Andreas Welsch 0:30

Hey, welcome back to another episode of What's the BUZZ?, where leaders share how they turn hype into tangible outcomes. Today we'll talk about how to design for AI attention in the modern mind, and who better to talk about it than somebody who's specializing Exactly on that, Steven Puri. Hey Steven. Thank you so much for joining.

Steven Puri 0:48

I appreciate having me. I hope this is one of the more engaging and maybe actionable episodes,

Andreas Welsch 0:54

I'm pretty sure. We'll have a good conversation. We've already talked quite a bit before we went live and really looking forward to your perspectives, what you're seeing and where things are going. So Steven not everybody knows you. What did you tell a little background, a bit about yourself, who you're and what you do. Yeah.

Steven Puri 1:10

Okay. For those playing along at home or driving their car, here is the very short version of why. This may be interesting to listen to me. I'm one of the few people you'll meet who has been a senior executive at two motion picture studios, so I've worked with a lot of high performing creative minds. I've also raised over$20 million of venture. I've run three tech companies, one successful exit, two failures, and the parallels, the lessons from seeing both on the technical side and the creative side, how humans. Develop habits for high productivity, sustainable high productivity has been really interesting to me, and that's what I lecture about a lot.

Andreas Welsch 1:52

Awesome. Wonderful. So I'm sure lots to cover and especially having been a leader and having been a leader myself, I see leaders facing new challenges and different challenges, but we get into that in, in, in a little bit. Folks, for those of you in the audience I'm always curious to see how global our audience is. Please put in the chat where you're joining us from. And let's see from which parts of the world you are tuning in from today.

Steven Puri 2:16

I just added it the chat. I'm in Austin, Texas. I just put that Oh yeah,

Andreas Welsch 2:19

yeah, beautiful city. I was just there a couple of weeks ago. One of my favorite places to, to visit. Next time, we should catch up too.

Steven Puri 2:25

Now that you, now we know each other. Yes, of course. You'll have to come.

Andreas Welsch 2:29

Now, Steven in good old fashion, I would love to play a little game to kick things off. And I was wondering if you're up for, What's the BUZZ?. What do you think?

Steven Puri 2:38

How could I not be? How could I come here and not be up for it? Let's do this. Come on.

Andreas Welsch 2:43

Wonderful. So here we go. If AI were a, let's see, what is it? If it were a color, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock.

Steven Puri 2:54

Oh, okay. So I would say that's a really interesting one for a color, I would say. It is like a blue turning into a yellow.

Andreas Welsch 3:07

Okay, and why is that? Why is it blue turning into a yellow?

Steven Puri 3:10

Oh, you said one question now it's two questions.

Andreas Welsch 3:13

Yes. It's two. You wanna

Steven Puri 3:14

know why? Because I would say it is that feeling of it dawn, when everything is blue and you're trying to understand what the day will be like and it's just starting to become yellow.

Andreas Welsch 3:25

That's awesome. I love it. Definitely. So much about day starting about things building and, some of the curiosity of what will this bring? Where are things going?

Steven Puri 3:35

I know, right? I actually didn't write that. It was on my chat, GPT screen over here. So I just read this, the screen,

Andreas Welsch 3:40

no. But we've started talking about this whole notion of where are things going? And I think maybe starting at where things are is really a good point to extrapolate from that. And what I'm seeing is definitely a lot of conversation in the media and in the news in the work that I do as an adjunct professor where students say, professor, do you think I'll still get a job once I graduate here.

Steven Puri 4:04

Will it be a junior job for me?

Andreas Welsch 4:06

Yeah. I'll talk about in entry level jobs being being cut to, to, to a good degree in part, to ai also, some of the macro economic trends. But what are you seeing in, in the conversations that you're having knowing that you talk to many people in different industries as well?

Steven Puri 4:21

It straight up you are addressing the biggest issue, which is I run a focus community. A lot of the lessons around how can you as a human sustain high performance, how can you be healthy, mindful with your performance, perform well? And if you're a leader, how do you create those conditions for your team to do that? That's a lot of the last seven years is building community around this app that we built. Now, I'll tell you five, six years ago. The engineering managers, the team leaders that were reaching out to me, they wanted to have conversations that ended up talking about hybrid and remote and how do you have people focus when they're, distracted with other things, not just being in the office. But those conversations have changed this year into, as you brought up. Do I need junior developers? Do I need to teach young people these skills? Because we have coding assistance, we have copywriting being done by, LLMs. And it is real how it's transforming the workplace. So you have some senior people who are guiding LLMs, essentially, whether it's in engineering, writing design also. But that bottom of the ladder is. Disappearing in front of our eyes,

Andreas Welsch 5:38

To, to me the question is why it seems that yes, from a, from an operational point of view, from a financial point of view I can see that it makes sense to, to say where can we reduce our cost. But what I feel many leaders that I talk to and organizations that I see have not figured out yet is what happens once we remove that. Layer at the bottom of the organizational pyramid, if you will. What comes after that? How do new hires..

Steven Puri 6:05

What is the pipeline for senior people? For experienced people? Yeah. Yeah. Andreas, I completely agree with you, and we do live in a for a public company to have the pressure every quarter to increase shareholder value.

Andreas Welsch 6:24

Yeah,

Steven Puri 6:25

It's unreasonable to expect that public company is really planning for deep, like long-term future gains. The CEO, the C-suite, they know that they're there for a couple of years. Like the tenure of A CEO has gone far down. You don't have people running companies with a view of a 10 years from now when I'm still CEO, this is not, like Warren Buffet, I'm 9,000 years old. I've been doing this since, dirt was young.

Andreas Welsch 6:49

Yeah.

Steven Puri 6:49

Now you have CEOs that are like, Hey man, maybe I have eight, 12 quarters in me. And let's just goose the short term results because of shareholder value. So yeah, that means rifs, that means no attention paid to. Where do we get the senior people five years from now? Not relevant.

Andreas Welsch 7:07

A couple weeks ago I was on a podcast and run by a successful entrepreneur. And he said, look, I. I don't want to hire more people than I need to. It doesn't mean that you need to hire more people than you need to, but also just thinking about where can I take out cost per, can I take out resources? Sounds like a very shortsighted view, especially, in, in light of what you said as well, having a quarterly view instead of a year, multi-year, decade long view. I'm struggling with this question right now of how. Do new hires. How do recent graduates. Become proficient, move into a senior role. And also I think what's missing in a lot of these discussions is what are actually the requirements, the new requirements in a senior role. If the senior role means work more with ai, monitor guide agents to some extent. Okay. That's one of the big pieces we need to define, but. What is then the work of a junior person? How can we grow them to become a senior and a senior to become an expert in and so on? This all goes up the hierarchy.

Steven Puri 8:13

So let's think about two things that are happening. One thing is, let us name any established old school tech firm. IIBM, Hewlett Packard. Been around for 50, a hundred years. They, like you said, have a very established ladder. This is how young people come in. This is how we train them. We groom them, they go through these things, they end up at this senior position. Right Now, those companies, as you said, are saying, oh my God, like our bottom line is so much better if we just cut the bottom of the ladder away. Why pay for these junior people? Just have a coding assistant. Just have a design, LOM sort of thing. Generative, yeah. At the same time that's happening, which we talked about. You also have this rise of tools that magnify the effects of one person.

Andreas Welsch 9:01

Yes.

Steven Puri 9:01

So suddenly, the young, the 21-year-old version of Andreas could say, wow, using these tools I can design and code. Most of this myself, it magnifies my efforts. 10 x, I don't need to hire all these people and raise all that money. So maybe, and I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, but just a thought is the same time the bottom of the ladder is gone. In large companies,

Andreas Welsch 9:23

it just shifts, right?

Steven Puri 9:24

Yeah. You can get experience because now you don't need to be in a large company in order to create an app a company,

Andreas Welsch 9:30

yeah. I think that's one of the big opportunities and, learning how to use the tools and how to use them well in, in, in many trainings that I give, one of the key things to get across is use it for more than a Google search. So when I see leaders, when I see executives, when I see professionals come up with their own ideas I ask you to analyze this data and look at it in or through the lens of of a customer or of a real estate developer and gimme the pros and cons for why they might want to negotiate or negotiate differently than what we are proposing. That's when I think it, it clicks and that's when I see people getting. What this wave of AI is about and what it offers. And to your point, combine that with the ability to. Create applications to create digital products much more easily within a couple of days, A couple of weeks, yes. Fine. Pull in some expertise on, on your security and data privacy things by all means. But building the app much more quickly, I think is absolutely within breach. Then focus on what you're good at or learn, iterate. So

Steven Puri 10:31

let's think about this because obviously those two letters that appear multiple times in your camera feed. They're often just conflated with LLMs, right? And to be very reductive, LLMs or our probability machines, they're predicting, Hey, not just Google Auto, correct. Suggest the next letters it saying the next idea. The next word is, and I'll string it together. And it seems like thought, but it's not deep thought, right? It's pattern recognition and matching. So here's the thing. What is still interesting about human thought, there is an element of creativity of deep work that you don't really get from an LLM, and we're approaching that sort of asymptotic plateau where it's okay, you can keep tuning it, but it's not going to cross over this line and suddenly turn into Picasso or turn into Einstein, or turn into, whatever. What does that mean for humans? Then this idea of you are somehow trading your energy in the day, whether it's physical or mental energy into work, right? Valuable work. Yeah. As Cal Newport has written, like deep work is a powerful thing. When you do something more valuable than what LMS can do. If your job is to. Shuffle these reports and output this stuff and put a TPS report in your managers in box every week, that's great. For an LOM that's shallow work, right? Yeah. But the deep work where you actually think about like the direction of your company or what are the opportunities in the world, or how could you create something that hasn't been seen before in that way, that's still an opportunity that's still white space for humans. And that's a lot of what I focus on with, Suko, with our company is how. The tools to do that deep in a repeatable, sustainable way'cause that you can still do better than an LLM.

Andreas Welsch 12:30

I think, we it's so important these days when not only notifications pop up every other minute, every other second. Yes. But sometimes you feel like a little like a little puppy. Oh, look at this, look at that. Oh, I could do this. Five minutes later, you think what did I actually want to do? So getting distracted so easily. But also, through the headlines, through all the noise in, in, in the tech space, obviously everybody needs to make a big splash. Everybody needs to talk about how awesome they are, how they're using the funding to. Develop groundbreaking world, changing transformative, yes. Supercharged products. It's fine. We get it. If you've been in this space, you know what I'm talking about. But where does this end? And how do you cloud back that time? How do you set these boundaries to say, okay, this is what I focus on. This is what I can control maybe in, in some respect. And if it is my time and where I spend it and how I spend it so I can do deep work. I think that's. That's one of the, yeah, so Andreas

Steven Puri 13:26

Here, you're speaking to my heart and obviously there, there are stories or anecdotes that I have to back up some of these principles that come from very talented people in film as well as people in tech, right? So let's talk about some of that. If you are looking at the modern workplace and saying, where do I fit in? I don't want to be replaceable by an LLM. Yeah. Then you and I agree. I think that you need to be doing the deep work that an LLM can't do. It can do the shallow work, draft a stupid response to this email, which we've seen. Right?

Andreas Welsch 14:01

Yeah.

Steven Puri 14:01

So if you're going to learn about yourself to develop that self-awareness to say, how do I optimize the thing that I do uniquely? Then there are some established techniques, and by the way. I'm a big proponent of flow states, right? And I know there's a probably a sizable cohort of listeners who are very into flow states. I know it's very popular right now. There may be some that are not as familiar, so if it's fair, let me take 30 seconds, just make sure I define what I mean by flow state.

Andreas Welsch 14:33

By all means. Yeah.

Steven Puri 14:34

There was a Hungarian American psychologist, Mihai, and she sent Mihai. He had a thesis. He said, if you talk to high performers in very different disciplines, athletes, artists, scientists, inventors, they talk about these highly concentrated states. They go into the states where they do the thing that makes them famous, and they talk about them in very similar ways. He was like, what's up with that? What is this phenomena? So he did the research and at the end of it he wrote the book flow. It's the seminal work on this. It is from once we get the term flow state. And he said the most amazing 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 ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current. It carries you, it magnifies your efforts. You go further and faster. And he said these high performers have figured out how to do that repeatably. So it's a fantastic book. We don't have time to go into all the details of it, but he said, listen, flow states. It is a thing where you lose track of time. You're not staring at the clock. Distractions fall away. You do your best work, you do it faster, and you think you will the end. You feel uplifted as opposed to depleted. And these are really important things if you want to have that consistent practice of outperforming. Other people and outperforming lms, right? So I say all this to say, there are some things we can talk about if you want right now, that are techniques to get into a flow state. There are ideas around self-awareness of how you work, where you can optimize that, and, if you want, we can go into some of those. Where would you like to go?

Andreas Welsch 16:25

Yeah. The part about how do you find your flow when you are asked to work with technology or when you want to work with technology and that it can do the menial parts. Yes. The repetitive things, the shallow work, like you said. And when maybe the high cognitive load work is left for you to do and there, there are tasks, there are times an hour, day times an hour week when we enjoy the high cognitive load and being challenged and Right. Doing something unique and great. And putting all your thought energy and knowledge and passion into it. And there are others where we're quite happy that all we need to do is reply and say, yes, tomorrow 3:00 PM works. How do you. How do you balance that? How do you find your flow when maybe work all of a sudden becomes primarily high cognitive load and might become more stressful?

Steven Puri 17:14

Let's talk about this. So I'm gonna tell you a story and then we'll talk about the principle. When I was coming up in film, this is years ago now, there's a famous screenwriter, his name is Ron Bass, wrote My Best Friend's Wedding in Rain Man and all these movies in the eighties and nineties, early two thousands. And he was famous. Or infamous for not talking to his family in the morning. He's I'm not the dad who's gonna say, who wants pancakes and who needs a ride to school? He's I can't talk to you because as soon as we start talking, I can't hear my character voices in my head. And he said, that's what I get paid a million,$2 million a script to write. That's why Julie Roberts says yes to my scripts. Or Tom Cruise, they say Yes. And his family's course was very cool at one to$2 million a script. They're like, dad, you go we'll make the dead cakes. Yeah. And he knew in the afternoon he was very good with. Interactive work, like if he had studio meetings to go over notes, if he had meetings with other writers or collaborations, like that was afternoon for him. Now, the thing he was very self-aware about is called Chronotype. There's a name for that. And he said, my awareness of what times of day I'm most adept at doing something helps me contain that. Be very productive in these windows. So when you say. Oh how do we find the time to do that deep work that really moves us forward? And other times the shallow work that's just ah, I want to, I want an hour of mindless returning emails or whatever,

Andreas Welsch 18:45

yep.

Steven Puri 18:46

Here's an easy exercise to understand this about yourself. You can take it piece of paper or pencil. You don't need anyone's app. You don't need anything sophisticated. Draw a simple grid Morning, afternoon, Monday through Friday. You can do this for one week or two. And just jot down, what did you do? How'd you feel? Oh, this morning, wrote blog posts, smiley face, tomorrow afternoon. Debugged. This feature, da. Frowny face. I'm gonna tell you, it is surprising. Do that for a week or two. You will see the pattern. You're like, man, I should be always returning email right after lunch. I should be writing original things code or your prose whatever in the morning. Like it is so clear. And then once you do that, then you can start to say, oh, my natural rhythm is such that I should be doing deep work in this window. Yeah. And then you say let me optimize the deep work. What are all the conditions precedent I can set to do it well? Or if you are a team leader and you have a bunch of people that are still not replaced at lms, real humans, right? You're a bunch of people and you're trying to give them those conditions, you get a sense of how to do that.

Andreas Welsch 20:15

I think that's a really good suggestion and a really good exercise. I've noticed this about myself. So you set a goal for yourself. Yeah. I'm independent, so it's a little easier to set goals for myself what I do in a given day or what I want to accomplish week, but then something else comes. There's a customer that calls, says, Hey, can you help me with this? Or something is really urgent, or there's a great opportunity to respond to a to a journalist about being featured in an article, but you have to do it by the deadline or else the window closes. So I've noticed about myself that when I see these opportunities or situations happen, I get more tense. Because the thing, you get more tense. Yeah, I get more tense because I know that there's this thing in the back of my mind that I want to do today, and it's already 12 o'clock and I haven't done it yet. So I know that I will go through that exercise for the next week to figure out when are my, I'm so

Steven Puri 21:10

curious what you find.

Andreas Welsch 21:12

So one thing that I do already know about myself is that once the house is quiet in the evening, once it's super quiet, I have my most productive when the four

Steven Puri 21:21

six year olds are asleep.

Andreas Welsch 21:23

Yes. When everybody's asleep. The best thing is just a computer screen and everything is dark. So that kind of peace and quiet that's my flow state because otherwise during the day there's always something popping up and something shiny to look at or go after. So that part I already know, but optimizing. Optimizing the afternoon. That's definitely something I'll look at for myself.

Steven Puri 21:46

I have a question for you. Go ahead. Yeah. How do you prioritize what you do when you have that time? You're like, tonight I'll have focused flow state time. How do you determine, what are the priorities for you to do?

Andreas Welsch 22:00

Huh. Good question. I would say mainly it's what needs to get done. But then it's the what do I like to do? And that's the conflict between urgency and interest in that moment. And sometimes, if interest is a little more dominant than urgency, I go to bed thinking, okay, what did I get done today? About the things I of the things that I really wanted to get done. I didn't do that. And what do I do? I remind myself, but you did all of these other great things that bring you joy and that make you happy, and that meant you, you were following your passion in that moment. And it's good too, having the flexibility and the time to do that. So sometimes it also takes a little bit of reasoning with myself to get to that point. But

Steven Puri 22:46

Yeah, anyways, how about you? One thing that I found, I'm actually gonna speak about something I do wrong, or something that's hard for me, which is I found that I procrastinate. So I call it the Cold start problem. Yeah. And it, when you, when I dug down and said why do I do this? For example, Andreas, tomorrow at 9:00 AM I really need to I want to finish coding this feature we're working on. Oh, I wanna write a blog post about the new feature. At nine 15, I will still be checking emails, and at nine 30 I'll be just quickly scrolling through the news to see if there's anything important that I need to know, right? It is procrastination. Let's call it what it is. I'm guilty. And I notice that the effect of that is felt at the end of the day when it's oh man, I was busy all day, but I didn't get that feature finished. Oh, I right. Yeah, that frustrated me because that turned into, the conversation. You don't wanna have, oh, Laura, tonight let's make dinner quick.'cause I have to get back and I'm trying to finish something before tomorrow morning. And I hate that thing of after dinner, let me try and work, oh, I'm gonna get up early tomorrow and try and finish today's work before I start tomorrow's work. Have you ever told yourself that lie. Occasionally, maybe. Yeah. Okay. So I have done that. So here's the thing that I found it traced back to my task list. We're going first full circle back to what we were talking about remote moment ago, which is I realized that my procrastination that 9:00 AM why aren't I actually starting, had a lot to do with my task list in one of two ways. Either there was something on there that was just. More of a goal. Like it was so big. It was not a task, it was not a discreet, Hey, in 30 minutes you can do this. In 70 minutes you can do this. It was, write my book do some code, some new feature. It's like that's an 18 hour task with QA and everything, and it needed to be broken down or second. My task list was so long that it was almost paralyzing. There's 17 things they all need to get done and you said you prioritize like urgent and interesting right? Tasks. So sometimes that fact that I'd be looking at 17 tasks where I'm like, oh, that needs to happen. Oh, and I do need to pay a tax bill. Oh, and I do need to reply to that email about being on and Andrea's podcast. You know that thing. So I'll tell you one little hack that I came up with is when I choose my three and I'm saying, you know what, this morning, these are three things I really need to do today. Anything else is icing. These three have to get done. When I start a session, I will have everything but the top three hidden. And we implemented that into suka, the focus app that we built. We said, Hey, we're gonna experiment with this guys. As soon as you start your session and we help you get into a flow state, the music plays, it blocks your distractions, stuff like that. We're gonna show you only the top three things in your task list. This is what you need to get done in this session. Yeah. What's interesting is this 77% more likely that our members would finish all three than when they previously could see their whole task list. Same tasks, same people, same general stuff. But it was just that sense of oh, suddenly this is not paralyzing. And that's a weird mental hack that I didn't realize until I was like, I can't stand seeing that whole list anymore. You were about to say something a moment ago. What were we gonna say?

Andreas Welsch 26:18

No. So sometimes I've tried something similar to, to say what are the big three things or even the little three things that I need to do today. Yep. What are the three? Yep. To feel a sense of accomplishment by the end of the day. And to your point, if I do four, five, and six, that's great. And sometimes there's just little things to your point, paying a bill or replying to this email that you've started to think about but haven't really fully thought through or articulated. It's these things that if they pile up at some point, they really become urgent and important. To, to use that that analogy. So yes. Figuring out. What is that optimal rhythm for me? What are the things to, to prioritize? So maybe coming back to technology, I think on one hand it gets more important to do that when it gets easier to delegate and it's, it gets easier to delegate some of the menial, some of the shallow work like you said. But on the other hand, there's still a good amount of work left for us in, in any given day. So how do we prioritize that? How do we find the balance between, Hey, cool, I don't need to do that anymore. I have more time for this. Or Now I have too many things over here that I need to do. How can I give more, two ai, two software or just space it out differently? But we're getting close to the end of the show. And Steam, I was wondering if you could summarize the key takeaways for our audience today when it's all about how can we design for AI attention and

Steven Puri 27:43

the modern. Okay, so let me share some things. Highlight a couple things. You and I are in agreement as many people are right now, that the talent development ladder is broken because many of the bottom rungs are gone now because they are very well done by an LLM that is just a probability machine. It's not incredibly creative, but it works for those menial jobs, right? So the opportunity then is. I'm a junior engineer, copywriter, designer. I'm not gonna go into a large established company where those jobs are gone. But the ai, the LM, I can leverage that to actually try out ideas of my own and get experience directly with very low cost, very low risk. So that's interesting that development of these jobs are gone, but maybe you can actually try more Is very cool. Another thing is. The value of deep work, what humans are still doing better than an LLM has gone up. Because now if you can actually have that idea, come up with that idea and go, this would change my life, our lives, the world, you can execute that much with much more facility than before. So some of these ideas around, hey. Develop a smart practice around how does your brain work? What time of day is best for you to do deep work? How can you block distractions? How can you set up the right conditions for you to have those moments of Wow. And it's not gonna happen every day. Yeah. Like in my company, we block nine to 11. Just for flow. There's some days nothing great comes out of it, but other days it does. So developing that respect for your brain and flow states and deep work is really important in a world where LLMs are eating the bottom layer of, the workplace.

Andreas Welsch 29:26

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. I know today's conversation. Was not the traditional AI governance program management, stakeholder management type thing.

Steven Puri 29:36

Should we talk tokens, inference? Should I have said compute?

Andreas Welsch 29:39

Nope. But I think it's it's incredibly important to, to think about. These aspects when change gets faster than ever, work just seems to pile up and gets more, do more with less all, all the empty phrases that we've heard and that many of us experience in our daily lives and work. So Steven I'm very thankful and appreciative of your perspective of sharing with us what and what you recommend. And yeah, just thank you so much for joining.

Steven Puri 30:05

Andreas, thank you for having me and for those who are listening, I hope this has been entertaining and maybe informative.