What the shareholder calls say. What Congress gets told. And why the gap between those two things should concern every one of us.

I’ll be direct with you. I do not invite guests onto this podcast simply to fill time or generate content. Every person I bring onto The Principles Podcast is someone I believe has genuine insight worth your attention — and your attention, as this episode makes very clear, is not something to be handed out carelessly.

Steve Puri is one of those guests.

He has been a senior executive at DreamWorks and Fox. He was part of the team that won the Academy Award for visual effects on Independence Day. He has founded three startups, raised over $20 million in venture capital, had one successful exit and two painful failures — and he’ll tell you himself that he learned more from the failures. He now lives in Austin, Texas, raising a young son, building a flow state platform, and thinking seriously about what it means to live a life that is actually yours.

That last part matters more than any of his credentials.

The Story They Tell. And the One They Don’t.

Hollywood has always understood the power of narrative. Steve knows this better than most. Steve and I share similar views on how these mega corporations survive and thrive because they tell us one story, but it’s not really the truth.

Take Meta. When Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress after Cambridge Analytica — after evidence emerged of teenagers developing body dysmorphia, of communities being radicalised, of data being weaponised — what did he say? He wove a careful story about grandmothers seeing photos of their grandchildren. About connection. About chairs, of all things. There was an entire advertising campaign, you can still find it on YouTube, about how Facebook is like a chair because chairs bring people together.

And then you listen to the shareholder calls.

No grandmothers. No chairs. No connection. Just a very clear conversation about hiring the best behavioural economists, the best casino designers, the best engineers in the world — to develop techniques that take more of people’s lives away from them. Because that time on platform is what gets sold to advertisers. That is shareholder value. That is the actual business.

Steve put it in terms that I think cut through all the noise very cleanly: the business model of these platforms is simply to steal your life. That is it. Full stop. Everything else is marketing.

The Dancing Cat Videos Deal

Here is how Steve framed the transaction, and I think it is the most honest description of what social media actually is that I have heard:

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg telephoned you personally and said: I would like your life. I am going to sell it to some advertisers over here and keep the money. But in exchange, I will give you some dancing cat videos.

Is that a good deal?

When you put it like that, no reasonable person would say yes. And yet, the majority of the population is saying yes with their time every single day. Because the mechanism is invisible. Because the exchange is never that explicit. Because by the time you look up, two hours have gone and you cannot get them back.

Steve made a comparison that you might want to sit with. His father smoked for 37 years. He watched three friends die of lung cancer. When Steve asked how they did that to themselves, his father’s answer was: the movie stars were smoking. The tobacco companies were publishing research about how healthy it was. We didn’t know.

Steve hopes his son’s generation will ask him the same question about social media. And I suspect they will. The question is whether we wait for that reckoning or whether we make some different choices now, while we still have time left to do something with.

Zero-Effort Dopamine and What It Costs You

We talked at length about the neurochemistry of what is actually happening when you scroll. This is not conjecture or moralising. The neuroscience is well established, and Steve referenced Andrew Huberman’s work on this, which I would encourage you to find.

We now live in an era of what Steve called zero-effort dopamine. You pick up your phone, you move your thumb, and you are immediately rewarded with a stream of stimulating content. No skill required. No investment required. Pure reward with no friction.

The problem is not merely that this is a waste of time, although it is. The deeper problem is that it recalibrates your brain’s reward system. It makes the effortful things — the writing, the building, the thinking, the creating — feel unrewarding by comparison, because the feedback loop is slower and the path is harder. And so you reach for the phone again. And again.

Steve was honest enough to say he does it himself. He is building a platform designed to help people focus, and he still finds his hand reaching for his phone when a build fails or a paragraph isn’t working. That honesty is important, because this is not about being superior to the mechanism. It is about understanding it clearly enough to make different choices.

The Plane, The Wi-Fi, and What Changed

The conversation that led Steve to build his flow state platform started with a broken Wi-Fi system on an Alaska Airlines flight from Austin to San Francisco.

He boarded the plane intending to mock up some designs in Figma. No Wi-Fi meant no distractions — no WhatsApp, no email, no notifications of any kind. He started working. He became absorbed. And then he looked up and discovered that two hours and forty minutes had passed without him noticing. The designs were done. He had a free evening in San Francisco he had not expected. He felt, by his own account, ahead of his day rather than chasing it.

That experience sent him back to the research. And what he found was that he had stumbled into something that the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had been writing about for forty years.

Flow State: What It Is and Why It Matters

Csikszentmihalyi’s thesis was this: when you interview high performers from radically different disciplines — athletes, artists, scientists, surgeons, musicians — and ask them about the concentrated states in which they do their best work, they describe those states in remarkably similar ways. Despite doing completely different things.

He called it flow. And his explanation for the word choice is worth quoting: we are all on the river, trying to move ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you. It magnifies your effort. That is what these people have figured out how to do — and to do repeatedly.

The characteristics of flow state, as Csikszentmihalyi documented them, are consistent: you lose track of time, you lose yourself in the work, distractions fall away, and at the end you feel a sense of uplift rather than depletion. Not tired. Not drained. Actually energised by what you have just done.

Michael Jordan called it being in the zone. He described it as it being him and the ball — everything else drops away. Steve noted that what Jordan was actually describing was the state in which the work that thirty years later would appear in highlight reels was being produced. Flow is not a luxury. It is where your best work lives.

To access it consistently, the research points to a handful of things: the right auditory environment (typically 60-90 beats per minute, non-vocal, certain key signatures), distraction blocking, a task that challenges you at the right level — not too easy, not overwhelming — and some form of feedback so you can gauge how you’re doing. That last one is subtle but important. You cannot stay in flow if you feel like you are pouring energy into a void.

Rain in Kathmandu and What It Taught Steve About People

One of my favourite moments in this conversation was the story of the rain.

Steve’s friend Julian — a sound designer whose work appears in the Star Wars games — went to Nepal with his son as a graduation gift. One day in Kathmandu, it rained so hard they couldn’t leave. Julian had his recording equipment. He recorded two hours of warm, lush Himalayan rain, came home, didn’t know what to do with it, and asked Steve if he wanted it.

Steve quietly added it to the flow state platform playlist alongside a thousand hours of specially composed music. Just slipped it in and watched what happened. It became the third most popular playlist on the platform.

When he reached out to the people listening to it and asked why, the answer was consistent: it evoked a time when they had to study. A grandmother’s house during finals week. A family lake house in the rain. A memory of being forced to sit still and focus, and finding that they could. The rain was not just sound — it was a trigger back to a version of themselves that knew how to concentrate.

I think it tells you something important: the capacity for deep, focused, productive work is already inside most people. It has not been educated out or lost. It has simply been buried under an avalanche of manufactured distraction.

What Can You Actually Do?

We talked about a number of practical things during the conversation that I think are worth pulling out here.

Turn your screens to greyscale. This is something I do myself, and I mentioned it during our conversation. When colour is removed, the visual reward system that these platforms exploit becomes significantly less effective. The bright colours, the moving shapes, the carefully engineered visual stimulation — all of it becomes considerably less compelling in greyscale. The competition for your attention drops noticeably.

Vote with your money. This is the most powerful lever most people have and the one most rarely used. These companies want your money and they will change their behaviour to get it. If enough people simply stop giving it to them, they will adapt. Your purchasing decisions are more politically significant than most people realise.

Have a device for one purpose. I mentioned keeping an old Nokia for when I need to genuinely focus. A device that is just a phone does not have the gravitational pull of a smartphone loaded with every application designed to steal your attention.  I use a dedicated camera, a Sony voice recorder, and paper notebooks as other examples. Things that need thought and care. For me, removing the temptation is more effective than exercising willpower against it.

Understand what multitasking actually is. There is no such thing. What people call multitasking is rapid context switching, and every switch costs you time and cognitive energy as your brain stores where it was, loads the new task, works on it, and then has to reload the previous one. The veneration of multitasking that we both grew up with was simply wrong. Single-tasking, done with full attention, is faster and produces better results.

Find the tools that help you enter flow deliberately. Steve built a platform to do exactly this — combining the right music, Pomodoro timing, task tracking and a community of people who are all trying to do the same thing. I will link to it below.

The Real Question

Steve said something towards the end of our conversation that I keep coming back to. He said: there are some people who want to do something with their life. Who have the potential to write that great novel, start that restaurant, build that app, contribute something. And it is criminal not to.

I agree with him completely. And I would add that the systems we have been discussing in this episode are not neutral. They are not indifferent to your choices. They have been engineered, at considerable expense and with considerable sophistication, to pull you away from whatever it is you might otherwise have done with your time. The people building those systems are very happy for you to wake up at eighty years old still scrolling, still talking about the novel you were going to write and the app you were going to build.

I am not. And I suspect, since you are here reading this, neither are you.

Listen to the full conversation with Steve Puri above. And if it lands for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

🔗 Steve’s flow state platform: https://www.thesukha.co/