place where you write your blog, where you work on your business plan, where you do grants, do it always in the same place and your brain will start to fall in. It'll recognize I'm here and it'll say, oh, okay, this is what we're gonna do.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, that's excellent. Time and place.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Know your, know your best time.

Steven Puri
You wanted stories. I gave you stories.

Tony Martignetti
Know your best time. Know your best place. Well, I hope that's not all, but yes, we got started.

Steven Puri
And it was a great podcast.

Tony Martignetti
But those are key. Those are key. It's like, you know, it's introspection, it's self-awareness, your best time and your best place.

Steven Puri
Yeah. Let us aspire to be self-aware and, you know, change the world.

Tony Martignetti
It starts with awareness. I agree. Absolutely. Um, okay. Um, you, you mentioned music and, uh, we said, you know, I said I want to talk more about the flow states. So yeah, so Focused music, I guess. Music. What's your advice around the flow states and how does music get involved?

Steven Puri
You said something interesting where you were talking about music didn't work for you and you first named lyrical music, right? I can't listen to Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones or whatever, right? Absolutely true. Lyrical music is very hard to focus to because you want to sing along. Second thing, you remember the second kind of music you brought up?

Tony Martignetti
I remember. Yeah. Yes, I remember.

Steven Puri
Right?

Tony Martignetti
Is it classical? Classical music is very complex. I tried classical. Yeah.

Steven Puri
Classical music is not like flow music. It is wonderful and there's some people who love it, right? But it is complex. My brother is a professor of music at UVA, like dual PhDs at Yale in musicology, music theory. Like listening to him talk, it is insane how much is going on in classical music, right? So I say this because yes, There's a lot of research on sound, the aural, aural environment that helps you drop in. Now, the sweet spot for most people, and this may not be true for you, Tony, but for most people is music that is 60 to 90 beats per minute. It is ambient, non-vocal, repeating music, certain key signatures more than others. And when I was creating, you know, the Flow State website, you mentioned the Sukha, right? I was like, okay, great. There's a ton of research on this. I have a bunch of friends who are film composers. Hey, could you write me like 1,000 hours of music that is basically long rhythmic tracks that help you fall in and stay in flow, right? I learned something after throwing up. We had all the music organized into playlists, lo-fi playlists, upbeat, downtempo. Yeah. A buddy of mine, Julian, who does the sound for the LucasArts, the Star Wars games, right? Lives up in Marin. He called me. He's like, I just got back from Nepal. My, my kid's high school graduation present, he wanted to go to Nepal. I took him to Nepal. It was great, right? He's like, one day while we were there in Kathmandu, it poured rain like this lush, delicious rain. I had some of my recording equipment. I recorded it. Do you want some? I was like, sure. Okay. For free. Okay, let's try it. Quietly put up a playlist in the middle of all the other playlists and just called it Himalayan Dream Rain. Let's see what happens, right? Can I tell you, it is our 3rd most popular playlist in Sukha now. It is just rain in Nepal. And I can see— I run the platform— I can see who's listening to it. So I've emailed people and be like, hey man, I'd love to learn what is it about rain that you prefer over music? And it was so— it goes back to that mental spaces thing we talked about 5 minutes ago. If you were to be very reductive about what people told me, they would say, oh, there's this association I have to when I was young and studying. I'd be at my grandmother's house in Georgia. Oh, we had this lake house. Oh, where I grew up. And it is that rain triggers them to, right, I'm back in school and I'm doing my homework. It's really interesting. So then we experimented because of course, once I learned that, I was like, duh, why didn't someone tell me this? We found recordings of Surf. Like, you live very close to the beach, right?

Tony Martignetti
I'm across the street from the ocean. Yeah.

Steven Puri
Yeah, from the ocean, right? So, I thought, okay, well, rain, gotcha. We put up a stream in Japan, this famous lake that has these indigenous birds in Canada, the surf, things like this. They became mildly popular, not as popular as the Dream Rain, right? Plus, Himalayan Dream Rain had a pretty good name. Then a woman reached out to me, one of our members, and said, hey, I had a baby during the pandemic and she's a writer. She has a blog. She said, I used to, before the pandemic, go to coffee shops to go write. It inspired me to be around other people and the energy of that. I can't do that now. I've got a 2-year-old or whatever, right? Any chance you could find a recording of a coffee shop? And lo and behold, someone posted this coffee shop in Vienna, Austria, like 2 hours off. It's like the espresso machines going, you know? Yeah,

Tony Martignetti
yeah.

Steven Puri
We threw it up. We called it Café Vienn, and we just threw it up there as like, hey, if you want to pretend you're in a coffee shop, if that helps you get in your groove, it's become almost as popular as the rain. So I share this for this sole reason, which is I heard you. You said, I listen to silence. I can't listen to the Rolling Stones. I don't want to listen to classical. But for many people who are part of our Our membership. Sound is a really important trigger to help them drop in and stay in.

Tony Martignetti
That's fascinating. All right.

Steven Puri
I love it. I'm very lucky what I get to do. You know,

Kate Martignetti
it's time for Tony's Take 2.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. I have another Tales from the Gym. Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. End quote. So I heard that said, uh, as I was walking out of the community center where the gym is one day. I looked back, uh, it was— there were 3 women, and I don't know which of the 3, uh, made that quote, but, uh, I, I bristled at it. I disagree. So Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. Let's break this down. So first of all, I know exactly who Mary is. Mary is a substitute instructor. I've been in several classes where she substituted for the regular Tuesday instructor, who is Danielle. Mary actually plays— I think Mary plays better music than Danielle, but, quote, too much heavy metal crap. Mary plays Fleetwood Mac. Oh, okay. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel. I've heard her do bands like that. The Eagles. She has a lot of— she has Hotel California often on her playlists. So that is not— I mean, that's rock and roll. That's classic rock and roll. It's certainly not heavy metal crap. Like, to me, heavy medical— Heavy medical. To me, heavy medical is open heart surgery. But that's a different Tony's Take 2. Open heavy metal music is like Metallica or Black Sabbath. Okay, those are heavy metal bands. Iron Maiden is another one. Nobody plays those. You couldn't have a fitness class to Black Sabbath. All right, so— This woman who, uh, I don't know, she, she stylizes herself or, uh, recognizes herself as some kind of music critic. She's off. She's off on the genres. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Mary does not play heavy metal. Uh, whether heavy metal is crap, that's, um, that's obviously also very subjective. It's not my taste in music, but it doesn't really apply because the heavy metal The crap, uh, is modifying heavy metal, and heavy metal doesn't belong in the sentence because Mary doesn't play it. So that's the breakdown of that music critic's comment that Mary plays too much heavy metal crap. That's Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
Sounds like you got some mean girls at the gym.

Tony Martignetti
Uh, sure. I don't know. Yeah, crap. She did say crap for, uh, In my little town, in public, people typically don't speak that way.

Kate Martignetti
Mm-hmm.

Tony Martignetti
I'm not talking about what they might say on their podcasts or in their private little clutches, but yeah, crap's a little strong for the public. But she was adamant. She was an adamant faux music critic, purported music critic. She didn't, she didn't make the grade.

Kate Martignetti
We've got beaucoup but loads more time. Here's the rest of Takeaways from Film Work So You Flow and Do Your Best Work with Steven Puri.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, the experimentation, uh, you're creating environments for people to enter flow states, or even if you're not in a flow state, but Just creating the right environment for others or us creating it for ourselves. It's, yeah, that points to a bigger revelation I've had about just myself living at the ocean. I've always—

Steven Puri
Which is what?

Tony Martignetti
I've wanted to live— well, I've been here 10 years now, so it's not recent. I left New York City. I'd been in New York City about 15 years. And I moved here about almost 10 years ago.

Steven Puri
Oh, cool.

Tony Martignetti
But I had wanted to live close to the ocean ever since my grandma and grandpa Martignetti used to bring me to their ocean townhouse. They didn't— ocean home. They didn't live near the ocean. Like, I can walk across the street and be in the sand. We had to drive, but it was in Belmar, New Jersey.

Steven Puri
Okay.

Tony Martignetti
Back in the days when a blue-collar guy could own 2 homes. They had a home in Jersey City, And they had their beach. It was really a bungalow. It was a 3-season home.

Steven Puri
That's awesome.

Tony Martignetti
It wasn't heated and didn't have enough insulation for the winter in Belmar, New Jersey. But, you know, Grandpa used to bring us to the— me and my brother— used to bring us to the ocean. And I thought, oh, I would— it would be— ever since I realized what private property ownership means, like at age 15 or 16, you know, from when I was like 5 years old when Grandpa Martignetti was alive and bringing us to the ocean. I wanted to live by the ocean. And 10 years ago, it was a dream realized. And I would say I'm much more productive, happier, content, managing stress better than the 15 years when I lived in New York City, which I loved. I didn't leave New York. Some people leave a city saying, oh, I can't stand the city. I'll never go back. I still visit it a few times a year.

Steven Puri
Me too.

Tony Martignetti
I still like—

Steven Puri
I met my wife in Battery Park in yoga.

Tony Martignetti
You met your wife in Battery Park?

Steven Puri
Yeah, at that Equinox in the Brookfield place.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. I don't know that. Well, the Brookfield is a building right on Battery Park.

Steven Puri
You know, right across from the World Financial Center. There's like that mall.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that—

Steven Puri
There's a yoga place in there.

Tony Martignetti
Yes, I know the, uh, and there's the World Financial Center too.

Steven Puri
Yeah, my wife worked at Amex, so she worked in the tower.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, okay, in the tower. All right. Yes.

Steven Puri
I married the girl on the yoga mat to my left.

Tony Martignetti
From Battery Park. That's outstanding.

Steven Puri
Battery Park.

Tony Martignetti
Wow. So your heart is in the city too.

Steven Puri
Can I pick up on something you were saying though? Would that be okay?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, it's a little anarchic, but yeah, go ahead.

Steven Puri
The thing I want to hang a lantern on is I feel like you were about to say something that's very close to my heart. And I know I'm a very jokey guy and I have a great life and I'm very happy about stuff, but let me just say this in a very serious way, which is You were right when you were about to say that there's a fundamental belief that I have that is expressed in why I'm here with you today sharing thoughts and banter, why I created the website that I created, which is I believe that we all have something great inside. And the question of this lifetime is, are you going to get it out or not?

Tony Martignetti
Hmm.

Steven Puri
And I think there are too many forces in the world And Laura and I have friends that work at some of the Meta companies or used to work at Twitter or TikTok. And there are too many forces that want to ensure you don't, you don't do that great thing. Their business model is straight up steal your life. And they're very proud of it. They used to hide it 10 years ago. Zuckerberg would testify in Congress and laugh about, oh, we're just here to show grandmothers their grandchildren's videos. And now Straight up, we're here to steal your life. And by the way, next quarter we have these techniques we're going to deploy to steal more of your life. And I think that's criminal. I think that's criminal on the level of— let me say this. I hope that my children, you know, I'm about to have my first child in 3 weeks. I hope that my children's generation looks at our generation with social media the way I look at my father's generation with smoking. I've seen his friends die of lung cancer. Dad has emphysema. And you talk to my dad about it, he goes, you don't understand, like movie stars were smoking, James Dean, like it was a thing. Tobacco companies were putting out studies how healthy it was for us. And I sure hope my children are like, yeah, we really want to do something with our lives. We're sorry that you wasted so much of your time watching Kim Kardashian's you know, ad for her underwear as if it's content and getting it 15 million likes. You know, like, we don't know how you did that or why you thought that was good, but we've moved on. We're in a better place. And that's why I created Sukha. That's why I talk about flow states is it is a way to say in that tug of war, we're on one side of that rope. It's trillion-dollar companies paying the smartest designers and the smartest engineers to steal your life. And you are alone on the other side. It's you. pulling back. And you need allies. You need people who give you help to not die with that thing still inside you.

Tony Martignetti
I'm letting that sit. That's a fantastic analogy that we, we look back on technology and, and apps and the way Our parents' generation look back, look back on smoking. It was good for you. It was good for you.

Steven Puri
It was. It was glamorous. The same way you look at, you know, whether it's Logan Paul or, you know, Joe Rogan or whatever. Yeah, you know, they, they were looking at James Dean and, you know, Humphrey Bogart. And now, like, I don't know anyone that smokes. None of my friends smoke.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Puri
Thank God. Only when on fire.

Tony Martignetti
There are forces though. Yes, there are. There are smart computer engineers and savvy tech bros.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Who want your, you know, they— you're saying they want your life. They want your attention. They want your attention. They want your time. And you'll get— it's negative rewards. I was gonna say you'll get hardly anything back for it. It's a negative reward system. You'll get less back than you give them.

Steven Puri
You will be that 80-year-old person sitting on the sofa talking about, I, I could have started that company, I could have saved the world, I could have cured cancer, I could have opened the restaurant, I could have made the app. And that's miserable to be that person, and it's miserable to be around that person.

Tony Martignetti
Regrets, regrets. Yeah. Yes, you will have been distracted away from what you said, Steven, your, your best potential, your best work.

Steven Puri
Going back to film, You know, in many films, especially the kind of films that I did, which are big summer action movies, right? First act, the world changes, something bad, hero has to accept the mission, right? And what is the top of the second act? The top of the second act is usually collect the allies, go around the Shire and get the other hobbits or whatever, you know, Lord of the Rings stuff. But it's that thing of like, got to get the Avengers back together, got to get the League of Justice, wherever the hell it is. You know what I mean? Do that thing. And it's a very important part of when the world changes and you say, okay, I'm Batman, I have to go solve this, is you have to know who your allies are. You have to assemble them.

Tony Martignetti
First, you're your own best ally.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
First, the hero has to take the challenge. For him or herself, and then coalesce the allies.

Steven Puri
That is the end of the first act.

Tony Martignetti
But you got to remember, but, but you come first.

Steven Puri
That you are the first act. Top of the second act is, okay, now that I've accepted the challenge, what do I need? Whom do I need?

Tony Martignetti
Everything from here on seems so trivial. But I do want to continue with more, with more Have I told you about Chiclets?

Steven Puri
Let's talk about Chiclets.

Tony Martignetti
What about Chiclets?

Steven Puri
I'm kidding. You wanted to be trivial.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, okay. All right. But to bring this to nonprofits, I mean, it's all subsumed in the work that so many of us are doing because we are managing remote teams and we are ourselves very likely remote. Yeah, doing your best work and helping your teams do their best work. We all know we want the people who work with us to strive, to succeed, to be productive, to do their best work. And their best work might not even be with our nonprofit. It might be 3 nonprofits in their future. Mm-hmm. But we all have an A moral and, and, well, less, less important, we have a professional and more significantly moral obligation to help those who work with us to do their best work, to have their best lives.

Steven Puri
Right. When you, uh, what you just said, Tony, I, I want to interrupt you for a second. Don't be frustrated with me.

Tony Martignetti
More anarchy. Yeah, go ahead.

Steven Puri
No, no, you go. You continue.

Tony Martignetti
No, no, I'm done. That's all I got. I'm very shallow.

Steven Puri
Yeah. Okay. Yes. And what you just said about leadership, I want to hang a lantern on, which is if you view leadership as making sure you tell everyone what to do and you measure their performance, you make sure the TPS reports come in on Friday, whatever it is, right? That's management. Leadership is when you assemble a group of people and you have that belief that each of them has something great and your job is to help them express it.

Tony Martignetti
So

Steven Puri
that means you start with hiring the right people, giving them the conditions, the inspiration, the goals to do that thing. And that, I think, is really powerful in an era when there is some remote work like many of us do. Not the whole world. There's obviously a pendulum that swings back and forth, but those of us who do hybrid or remote, There is something about leading teams that is in some ways better and more flexible, but also harder. And some of— I'll tell you, a lot of people approach me because I run a platform for people to focus, especially people who work remotely, right? So I get leaders, managers, whatever you want to call them, who come to me, talk about their concerns. And when you really peel the onion back, you're going, well, why do— why, why that? Why that one? You get to, I'm afraid, What are you afraid of? I'm afraid if I can't see Tony at 3 o'clock on Tuesday, I don't know what he's doing. Okay, so that's really what your pushback is. That's your RTO mandate is really driven by, I'm afraid I don't know if people are working. To which I usually share this. Listen, if you as a leader do 2 things, just 2 things really well, you express your mission. Hey guys, we are here to cure cancer. Yeah. We are here to clean up the environment. We're here to make great romantic comedies, whatever it is. And you express the values of how you're gonna do it. This is how we will treat each other. This is how we will treat our customers. This is how we'll treat our competitors. You do those 2 things well, you'll attract the right people. Because I'm gonna tell you this, if I'm trying to cure cancer and I talk to you and you're like, My mom died of cancer. I don't have to watch you Tuesday at 3 PM to know what you're doing. I know you're moving the ball down the field. But if I hire some guy who's had 5 jobs in 6 years and he's surfing Indeed for his next thing, I'd be an idiot to hire him.

Tony Martignetti
Steven, let's, let's move to, um, health, health and wellness, healthy productivity. You got, you got some tips there. What, uh, what, what— instead of me introducing them all, you, uh, you bring us into them.

Steven Puri
Okay, cool. Well, let me ask you this. In your, you know, illustrious career, you have dealt with burnout at some point, right? Where you're just like, I'm tired of this, I'm frustrated. Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, the last time I was an employee, which was 2003.

Steven Puri
Okay. I've experienced that too. And there is something about needing to produce, right, that can lead to burnout. There are ways in which we work. It's the exact same thing with an athlete. There are ways in which you can train to be ready for the game and there are ways in which you train where you're depleted and you are not properly prepped, right? So, this is one of the things that I obviously studied in creating a platform about how to have healthy high performance. Yeah. Which is there are simple concepts. For example, maintaining your own rhythm. You know, we talked early in this episode about your chronotype, when in the day you should do certain things. There's also a sense of when you do block out that 3 to 5 PM when you're great at doing whatever. Like, I'm really good in the morning from like 6, 7 in the morning until 9 or 10 for anything creative, writing new code. Writing new words for the website—that I'm really good in the morning, right? I suck in the afternoon, right? So when you do say, okay, here's my time block to do this, something that we found is for those who don't know what the Pomodoro technique is, I'm just going to explain it quickly, which is there was an Italian Francesco Torillo who wrote about he had a. cadence that he worked of working for 25 minutes and taking a 5-minute break. And he would repeat this several times and after like 2 hours, take a longer break. He used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. Pomodoro is obviously the Italian word. I think you're Italian, you might know this, you know, for tomato. So we call it the Pomodoro Technique. It is simplistic on a certain level, but it's also very healthy to say, oh, you know what? I have not stood up for 25 minutes or 50 minutes. Let me stand up, do something like that, do a breathing exercise, stretch, look in the distance, which I think you made a joke about looking in the distance at the ocean. You know, these are all like real things and they do help you to have sustainable high productivity. You know, there's a, the famous quote, I'm sure, you know, Picasso talked about staying up all night and forgetting to pee or eat. But he finished Guernica, right? Yeah. Okay. Guernica. I will never create anything in my lifetime as powerful as, you know, the horrors of war on that canvas. So I can't criticize it. But if you do that all the time, stay up all night continuously, you're going to burn out, right? Maybe that was a great way to get over the hump of I've expressed this thing that I've had inside. But you do need to have a healthy cycle of working. And this is just a really, again, it's a free technique. Just set a timer. You don't need my website. You don't need anybody's Pomodoro timer. You can use your phone. Like, get up, go get a glass of water, stretch at your desk, something, breathe.

Tony Martignetti
Every 25 to 30 minutes?

Steven Puri
This is the Pomodoro cycle. I actually, personally, I adapted because I found after doing this for a while, After 25 minutes, I'm usually in the middle of a thought and it was frustrating for me to have the timer go off after 25. I found my cycle's more like 40-ish. That feels better for me because I start, I get there, I capture it, and then I'm like, oh, let me go downstairs, get a glass of water. Let's, you know, stretch. So I do like usually 40 and 5.

Tony Martignetti
Now, are you allowed to do the Pomodoro technique while you're inside your flow states?

Steven Puri
That's what drives it. Our website, the Sukha, has a big play button in the center. When you open the website, there's a play button. You hit it, it starts a Pomodoro timer, it starts your music. It is all— it is the heartbeat of our system, is to say, have a healthy flow session.

Tony Martignetti
I say hello— I say allow facetiously. I didn't, but, uh, I, I thought— I thought so, a flow session can have Some minor interruptions like stand up, look in the distance. Well, look in the distance is hardly important.

Steven Puri
Especially sustainably. Like you said you had a several-hour flow state.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, it was like 2 and a half, 2 and a quarter, 2 and a half hours, something like that. Yeah.

Steven Puri
Which is awesome. And that's great. But if you were to do long flow sessions over and over and over, that's not sustainable. To do it every now and then, sure, go for it. You know, maybe you do stay up all night like Picasso and you go, oh my God, I finished the application for the grant.

Tony Martignetti
Picasso was an outlier in a lot of respects.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
All right. All right. I see. What about— you mentioned on your site dopamine management.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
How can we— dopamine's a neurotransmitter, right? We need it to wake up along with norepinephrine. I think we need dopamine and norepinephrine to help our wake cycles. But dopamine management, how can we manage?

Steven Puri
Okay. I'll be vulnerable. And tell you something that I do that's really bad, which is I notice that when I work, when I hit something that's hard, oh, I'm coding something and the build keeps failing. Ah, I don't know why. I'm writing a blog post and I just keep reading that second paragraph and it's, I know it's bad and I know it has to be rewritten. I can't get it right. When I hit that block, my hand, like muscle memory, I don't even think about it. My hand will reach for my phone and say, oh, let me just check my WhatsApp real quick, see if Laura or Tony, you know, and it's this little craving of like zero effort dopamine. And Huberman does a great episode on this, as a matter of fact, just to say, you know what, it's gonna feel so good because you got that little note from Tony with some funny GIF. And then, you know, maybe he gave you a link to a YouTube video you'd love and you open the YouTube video and, and then half an hour's gone by. By the time you actually look up, you go, oh yeah, that. Video led to another video, and then I got the email notification at the top of the screen and I checked the, you know, I am super, super guilty about that. So it was something that when I looked at this and I said, okay, so that's part of why I don't finish at night. What I did was super simple. It's gonna sound idiot simple is, remember I mentioned to you The website I made, you hit play, the music starts and stuff. When you hit play, a QR code pops up. I can tap it with my phone, put my phone down. If I pick up my phone, the little smart assistant on my laptop says, hey Steven, do you really need to be on your phone? And it doesn't stop me, but it gives me that 1 second to go, who do you want to be? Do you want to be the guy who's done tonight or do you want to be the guy who's like, Laura, we got to get home from dinner early because I got to finish this thing after dinner. And It's miserable. Oh, it's 9:30 at night. Let me try and pick up my work and work until 1 in the morning. I don't want to be that guy. And that really was about craving dopamine, you know? And you want to talk about social media?

Tony Martignetti
Not only do I—

Steven Puri
Yeah. One of the things about social media is when you look at where do they look for design, it's casinos, it's gambling, like variable rewards. is a huge part of social media. They know the content that you want, Tony, and they deliberately stick into it stuff that you do not want, because then when you see the content you want, your dopamine hit is greater. It's exactly why slot machines pay off the frequency that they do.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, so there's some, there's some, uh, some elements of our feed that are Intentionally slightly off topic.

Steven Puri
100%.

Tony Martignetti
So that when we get the 100% on topic, it gives us a spike.

Steven Puri
Google the word social media variable rewards and you will learn the extent to which they study not just what you want in your feed, but what you don't want, because it heightens your addiction to get variable rewards. If every piece of content were what you wanted, it would be easier to put down. And they know.

Tony Martignetti
Damn. What's that movie? Is it Social Networks? No, there's a movie. There's a— there's a—

Steven Puri
there's a— yeah.

Tony Martignetti
What's the film about? About this? About the social engineering that goes into—

Steven Puri
yeah, Social Dilemma and stuff. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Social Dilemma. Was that the name of the— was that the film? Social Dilemma? Social Networks?

Steven Puri
Social Network, I think, was the Sorkin film about, you know, Zuckerberg and the irony that this guy was totally antisocial. Oh, that.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Yeah, it's okay. That's not— it's not that, because it's more— it's more done in a documentary format.

Steven Puri
Yeah, Social Dilemmas is the documentary you're thinking of.

Tony Martignetti
Social Dilemmas.

Steven Puri
It's really smart.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah,

Steven Puri
yeah. For those playing at home, worth watching.

Tony Martignetti
It's a docudrama type. I'm not— yeah, okay. Yes, Social Dilemma. Social Dilemma. Um, yeah, not only am I— you, you, you were explaining The, um, what I would, I would have called a distraction, but you said dopamine management, you know, that, that hit. Not only do I know what you're talking about, I, I do it.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
I do it with, you know, it could be at 9 or 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night, and I just think, oh, it was this, or like something in my work will remind me, oh, there's this Honeymooners episode. So I'll go grab the, I'll go grab, you know, on YouTube I can find the clip because I know I know the 39 Honeymooners episodes, the classic 39, quite well. So I can find the episode that— maybe I'm not watching the whole episode, but I'm watching like a 5-minute clip.

Steven Puri
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Because it's got the line in it that I want to hear Audrey Meadows give to Jackie Gleason. I want to hear her say it. It's not good enough for me to remember it. I want to hear her say it. So now I've lost 6 minutes. And then there's another one. Oh, there's the one with the— oh, right. There's the fishing trip one. Oh, I love that one. All right, there's a little clip. And the next thing I know, I'm watching another, another episode. There's the third one, and I'm watching the third episode. Now it's 11 o'clock and I'm too tired to keep working.

Steven Puri
You took the words outta my mouth. That's exactly it. The recommender engine is so good that it's like, we know what Tony's gonna click on next. And sometimes it's not, he watched a Honeymooners clip. Here are the other Honeymooners clips. They have a profile on you, profile where it's like one of those 3 or 4 things will be a Honeymooners clip. The other 2 or 3 will be Absolutely stuff that interests you. That's totally a field because they have your profile.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah. And next thing I know, it's like I said, it's too late. It's too late to keep working.

Steven Puri
Exactly.

Tony Martignetti
And and I've let myself down now. I've I've I've disappointed myself.

Steven Puri
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
I but I got the dopamine. I got like I got the dopamine high. I got to watch Audrey deliver the line.

Steven Puri
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
But then I got carried away. I didn't stop at the 6 minutes.

Steven Puri
That is correct. And it is—

Tony Martignetti
Those fuckers.

Steven Puri
We live in a world where the best paycheck, if you are a great engineer or UI/UX designer, is to work for one of those companies who wants to steal your life. They will pay you more than anyone else. You can't go work in aerospace. You can't go work in— you want to go there, you could be making millions of dollars right out of the gate if you're good.

Tony Martignetti
Forces are working against you. You, you got to be, you've got to be accountable to yourself and then to your team.

Steven Puri
Yeah, to help. Ultimately, like when you talked earlier on about being self-aware, like what's the point of being self-aware? I believe the point of being self-aware is you do get to do the thing that you're here to do. It's probably not scrolling.

Tony Martignetti
Leave it right there. Steven Puri. The app is the Sukha at the Sukha, S-U-K-H-A, the Sukha dot co. Connect with Steven on LinkedIn. Steven, wide-ranging but fascinating.

Steven Puri
It was really fun. Thank you for having me.

Tony Martignetti
I loved it. Thank you for your vulnerability too. You told some good stories and shared your personal journey, your personal experiences. Thank you for that.

Steven Puri
You have done hundreds of these and I am happy and proud to be in that canon.

Tony Martignetti
Thanks for being with me, with us. Thanks for being with us.

Steven Puri
Goodbye, everyone.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, what we can learn from for-profits. If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I beseech you, find it at tonymartignetti.com.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show's social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great. Thank you.