The end of an experiment

Well, this is it. I have reached day 15 of my tiny experiment in micro blogging. I would say there is not much micro about my blogging. The shorter entries are at least 500 words, and the longer ones over 3,000. Now that is very different from writing a book, or even a journal article; however, I do believe I have shared a lot of good ideas that are grounded in some pretty solid research.

Some topics are debatable. For example, I think Meta and Roblox are doing everything they can to refute the harm they cause. They might even believe it. When you study self-rationalization, you start to realize there is almost no behavior humans cannot rationalize.

As a matter of point, I really try to do my best to not ever consider myself a victim. Why? Because I have seen people use resentment and feelings of victimization to rationalize some really awful behavior. I am not saying there are not victims, and bad things don’t happen to good people. What I mean is that personally, the mindset of seeing myself as a “victim” usually leads to some undesirable behavior and generates more suffering than it cures. The book TED - The Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald expands on this idea at great length.

For me, the rule goes something like this:

• Treat others with compassion
• For myself, live with humility, faith, and courage.

Now, Kristin Neff, a prominent researcher at the University of Texas and expert in self-compassion, wrote that your ability to show compassion to others will be gated by your ability to show compassion to yourself. Brené Brown wrote about her in one of her books, and whose website I have visited (https://self-compassion.org) and read content from convinced me that being excessively harsh to myself created conditions where I believed it was “okay” to be “less” harsh to others. I was doing them a kindness by not holding other people to the same impossible standards of perfection I was holding myself to.

Wow, talk about a load of self-rationalizing garbage. I had no business being so negative to myself, and definitely no right to treat other people even a fraction of the way I was treating them. If you struggle with perfectionism, negative self-talk, and in general treating yourself like hot garbage, I recommend the book Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine. However, in truth, the book that changed my life the most was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. One day I stopped projecting myself into imaginary future fights and I stopped relieving my worst memories. I was able to calm down and get centered in the present moment. Morning pages (see The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, or better, just Google it, or Google Tim Ferriss’s and Morning Pages) gave me ways to get calm, grounded, and centered.

From the space of being grounded, I rediscovered my faith, not as a source of guilt and judgement. I am a fan of Rob Bell. (Love Wins). I personally believe the Bible was written by real men and women, for a real audience, at a real moment in time. They were all figuring it out (the humility to recognize they did not have the answers), with prayer (faith), and imperfect living (courage).

That is the most effective move of living I have found so far.

But nothing about that says, “I am a victim.” Nor does it say, “Do not take care of victims.” And nowhere in there does it say judge. In fact, the Bible is pretty explicit on that point. We are not supposed to judge. That is someone else’s job. I believe in discernment, evaluating, and sorting, but I believe the Buddhists and the Bible (Judeo-Christian) are in alignment with the ideas behind three Buddhist principles.

1. Non-attachment.
2. Non-permanence.
3. Non-judgement.

If I recall correctly, the first parable that captures this actually comes from the ancient Sufi tradition. I will start this story, like all good fables start, with four famous words…

The King

Once upon a time, there was a king given to wild emotional swings. From the heights of joy to the depths of despair, daily he flew from rail to rail, wearing himself, his family, and his court out both physically and emotionally. He offered a reward to anyone who could help him with his exasperating life. A Sufi brought him a small box and explained that he had the resolution to the King’s problems. The king asked the mystic what price he wanted for the medicine. The man replied that it was worth more than his entire kingdom, but he would present it as a gift if the King promised to keep it with him always and follow his instructions without fail.

The king agreed. The man handed the king the box, then said, like a doctor prescribing a treatment plan for a patient, “First, you must wear this ring at all times. Second, whenever anything happens, before you declare it good or evil, you must pause for a moment. Then you must read the inscription upon the ring.”

The mystic then turned and left the king with his box and his ring. The king opened the box and saw the simple gold band tucked in velvet cushions. He lifted the ring and slipped it onto his finger, where it fit perfectly. He then read the inscription. It said simply, “This too shall pass.”

From that moment on, the kingdom knew peace.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story, as I took it away, was that it is a very human condition to assume that whatever is happening to us will continue to go that way forever. In fact, as a species, we do a really great job of trying to convince ourselves that whatever we do is permanent. We love certainty. We love predictability. Until they confine us, strangle us, and bleed all joy out of our lives. We love adventure, change, and variability until the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, and the unknown leave us exhausted and emotionally drained. The story is the reminder to take the larger view that nothing is really permanent and moments will change.

I noticed over the decade that I walked my dog, Cookie, every morning to the school track and back, about a mile and a half, sometimes two, **no two days were ever the same. I think it was healthy for me to spend that amount of time every morning in nature. I saw trees broken apart from storms, then heal, then grow again. Some days there were other dogs, some days it was just me on the Log Beast. But every single situation passed, and something similar, but new, took its place.

The Baby

Once upon a time, in ancient China, a wise and respected Zen monk lived in a small fishing village. He made his home in a comfortable cottage alone on top of a low hill. One day, a farmer and his wife knocked on the monk’s door early in the morning. The monk opened the door to greet the man and his wife and saw that they also had their daughter with a newborn infant in tow.

The farmer explained that his daughter had become pregnant and named the wise monk as the father. The monk simply replied, “Is that so?” The farmer insisted it was so, and then told the monk that he must raise the child. The monk said again, “Is that so?” The farmer insisted it was since the father must take responsibility for his child. So the monk took the baby from the miserable girl, and then proceeded to raise the child as his own.

He fed the baby, cared for the baby, and loved the baby as a true father would. His reputation in the village was ruined, but it seemed to make little difference to the monk as far as anyone could tell.

Then, one day, some months later, the farmer returned with his daughter (still miserable). The monk greeted him and asked how he could help. The farmer, now somewhat sheepish, but still very angry with his daughter, explained that the true father of the child was, in fact, a boy from the fish market. The child’s father was the son of the fishmonger. “Is that so?” was what the monk said. “Yes!" said the miserable girl, speaking for the first time. “So you must give us her baby back,” the farmer said roughly.

“Is that so?” The monk asked.

“Yes!” The farmer and his daughter insisted together. So the monk returned the healthy, happy baby boy to his mother and grandfather.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story, as I can remember it, goes something like this: the monk was never attached to his reputation, his solitary way of life, or even later the child. That last part seems rather cold to me personally, but he accepted what life offered him in the moment with love and dedication, and when life returned to demand back what it had given him, he released it without grief, moaning, or objection. The story does not ever actually say how the monk felt or what his thoughts were, but the reader (or listener) is left to ponder his words. “Is that so?” Maybe not all things are as they appear. And sometimes, when a situation (or a person) is brought into our life, they will not be with us as long as we hope or fear. In fact, and this is the moral of the story, like the King who knew that “this too shall change”, the monk knew the only certainty was change. Therefore, the best way to handle any situation in life is to make the most of it while you are in it, appreciate it for what it is, but be ready to let it go when its time has passed.

Now for the final story.

The Farmer

This is the most famous story as near as I can tell. I heard it in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, it was in the book The Power of Now, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff included it in her book Tiny Experiments. This story is quoted more than any other fable I have read, and I’m certain it is in many more books in my collection than I have mentioned. (I should probably start linking each book I find it in to my digital second brain to get a feel for how often this story comes up.) I feel confident you have heard of it. It goes like this…

Once upon a time, a farmer discovered a beautiful black stallion in the woods and was able to lead the wild horse back to his farm. His neighbors saw the horse and immediately commented, “Oh, this is a sign of good luck!"

The farmer replied, “We shall see.”

A week later, the farmer’s son was trying to tame the horse by riding it. The horse was strong and wild, and it threw the son from the saddle. He fell awkwardly and broke his leg. The next day, upon learning of the boy’s injury from the doctor who set and plastered the leg, the neighbors agreed, “You are right, the horse is an ill omen. Look at the misfortune you have suffered.”

The farmer simply replied, “We shall see.”

Later that week, the king’s army marched into town looking for conscripts. The farmer’s son was overlooked because of his broken leg. The townsfolk, many of whom had lost their sons to the forced recruitment, looked upon the farmer with envy. “You are right,” they said, “The horse was a blessing. You still have your son!”

As ever, the farmer replied, “We shall see.”

The Moral of the Story

This story, like the others, contains hints and flavors of the others, but the core message is that it is in human nature to rush to judgement. We always want to determine if something is good or bad, and then assign it that value forever. The farmer’s refrain, “We shall see,” is a reminder to be patient, not to rush to judgement, and to be open to possibility. The farmer advocates for curiosity. We don’t know what things mean as much as we want to.

I read once that the reason we love stories so much is that stories combine three things and make them happen in sync that we get:

• Events
• Feelings
• Meaning

All at the same time. Like, they happen simultaneously. We can see what happens, we know how the characters (and in a great story ourselves) feel, and most importantly we know why it matters, we know what it means. Life lived in real time is rarely so clean and clear. Often we’re not sure what the hell is going on while we’re right in the middle of things. We don’t have all the information, the context can be jumbled, and it is coming at us in real time so we are sorting it out as we live through it. What’s more, our emotions can be a mess too. As Pixar made so brilliantly clear in the movie Inside Out, emotions are complex combinations of often conflicting feelings. And as for meaning? How can we possibly know what something means when we don’t know what is really happening or how we really feel about it? Yeah, life is good, but it is also challenging and more often than not confusing. Or we have done such a good job getting our life under control that it feels completely predictable and boring and we begin to worry about its significance or the fear that it will never be different overwhelms us.

The bottom line is that we often have to reflect upon what has happened to us to sort out the events, the emotions, and the effect of it all. We just don’t know while we’re going through it. But later, with the advantage and perspective of time, we can piece it all together.

These three stories bring to life the principles that can help us overcome some cognitive biases that affect all of us.

1. The tendency to project whatever happens to us in the present moment as a permanent condition. It isn’t. It will most certainly change.
2. The tendency to attach to life’s conditions and resist unexpected (and unwanted) change.
3. The tendency to rush to judgement.

In summary, the antipodes are:

• Recognize that things will change and use that knowledge to appreciate fleeting joy, or endure temporary hardships.
• Be open to what life brings you.
• Live with curiosity and not judgement.

Life Advice

Wow, that’s a lot of life advice for a micro blog. I think these thoughts are sparked by my daughter’s graduation. Last night, thousands of kids and their families packed into the basketball stadium on Boise State’s campus and watched the graduation ceremony.

This marks the final of three journeys from infant to adult for my wife and me. Hopefully, there will be grandchildren to carry on the tradition, but for Stacy and me, our kids have completed a long and worthy journey to independence. And as I sit here, I realize that each of them is now engaged in their own version of the same journey I am on, and the one you are on. Figuring it all out. The prescribed answers are over. The clear path ahead is complete, and we are left in the wonderful, wild, woolly world where choices have consequences, we just can’t know what most of those will be at the times we have to make the best decisions we can.

College may have prepared us for a career (maybe), but what has prepared us for life? Each other, I hope. It is on that journey, I find that doing my best to keep faith, live with humility, and act with courage is surprisingly effective.

It does not prevent me from being afraid, frustrated, angry, or hurt, but neither does it leave me stuck, anxious, or bitter.

Compassionate, courageous, and curious to me feel like better ways to approach the world. Or as my dad put it,

1. Set an intention.
2. Get in motion.
3. Pay attention.

Compassion orients me toward doing what I can to recognize the suffering of others, and if I can do that, I can do something about it. Courage gives me the motivation to take action. And curiosity keeps me in the present moment so I am aware that maybe, just maybe, life is offering me something better than I imagined.

Conclusion

I have found this experiment in sharing my thinking and my thoughts wonderfully liberating. It has also given me a… a space? A venue? A medium in which to explore my own thoughts and questions. After today, I will take a short break, about a week, then take the best of what worked and drop the rest.

My initial reaction is to slow down the posting schedule. And I haven’t decided yet, but I feel like I should take the best of this blog and migrate it to my speaking blog, but keep this one running, sort of as a kind of daily journal. Or rather, a daily journal.

I feel good about the commitment and the sprint. I honestly had zero expectations for what would happen here; I simply committed to doing it. I followed Le Cunff’s suggestion: Set a purpose, an action, a cadence, and make it trackable. Fifteen days. Fifteen posts. Done. One a day. The purpose? To learn and think very publicly. And then see what happens. And for now, what I have learned is:

• I enjoy it.
• I am having more interesting conversations with people.
• Questions are more inclusive than conclusions.
• When people feel like they can contribute, they are more likely to participate.
• Focusing on only one thing and being known only for one thing may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
• I have a lot more to say than I thought.
• People value what I am sharing more than I expected.
• I still have a lot of questions.
• I created enough content to write a book.
• I am going to write a book for parents and educators about kids and video games.

Reflections

It is Saturday as I sit here and type this. My final posts will be written and published on the road. I still have not answered some of my biggest questions, but I do have some actions I can take next. First, I think I will start a blog series on my main blog, that will be more open-ended and authentic. I will try to be a little less polished and authoritative. The conversation to me is more interesting than the answer. Don’t get me wrong, I love having the answers to why things work the way they do. However, I appreciate engaging with people more.

Also, it frees me up to share more often because it nerfs my perfectionism.

Note: Someone asked me recently about the expression to nerf something. As far as I am aware, it comes from the video game world where a weapon in a game would be overpowered (OP), and the developers realizing it would change the game device (weapon, spell, charm, tool, character class, etc…) to be less effective. Like a nerf version of a sword. I might look cool, but it was no longer so dangerous or effective.

Therefore, my first reflection is that I want to write more often, probably 2-3 times per week, but be more open. Perhaps I will focus on the weekly question.

The second thing is that I am going to share more of me. There’s an idea that you must focus on one topic and be known for one thing. The truth is all my interests are part of who I am and they are interconnected. Also, Keith Roberts, the creator of the Oak Journal, who I am lucky enough to call a friend, told me to have four to five core messages. Well, he might not have said messages, but interests. I think most of us have more than a single interest, although we might have a single career.

And in the spirit of Tiny Experiments, focusing on only one thing is just another form of rigid linear thinking.

Lessons Learned

I would say that along the way, creating this blog has had an impact on some of my other habits. For one, my morning pages routine did get decimated. I have many blank pages in my journal. I just can’t do all the kinds of writing I want to do in the amount of time I allocate in the morning.

However, I have also learned, or at least I have had my own learning process confirmed. Being patient and persistent makes knowledge and methods available to me that I feel should have been available from the moment I started, but for whatever reason, they did not become apparent or available until I spent some time working with the tool, material, or domain. For example, I now know that I can publish micro.blog content directly from inside of Obsidian. So my new writing process has taken that into account. I learned how to upload images from my phone to Micro.blog using the iOS app, and then I can paste the links directly into the Obsidian draft of the blog post and they work. There are a few more steps, but my overall frustration with the process has dropped dramatically. It is still easier to use this system with MarsEdit on my MacBook, but only needing a portable keyboard and my phone opens the universe to me for publishing blog posts easily.

That strikes me as very cool.

I have not decided if I will continue to use this platform, but I feel like there could be room for something here. Matthew Dicks blogs his personal life constantly and has for years. However, there is some risk as his entire life was turned upside down by people who edited his blog posts with malicious intent and then blackmailed him and his employer with it. There are reasons people are not always open and vulnerable. Sometimes, vulnerability means exactly what we fear it means, and not what Brené Brown tells us it means in its best use. When you are vulnerable, you are in fact open to being hurt.

Shopping

As part of my one-bag travel, I am always on the hunt for products or clothes that make the experience better or more effective. One thing I have struggled to find (until today) is sandals. I had some Xero sandals, but I did not like the way they fit, and they are extraordinarily flat. Now, the whole point of the Xero shoes is to have a shoe that feels barefoot, but there’s sort of a point where it’s a little too flat and I just never felt good about wearing those sandals. Teva’s, sort of the granddaddy of the sports sandal, are surprisingly thick. In general, they have very thick curves souled and thick straps making them heavy and surprisingly bulky.

Aside: Arch Supports Are Stupid Until you hear someone point out how dumb something is, it can be hard to realize when a piece of marketing hype is just stupid. One of my favorites is “Arch Support”. Or perhaps it is one of my favorites to ridicule. You see, arches provide support, they don’t need support. Think of the arch de Triumph in Paris, or the famous arch in St. Louis. Arches do not need support. They are support structures. I am not a doctor, but I am an engineer, and the arch is a marvel of engineering the way it distributes force from a top to the sides. That is what arches do. Now, according to the shoe makers - who may or may not have doctors advising them - weak arches are likely the cause of having arch support and not conditioning your foot to do its job. In other words, walking barefoot causes your arches to flex, which stretches the ligaments and builds up the muscles that hold the structure together. But, part of the key is to switch from heel striking to landing on the ball or pad, or side of your foot. Most shoes with heels, or thick padded soles encourage heel striking (letting your heel hit the ground first). A more natural way of walking is for the ball, pad, or side of your foot to touch down first. I was surprised how much this changes the way I walk, from body position to the entire motion of my leg, yet despite that, I have been a fan of zero drop style shoes for years now.

So back to my sandal adventure, my son’s partner, Shelby, recommended Bedrock sandals. This particular brand has a Vibram sole, the same kind they use on hiking boots, but they are relatively thin, with a decent “lug” which gives them good “grip." They are zero drop (flat) and they are light. These are the best compromise I have found for a travel sandal that can earn a permanent spot in my one-bag travel kit.

There are two styles of Bedrocks, a thicker model and a thinner. I purchased the thinner variety, and my initial impressions are extremely positive.

I also had one of those strangely serendipitous shopping experiences where REI had a shirt I liked, but never in my size, and as I was walking out of the store, I literally said, “I wish they had this in my size,” and the shirt on the top of the pile - that was not there the day before - was in my size. So I grabbed it and I bought it before I changed my mind.

So it was a good start to the day, and I got back to the house before anyone else besides my wife was awake. Stealth mission complete.

More Reflections

So, getting back to video games and addiction. One of the problems I have with the word addiction is that people use the word both casually and seriously. One example is the new game Balatro. And by new, I mean this is not a classic game that has been around for decades. Balatro is a roguelike deck building game that uses poker-like elements for gameplay.

But first, some definitions:

• Roguelike: A “roguelike” game is characterized by procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. These games often emphasize strategic decision-making and replayability.
• Deck Building: A deck-building game is a card game where players start with a small set of weak cards and gradually acquire more powerful cards to build a stronger deck as the game progresses. The goal is to strategically improve your deck to achieve victory.
• Poker: Seriously? I don’t need to describe this, do I? But just in case, ChatGPT generated this: Poker is a card game where players bet on the strength of their hands, aiming to win chips or money. It involves skill, strategy, and luck, with players trying to form the best hand or bluff opponents into folding. The most common variant is Texas Hold’em.

Okay, a number of people describe Balatro as addictive. But is it really? First, it passes my two critical criteria.

1. You can buy it.
2. You do not have to be online to play it.

But then why is it addictive? And is it really? Well, one thing about the game is that it is definitely compelling. But is it something you can set down when you want to?

In my experience, yes; however, I hear (and read) from a lot of people that the game is “addictive.”

In my experience, what makes the game so compelling is its well-balanced play and replayability. It does not appear to have any of the devices or mechanisms that are common in addictive games.

Basically, in an addictive game, the core mechanic is luck. A boss. Of mine once explained the difference between gambling and risk-taking.

In gambling, there is nothing you can do to change the outcome in your favor. When you are taking a risk, you can influence the odds of a good outcome in your favor through research, hard work, and discipline.

In a gamble, you are along for the ride. Pull the slot machine lever, throw the dice, hope you get the right cards. But with a risk, you get to make choices in how you deploy your resources, or trading one object for another.

When games lean toward manipulative, in my experience, they tend to hide information. If you think of Tetris, it showed you the next piece, but also their primary mode of difficulty was speed. As you advanced, the game got faster. However, with gem matching games, they drop batches of gems, and the boards themselves “appear” to be randomly generated. You really have no idea what is coming next.

Roguelike games, with their random generation, seem similar; however, usually, the random elements are largely cosmetic or aesthetic. The layout of the map, but the types of enemies you fight are largely consistent, and getting past them requires skill. But in manipulative games, the difficulties err on the side of never quite being something you can master because, like in a gamble, they don’t want you to experience the consistency of developed skill; they want to keep your brain in a mode of experiencing experimentation. They are designed to produce a variable reward, not a consistent reward based upon skill.

Interesting, Balatro will show you the entire deck of cards remaining to be played in a hand. This single piece of information, allowing you to calculate odds by showing the deck (something they would never do in Las Vegas), is a pretty compelling argument to me that the designers of Balatro are trying to help you improve your decision-making.

Taking calculated risks to achieve rewards is a valid form of decision-making. And decision-making that balances available information, resources, outcomes, and probabilities, is a skill. In fact, it is one of the most important skills in being an entrepreneur.

Also, once you recognize certain hands can produce certain point yields, your decision-making can become faster and more consistent.

Consequently, I am inclined to believe that Balatro is what I would call a good game. That is a game where:

1. The developer is trying to entertain the player.
2. The developer is not trying to steal attention and sell it to someone else.
3. The game builds skills that can produce reliable or consistent results.
4. You can voluntarily put the game down when you need to or want to.

There may be other attributes that I’m not considering, but so far, I feel like this analysis works well.

I am a little uneasy about yesterdays post. I feel like I should know a lot more about girls and social media. However, the truth is I would be taking a lot of information from predominantly two sources: The Anxious Generation and The Facebook Papers. There is a third source worth considering, Alison Armstrong’s material, but that is actually about adult women, and adults, whether men or women, are materially different from children whose brains are still developing. To do that segment justice, and not simply regurgitate what I’ve already read, I would need (and want to), go to Professor Haidt’s sources. That’s one thing I love about great academic writers, they cite their source material, and typically I find in those books a wealth of useful and interesting information.

Now that I am on day 11 of 15, two things pop up for me.

1. I am traveling for my daughters graduation, so I am not sure I will be able to sustain the content production I have been pushing for the last 10 days.
2. I want to do some more research on:
   1. What are the “bad” games?
   2. What are the “good” games?
   3. What else are people doing to help neurodivergent kids with video games?
   4. What exactly is social media doing to girls?
   5. What is the state of the art for age verification? (Meta invests according to SEC filings $1B a month in VR and metaverse technology. Why can’t they solve the age and account verification problem? - my take: because they don’t want to. Well, Bars don’t to check ID’s either but they have. We do we let Tech companies make their own laws.)

Super Cool

My interview on the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast with Hillary Wilkinson. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here. I really love the work Hillary and her organization are doing to educate parents on screen safety. She and her cofounders were on this topic long before it became cool. If you take a look at healthyscreenhabits.org, their content is fantastic and they start with five healthy screen habits:

1. Give you phone a bedtime.
2. Ask what’s my purpose
3. The grandma rule
4. Phones away or silent.
5. No phones in bedrooms.

And I really love their Family Technology Plan. If you want to see something happen, having a plan is one of the best ways to do it. They also have a book called: Healthy Screen Habits for Tweens & Teens which retails for $14.99 on Amazon. What I really like about these resources is that they are chock full of tips and techniques to help keep your kids not just safe, but in a space where they can thrive.

5:11PM

I spent the better part of the day at the dentist office having the hardest to reach tooth in my mouth worked on. The dentist kept telling me I had a “tiny” mouth. I kept telling her, no one who knows me will believe that. I plan to call her as a character witness in the future. Consequently, this shall be a short blog post day.

They all can’t be monster writing days I guess. As Oliver Burkeman said, “try to be Dailyish.”

7:30 a.m. Breakfast Meeting

This morning I had an awesome meeting with Isaac and Arthur, two enterprising young men who are starting out on a new business adventure. Meeting with other entrepreneurs is one of my favorite things to do. The focus, commitment, and enthusiasm for building a business that has an impact always inspires me.

While waiting for the meeting, I experimented with uploading my blog from my phone. For the most part, it works really well; however, one of the challenges is dealing with images. MarsEdit on macOS is my preferred way to post to micro.blog; however, on the phone, micro.blog does have an iOS app; however, whenever I upload images, they automatically get pasted to the bottom of the post. I wish they would stay inline or past the link at the cursor when they upload images. But they don’t. Or at least, I can’t figure out how to make it work.

So what I learned is that I have to upload the image, scroll to the bottom of the post to get the URL for the image— typically a <img /> tag— and then move it to where it belongs in the post. And by move it, I mean copy, paste, then go back and delete it. All things considered, it worked. So my revised phone flow looks like:

1. Edit markdown in Obsidian
2. Copy Obsidian page note and paste into Drafts app.
3. Inside of Drafts app, run macro to remove WikiLinks syntax(things in double brackets ``).
4. Make sure any images are saved in my Photos app (so Micro.blog app can upload them).
5. Run Apple AI Writing Tools Proofread (it doesn’t run in Obsidian for some reason).
6. Copy cleaned-up article.
7. Paste it into Micro.blog new post.
8. Upload the images.
9. Move the images to where they belong in the post.
10. Post the image to the blog.

It’s more tedious than it needs to be; however, it does work, and that is good enough. It means I can post on the road and keep up my commitment to this little experiment.

9:30 a.m.

This morning, I had another meeting with Rizwan from Pakistan. For the past few weeks, we have been talking about morning routines and productivity. Rizwan is a very kind and supportive entrepreneur who has shown a lot of interest in my second brain learning system as well as how I manage notes. However, today, we talked about kids and video games. In particular, Rizwan has been reading these blog posts, and the information about kids and video games interested him. He speculated that video games might be useful for helping neurodivergent kids adapt and adjust in social situations.

The call was fascinating, and it recalled some of my own experience working with kids on the spectrum. The last post, I spent a lot of time talking about the experiences boys need. I suppose it’s not a terrible point to stop and share some information and experiences that I have learned about working with kids on “the spectrum.”

Neurodivergent Thinking

One parent in particular raised the question, “Can’t we use video games to help our kids connect?” And the answer is, in my experience, absolutely, but like with all things, it is about being intentional. Being in the video game events industry, I have worked with a lot of kids on the spectrum. Here are some of the best practices that I have seen.

I love working with the Boys and Girls Clubs because most clubs have a policy of “normalizing” kids. When we would run programming, they would make sure to include autistic kids and kids with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Note: For a long time, Asperger’s and Autism were considered separate conditions; however, in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), they do not differentiate between the two. Both now fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Historically, Asperger’s was generally used to describe individuals with milder symptoms than autism. They typically had strong verbal skills and intellectual ability, but experienced difficulty with social interaction and repetitive behaviors. The main difference between Asperger’s and autism was the lack of cognitive or language delays in the Asperger’s patients.

The key idea was that the Club staff wanted both groups to become normalized to each other. However, they recognized that some kids could become quickly overwhelmed in a high-stimulation environment, so they created exit plans for the children on the spectrum to be able to go to a quieter space when they became overstimulated.

A friend of mine runs a clinic that specializes in providing services for neurodivergent children, and she gave me some excellent tips which we used to train our staff.

1. Be clear. Use simple, direct language.
2. Structure and predictability are important.
3. Plan for sensory considerations.
4. Focus face to face to hold their attention.
5. Be patient.
6. Be kind.
7. Be present.

As Will Guidara wrote in his book Unreasonable Hospitality, everyone wants to be seen, valued, and cared for. Autistic kids are no different. But the behaviors that will make them feel seen, valued, and cared for can be different from most other kids.

How Video Games Can Help

One reason video games are so appealing to this group of kids (both boys and girls) is that they are inherently structured. The consistency is appealing. Back in the days when computer hardware was not that powerful, games could only render what mattered. They did not have the capacity to throw a bunch of random things at you. This made it much simpler and easier for all gamers to process, but especially appealing to kids with autism.

Also, what inhibits social emotional development for most kids (staring at glass instead of a screen) can be a relief for many autistic kids. The social environment is radically simplified so they are more or less protected from making the kinds of awkward mistakes that frustrate them in large group settings.

But perhaps the most empowering part of video games is that many children experience a kind of status inversion. They are not just good, they are very good at the games. Thus video games are a domain where they can experience mastery and respect of their peers.

The Video Game Party

One set of parents that I met did one of the best jobs I have seen working with their autistic son. They invested a lot of time and energy with their son to see his condition as a gift and a challenge he would have to learn to manage. They often used video games to help him socialize and normalize working with other kids. When GameTruck showed up for his party, his parents had invited a few of his closest friends over to play. It was a small party, but the boy had his own noise-cancelling headphones, and impressively he self-regulated. When he felt he was becoming overstimulated, he told the Game Coach (the party host managing the event) and went into the house or the backyard to let the energy dissipate. When he re-regulated, he returned to the party. His parents watched, but never interfered.

This even was as much about giving their son opportunities to practice emotional and self-regulation as it was about celebrating a birthday. I watched the entire situation and was deeply impressed by the compassion and commitment of the parents. Even more impressively, none of the guests and not even the Game Coach really realized what was happening. From the outside, he was just another gamer who was taking a break every now and then. Which is not an unusual behavior.

I share that story because it gives me hope that we can use tools like well-made video games to help kids experience dignity and acceptance that can be hard to experience in other areas of their lives.

And What About…

Okay, I will confess I am not an expert in girls and social media, but I am a father of a daughter, and the impact of attention-stealing platforms appears to be as harsh (or more harsh) for girls as “bad” video games are for boys.

For the best information I have found, I highly recommend reading The Anxious Generation. But for the sake of being fair, here’s what I know.

Girls also want to have experiences of agency, mastery, and relatedness. However, they tend to prioritize community first. They are more attracted to visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

The first big problem with all of these platforms, for both girls and boys, is that none of these platforms do age verification. None. They can do age verification for gambling websites, but the most valuable companies on the planet can’t (or won’t) do it. What’s more, they do not do account verification. It is easy to open multiple anonymous accounts. Have you ever tried to do that with a driver’s license? If you think that’s not a fair comparison, then try to buy liquor without one. We use government-issued identification all the time to regulate business behavior in the real world.

Why can’t we do that online?

This level of anonymity creates multiple problems for girls. First, is the tremendous pressure to “look pretty” - all the Instagram and TikTok filters that dramatically increase the girls' sex appeal, which leads to creepy old guys reaching out and soliciting them. Or worse, stalkers and predators seeking them out and grooming them.

There is a serious move to fence in the elementary school a block from my house. It has been an open campus for sixty years. I understand the school board’s motivation, but if they are going to do that, why can’t they also make the schools' phones free? Because the predators are not lurking outside the school anymore, they are in the kids' pockets, in their apps, and they have perfected methods to get the kids to come to them.

The other problem with the complete lack of regulation of account authenticity or age control is that for girls, relationships are much more important than they are for boys at the same age. So to hurt a teen girl, you hit her in the relationships. Social media platforms are all about judgement, from the like button to the comments, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to savage someone’s reputation and once one kid gets taken down, the mob mentality sets in almost as a mode of survival. As long as the angry mob isn’t after me, I’m safe.

Never before, in the history of humanity, have so many people been able to weigh in so angrily, viciously, and ruthlessly on one person without fear of reprisals or accountability. Matthew Dicks, winner of the Moth Grand Slam and story coach, shares his own experience with having his content edited, modified, and then used to assemble a smear campaign against him. As a successful grown man, he goes into great detail about this in his book Storyworthy. And no one was trying to blackmail Dicks into sending nude pictures of himself.

Your average teenage girl is at risk of cyberbullying and attempts to solicit compromising images from her constantly. While boys are experiencing fake agency in video games, girls are experiencing fake community in social media. They are both being cheated out of the real experiences they need to develop healthy social-emotional skills.

Meta’s Response: Instagram Teen Accounts.

As I was writing this, I happened to see an advertisement on TV from Meta announcing a “new” teen mode for Instagram. There is a lot of chatter online that this is not about helping kids, but more about averting regulation.

So what are Instagram Teen Accounts? So here’s the short version: Supposedly it’s their big move to keep kids safer online. These accounts come with a preloaded list of safety features: the accounts default to private, there are tighter restrictions on who can message them, content filters are stronger, and there are built-in nudges like time limits and sleep reminders. They’ve even beefed up age checks and added tech to spot underage users trying to sneak through. Parents now get a dashboard with some actual levers to pull—especially for kids under 16 who can’t change the defaults without a parent’s OK.

That all sounds great, and I’ll give them credit—those are good moves. But let’s not kid ourselves. Plenty of experts and child advocates are still giving Meta the side-eye. The core concern? Instagram is still Instagram. The same algorithms, the same infinite scroll, the same comparison traps and dopamine spikes. And while Meta’s tools help, they also put a lot of the burden on parents—again—to monitor and manage a system built to be addictive. The timing of all this also feels… strategic. Convenient, even. A new rollout that just happens to line up with mounting regulatory pressure?

What do you think?

For me personally, “reminding” a kid to go to bed is about as effective as PornHub’s “Are you 18?” banner. The kid dismisses it. They are not missing sleep because they forgot it’s bedtime. They are missing sleep because the platform is addictive. Every cigarette pack sold in the USA has a warning label. And people still buy them. You know what stopped people from buying cigarettes? Taking them out of CVS. When CVS dropped cigarettes, people assumed the sales would spike at other retailers. It didn’t. The market literally shrank. Taking the product AWAY reduced smoking. Warnings stop new people from smoking. But Meta isn’t warning kids to not use Instagram, just not to use it so much with an easily dismissible notification.

The other thing about Meta’s announcement is that they never address the issue with kids under 13 getting on the platform. It is almost as if they intentionally mention the under 16 to create the impression that only high school juniors and above are on the platform. They completely avoid the issue that most middle schoolers and a good chunk of elementary school kids in the fifth grade are getting on the platform.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Kids deserve to have the same protections online that they have in the physical world. An 11-year-old can’t walk into a bar, a strip club, or a dispensary and purchase products. If they do it, it is the business that is held accountable. Our government helps us protect our kids. Massive tech companies claim they are different because… they want to be held to a different standard. That is patently absurd.

06:19 a.m.

While it is interesting to understand how things work, I find it far more valuable to answer the question, “Yeah, but what can you do about it?" Or perhaps even, “What can you do with it?”

Perhaps the best way to handle this next part is for me to share the framework of what is happening for both boys and girls.

Note: If you are not offended that I focus on only two genders, you can skip ahead. If you happen to be either offended or upset that I focus on only two genders, then I offer you this path for your consideration. I do this not to be political or oppressive but rather because it creates contrast. It is much easier to see choices when they are put in contrast to each other. You can think of it this way. It is human nature to take a spread of almost anything and reduce it to binary poles. Rich and poor. Tall and short. East and West. In fact, one of the most common cognitive biases (mental shortcomings) Homo sapiens like you and me suffer from is called the “False Dichotomy”, creating a division where there is none. Personally, I do believe we are predominantly of two genders, but I also believe (and the data shows) that human behavior manifests on a spectrum, and men and women have a lot more overlap than they do difference. There are ample mannish women and effeminate men. So you are free to think of the needs I put below as options, and by watching your own child or the children you care for, my hope is that you are more able to rapidly identify what they need and help them fulfill that developmental requirement. You see, there is one thing I do not accept. I do not accept sameness. Equality, yes. Sameness, no. Our individuality may be our greatest gift. Even genetically identical twins are not “the same” person. If they are not, why should anyone else be? Extraordinarily similar, perhaps, but not identical. Forcing everyone to be the same is the gist of an Ancient Greek tragedy about the Procrustean Bed. I’ll share it when I get the chance.

What Do They Need?

To figure out what to do, it would first be helpful to know what kids need.

While philosophers may argue that much of our gender roles are created by society, the odds of anyone of us changing society in time to help our kids is so vanishingly small, I think it’s better to just sort out why the rules are to the best of our understanding and go from there. These, of course, are changing, but not in a way that any of us seem to understand or can predict.

So I will try to break it down by what kids need, in general, then what girls need, then what boys need. I am most personally familiar with boys because of my coaching background, and well, my own experience growing up as a modern man.

It seems most women are familiar with what girls need for the same reasons: time, exposure, and personal experience.

There, all the caveats out of the way, let’s take a look at my current best understanding of what kinds of experiences kids are looking for.

What Kids (both boys and girls) Need

During that magic window when children develop their cultural identity, there are a few other things happening as well.

With each increase in movement, I saw that my children also took another massive leap in personal development. When a baby went from being held to crawling, more of their personality presented itself. They could move away from Mom or Dad. When they went from crawling to walking, they became even more of an individualized person. They could move about the house and could be trusted to walk themselves, albeit in close orbit to Mom and Dad. Then, when they got a bike, they could rove, moving about the neighborhood and street. Sadly, still in range of Mom or Dad, but that was about the time that they started to go to school and spend time away from Mom and Dad and spend it with other kids their age and with other adults who would look after them.

During the elementary school years, our children learned how to be a part of our family, and then slowly how to make friends. They were becoming well socialized. As they approached the third, fourth, and fifth grades, their development expanded from being part of the family to being part of a “friend group” at school. And this correlated with that window from 5-14. The elementary school and middle school years.

During this time, they also started to expand their identity beyond the family group and started to try and find their place within their new tribe, their same age cohort, their class, their team, their neighbors. What we loosely call their “friend group.”

It is such a natural and timeless process that I think it would have stayed invisible and ordinary to us all if it had not been distrusted by technology.

So what is happening in this friend group? Or, what should be happening?

12:45PM

Monday’s are usually chock-full of meetings, so it is hard to engage in a full thought thread. One thing that popped up for me today: I was able to rattle off a bunch of new cartoons. I will sometimes use a smaller sketch pad with a pen or pencil and block out body language and the “jokes."

These rough sketches let me make mistakes and iterate quickly. I can also do them in batches or a few days in advance, and then when I have time to draw (and my brain is fried), I can convert them into line art, which I later color. So far, I’m up to 96. I’m almost halfway to my first goal of creating 200. Well, not really a goal. A tiny experiment, let’s say. Already, I have learned:

1. What markers work best.
2. I’ve established some conventions for conveying interactions.
3. I learned how to create a comic series (see: atplaygang.thecomicseries.com)
4. I even have a few people that follow me and comment on my comics. That’s fun.
5. I’ve learned about different kinds of markers.

Here’s an attempt to create Sonny in Excalidraw:

In principle, I can make it work, but I personally like the imperfections of the hand-drawn art. At present, it is less fun making vector art look like hand-drawn art.

What Kids Need

What kids need has a shocking resemblance to Self-Determination Theory. Basically, both boys and girls are looking for experiences of:

• Agency (Autonomy)
• Mastery (skill development)
• Relatedness (Community)

What is different between boys and girls is that boys traditionally have sought more experiences of agency. Acting in the world, risk-taking. Risk taking. The explosion of “safetyism” has greatly hindered (some would say harmed) boys’ ability to have these experiences. Video games provide a simulated world of agency and, therefore, instead of channeling a boy’s desire for exploration into fake and unreal ends.

It is hard to say which is worse: video games or safetyism. What is safetyism? It is the unchecked belief that kids are not safe in our neighborhoods or the world in general and must be watched and guarded by adults at all times.

I often share the story that I grew up in the era when I was told to “go outside and play.” I was not allowed back in the house until the street lights came on. I remember one time coming home, and my dad asked, “Are you in for the night?” I said, “No, I’m just getting a flashlight.” He was fine with that. And so was I. I. I ran outside to join my friends as we prowled around Holly Hill Farms, the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in Michigan.

Today, however, when I talk to my friends with kids, the few who want to send their kids out to play discover there is no one to play with. My wife and I moved to our present neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona, because there were so many kids visible. We moved two miles from our old neighborhood, but it felt like we had moved a world away. In our old neighborhood of Pecan Grove Village III (apparently the builders really liked the name Pecan Grove Village), we did not meet a neighbor boy who lived just four houses down the street from us until both boys entered kindergarten. For five years, the two boys lived a few hundred feet apart, but neither boy nor their parents knew anything about the other.

That would have been impossible in Holly Hilly Farms.

I first noticed this strange isolation effect when I started GameTruck. In 2009, as the brand was taking off and becoming popular, I drove to a neighborhood in Gilbert where the family was bragging (well, proud) of the fact that they were the first people on their block to have a GameTruck Party. The very next weekend, we went to the exact same neighborhood and the exact same street, only we were across the street from the other family. This family also bragged that they were the first to have a GameTruck Party in their neighborhood. I thought they were joking, but they were serious. A week later, we showed up five houses down near the end of the block, and that family gleefully claimed that they were the first. That was when I realized that none of them knew each other.

We live next to each other, but rarely, if ever, interact anymore. Each of these families believed that they were part of their community, but the reality is that today’s professional work environment, school choice, and keeping kids indoors all the time has radically changed and limited how boys experience agency.

I remember about ten years ago, Nintendo hired us to do a birthday party event for one of its executives. What made the party special was that leaders from Nintendo Japan were coming specifically to check out GameTruck and our mobile video game theater experience. I made sure to show up to answer any questions they might have about the business.

They were very impressed with the concept, and as I stood there on a beautiful sunny Saturday in Northern California, I pointed out the neighborhood to the group and their translators. “All these families are home. See the cars?” they all nodded. “But what is missing?” I asked.

They shook their heads. It is hard to see what is not present. Or, to be more accurate, it is hard to notice what you can’t see.

“There are no kids. This neighborhood should be buzzing with children, like packs of busy bees floating from one house to the next. But you don’t see any of that. The kids are either at sporting events, or they are cooped up safe inside.”

Safetyism is the overreach of trying to keep kids safe by basically locking them up all the time. Now, this is another one of those gender differences that hides in plain sight. Safetyism is also the outcrop of rising divorce and single-parent rates, coupled with the fact that most of the time it is the mother who ends up with the majority of the custody (if not all) time.

Alison Armstrong, who leads a series of couples retreats in Northern California and has an excellent series of recordings available on Audible under titles like, Making Sense of Men, and The Queen’s Code, asks a room full of men and women, “Men, when was the last time you were concerned for your physical safety?” Most of the men turned and looked at each other. They had to try and remember. When I heard that, I recalled the time I felt 30 feet down a cliff while mountain biking. I remember thinking, “this is going to hurt.” It did, but fortunately I got no serious injuries from the tumble, just a lot of scrapes and bruises, and I lost a really nice bench-made pocket knife. That incident was months (now years ago, as I write this).

However, when she asked the women that question. All of the women in the room raised their hands when Alison asked, “Has it been within the last 24 hours?” To women it was patently obvious the world is a dangerous and hazardous place. The men were taken completely by surprise. You can run this test yourself. When I asked my sons the question, they really had to think about a time and they struggled. When I asked my wife and daughter, they both said it happens every day and they each could describe situations which to me sounded innocuous but to them represented risk, such as walking the dog in the neighborhood, or riding a bike to the grocery store.

Men and women perceive the world of risk very differently. Or at least, we used to.

With more single women raising young boys, more boys are being indoctrinated into the world of Safetyism. With the collapse of male teachers (according to Haidt, the percentage of male teachers is down from over 30% to just above 15% as of the time of this writing), boys are getting exposed to fewer, and fewer men.

In fact, in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover points out that for most of human history, women did not raise boys. When the global economies were mostly agrarian, boys were kicked out of the house and spent the days with their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, great uncles, and cousins. Men raised boys. If you read the autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (benefactor of Carnegie-Mellon University), he did not start school until he was 10 years old! Benjamin Franklin also did not start education until a similar age. Today that would be like waiting until the fourth or fifth grade to start formal education!

But the Industrial Revolution removed men from the household, calling them away to the factory. As a double whammy, the only careers available to women were largely childcare jobs, including teaching.

So Glover points out that I am now part of the third or fourth generation of men to be raised by women. I will leave it to you to do your own research about what this means, but I can tell you as a man who grew up in a loving home that was nevertheless split up by divorce, I never really had a great idea about what a mature masculine man looked like. I am not trying to bag on my father, but it was not until I was an adult that I realized I would have to take charge of “the rest of my upbringing.”

And that was before safetyism. I am sharing these things with you because it was part of my own journey in understanding what it would look like to become a “good man,” a mature and capable masculine man. It was largely assumed I would just “get it” but from where? From TV? Dear Lord no. And I grew up before social media, before the frenzy of elevating the fringe, novel, and extreme behaviors that dominate the algorithm.

What I’m saying is that, like the observation about morality, finding out what is “good” is actually nontrivial and not obvious. At least, it wasn’t for me. I had to go looking for it.

Now imagine the life of a young boy lost in video games and more or less locked up at home, or in the classroom so they can be “safe.” What are they learning?

Opportunities for physical risk taking, like climbing trees, or crossing creeks, or riding your bike “a little too far"from home have become non-existent. It is no wonder for the first time since we started tracking the data we are seeing boy behavior switch from externally focused to match that of young girls, internally focused.

Traditionally, boys acted out. They were aggressive, or they expressed themselves physically to process their emotions. When I wanted to talk to my boys I would grab a basketball, football, or baseball and we would get moving first. We talked later.

According to Haidt, however, more and more boys are starting to experience their stress and emotion in a manner more traditionally experienced by women. They are turning inward, staying at home, inside, safe, but stressed.

This change appears to be correlated with the rise of Defend Mode in boys.

But what about the girls?

I will have to approach that… in my next post.

Discover and Defend

8:36AM

Sunday. This should be a relatively laid-back day. Yesterday was crazy. I woke up early, wrote my blog post, then got my gear ready for a Harley ride to Yarnell. The weather was perfect for it, and the Foothills HOG group turned out 10 bikes for the ride. Not big by some group standards; however, for an impromptu Saturday ride, it was very cool. Then I had to race back, take a shower, and get dressed for my EO Board Appreciation dinner at Puttshack. I am all about games and play. We had fun, then I had to race back to Tempe and join my wife and neighbors for game night. I felt like I was home for an hour, but it was all social, all fun, and all some of my favorite things to do with some of my favorite people. How can I complain? (Because I’m talented at complaining, that’s how! You will never hear me say, “I can’t complain”, because that would be a lie. I do not have things worth complaining about. This is true. However, my capacity to complain is excellent. I have a lot of skill there.)

So… Kids. Video games. Smartphones. As I recall yesterday, I left off with the hint that I was going to cover Discover and Defend mode. Well, that sounds like a good topic to bite into. As per usual, I will add my own thoughts and research I have done about kids and mindset to Dr. Haidt’s terms (I first heard these labels in his book The Anxious Generation). So… let’s get after it.

Slight distraction

As I have said before, my day job is CEO of GameTruck, the franchisee of the GameTruck Party concept. People often assume the job is fun, and mostly it is. Occasionally things go wrong and we mess up some kids' party. That is the worst, but then there are days like today when I wake up to a review like this:

New review for PDX on Google: “What an amazing time was had by ALL! This was a birthday part for my now 9 year old autistic son who was over the moon about the Game Truck! The employee was kind, professional and efficient, providing the kids with all the minutes we paid for by arriving early for set up and guiding kids into the experience into a unique experience they enjoyed thoroughly! One unexpected blessing I had not anticipated was a QUIET house during the party so I could continue to prepare for the food and cake portion of the birthday party! It was worth the cost, I would totally do this again and have already recommended to others!”

One of the things I tell our staff - we call them game coaches - is that they are very important in the lives of the kids. Why? Because they are an adult who is not a parent, teacher, or coach, and they play video games! This makes them someone the kids naturally look up to. They have an opportunity to have an enormous impact on these kids by role modeling what it looks like to be a good gamer, not just good at games, but good at being a human being. They are there, helping the kids play together, and the actions they take to make sure everyone is included give the kids a chance to see what that looks like, in person, up close and personal. For me, that is the best part of this job, inspiring kids even in the smallest ways to think that a good gamer is also someone who takes responsibility and looks out for others. You can be skilled and considerate. You can be capable and compassionate. Video games are not always about competition; they can also be all about connection.

Discover and Defend

Or… what are we doing to our kids?

On Raising “Good” Kids… What does that mean?

Well, hopefully what we are doing to our kids is raising them to be good people. There’s a lot of debate on what that means. One of my favorite authors is the neuroscientist Sam Harris (who also happens to be famous for being an atheist). I read Dr. Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, and I found many of his arguments compelling. However, as much as Dr. Harris would like science to lead the charge into better living, he sees two deeply entrenched obstacles which he identifies in his book. According to Harris, the scientific and academic communities have by and large dropped the ball on establishing anything remotely like a moral framework (much to his chagrin), because of two entrenched beliefs:

1. Science is restricted to pointing out what is, not what ought.¹
2. Moral relativism disempowers academia from making any attempt at defining how people “should live."²

Facts and Values

The first limitation was created when the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued:

that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality).

Hume was quickly followed by more philosophers building upon his conclusions; the likes of G.E. Moore and Karl Popper supported the idea, basically cutting off morality from all our forms of knowledge outside religion.

Consequently, science, the domain of “facts,” does not have to try to answer the question of how we should best live or even coming up with a working definition of good for that matter.

Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition.

Anthropological Relativism

So if science can help us, what about academia? Again, Harris is frustrated in his attempt to create a non-religious moral framework because of the concept of moral relativism.

Harris believes that moral relativism is a reaction against colonialism and ethnocentrism. The philosophy gained traction as it led to the belief that all cultural practices and moral systems are equally valid. He suggests that this perspective has been perpetuated by certain academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, which often emphasize the importance of understanding cultural differences without making moral judgments.

Harris points to influential thinkers such as anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Harris’s frustration is that instead of using the best intellectual toolkit ever created for problem-solving; namely, the scientific method, we have declared analysis off-limits. Harris believes we have been cut off from determining if one mode of living is in fact better than another and left to our own devices. Therefore, instead of investigating and optimizing how we can improve human well-being, we must turn to matters of faith.

From my perspective, if science can’t (or won’t) tell us anything, and all moral systems are relative, then defining “good” becomes highly subjective. Conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson raise the concern that this kind of thinking quickly leads to nihilism; the belief that nothing matters. Personally, I see nihilism as another form of learned helplessness.

I, for one, am not ready to make that leap, and I do believe there are better ways of behaving. Not all systems are equally effective, and while I agree we should not judge, I do believe we absolutely have an obligation to discern.

Human suffering is not an abstraction. Just ask any parent how abstract it all feels when they see their kids suffer.

I think about these things a lot. It started because as a Caucasian, conservative, Christian, heterosexual male business owner, I am the man. I don’t want to be part of the problem. I want to be part of the solution. And so far as I can tell, the advice given to “people like me” is, “don’t be a Nazi.” Well, lots of people are not Nazi’s. That’s a very broad and not terribly useful orientation. I wanted to seek something that oriented me toward maximizing the well-being of the people I care about and the people around me. As Simon Sinek wrote in his book The Infinite Game, you want to be for something. The old saying says, “what you resist persists.” So, I started my own research project to help raise my sons and challenge myself to be a good role model for them.

So, I’m going to go with the definition I have used in my own life. My goal as a parent was to raise decent, competent, capable, compassionate adults.

Aside: A Note about Decency. A behavior is decent when you can pretty much do it forever. Kindness, contribution. These behaviors are sustainable. Indecent behavior, on the other hand, tends to have a short life span. Drinking and partying will destroy your health if not your relationships. So, at a minimum, behaviors which lead to greater well-being tend to be decent. Those that lead to suffering tend toward indecent.

I say this because, in the short term, what kids are experiencing from the phone-based childhood does not look all that harmful, but over the course of their young lives, the distortions to their mental and emotional development can lead to long-term suffering.

A Model for Human Behavior

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Professor Jonathan Haidt talks about discovery mode and defend mode. He points out that animals have two default modes that a person can develop. They are like filters, or belief systems that regulate how we process the world.

We can use animals as images or metaphors for these two psychological states. Discovery mode is like a Labrador puppy, full of joy, energy, and a desire to explore the world. They believe they are fundamentally safe and they engage with the world through a lens of curiosity and wonder.

Defend mode, on the other hand, is characterized by a state of worry and fear. You can think of defend mode by imaging mice. Timid, shy, and overly cautious. They interpret everything as a threat.

This view of the unknown, however, extends beyond physical safety; it also affects how we process new information and new ideas. And this perhaps is the most concerning.

Discovery mode

When it comes to new information and new ideas, discovery mode is a state of openness and curiosity. When in discovery mode, individuals are more receptive to new ideas and willing to explore different perspectives. They are motivated by a desire to learn and understand, which allows them to engage in constructive dialogue and consider evidence objectively.

Defend Mode

In contrast, when a person is entrenched in defend mode, their approach to new information and uncertainty is characterized by a defensive and protective mindset. When in this mode, individuals are more focused on defending their existing beliefs and viewpoints. They are less open to new information and more likely to interpret evidence in a way that supports their pre-existing opinions. This mode is often triggered by perceived threats to one’s identity or beliefs.

It should be relatively simple to see that people who are more open, curious, and seeking to understand are more likely to engage positively with new viewpoints and new people. People primed in defend mode, on the other hand, are going to resist change and are likely to see new ideas (and people) as threats.

I also find it interesting that the book which kicked off this entire blog post series, Tiny Experiments, advocates for curiosity. From my perspective, Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s entire effort is to get us to treat our own personal experiences as one giant discovery mode. Be curious, be flexible, be open, explore, and learn. If we are priming kids to be defensive, closed-minded, and rigid out of fear, that runs counter to what we are learning about human flourishing.

Experiences Shape Kids' Default Mode

What does all of this have to do with kids? When children are encouraged to play freely and explore their world, when they have those:

• Face-to-face
• Synchronous
• High-commitment relationships

They are more likely to be primed to approach the world in discover mode. However, when they “come of age” in an environment defined by:

• Anonymity
• Asynchrony
• Abandonment from low-commitment communities

They are much more likely to be primed to act in defend mode. The technology-mediated experiences which are dominating their waking lives are cultivating them to act in defend mode.

In short, 24/7 access to the internet, whether it is games, online porn, or social media, is having a serious negative impact on kids. And with half of all kids having a phone or a tablet, they are growing up in a way that is making them more defensive, more rigid, more closed-minded, and more likely to view new information and new people as a threat.

Put another way, the phone-based childhood is training our children to fail the public goods game.

Healthy and Happy

One area of research that is skirting the line when it comes to understanding, if not morality, at least, how to improve human well-being is the area of Positive Psychology. Pioneer Martin Seligman about twenty years ago made an observation, followed by a question. His observation: “All we seem to do is study mental illness in psychology.” His question: “Why don’t we study human flourishing?” As president of the American Psychiatric Association, he was in a particularly influential position to both make the observation and ask the question. His inquiry sparked a decades-long foray into what is now known as “Positive Psychology.” It goes along the lines that the absence of illness is not the same as robustness of health. Dr. Seligman was a particularly well-qualified psychologist to ask this question, since his own research in the 1960s and 1970s established the concept of learned helplessness, which shows how exposure to uncontrollable stress can lead to depression-like behavior.

He might not be establishing a moral framework, but he is a huge proponent of using evidence-based approaches and practical tools for improving mental health. His methods are valued by both practitioners and researchers. I have often joked that I like being an engineer because I do not have to prove something is true, only that it works. That is my snarky way of admitting I am a practitioner, not a researcher. If a model works, I will apply it. However, Seligman is a bit of both. A researcher who cares about the applicability and utility of his findings.

And his model for humans is The PERMA Model. The five letters stand for:

• Positive Emotion
• Engagement
• Relationships
• Meaning
• Achievement

I want to point out two interesting but similar points in this model. First, positive emotion, what we call happiness or feeling good, only accounts for 1/5th of what we need to flourish. As Seligman himself said on Dr. Laurie Santo’s Happiness Lab Podcast, (I paraphrase)

Pursuing happiness alone is stupid because you are missing 80% of what you need to flourish.

I believe he meant that pursuing happiness, and only happiness, is a failing strategy. You need more to truly flourish. In a similar vein, Achievement also fails to produce flourishing for the same reason. As a member of the entrepreneurs organization, I have met many high-achieving financially successful founders and business owners who are miserable. When you pursue achievement at all costs, the costs are very high.

This leaves the three in the middle. What is Engagement? Seligman defines it as “Flow”, that state of timeless wonder when we are working at the edge of our ability. First described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say his name five times fast, I dare you) - the famous Check psychologist who studied and then described the phenomenon in his book Flow. Flow is a state of optimal engagement. Yes, I realize that is a circular reference, but Flow is highly related to Self-Determination Theory, which is why so many video games focus on creating it. When you have established a baseline of competency, and you are working on a challenge you find interesting, you can drop into a flow state. Add in a dollop of relatedness, like this challenge will help or benefit people you care about (such as your teammates, or clan members) and you have the key ingredients for a flow state.

That leaves the other two. Relationships. Seems pretty self-evident, but the final word, meaning is an interesting one. Viktor E. Frankl is the famous Austrian psychoanalyst who was imprisoned during World War II in the Nazi concentration camps. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning is often quoted for Frankl’s proposition that humans can determine the meaning of their lives. It is a choice.

But last year, I heard in a podcast that Seligman was updating his PERMA model to switch from Meaning to Mattering. It is not abstract meaning that helps us flourish, but the kind of meaning that is both personal and relational. We want to know that our efforts (the achievements that came as a result of our engagement), were noticed and appreciated - they mattered to people we related to.

If we want to raise healthy, happy children, then we also want to help them experience the PERMA model, which means yes, they should have positive emotions, but they also need to:

1. Learn challenging skills that align with their interests.
2. Learn how to relate to other people.
3. Focus on achieving work that
4. Matters to the people they care about.

This chain of challenging work which produces positive outcomes for people we care about is about the most concise way I can state the ideal.

Seligman’s implication, although not clearly stated, is that a person in a PERMA mindset is also a person in a Discovery Mode. They are curious, exploring, and fully engaged. This also happens to be highly correlated with Carol S. Dweck’s “Growth Mindset.” Children (and adults) with a “Fixed” Mindset more closely resemble Haidt’s defend mode mentality. You cannot work at the edge of your ability without embracing a certain degree of uncertainty. Fixed Mindset and Defend Mode are all about staying away from risks.

In other words, raising kids with smartphones primes them to do nearly the exact opposite of flourishing.

But What Can We Do About It?

This is the next part of the challenge. Removing smartphones from a kid’s life, or telling them to go outside and play with their friends, are not very effective strategies if everyone else they know has a smartphone and no one else is outside to play with.

And this is where I can come into the heart of my research. What can we do about it? I think I understand what is happening and why, but really digging into what we can do, especially as individuals, parents, and educators. This is going to be tricky and challenging.

So, I think the paths seem to fall along three lines. I see these as, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our country.

1. Making informed decisions.
2. Working for change in our schools.
3. Advocating for change nationally.

Armed with better information, we can start to make the kinds of choices that give our kids a better chance for living a rewarding, fulfilling, flourishing life. When we know what is going on, we can try to support others in our community who are asking for change, like phone-free schools, and more intentional social interaction with other like-minded parents. Finally, together, we need to start advocating for the kinds of protections online that we get in the physical world.

Notes

6:10AM

Posting is going to be a bit of a challenge today. I don’t expect I will have much content, but I always think that at the start of the day. Today is Saturday, and I have a Harley ride, my Board Appreciate Dinner, and everything is pretty much back-to-back, back-to-back. My only time to write will be this morning. I did spend some time publishing today’s post. It takes a while to proofread, load up the images, and then re-paste them into the article. However, I’ve noticed that if I keep up this sort of pace, I might end up with a close-to-a-book-length manuscript. Then I need to edit it into something reasonable.

Human’s are Unique

I have no idea why I have put this part off for so long, but the most interesting thing I usually share with people is why protecting kids from the hook loop is so important. And it’s not just the hook loop. Human children need specific kinds of experiences to develop what we used to consider normal, healthy social interactions. To become well socialized, they need experiences of agency and community. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is two of the three parts of Self-Determination Theory. And of course, they want to improve their skills in a wide variety of areas, so mastery will come along.

However, there is something special about human children compared to the youth of all other mammals. Several things actually, and they directly affect how our brains and therefore ourselves develop.

Number 1: Human Brain Growth.

According to Gabor Maté, the author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté is a renowned physician and author known for his expertise in a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. He is particularly well known for his work in the area of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. According to Dr. Maté, humans are the only mammal whose brain quadruples in size after birth. An elephant or a whale may be born with a brain that is larger at birth than a human; however, they never get much bigger. A human brain will increase in size fourfold. And this is important because so many neural connections will be formed after birth. The next closest animal is the chimpanzee with a doubling.

Now, the typical human child will see their brain reach 90% of its final size by age five, but according to Haidt, they will have more neuronal connections than an adult. That means, their neurons could be said to be “over-wired” with an abundance of connections. Why? Because little kids are nothing if not bundles of potential. They are primed and ready to go.

Number 2: The Long Pause

The second reason that humans are unique is that we do something no other mammal does (that I know of). Every other mammal races from birth to reproductive age as fast as possible. Our neighbor’s dog Roxxy had our Lab puppy when she was three years old. Think about that for a second. How old was the mother of your cat when she was a kitten? Probably only a few years old. I suspect that even accounting for lifespan differences, the difference with humans is unique. Humans, you see, do not race to reproductive maturity as fast as possible; we pause for seven years. Yeah, for most human children, they do not enter puberty until 12 or 13.

Why the pause?

What is happening for us in that window? You have a lot of new, unimproved, or unstrengthened neural connections, the most we are likely to have in our lifetime, and seven years to do what? The answer appears to be absorb our culture. Yesterday, I wrote about how humans won the public good’s game, or the prisoner’s dilemma. We learned how to work together, and work together in ways that benefitted the whole tribe. So learning how to be a part of, and contribute to our social group is essential.

A Japanese professor of psychology, Yasuko Minoura, who taught at Okayama University in Japan, studied the children of Japanese businessmen. Specifically, she studied children who moved to California when their fathers had been transferred there in the 1970s. She wanted to know at what these children developed their sense of self and how living in America influenced their ways of interacting with friends. In particular, she was interested in the kids who retained the influence even after returning to Japan. She found the critical window appeared to exist between 9 and 14.

If you moved a child to America during that window, they would come home feeling American. However, if they came home before 9, they would often forget and revert to Japanese culture. And if they moved to Japan after 13 or so, they would always feel like a foreigner. But during that critical window, if the child lived in the United States, they saw themselves as American. They more than spoke English like a California native; they got the jokes, the facial expressions, the music, the food. In summary, they absorbed the culture.

In principle, the same thing would happen in reverse. If we took kids before nine and dropped them in China, if they stayed until they were fourteen or fifteen, they would come home “feeling” Chinese. It would be a part of their identity.

Therefore, Professor Haidt and others conclude that our long pause is really about becoming integrated into our clan, our community, our culture. This is an important developmental window for children where they are seeking experiences that will help them develop into competent adults. At five, a child is entering kindergarten. Think about their handwriting. Now what does it look like a few short years later? You can see how their brains have become wired to go from a crayon to a pencil to a pen. Their brains are wiring up incredibly fast to master the tasks of life, one of the most important of which is to fit into their local community.

There is one other very important thing about this 9-14 window. Around 12 years old is when the human brain seems to complete laying the emotional foundation of someone’s life. When psychologists talk about the “inner child”, very often, that child is the one whose memories cover this window. Also, the part of the brain that holds the executive function, the prefrontal cortex, does not begin to develop in earnest until high school, right around 14-15. When you layer in the insight that human brains grow from the inside out. I call the three “stages” the lizard brain, the dog brain, and the primate brain; a brain develops from the brainstem out toward the outer layers that look all foldy and squiggly. It is these last layers that develop. In practice, what this means is that children do not have the same distraction protections as adults. On top of that, their emotional systems have not fully developed. This is important because of what we have been doing for the last ten years.

Now imagine you interrupt this development by sticking a device in a kid’s face to keep them entertained (likely so you can be on your device). Here’s the trouble. That kid is likely, if current trends continue to have that screen or some variation of it, for the rest of their life. What’s more, that device now has unfettered access to your child’s mind and behavior loops without having to battle through the prefrontal cortex.

What could possibly go wrong?

DDevelopmental psychologists agree that children need to seek experiences that have these key elements:

1. They are in person, face to face.
2. They are synchronous (we are doing the same thing at the same time).
3. They are high commitment (hard to join, hard to leave).

The face-to-face part, I think most of us understand; however, this brings in a third major way that humans are unique.

Number 3: The Sclera

Humans are the only animal who has readily apparent sclera, or “whites of the eyes.” This is another oddity of being human. It is supremely important that we know what other people are looking at. Cognitive Neuroscientist and author of the book Journey of the Mind, Ogi Olgas pointed out that humans are only one of five animals who can sing duets. Singing a duet requires a crazy amount of mental and neural synchronization.

And Homo sapiens have another superpower, which may explain why being able to see what another human is looking at is so important. We have shared attention. While chimpanzees and other primates can look together at an object one primate is holding, they (so far as we can tell) are unable to direct the attention of others by pointing. It seems so simple, yet it is astoundingly powerful. Shared human attention may be the foundation of our storytelling capability and perhaps one of our greatest superpowers. We can work together in groups. But more than that, we can become extremely synchronized.

Note: okay, there are technically six, I suppose… two kinds of monkeys, two kinds of birds, frogs, and us…

In the book Super Communicators, journalist Charles Duhigg shared the result of research done at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany in 2012. Scholars studied the brains of guitarists playing Scheidler’s Sonata in D Major. When guitarists played by themselves, separately, their neural activity looked dissimilar. However, when the musicians played guitars in a duet. The electrical pulses within their craniums began to synchronize. To the researchers, it appeared as if the guitarists' minds had merged. What’s more, the linkage showed up throughout their bodies as their breathing began to fall into similar rates, and their eyes dilated in tandem while their hearts beat in similar patterns.

Breaking the Connection

When kids spend too much time staring at a piece of glass, it breaks, or blocks the development of the skill of seeing how our behavior affects other people by the look in their eyes. Since founding GameTruck, and working with kids and video games in a number of areas, I have been shocked by the number of times a parent has come up to me and introduced their child and said, “They are not autistic, I had them tested.” What a completely weird way to introduce your child.

My cousin who is a school teacher described to me a phenomenon she has been seeing that she called, “Synthetic autism.”. Amy Adams, who is one of the founders of the Healthy Screen Habits podcast, called it “Virtual autism.” The effect is the same. The kids treat people like things. In his book “Blink”, journalist Malcolm Gladwell writes about an experiment held by Professor Ami Klin. Klin teaches at Yale University’s Child Study Center in New Haven and is a leading expert on autism. They ran an experiment where they asked participants to wear a special hat that contained powerful eye-trackers. They then had them watch the play Who is afraid of Virginia Wolf? You average person would focus on the characters and their faces, looking for meaning in the emotional expressions of the actors. The autistic participants in contrast, tracked objects, a light switch, a button, a lapel, the fake gun that plays a key role in the scene. The link between facial expression, emotion, and meaning did not seem to exist for the autistic participants. They looked for meaning in the things they saw. The subconscious tendency to focus on faces appeared to be absent, and as a result, they frequently missed the emotional charge of the play.

I share this story because this is what we are seeing happen with kids. They are becoming “face blind,” and Sherri Turkle, the Harvard Professor who has written about the deteriorating state of conversation in our country, has also pointed out in her book, Reclaiming Conversation, that the emotional age of most children is slowing dramatically. I think you can ask any teacher this who has been in the classroom for 15 years or more, and they will agree. Twelve-year-olds now have the maturity of eight-year-olds, and the slip goes right on up the chain.

Instead of learning how to read each other, our kids are learning how to read screens, that instead of giving them what they need:

• Face to Face
• Synchronous interactions in
• High Commitment Communities

The tech is giving them anonymous, asynchronous interactions which happen in high fluid communities (anyone can join or leave at any time). This is quite literally the opposite of what they need. And this is even before the kids get hooked into staying on those platforms virtually every waking moment.

In this section, I wanted to share the reasons why our children’s experience with technology is very different from an adult’s, and to help you understand the impact we are seeing from children losing access to the kinds of experiences they need to develop.

Humans learn by watching each other. I never taught my children to walk. The mirror neurons on their heads and their natural inquisitiveness drove them to copy me. In fact, that is how we all learn physical movements, by copying another and trying it ourselves. But to learn social and emotional skills, we have to talk and interact with each other. We need to play and discover, because the one thing none of us can do is see into the other person’s mind. Olga posited that humans are special not only because we can sign duets and share attention, but we do something more. When we learn our language and our culture, we become part of a supermind. Minds in sync, thinking, and working together. To be able to do that, we have to train young humans how to integrate into our community. This is a totally natural and wonderful, and necessary process.

Except, we seem to be disrupting this process with technology. Sadly, the two core needs of kids, agency and relatedness, are both being subverted by applications which promise fake agency and fake communion. It’s like junk food for the developing mind, and we’re seeing the effect of it play out in the anxious generation.

07:25 AM

Okay, wow, I need to get ready for this crazy day. And I am again surprised at home how much content there is to share on this topic, and the support I find for this across a wide range of other books, research papers, and experts.

You know, when I started looking into the downsides of “screen time”, it was before the smartphone. It was before kids had the internet in their pocket 24/7. We used to worry about kids sitting around and getting fat. It was their physical condition which garnered all the concern. Today, however, screens are not simply emptying kids' heads, they are rewiring them in ways we do not fully understand. You can exercise and diet to reverse the physical effects of inactivity, but how do you restore to full health a mind that has been wired toward fear, uncertainty, and caution?

Tomorrow, I’ll have to dig more into discover, vs defend mode.

6:44AM

Okay, publishing blog posts is kind of messing with my morning routine a little. I slept in until 6:01 a.m. My wife is a very snuggly person, and there are some mornings where I think, you know what? I really don’t have anything better to do than lie in bed and hold her. It’s quiet, cool, and the birds are singing outside. This really is heaven. Few things are more deeply satisfying and rewarding than holding someone you love and knowing they love you back.

The day can definitely wait… until it can’t.

Posting a long article like yesterday takes some time. These are rather raw and somewhat full of mistakes (I’m not proofreading them, and I don’t trust AI not to change my peculiar wording when it proofreads). But it’s the pictures that take the longest. I write in Obsidian - my digital second brain. I have set up Templater macros to help handle the complexity of creating Zettelkasten-style linked notes. Templater is a community plugin that is extremely powerful. This, for me, is what makes Obsidian insanely powerful: the community plugins. I write the name of the next note in my thought chain on the line that says Next Card, then I select that text and the Ctrl+T.

A menu pops up listing all my templates, and I select Next Note in Chain - TMPLTR. And bang, it creates a new note, generates the ZID (Zettelkasten identifier, which is unique), then populates the new notes with a structure and fills in some useful data like the Created date, and backlinks in the Prev Card field, as well as the heading and aliases (which make the note easier to link to).

My Most Used Obsidian Plugins

• Obsidian Sync - keeps my vaults synced across all my devices.
• Daily Note - essential for creating daily notes. Works with Templater.
• Templater - Template engine with javascript support for super smart macros.
• Calendar - Useful for creating weekly notes, and Daily Notes on future dates.
• Tasks - for task management.
• Dataview - awesome for treating my vault (or notebase as I like to think of it) like a database.
• QuickAdd - Automates capturing certain kinds of information.
• Copilot - awesome ChatGPT / AI Integration
• Share Note - for publishing notes to the web and sharing directly. (I also have Obsidian Publish - which is okay, but Share Note is just easier and faster)
• Excalidraw - best vector drawing package ever, and it’s a plugin!

Those are the big dogs. There are a few others, like Emoji Short Codes, and LangTool and Meta Edit, but if you just had to pick like four it would be Templater, Dataview, Calendar and Excalidraw. I use Excalidraw to create most of the diagrams you see in the book. I think I could even create most of my cartoons using Excalidraw if I wanted to - but I enjoy playing with markers and paper way too much.

The Hook Loop

Yesterday I talked a little about the Hook Loop. I first learned about this from the book The Anxious Generation. According to Professor Jonathan Haidt, he first called it The Hooked Model and it appeared in Nir Eyal’s 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, educator, and entrepreneur renowned for his expertise in behavioral design and habit formation. It was Nir Eyal who said:

“If you want to change someone’s behavior, give them a better tool.”

But Eyal was not the only one teaching the idea that computers and software could change behaviors. In 2002, Professor B.J. Fogg at Stanford wrote a book titled, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Fogg taught students how behaviorist techniques used for training animals could be applied to humans. Awesome. What could go wrong? Many of his former students went on to found or work at social media companies. In that group was Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram.

Yeah. You read that correctly. A cofounder of Instagram was educated in using software to change people’s behavior. Remember when I said I was not sure about the ethics of a major public university teaching engineers and entrepreneurs how to create addiction?

So back to the Hooked Model, or what I have called the Hooked Loop. A dozen years after Fogg was teaching his class, Eyal created this nifty design principle:

The Hooked Loop

(or Aka the Hooked Model)

The key to the Hooked Loop is that there is some kind of external trigger, which leads to an action (a behavior), and this action generates a Variable Reward. As I can tell, Eyal’s brilliant but devastating addition to this model was the fourth step, the Investment. Only humans can do this last part.

So let’s break it down.

The Trigger

The trigger is a kind of cue, a prompt, or a notification. Have you ever noticed that every single app you install on your phone asks you to turn on notifications? Of course, they do. It is the beginning of the loop! If they can’t cue you, it’s harder to hook you. This is why I only allow about 4-5 apps on my phone to generate any kind of notification. I want to be in control of when I check, not the app, but also, notifications are the gateway to addictive behavior. They might sound innocent, but they are not.

The Action

This can be virtually anything, but it involves the user taking an action. It can be as trivial as a swipe, or pressing a button, or feeding a Tamagotchi, or scrolling through a list of updates. But the cue must lead to the user interacting with the application - not simply reading. Get the fingers moving, and you’ve got step two of the model in motion.

The Variable Reward

This is the element that hacks our unconscious mind. The reward can be social, such as likes or views. But the key point is that you will never know for sure what will happen. Other humans provide absolutely the most effective kinds of variable rewards because we are, well, fickle. So this connects to our ancient social emotional intelligence and desires to be liked. Despite a lot of the culture war focusing on “dominance” and “power struggles”, humans do not naturally or innately value the most powerful (and neither do chimpanzees). We value prestige. And Prestige is a form of social currency derived from providing the most good. As a species, humans won the Social Goods Game, often called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Therefore, we are disproportionately sensitive to the approval of others, because we are primed to believe this approval bestows the much coveted prestige. There could hardly be a more effective variable reward than public approval.

Note: The Prisoner’s Dilemma Explained If you recall, that is the game where if every prisoner looks out for each other, they all only suffer a little. But if one prisoner rats out the others, he goes free but the others go to jail for a long time. It is easy to “win” the prisoners' game if you are self-centered, selfish, and can cast yourself as a victim. You just throw everyone else under the bus. However, you will need to find another tribe or community to abuse because the people you just screwed over will never forget what you did and you just burned trust. The real way to the group to win is for everyone to look out for each other. And in highly interdependent groups, that is just what they do.

According to Wharton Negotiation Professor Stuart Diamond in his book Getting More, Trust is the degree to which you will look out for someone else’s interests. Let me make it more personal and clear. You will trust me to the degree that I look out for your interest, even if I suffer harm as a result. The more harm I am willing to take on your behalf, the higher the level of trust. The highest level of trust, which is most visibly demonstrated by the US Secret Service, is the willingness to suffer grave bodily harm, up to and including death. In short, if I would “take a bullet for you”, that is the highest level of trust a person can demonstrate. So the prisoner’s dilemma is really about social trust. Individuals who win their freedom by ratting out their compatriots are by definition untrustworthy. In a high-trust community, however, everyone looks out for everyone else.

As a species, we bestow the attribute of prestige on the most trustworthy individuals, those who look out for and contribute the most to the social good. As far as we can tell, chimps actually share this attribute. In an updated TED Talk on Alpha Males, Frans de Waal explained that even chimps value coalition building over raw strength and ability. Frans de Waal is a renowned primatologist and ethologist. He is a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And in his updated TED talk, he said that even female chimps in a tribe also have a hierarchy. Interestingly, one of the functions of the alpha male is to protect the weaker females from the alpha female. It is all about checks and balances. Primates value group well-being over individual dominance and power.

Investment

This final part of the Hooked loop is simply genius and unique to Homo Sapiens. It is the idea of customization, of “putting our fingerprints” on something. Humans are creatures of paradox. Or to put a more positive spin on it, we are creatures that live in the balance of opposing forces. Two such forces are our desire for group acceptance (social approval or prestige), and our craving for agency, or individualism. Consequently, when you give someone the opportunity to invest some of their own uniqueness into the application, this strengthens their perceived connection to the app.

In other words, we all want to be unique, in a group we feel like we belong to. Giving the user the ability to invest in an application addresses this desire (craving) for uniqueness. We can customize our avatar with skins, or post a picture of ourselves on social media, or share our thoughts in a Tweet or an update. I saw this when I worked in a lab at the Boys and Girls Club. We helped the kids build little cardboard race cars. Everyone in a group, doing the exact same STEM lesson, however, what took it over the top was that we let each kid decorate and customize their car. Every single kid in every single lesson jumped at the chance. Over sixty thousand kids participated in that program and I don’t remember a single kid refusing to customize their weird little cardboard car. We all have a deep-rooted desire to show up. Apps that give us the opportunity to do so only increase our emotional attachment to the experience.

This is also where the companies are learning to make enormous amounts of money through what we call microtransactions. One dollar here, five dollars there. I have heard parents lament that their kid spent money on “skins.” This is why. Players are looking for chances to become unique. And if you tailor the experience to layer in some envy… watch out. People will go to insane lengths to not only generate approval, but envy in others. Feeling envy sucks. However, being envied must mean we have secured the precious prestige we are after.

The Trigger Revisited

The holy grail, as it were, of apps is when the player no longer needs an external trigger to start the action, but they self-trigger. Like a smoker who reaches for a cigarette out of habit, the player will pick up their phone or tablet to check the results. Professor Haidt pointed out that these techniques were being designed into software in the early 2000s; however, it was not until the smartphone put the internet in our pocket with 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week access that the addiction spirals really took off for both adults and, later, as parents gave their children phones, kids.

Summary

So a hook loop hacks an ancient mammalian behavior loop by triggering a consistent behavior which receives a variable reward. The player or user can never quite figure out how to get the consistent reward, so the dopamine cycle gets ramped up. Commitment to the app is enhanced by allowing the player to invest in personalizing their experience. When the player no longer needs the notification/trigger to prompt the player to action, the developer has “won” and the behavior is now well on its way to becoming what looks like addiction. No chemical dependency necessary. No social isolation and despair required. We can bypass trauma and go straight to hell.

Okay, that might be a little harsh. However, ask the parents who try to take away the devices from their obsessed kids how it feels. In the stories I hear, everyone suffers. That sounds like Hell to me.

8:03 a.m. - Bagel Time

Okay, today is another full day of meetings, some with friends. Every Friday, I meet with two fellow “dads” I met through little league baseball. When I first got into coaching, my neighbor Mark McGinnis was responsible for the coaches, and he gave me two amazing pieces of advice:

1. If you’re going to form a club team to help your son improve, form a team out of neighborhood kids. You’ll make friends for life.
2. Say something nice about every kid after a game.

I took that to heart. For my oldest son, Ryan, I was not confident enough to start a club team, so we found him a club team. We never really made friends with those parents, and he really did not keep in touch with any of the kids from that team. (I’m sure I also contributed to that because we were obsessed with getting him on “the best teams.” - sheesh, the things you do as a parent you believe are right only to look back and ask, “what was I thinking?"). However, for his younger brother, I had coached enough by the time he was old enough that I felt confident I could start a team. And Ryan’s club coach offered to help me, so we created this team made of neighborhood kids. I told the parents I did not know if we could win, but I committed to teach every kid how to pitch and to hit. I wanted to teach them the same skills I was teaching my boys. And Mark was right. The parents and kids that joined over the years became fast friends, and fifteen years later, the “Sister Wives” still get together regularly for coffee or drinks, and “The men” meet every morning Friday at Bagel Nosh to catch up. As for Matt? He and his core of friends stay in touch through Snapchat (I think), but they always get together when they are in town for the holidays. (Young adults tend to scatter after college - welcome to our mobile economy.)

As for saying something nice about every kid? That should be a blog post in itself, but I’ll say this. After every single game, I sat down and wrote a game summary email to the parents where I compiled statistics and made the effort to say something nice about every kid. One parent printed off the emails and put them in a book as a keepsake for their son. I also learned that as the coach, I benefited as much as the kids because my last memory of each game was something positive about every player, and it made me want to come back and coach them again, and again, and again through 21 games in a season.

What is the quote from the Bible? I think it’s in Ephesians… Okay, I found it. Thanks, ChatGPT!

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” - Ephesians 4:29

If you want to check out a report, you can find it here: Sample Little League Game Summary

Mr. McGinnis gave some good advice.

Plus, social connections are considered one of the three key pillars to living a long, healthy life. Exercise and nutrition are the others. However, I have heard it said that loneliness kills more people than a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. (That is attributed to Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. Surgeon General.) Sensational, but that’s the point. Get out there and spend time with your friends.

Human connection is important. (To them as well as to your own well-being.)

01:29 p.m.

I finished wrapping up filming some social media videos, which I hope will help me reach the parent audience I am trying to get to. What is interesting to me is that the two young men who helped me today were fascinated by my content. I’m a little nervous because the visual representation is way more assertive and bold than my normal voice. Still, it is me. However, it is directed to be attention-grabbing and informative. Well, you can’t try to reach people by hiding.

I had this one thing that popped into my head, that as the gamers themselves grow up, many of them are also frustrated by some game behaviors they see as shady. I also realized I need to get some more statistics and specifics on games.

1:56 a.m.

I revisited a quote that came up in my daily readwise review:

“Origen performed the castration operation on himself. Justin reports that Christian men in his time, the second century A.D., implored surgeons to remove their testicles; many monks of Mount Athos accepted castration at that time,” (Robert Bly, Iron John)

Dear Lord, why?

When I see a quote like that, I will often stop and go back into the book or ask ChatGPT to help me understand the broader context. I read Iron John because Robert Moore talked about it so much in his book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. One of my personal goals was to find a model for healthy male maturity. I do that. I will read the books authors cite.

From ChatGPT: Robert Bly, in Iron John, refers to Origen’s self-castration not just as a shocking historical fact but as a symbol of how the masculine spirit can be cut off from its full vitality–especially in religious or overly civilized contexts.

Bly’s point was that we need to learn to balance our primal nature and our spiritual nature. Or as he put it, live upstairs without being afraid to go into the basement. Suddenly this truck me in the context of Hikikomori and the lost men. Only, they have made the basement the intellectual and rational and a place where men run from their vitality, and they have made the upstairs, the outside world the place to be feared. The world for men has metaphorically turned upside down.

4:04 p.m.

Friday afternoon. I have finished running errands and assembling gifts for my fellow board members for tomorrow’s board appreciation dinner. I hope they like them. I also realize that I need to get more specific about which games are the worst or most addictive. Are there statistics? I have some more work to do, but not today. It’s the weekend.

5:50AM

Same morning routine. Bullet Proof Coffee, and my check list. I notice I have more early meetings than normal these days and I’m not getting to my fountain pen journaling (morning pages) until the evening. So be it. These journals are a new experiment and I have to make time for them. And so now I am ⅓ of the way into tiny experiment, and what I’m noticing in that putting these ideas “out there” (and I don’t just mean on the web), by telling people what I’m trying to do (the website link is like a business card), I am having many more interesting conversations with people about what I am trying to do.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time sharing / capturing what I presently know about the hikikomori (引きこもり); the young men who withdraw from social life, often to an extreme degree, and stay in their homes for extended periods, sometimes years, playing video games, watching TV, or engaging in other solitary activities. I have no statistics on how many isolates are women. It has to be more than zero. However, the current trends in our country seem to speak more to me of imbalance than balance. Currently 67% of college graduates are women. And college graduates predominantly join the Democratic Party. The majority of single young men however, tend to join the Republican party. At every level of school, boys trail girls, and according to Warren Farrel and Michael Gurian, when researchers change the names on subjectively graded homework from traditional boys names to girl names, the scores go up. The website the boys initiative (https://boysinitiative.org/tracking-boys-for-every-100-girls/) tracks the following:

Yeah, the statistics are not all that encouraging. Jonathan Haidt also observed that number of male teachers is also declining, from about 30% a few decades ago to just 15% today. Schools can’t hire them because men are not applying.

To me this says that it is not just a video game problem, but that there are larger cultural pressures for boys we don’t fully understand and know how to balance out. In 2019 Dr. Mark Goulston made a presentation about teen suicide to the members of EO Arizona. It was a powerful presentation and - oh wow, I just learned as I am writing this that Dr. Goulston passed away in late 2023. That is a bummer. He did some really great work. However, it Dr. Goulston has this slide, which I share now - admittedly without permission. (I asked for it but never got a response, I would like to believe he would not mind).

There’s a lot on this chart, but let me simplify it for you:

This simplified version of Dr. Goulston’s graph shows that we experience some eustress, which is good stress. We need some energy to tackle challenges, but it can descend into stress, the unhealthy kind. And if that persists, we fall into fear, anxiety, and here is the key despair. The word literally when you break it apart - des-pair, means to unpair or uncouple. When humans feel alone, isolated, uncoupled with people around them, it hurts. We suffer.

This is where my graph varies from Dr. Goulstons. In all the research I have done, and drawing upon a book called The New Personality Self-Portrait, human personality traits fall on a spectrum from “normal” to “extreme.”. Extreme personality traits show up in a very special book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short. (They are up to version 4). The DSM is a very important book, because it codified, or clarified the language and terminology used by clinicians when diagnosing mental illness. For years (decades more likely) psychology got a bad wrap because practitioners, clinicians, and educators often used the same words to talk about different things.

Aside: One of my favorite stories about this phenomena comes from Chrysler Corp. When doing market research with SUV and Minivan buyers, the potential owners kept listing “control” as their top priority, which the researchers found confusing because these were two very different groups of people demographically. So they decided to dig deeper. What they learned was that minivan buyers wanted control of everything inside the vehicle, while SUV buyers wanted control of everything outside the vehicle. They were using the same word to talk about two completely different domains.

The DSM streamlined, simplified, and standardized meanings. The New Personality Self Portrait posited that human behavior exists on a spectrum. And that is the essence of the branching paths in my version of the mental distress chart.

The early research I did into addiction lead me to learn that there are predominantly three responses to the pain of “des-pair”, or the pain of unpairing. People withdrawal, people resist, or people numb out. These behaviors can show up in ordinary ways in a work environment. If the environment is stress enough for them, they can become disruptive, they can give in to learned helplessness and physically show up, but mentally they are gone, or they can quit and go somewhere else. In the extreme forms of these behaviors however, which we see in the boys groups from the data above, these paths lead to addiction, violence (violence against others), and suicide (violence against self).

For now let me focus on what I learned, or thought I learned about addiction. British journalist Johan Hari gave a famous TED talk entitles, “Everything you know about addiction is wrong.” and the core of that video, and his later books is that chemical addiction (especially the kind shown in rats), was the result of social isolation (des-pair). What’s more, most experts (at the time), agreed that there was a difference between chemical addiction, and behavioral addiction. Implying that behavioral addiction might be as “serious” because, well there was no external chemical acting on the body’s biology and nervous system.

The antidote, according to the experts, and one that I have advocated for myself is to repair - literally re-pair. The power of human connection in alleviating suffering cannot be undestimated in my opinion. As Dr. Goulston said it, and it stuck with me almost a decade ago, if you are going through hell, I may not be able to do anything about it, but the one thing I can do, is I won’t let you go alone.

Aside: I can pull all this up and share it because, I used my digital second brain to aggregate the sources, and I work with the information to turn it into knowledge. I know what I know and I know where I learned it from. If you feel or experience resistance to anything I am writing because it does not jive with, or align with something you already believe, that is totally natural. As human’s we crave feelings of certainty. New information and ideas therefore can threaten or unsettle us.
As Adam Grant pointed out in his book Think Again, we have a standard playbook for ideas we don’t like.

1. We attack the idea (prosecute.)
2. We promote our own beliefs (preach) and,
3. We try rally support from other people who share our beliefs (politic).

I have found utility in choosing to be curious instead of defensive.
Adam Grant proposes a rethinking cycle. When you feel defensive about a topic, engage in humility, Acknowledge you may have doubts. Then get curios. You may discover something. He draws it out this way:

I get a lot of utility out of leaning into curiosity. Now back to my thought train...

But what if the addiction models missed something…

For years, this all information about addiction made sense to me until… I saw what was happening to kids with certain kinds of video games. Young kids, kids who are well socialized, surrounded by loving parents, who are not isolated, not stressed, and not consuming any substances - in other words, normal healthy kids who are far away from despair, have been starting to exhibit addictive behaviors in increasing numbers. These behaviors are manifesting as compulsive, obsessive, fixated anxiety. They are losing control of their ability to stop playing, and then obsess over their next chance to play, and lose control emotionally - which some parents are now mislabeling as Intermittent explosive disorder, a serious illness in adults, but basically means the kids come completely unglued in one specific situation. The adults try to take away their devices.

None of this sounds like socially isolated emotional distress. What’s more, it also does not sound like chemical dependence.

What the hell is going on?

I want to point out, that for adults (both young and old), the best treatments I am aware of today, that lead out of the pain of despair involve reconnection, and establishing close personal bonds. Obviously, suicide is devastating because there is no coming back from that. And while yes, some people are rehabilitated in prison, the research there indicates that time spent in jail does more harm than good for the vast majority of inmates. I can’t imagine many parents think their child’s life path would be improved by time spent behind bars (okay, jokingly perhaps). But from addiction, to incarceration, there is a chance at recovery, but the goal would be to help before any of those paths hit their archetypal end.

But let’s get back to the young kids and the games. None of the preconditions of isolation are at play here. So what is going on?

Design Algorithms

It is well established that humans are adaptable. We have a super power (one among many). Unlike nearly all other animals, we have programmable behaviors. Our behavior is not constrained by our DNA and our instincts. We still have instincts, but we also have the capacity to overrule them. This, I believe is one reason human psychology is so complex. We are constantly striving to achieve a balance between change, and stability, between adaptability and constancy.

But what if there was a technology (that hadn’t existed before), which could disrupt our evolved patterns of behavior? What if there was someway to literally reach into our brains, alter the chemistry, and thus, control our behavior? Bosses and governments all over the world have been dreaming of such a contraption. It turns out, the video game industry and social media platforms may have created exactly this kind of behavior modification device.

When I made video games, we designed for an algorithm built upon self-determination theory. Self Determination Theory (or SDT), is a theory of human motivation. Most. people are familiar with the carrot and stick approach of motivation. Those are called extrinsic motivators because they are external to the person. However, SDT deals with intrinsic motivation. In other words, researchers wanted to know how people motivate themselves. This model (which I will go into more detail later), has three parts. People seek experiences of agency, mastery, and relatedness. You can also describe these as: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

For example, video games like Smash Bros from Nintendo do an excellent job of appealing to these principles. There are six (that’s right six) character types and you can win the game with any of them. In business, we like to talk about SOP’s - or standard operating procedures, as if there is only one valid way to do a job. In the best video games they reject this assumption and recognize that there are multiple valid ways to do a job and they support player choice. Players can choose a style that suits them, and all are supported. All are valid. The Mastery part is satisfied by the learning curve that comes with each style. So in principle, players face hard challenges (of their own choosing), then develop skills to overcome those challenges, and finally persist until they do. The reward here is a tiny hit of dopamine. Dopamine is the reward hormone. It has also been called the achievement drug. When we get something done, or solve a problem, or achieve a goal, the positive emotion we experience is dopamine.

Now here’s the problem with dopamine. It doesn’t last. And when it is gone, we want to have that experience again. This is what motivates most people to learn, or to keep working or keep going. In short: in addition to positive feelings of accomplishment, dopamine also creates feelings of craving.

The Hook Loop

Now, I am describing what I call traditional, or core video game design. But, with the rise of smart phones, and “freemium” games, developers discovered a new way to trigger dopamine in a human brain. This is called The Hook Loop. As smart as people are, our brains are built in three layers. What I call the lizard brain, the dog brain, and the primate brain. We rely heavily on our ancient systems to navigate a chaotic world in real time and maintain our sanity. One of these ancient loops has to do with how we learn. When it comes to skill learning, we have a conceit, a false belief in how we acquire skills. We often believe that we learn how to do something in a sort of linear fashion. You just start practicing and build upon your skills as you learn them.

This is a nice story, but it is not exactly true. In reality, we have a behavior we are unaware of because it happens below the level of conscious thought. What actually happens is that we enter into trial and error loop. Even after we discover how to do something! There is a (normally brief) window of time where the brain continues to engage in trial and error learning. It is as if the brain doesn’t believe what just happened and it wants to make sure what we learned is true.

Imagine if you were locked in a cage and you had to bang on the walls to figure out how to get out. Your self image tells you that the first time you hit the magic brick that unlocks the door, you would then naturally only ever touch that brick any time you were locked in the room and wanted to get out. But that is not actually what happens. For a brief, but consistent period of time, you would continue to bang about the room looking for a way out. Only after some seemingly random (but small) number of lessons would you stop the trial and error and go straight for the “escape brick” to get out.

Now, every time the person “finds” the brick, they get the hit of dopamine associated with achieving their goal, to get out. They are rewarded. And here’s the key.

All mammals exhibit this iterative trial and error learning behavior, and humans are little different. This is an ancient exploration system that has served mammalian life well for hundreds of millions of years. This is a feature, not a bug.

However, it is also the weakness that developers learned to exploit. The “Hook Algorithm” is designed to maximize and extend this learning cycle indefinately. What is worse, by hammering the dopamine reward process, the hook loop simulates craving in the user on part with any other addiction. In short, instead of feeling “successful”, users experience a loss of self control and deep cravings to continue until they figure it out. But the problem is, by design, they will never figure it out.

By using what is known as a Variable Ratio Reward Schedule (VRRS), developers are able to sustain the trial and error seeking dopamine cycle. Whereas in SDT designed games, players build skills they can relay upon to achieve (temporarily) satisfying outcomes, applications that build around VRRS have more in common with gambling than video games. Players never figure out the system, because it won’t let them.

To make matters worse, kids, are biologically more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than adults. (More on that tomorrow)

Which sucks.

When attention became the most valuable commodity on the planet, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that some people figured out how to steal it. The sad part is, our economy assigns insane values to companies for how much attention they can steal, not the value they deliver to their users. And our kids are suffering as a result.

This is not an imaginary, or made up phenomena. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to manipulate player behavior to maximize software usage statistics so CEOs can drive up their stock price. They sell the kids stolen “attention” to investors and advertisers. Note only that, they have also been figuring out ways to monetize the hook loop itself by getting the kid “addicts” to buy digital customizations which make the hook loop even more addictive. How messed up is that? Instead of paying for entertainment, we have waves of kids with gift cards from grandma and grandpa giving money to developers who are basically enslaving their attention.

I am beyond thankful my kids went through their teen years before the ubiquity of the smartphone.

Can you see why I want to share this information with parents?
But how to reach them?

11:57AM

A morning full of meetings and conversations. First meeting, finance committee. I’ve heard it said there are three core responsibilities for a CEO: Culture, Cash, Clients. So, finance meetings are also always about the cash forecast. This present economic environment makes that rather difficult to predict.

Next call, helping out a friend from Pakistan of all places. Thanks to EO, I have friends around the world. Rizwan Buttar and I have been having weekly calls about morning routines and some of my “uncommon” thoughts on leadership and productivity. He encouraged me to write more and share more about what I do. That’s interested, because yesterday my forum had an amazing session with Keith Roberts, the creator of the Oak Journal and he talked about his “pillars.” I believed thought leaders needed to have one idea, but perhaps that thinking is too narrow. I’ll have to play with that.

Most recent call was with two spectacular humans, Ab and Rishi and their new friend Michael. They are AI wizards and are firing up a new company. (may be multiples really, AI is creating an insane number of opportunities.) One of their ideas intersects with some of my experience. Always fun to talk with those guys.

However, one part was not so fun. Michael told me that major corporations are firing 40% of their GenZ employees because they can’t work with people in the office. Like they don’t know how to hold eye contact, or have a conversation. Even more disturbing he told me that they are now tracking children shooting their parents for taking their tablets and phones away. The number is not a single digit number and there it is concern it is growing (or will grow) rapidly.

Of course, when someone says something, I really need to check the source. Using ChatGPT’s new deep research I was relieved to find that the number of verified incidents of parricide (children killing parents) involving technology appears to still be insanely rare. A total of six incidents were found between 2007 and 2024. That is six incidents globally in the last 18 years. Or one every three years. Still that is six more than anyone wants. Using data collected from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program, there were approximately 306,000 murders over the last 18 years in the US. If we remove the one crime that occurred in Brazil, that is five murders out of 306,000. However, there is growing concern that pulling devices from kids is making them more violent, but I was unable to locate any verifiable data to confirm this, only the experiences of a few educators and individual psychologists.

I wonder where the story comes from? I will ask for sources next time I talk to him.

Now, back to my task list. Oh yeah, I have a day job.

1:42PM

Ugh, I ran out of cartoons. Time to draw some more. Usually I do them in batches of 5 so about a week at a time. For the last few days however, I’ve been a little “distracted” (could it be this blog?)

Pro Tip:

• Use Sharpie Creative markers for the bold black character outlines. The Sharpie is just the best marker ever for this. My backup is a Uni POSCA paint marker (but I have to let the ink dry for 15 to 20 minutes before I fill with color or the paint smears). The Sharpie creatives only take a minute or so to set.
• I use a combination of Sharpie S-Note markers and karin brushmarkers for coloring. The S-Notes have a fantastic pastel shade and they don’t smear. The Karin canary is the best yellow color for Sonny I have found yet. None of them smear or interact with the thick dark lines once they are set.
• My style is to go after something that looks like it was drawn with Crayola Washable Markers, you know the kind we all used in grade school? But I want to do it in a way that doesn’t make a mess and keeps the lines and colors “clean” but imperfect. I tried every conceivable marker I could get my hands on before I settled on these.

5:58 PM

Man, I had a filling fall out of a tooth. That was not on the agenda. Was lucky enough to talk my dentist into staying late to fix it. He put in a temporary filling and I will need a crown next Wednesday. From I can tell he only works two or three days a week. I want that schedule… wait. Maybe I have that schedule… Does this count as work?

9:08PM

Definitely the end of the day. Put a bow around this one and get some sleep. Hit it again tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy weekend.

I don’t expect to get much done today. Today is my EO Forum. If you are not in EO and you don’t know what form is, it is a little hard to describe. The Entrepreneurs Organization has a rather muddy value proposition, and yet we have almost 20,000 members in 220 odd chapters around the globe. It is easier to describe the requirements to become a member than to explain why you want to do this. You need to be the owner, founder, or have controlling interest in a business that generates at least one million dollars a year in revenue to become a member. But why do people become a member? The best answer I have heard so far is support. When you are the crazy fool who convinced everyone to join your brilliant idea for a business, it can be stressful. There are things you have to believe not because they are true yet, but because you are going to make them true. And while there are lots of schools, books, classes and coaches who will tell you what you need to do to start a business, there are very few people who will help you understand the emotional toll it takes to do those things. And here’s the problem - everyone of those previous solutions wants your money. It’s hard to have 100% confidence in someone who is paid to care about you.

But EO, for all its weirdness and cult-like reputation, is a peer to peer learning organization. We are organized into chapters which consist of forums that have 6-10 members each. No one in the chapter works for me. I don’t work for anyone in the chapter. No one is a customer (typically), nor am I their customer. In short, we are on equal footing. And because we are on equal footing the relationships have a chance to be more open, authentic, and supportive. All the usual tools I have as a business owner (pay & promotion) do not apply here. I just have to show up as me. I have described EO as a very human organization because that’s how you have to show up. It is more like high school than any other business organization I know because, you’re just part of the class. Who are you going to sit with? Who will be your friends? Who shares your interests?

There is however, one other thing. In software engineering we have this concept called “Rubber Ducking.”. It goes like this. You are working on a really hard problem and you are stuck. So you call over another software engineer, and here is the important part. The other person needs to be able to understand what the heck you are talking about without a lot of background. They need to be someone you respect, but do not fear. They need to be smart and safe, and able to follow along as you describe what you are struggling with. The magic of the “rubber duck” is that the other engineer rarely, if ever has to say anything. The simple act of describing your problem, to another person who you believe has the capacity to understand you nearly always leads to you solving your own problem. Hence, the other person just sits there and nods, like a rubber duck. You would think that talking to a rubber duck would be just as effective, but it turns out, it is not. You really do need the other person to be able to understand what you are talking about with little to no preamble.

Note: I actually have some clue as to why this is. It has to do with how Homo Sapiens evolved to argue. We are not just social, we are hyper social, and our internal powers of rationalization are actually pretty weak. Put another way, when you argue with yourself, you always win. Add to that, we are primed to want to share our thoughts and reasons. Hello self justification. This causes us to want to blurt out what we think. This is a good thing, because as humans we have exceptional reasoning ability when it comes to critiquing other people’s ideas. In fact, they have done tests where people produced reasons for behavior, then those reasons were disguised and later presented back to the study participants as if they came from someone else and nearly every shredded those reasons. Another example of this are the Cognitive Reflection tests. These are clever little problems that challenge your reasoning ability. If you take the suite of tests alone, you are most likely to miss ⅓ of the questions and more than half the people get ⅔ wrong. However, if you take the tests in groups of at least 3 people, not only will your team complete the tests faster, as a small group you will get 99% of the questions correct. Human’s reason better in small groups. We are not just social, but hyper-social.

This same effect appears to be true for Entrepreneurs, and hence the need for small groups of other business owners who can comprehend the problem you share with them. This also requires two other critical features to work. First, is 100% confidentiality. The second is vulnerability. There is a third element as well. No advice giving, only experience sharing. So what is that? Networking? Mastermind? We call it peer learning. But it feels like so much more. As I learned in Cape Town South Africa at the Global Leaders Conference a couple of years ago, one of the core ideas of Ubuntu, is that I have more access to myself because of my relationship with you. When we are connected and sharing our authentic self with others who do the same, life seems to be… better.

6:40AM

Daily habits complete. Well, mostly. I hate it when checks show up in YNAB. Hate is too strong a word. I find it annoying. I have to go look up what it was. Extra steps. I just want to check the boxes and keep going… but complaining about it doesn’t make it better. So just do it.

Note: Chapter 5 of the book tiny experiments talks about learning to make procrastination your friend, that rather than power through our resistance we should listen to it and look for clues as to why are enthusiasm has fled… I have yet to make that process a habit. Through long years of practice I find it is easier to just get mad at myself and punch through my resistance. Maybe I’ll start another “tiny experiment” to test out her Head, Heart, Hands approach.

Posting pictures in the Micro.blog app is cumbersome on mobile. I wonder how I can fix that?

Trapped Young Men

Yesterday in the conversation with Ev we discussed the VEN Diagram of those who get trapped. They seem to have an overlap of at least three, and according to one therapist I spoke with last month, four challenges that contribute to them being stuck.

1. Heavy video game play
2. Porn addiction
3. Involuntary Celibacy
4. Heavy pot smoking/vaping

Ev theorized that if you could break one of those habits, the others would crumble as well, that they are tightly coupled. That’s an interesting idea, but not one I am sure is completely true.

I don’t know how many of these factors contribute to young men becoming lost, and I do believe most men do not want to talk about how porn is effecting them and their relationships. What little information I have is that women do not like it, and get angry about it. There’s not a lot of compassion there - which while I can understand on one hand, creates a sewer cycle of shame for the men. For this whole group there is sort of a compassionless trap. You should just “man up” and stop doing these things and get to work. And how is that working?

This is where the double standard for gender comes into society. While there is a belief that medical science only studies men, that has not been true for decades. The Federal Government has more than 60 agencies which provide health care and services to women and children. There are none for men. ZERO. What’s more, when women become indigent (not gainfully employed and can’t pay their bills), governments and communities at every level step in to help support them. When men become indigent, we throw them in jail. Especially if they are “dead beat dads.”.

We have a society that is kind and compassionate toward women who struggle, and harsh and judgmental toward men who struggle. Even I feel uneasy talking about these things and I by all measures would be considered a productive member of society. I own a business, I am a father of three, I am a home owner who pays my taxes. And yet, showing compassion toward suffering young men activates a response in me that vacillates between anger and sorrow. Why anger? Because of fear. I worry how easy would it be to just drop out?

Truth be told, I had that opportunity. When I left Rainbow Studios and before I joined Disney, I had the resources to just hang around for a couple of… not just days, years. I told myself I would play Blizzards (then) uber popular game Warcraft for a few weeks (or months), then figure out what I would do next. That lasted two days. One really. By the morning of the second day, I scared myself into turning off the game and never going back. I knew if I went down that rabbit hole I might never come out. I needed to do something, not just pretend to do something, but go out and make something happen. It took me almost nine months to figure out my path which lead to me starting GameTruck and being hired on as a Vice President of Hand Held Studios for Walt Disney Interactive. An impressive accomplishment. But for a moment, I looked down the barrel of withdrawing from life. Leaving Rainbow was not a pleasant experience. For me, as I suspect for most men, quitting a job is not a simple matter of finding more work. I quit my identity. In the book Zend and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig was told that he “had a new personality” after leaving the mental hospital. He wrote, “they should have told me, I was a new personality.”. I felt like that leaving my job. I left behind who I was and I did not know who I would become next. In those dark days of uncertainty, video games seemed like a place to pause, to wait, but I knew after just one day it could be a trap I might never leave. The risk of building my identity around pretending to be someone of consequence was too high. I had to stop playing and I knew it. How many young men never get the chance to feel that they can have a positive generative impact on the world, and therefore they get sucked down the sewer cycle of gaming, porn, smoking and becoming lost?

I don’t fully know how I was able to break out, probably because I had a partner, I had a family, and I had already experienced what it was like to build a life. I could recognize the danger, if not consciously at least emotionally. I knew it was quicksand. I got out before I fell in. But how do you get someone out after they have fallen in?

This is one reason I want to focus on parents of young kids. I want to give them the tools to prevent their kids from falling in, in the first place.

I am not an expert on preventing drug and porn addiction - but I am willing to learn. What I do know quite a bit about is designing interactive applications. Basically, video games. So one corner of this four-part problem. And if Ev is true, that breaking one circle can give you the resources to break the other four, then helping people break their video game obsession is a worthy goal.

Understanding the Risks

To understand the risks, I feel non-gamers (and probably even some gamers) need to understand the fundamental ways video games are designed. I look at video games as applied psychology. This is story telling in the second person. You are designing an experience for someone else to have. Since I joined the industry 26 years ago, the industry was split mostly into two camps. Casual games, and core games. About a decade ago, a new kind of “game” joined the fray, a game built not on creating awesome experiences for the user, but games whose purpose was to steal as much attention as possible from the user. These were companies who’s value were built upon user bases and usage hours. These were the always on, always connected internet games, and the vast majority of them were free. At least, they appeared to be free on the surface. Instead of trying to engage their users, like casual games and core games, these games aimed to hook their users, so they spent as much time on the platform as possible.

If that sounds familiar it is because these companies grew up at the same time as social media, and they both learned from each other, taught at major universities like Stanford (See The Anxious Generation). I still don’t fully understand the ethics of teaching engineers and designers how to exploit users but once the genie was out of the bottle as the saying goes… it must be okay because “everyone” was doing it.

What drove this demand was the arrival of the smart phone. Most console manufacturers sell their hardware at cost (and in the early days at a loss). They make money by charging a royalty to developers who create video games for their platforms. So they really had no desire to give away “free” games. But the smartphones became the way to distribute inexpensive and “free” games. The age of the smartphone ushered in the idea of “freemium”. Give away something free, then use design principles which “hook” users into wanting more, and more and more until they can’t put the game down and are happy (or desperate) to pay for in game items. This methodology spread from phones and tablets to PC’s and eventually Chromebooks.

These “free” games became ubiquitous.

But What About…

At nearly the same time, something else was happening at the very “highest end” of gaming. Excellent games that had been built to engage expanded to include online competitive modes. Some of these were called multiplay online battle arenas or MOBA’s. Along with the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), players found new ways to engage that were driven by a new kind of incentive - virtual social validation. Players who struggled to find their place in the real world, could suddenly find themselves “ranked” in their game of choice. All they had to do was invest countless hours becoming proficient at their game of choice. It is a slightly more complicated to understand why these games became so compulsively attractive to gamers, but the underlying roots are there. The developers make more money the more people play, and the more invested them become in their platform.

Now, I am really far into the history of how we got here, and I want to do some more research into the risks and threats of these massively multiplayer games that seem to have sucked a generation of men down out of the workforce. I don’t know enough here. What I do know, when it comes to kids, is what is happening with the “free games,” the ones I call attention stealing games.

And so I’m going to focus on those for a bit, because there is one crucial difference. No one gets handed a copy of League of Legends, or Defense of the Ancients, or Valorant by accident. These do not show up on an inexpensive gaming platforms like Chromebooks and cheap linux laptops. But kids across America are being introduced to platforms like Roblox by well intentioned schools and educators who do not understand the risks and the dangers of these “free” games.

7:54AM

Time to ride. I meet up with a friend and we cycle for 10 miles every Wednesday morning. It’s time to get some exercise in.

9:17AM

Sixteen miles. When the ground is flat and the wind is at my back I feel like I could peddle for hours. I never feel like that when I run. I wonder why.

Morning breakfast time, and I’m still thinking about what I wrote this morning. How did we get here?

Morning breakfast, I am “borrowing” a habit from Corbin, one of my closest friends. Couple eggs, some sausage, cheese, (I like to dice up some veggies). All in about ~500-600 calories. No carbs. This will easily carry me through lunch. My “orange juice” is a Yeti 20 ounce tumbler filled with sparkling water and flavored with Mio Orange/Tangerine water enhancer. Zero calories. Deeeicious.

First morning call is at 10AM, then another meeting, then I’m off to Forum, so it is unlikely I will have more time to think, or plan, or research for the rest of the day.

But my final thought is this - for competitive video games, or Esports, there is a tricky divide. Some players do actually become professionals. And the money to be made in that space is staggering. It can be a combination of influencer and celebrity money. A few years back I met a guy who owned a professional esports team at the Waste Management Open. He pointed to the leaderboard (golfese for scoreboard) and said, “My lowest played player makes more money than everyone on that list except the top five guys. And my best players make more than they do.”. There were a few mega-celebrities in the space that made more money every month than Tom Brady made in a year at the height of his career. With money like that, no wonder the industry attracts so many players. But like professional sports, it ends up being a tournament with a wide base and a very short narrow top. For everyone earning a living it feels like there are 10,000 more barely getting by, and hundreds of thousands who have become lost, and tens of millions of casual fans. In 2019 the highest viewed hockey game of all time was the Game 7 of the Stanley Cup world finals where 11 million simultaneous viewers tuned in to see the game. That same year 45 million live simultaneous viewers watched the Overwatch World Championships, a game most people have never heard of. With prize money measured in the tens of millions of dollars for major tournaments, esports is a serious industry, and one where people can become internet celebrities. However, what is interesting about esports is that nearly everyone in the audience also plays and competes at those games. Imagine if only active baseball, basketball, or football players watched their sports? They would collapse. But with esports, that is the case. It kind of gives you a clue as to the enormous hidden audience out there. And with any group of humans that large, some are going to be hurting. Jonathan Haidt suggests 7% of heavy gamers have a serious problem. Meaning 93% are for the most part, just fine. But… 7% of tens of millions of gamers is a very big number.

Yesterday, I got a lot of great feedback from my network. I had an amazing conversation with Cary Bakker who does life coaching about the pros and cons of blogging, vs using social media. So plus one for sparking interesting conversations. Cary expressed that he is a huge supporter of what I am trying to do.

What it looks like

I took a snapshot of my Project folder on my iPhone so you can see what my Second Brain looks like working on this tiny experiment.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, if you look, you can see that my “vault” has over 10,000 notes. That’s a lot. However, Niklas Luhmann had over 90,000! In the 1960s! And they were all handwritten on paper! I can’t imagine what he would do with today’s productivity tech.

Luhmann published 400 peer reviewed academic articles - or about 2 a year in addition to publishing 40 books. Why has no one ever heard of him? Because he was a German Sociologist. Not a huge demand in the USA for German Sociology. But his productivity is what captured everyone’s attention in 2017 when Sönke Ahrens| wrote a book called How to Take Smart Notes. The concepts swept through the medical community and the creator community. Why? Because in medicine everything is connected. The other group latched on because the internet has a voracious appetite for content.

Note: What are those weird numbers in my file names? They are called Zettelkasten numbers, and they help make sure every note is unique. They consist of the year, month, day, hour, and minute the note was created. For example, if I made a note right now it the file would start with 202504290719 -. It is pretty rare to make more than one note a minute, so they usually don’t include seconds. These numbers act as a form of UID or Unique Identifier, only one that is easily decipherable. When you start getting thousands, upon thousands of notes, making up unique file names is not as easy as it sounds. Plopping a ZID (Zettelkasten identifier) on the front of your file makes this process much easier. I use templater scripts in Obsidian to automate the process.

In summary, I started a project folder called Project - Tiny Experiment 1 in my 1 Projects folder (I put numbers in front of my PARA folders so they sort correctly, otherwise I’d get AAPR), and then I made a project file _Project - Tiny Experiment 1 which serves as a kind of README file for the project. I call this the Home Note. I use a template for it, so all my projects start with a standard structure. Then I start adding, creating, and linking notes. I will create a folder on my OneDrive cloud drive that has the exact same name in the same PARA folder structure (OneDrive\1 Projects\Project - Tiny Experiment 1) to hold any PDF files, spreadsheets, images, videos or other assets I may or may not want to put into Obsidian. Though, Obsidian does a good job with PDF files. My OneDrive usually ends up holding MS Office files. I use a similar file structure on google drive (GDrive/1 Projects/Project - Tiny Experiments 1) if I have google sheets, slides, or docs. The path structure is exactly the same and I call this organizing by convention. I use the same convention everywhere so I expect to be able to find what I am looking for quickly - usually in one or two clicks. Occasionally, but not always, I will paste web links to these folders in the project home note. It is all about making life for my future self easier and reducing the cognitive load. The less I have to remember, the more working memory I have for thinking.

Thinking is hard.

I use tools and systems to make it easier and to coral my ADD brain. I don’t have to remember details, my Digital Second Brain does that for me.

7:29AM

The calls start. Finished up my morning routine, now it’s time to talk.

8:30AM

Hey an opportunity came in. A possible speaking gig for New York City Schools. During COVID we did a lot of events for universities and colleges around the country. I also helped our largest franchise owner in Long Island host a bunch of educational after school programs built around games minecraft as well as some esports titles like rocket league and smash bros. They reached out to see if we could help with a program they are working on. I had to provide a bio. This is what I pulled together (my personal website which is focused on my speaking is at: https://scottnovis.com.) Maybe someday I’ll migrate these posts to that space, but for now, since this is unproven and that is all about “looking professional” I decided to keep them separate. Mistake? What do you think?

But here’s the Bio:

Scott Novis Bio

About Scott

Scott has two engineering degrees and 11 patents. His “gameology” consists of 15 published video games for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. He left the Walt Disney Company, where he served as the Vice President of their Nintendo Development Studio, to start his entrepreneurial journey by founding GameTruck, the original mobile video game theater concept. Since its founding in 2006, the GameTruck franchise system has delivered more than 500,000 events and has entertained more than 14 million players. Scott started GameTruck with the purpose of creating feelings of belonging through play. Through the Entrepreneur Organization, he mentors young entrepreneurs and lectures on innovation. He is an experienced international keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for safe gaming. He helps parents and educators protect kids from video game obsession.

9:15AM

Need to work on creating and queueing up some more cartoons. That experiment I set for 200. I am at 82 so far. I have the process down to something that only takes a few minutes… if I have an idea, and even if I don’t…

After I line out the action, then fill the color. I scan it, clean it up, then upload into a template I created in Canva. That is where I add the dialog, and get it ready to publish.

oh great… I want to get to work and Canva has hijacked my work environment with some new promo video. Thanks guys…

okay, it’s over… back to getting stuff done.

The final cartoon looks like this…

Work flow:

1. Sketch
2. Line
3. Color fill
4. Scan
5. Cleanup with Acorn 8 (I use a Mac)
6. Edit joke in Canva.
7. Download and save in appropriate PARA folder on OneDrive
8. Schedule posts in PUBLR.
9. Upload post to ComicFury

9:59AM

Blah. Parents are an amorphous economic entity. What I mean is that parents as a group have no specific shape or boundary. They are not a business, or a team, or members of a program. So how do I reach this audience? When I do get to talk with parents about video game safety, they immediately identify with the topic. And when I share my tools and tips, they appreciate it. When they use them, they always tell me it made a (positive) difference.

However, parents are not some unified economic entity. They are not a business or a specific community. To reach parents I need to work through groups that serve parents, and those groups don’t actually do much with the parents as a group. Take a community center, they tend to serve individual families. If you could get all of their clients together in one space you would have “parents”, but most of the time schools, churches, and NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) don’t want to do that. They deal with parents individually. I think some school districts will have meetings and hearings for “the general public” - which includes parents. But finding the partner who has an audience of parents is proving to be far more challenging than I imagined. Even Richard Walton, who runs outsell told me, “this is the longest sales cycle I have seen in a long time.” It is easier to sell a complex piece of software than a talk about parenting kids.

So, I put my outreach program on hold until I figure it out. That is another reason, I started this “tiny experiment”. Maybe you, or someone like you reading this will have an idea as to how I can reach parents. I’m definitely missing something.

What If: What if the problem is parents is too generic? What if I need to be more targeted, like I need to reach mom. Or Dad? (My gut tells me it’s mom.) How could I make the content more specific and relevant to mom’s? And what if talking about parents complicates the issue? Now I need to get both mom and dad involved. That could be a high hurdle. things to think about.

This sounds like it should be easy but isn’t.

10:30AM

Prime time productivity declining, mental energy sliding. I’ll “take a break” by adding to some book notes. Specifically I want to pull the most interesting content out of the book Tiny Experiments and turn it into Second Brain notes. This process is based upon the The Feynman Technique. The core idea is that if you can describe something you learned as if you were talking to a 12 year old you know it. If you can’t, you have some more work to do. The act of producing or expressing information is part of what turns it into knowledge.

Note: If you want to see what a Book Note document looks like you can see check out my Tiny Experiments Book Notes.

12:00PM

Had an unbelievably energizing call with Evan Walton. During the conversation as we got to know each other, he shared a personal story that gave me an idea about a path I might be able to take to help kids.

What’s my problem? Parents are not an economic entity, they are an demographic - an attribute, but it’s not specific enough. However, when parents have problems with video games, this can lead to counseling. It can be family counseling, or marriage therapy. What if I target therapists and counselors? They need continuous professional education and they are not doubt being affected by these types of trama, and perhaps they could benefit from my content, and then they can help their clients who are also struggling with it.

That is something to look into. Also investigate Bowen Family Therapy systems. (I think this is the second time that has come lately).

• Under this project file I will create a note to hold information about Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Note: This is what I do when I learn about something new. I make a note. Do some googling, some ChatGPTing, and I capture information and I put it into the second brain.

Possible next course of action. Reach out to the Therapists I know and do some googling as to how I might be able to help them.

5:20 PM

Had lunch with a friend. We talked about business and managing teams. I shared my new favorite management tool, the Spotify Squad Health Check. Now I’m back home and I’m tired. I want to get more done, but I’m frazzled… My energy is 🪫 and I’m in that weird place where I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to work out, I do not want to watch TV, even playing a game feels like too much effort. This will pass in a little while, but I miss feeling like I did this morning where I just sat down and got after my task list.

My best option right now is to journal. A little self reflection wouldn’t hurt. I journal with a fountain pen and quality notebook.

8:20PM

I did some reading on my kindle with warmlight on (reduces blue light). I try to stay off my devices after 8PM and definitely the half hour before bed time. No screens (kindle excepted) in the bedroom. No watching videos, no social media. The bed is for sleep. Well, sleep and and other activies that lead to sleep. I learned from the book Breath by James Nester that if I sleep with my mouth closed my sinuses generate an anti-duretic mist which is inhaled into my lungs. What this means is that as a man in my late 50s I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom any more which really helps my quality of sleep.

5:41AM

Another day, another chance to learn. Yesterday, after posting my first blog, I decided to keep notes, what was I doing to advance my cause, solve my problem?

7:15 AM

I can’t believe I posted this blog to just about every chat group I am in. That’s crazy. But there it is. Now I guess I really have to do it.

9:15AM

I realize that this blog post series, is different from my other post in a very fundamental way. Most of the time I strive to provide answers. Hey, here is a problem and it’s solution. This series in contrast is really set up to be an intellectual travel journal. Here’s where I am trying to go, watch me fumble, stumble, and bumble as I find my way there. Well, I assume I’ll make mistakes along the way, as that is usually what happens when you do something you haven’t done before. So in contrast, this post shares questions.

One of my favorite cartoons, which I attribute to the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson shows a picture of two signs in a building labeled “Department of Research”. The sign pointing to the right says, “Unanswered questions” but the sign pointing to the left, reads, “Unquestioned Answers.” My rule of thumb:

Question the answers.

BTW

The term “pat of butter” originates from the process of shaping butter. Traditionally, butter was shaped into small, flat, rounded pieces using a tool called a “butter pat” or “butter paddle.” These tools were used to mold and smooth the butter into a consistent shape, making it easier to serve and use. The word “pat” itself can refer to a light touch or tap, which is similar to the action used to shape the butter. Over time, the shaped piece of butter itself came to be known as a “pat of butter.”

So, I tend to live two lives. Well, at least two. One is the day I plan to live, the other is the day I actually live. I use tools to organize my intentions into actions which should result in the completion of my goals. I have other tools which allow people and opportunities to enter into my conscious awareness and take me on unexpected little side journeys (conversations mostly) that, while not part of my plan, add to the rich tapestry of my lived experience. Wow was that a convoluted way to say: man proposes but God disposes. I enter each day with a plan… then see how it goes.

Basically, my day is a dance. I think of it as a Tango. Sometimes I lead, sometimes life leads. I try to be on the look out for when life wants to make a move, and I also try to see if “life” is open to my moves. If I find a better way to live a day, I’ll let you know.

This means in practical sense that I need to strike a balance - I need a system that allows me to capture two things:

1. What I intend to do
2. What happens to me.

I recently thought of this as the dance between will and wonder. To do research, I need both. I have to be intentional about what resources I am going to investigate, but I also have to be open to discovering new things I did not expect to find.

10:30AM

Tools

The best tool I have found for managing this balance is to use a digital second brain. Sometimes called Personal Knowledge Management. The piece of software I use - or the “app” that helps me implement my digital second brain is Obsidian. (https://obsidian.md/)

It’s not so much the application itself as a system of thinking about how I work with information and turn it into knowledge. It might help you if I shared some definitions. You see knowledge and information, in my experience are suitcase words. You can pack a lot into them, and people tend to pack different things into them. For me:

• Data - raw, unprocessed facts or ideas.
• Information - Data organized in context so as to be useful.
• Knowledge - Actionable information.

Examples might help.

A list of numbers is just data. like 22, 25, 27. To become Information they need to be about or related to something, say the ages of my children - Rebecca is 22, Matt is 25, and Ryan is 27. This becomes knowledge when I add their birthdays to my Calendar so I remember to call them on their birthday and buy them gifts. Or you could say it becomes knowledge because their age influences the kinds of gifts I can buy them, such as now they are all old enough to receive a nice bottle of wine as a gift. (but I’m more of a bourbon and beer guy, wine is my wife’s thing.)

In general, I believe:

knowledge » information » data.

So, I try to move up the value chain from data, to information, to knowledge. A second brain is the tool I use to help navigate that process.

That process for me is a blend of techniques. I use the PARA method, which I first learned about from Forte Labs (Tiago Forte), and a Zettelkasten.

Zettelkasten is German, combining Zettel (meaning “slip” or “note”) and Kasten (“box”), translating to “slip box” or “note box.” It refers to a personal knowledge management system developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it to organize his thoughts and research. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten comprised over 90,000 notes, facilitating his prolific output of more than 70 books and 400 articles .

PARA organizes data and information by actionability into:

• Projects
• Areas
• Resources and,
• Archives.

PARA gives data context turning it into information. Luhmann’s way of linking ideas into networks turns information into knowledge.

But what about tasks?

Nearly everyone asks me about how I keep a todo list. That is a topic for another day, but in my experience, tasks that don’t use knowledge or information are often trivial - (such as take out the trash). It is the interplay of what I learn, and what I do with what I learn that drives me to use a system like Obsidian. Working with, and in, my Digital Second brain is where I experience my greatest productivity.

Okay, I could nerd out about this all day (week or month) so if you want to know more check out this: https://publish.obsidian.md/scottnovis/.

12:24PM

For some reason, I felt compelled to make the hierarchy of data, information and knowledge visual. I think of them like this:

I share this because it I wanted to give you some context as to how I started to work on yesterday’s questions. For me what converts information into knowledge is how I connect it to things I already know, or projects I plan to work on. It is the connectivity that makes Obsidian so powerful. It is where I synthesis ideas and generate the content that will shape new output.

So, working on this:

1. I created a Project in Obsidian.
2. I start making note pages (I call them cards), to capture anything and everything that occurs to me on this topic. In general, one “card” per idea.
3. I began connecting data and information to those cards.
4. As the day progressed, I add to the notes, and the connections, working with the ideas.

Note: Working with means writing, connecting, or doing something Forte called progressive summarization.

Healthy Video Game Info

My day job is as the CEO of the video game party company GameTruck. It is a franchise concept that conducts tens of thousands of video game parties every year. I started the company on a wish to help my son and his friends play the best games with their best friends in person, together. Since I first had the idea in 2005, and then launched the company in 2006, I have seen tremendous changes in the video game industry.

We started our company with the XBox 360 and Nintendo GameCube (16 player Halo and 8 player Mario Kart Double Dash). I did not invent the idea of video games in a trailer, but I did innovate the idea of a video game living room in a trailer. If you googled GameTruck in 2005, all you got back were toy trucks and board games - basically trucks to play games with. Today if you google that all you get is mobile video game party companies, including mine (Https://gametruck.com). Our brand became the super-category for mobile video game theater businesses.

Since 2006 we saw the rise of the Nintendo Wii, Music Games (Guitar Hero and Rock Band - and their demise). A decade ago partnered with Nintendo who wraps our trailers every year to promote their latest and greatest games. (I am personally and professionally excited about the Switch 2).

But why talk about video game addiction if I work in the industry? Because first and foremost I am concerned about kids and their well being. Remember, I started this business to help kids play together.

At GameTruck, our mission is: To create feelings of belonging through play.

And, in my experience, if you do it right, a GameTruck Party is a great way to create those feelings. I have been very blessed to earn a living making people happy.

However, the wider video game industry has a problem with some, (but not all) video games.

In 2022, I was selected to attend the Global Speaker Academy hosted by the Entrepreneurs Organization. While attending, I casually shared what I knew about video games and kids with other members. My fellow entrepreneurs told me that I needed to get this information in the hands of parents.

That my friends, is easier said than done. (Hence this blog trying to figure it out).

I will admit that the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt lit a fire under me. Professor Haidt convinced me that attention stealing apps (including games and social media) on smart devices are harming kids. While video games can be a source of joy, engagement, and entertainment, there are some bad actors who only pretend to entertain users. Their real business is stealing attention and using it to drive up their company stock or sell it to advertisers. Some games are the opposite of fun, they are a trap. One of the worst offenders of this is the free video game platform Roblox.

Chipping Away At It

I spent some time this morning after our weekly L10 (a highly structured meeting that is part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System to make sure we stay on task and achieve our goals as a company), and dove into two articles written by different members of my team. The first one is a blog post written by my head of marketing to help parents understand Roblox. The other was an SOP / training document created by my team lead to help our video game party hosts (we call them Game Coaches) know how to handle requests to play Roblox at birthday parties.

My initial reaction? Both articles are great, and useful, but neither really touches on the risks Roblox poses. And this is a challenge. No one wants to be negative. No one wants to scare people away. However, if we don’t talk about the risks, how will people know?

Note: If you want me to attach the documents for reference I am happy to do so.

This will be a marathon, not a sprint.

Point of Process

When I get new information, like the Roblox articles, I copy the links to them and paste them into my SB Project. I always have a section called resources where I can keep links to google docs. Book marking is useless in my opinion because it lacks overall context. Saving the links in the context where I need it, is one small way to turn data (a link) into information.

If these articles had been web articles and not google docs, I would have clipped them (adding the words to a file in a Clippings folder), then I would link those files to my project resources section using Obsidian’s WikiLink method.

Bottom Line: When I get new data, I turn it into information by saving it and connecting it in my second brain.

Today’s Questions

So what information do I need?

1. Connections. Who do I know or might I meet who is already interested in this area?
2. Resources: What are the best tools for protecting kids online? Like firewalls, and phones.
3. Solutions: What solutions already exist for young adults who are addicted?
4. Podcasts: Get the list of all the podcasts I’ve been in, and what is coming up.
5. Get my latest webinar videos and post them to YouTube.
6. Confirm with Dalton that we are still on for video recording Friday.

3:30PM

Okay, what I do is intense, I get that. But it is not as intense as it sounds, because I have somewhere to keep all the information when it comes to me…

Question How Do Parents Think About Video Game Risk?

I once heard this concept called, “the voice of the expert.” The problem is that once you become an expert, you tend to look at the world through that lens. But the person with the problem rarely thinks like an expert… or they wouldn’t have the problem they are having. In practice this means the person with the problem will usually describe the problem in their own words. And in my experience these words are hard to guess. You need to have a lot of conversations to find the common thread.

I want to grab parents attention, so they can immediately recognize my content as a solution to a problem they know they have.

When parents are anti-video game, they usually take a hard line. All video games are bad. Unfortunately, this does not protect their children from brain hacking by digital platforms. Worse, their kids have no skills to deal with the thread and therefore end up totally unprepared to handle it when the parents are not around.

To make matters worse, most of these platforms empower the kids help each other undermine parental safeguards and protections. It truly is like a mind virus. A friend of mine found out her son had a burner phone so he could talk to his friends on Discord. That’s right. For chat.

Note: Discord is a messaging platform like slack by started by gamers for gamers. It began as voice chat for gaming and rapidly grew into one of the largest community management platforms in the world.

It is unlikely that parents to completely ban video games will be interested in my content. I know because when I meet them they are very happy to tell me in no uncertain terms they don’t have a problem because they don’t allow their kids to play video games.

Not thinking is easier than thinking.

I get it.

I just wished that worked for the parents as well as they believe it will. But trying to “help” this group usually leads to pointless frustrating arguments, and those don’t help anyone.

But who is most likely to be interested in what I have to say? Who do I have the greatest chance to help?

My Hypothesis

I believe that parents who are relaxed about video games but worry that they are being too lax is my ideal target group. They are likely to let their children play games, without understanding the dangers.

They are open, and curious, but they don’t realize there is a danger until their child starts to demonstrate negative behavior issues. When I talk to parents from this group they genuinely want to learn what I have to share, and nearly all of them immediately put the content into practice - seeing rapid benefit.

These parents use the following words to describe their fears, and concerns about “too much video gaming”:

• Addiction
• Obsession
• Fixation

I can’t really talk about addiction because it is a medical condition and I am not a doctor. Therefore, I should do some more testing around obsession, and fixation. (ChatGPT also suggested “Compulsion”)

8:53PM

Time to shut down. I’m too tired to think about doing an evening routine… but overall, I feel like it was a productive day. Tomorrow, frame out the GPS - the goal, the problem, the solution.

One final task. I grabbed a story from Our Daily Bread to analyze.

Story analysis:

As his daddy cast his fishing line out into the lake, two-year-old Thomas mimicked his father’s actions with his own toy fishing pole. Later, as he stood on the shallow edge of the lake, Thomas also tried imitating his father’s example of throwing fish back into the water by dipping his pole in the water and “catching” weeds. After each “catch,” Thomas held the weeds up for his daddy to admire before releasing them back into the lake.

Tools:

• Starts in motion - casting a fishing line.
• Paints an image of a location: fishing in the lake, the shallow edge of the lake.
• The boy has a goal - to mimic his father
• What’s the obstacle? He’s pretending, we the read know he has a long way to go but…
• The payoff: he hold’s them up for his father to admire before “releasing them.”

We know, and the father knows the boy has a long way to go, but he’s doing his best, with what he has to work with, to imitate the man he admires. There’s something courageous and endearing in that. It sparks emotion.

Time to sleep…

Note: This entry starts day 1 of 15 consecutive days I intend to practice a tiny experiment, sharing how I am trying to learn how to help parents and educators with their kids video game obsessions.

5:39AM

I just woke up, grabbed my cup of bullet coffee (two “pats” of butter - why is a small quantity of butter called a pat? and not a blob, or a bill, or a slice? - well that and one tablespoon of MCT oil, and french roast coffee.) Then I sit down at the kitchen table to start my morning routine. The kitchen window is open, and the birds are a riot of joy outside. Chirping, hooting, tweeting, and singing. It is social hour in the Novis neighborhood for the avian folk. I love the trill of life and the cool air. Better enjoy it, the heat is coming soon. It always does, but at 5:30AM the sun is just up and the day has begun with a gentle fresh breeze.

My half of the kitchen table is a mess. That’s my mind externalized. I cleaned it up last night, but I have my iPhone, portable keyboard, four fountain pens (two black, two blue - sometimes there are more colors like green, red, and yellow), a bible, AirPods, and my morning pages journal. Strangley there is a business card from SportsClips with the name Marcia on it. I wonder why they give these out. I never see the same stylist twice. Partly because I don’t really care who cuts my hair (I’ve had the same “do” for decades and it’s simple), but partly because they never stay. It’s always a new crew there. The steady turnover at these places is remarkable. Why waste the time and cost of giving them business cards?

On second thought, looking at the kitchen table, this is not so bad. Yesterday my cartoon drawing kit was out here and bunch more keyboards. For me, keyboards like pens are an obsession. If I can find the perfect pen/keyboard/notebook/device I can write the perfect story… or so the distorted thinking goes. On a “good day” I can cover every inch of my half of the table with piles of papers, journals, pens and electronics. Today I can actually see the placemat and the kitchen - what do you call it? cloth? cover? Let the caffein set in, it will come to me.

So, usually I begin the day with several steps.

1. Open Obsidian on my phone and make sure it has the Daily Note populated.
2. Glance at my Habits list, and then start working my way through the top three “chains”

The list looks like this:

Habits

• Daily Devotional
• Readwise Review
• Bible Study
• Write
• Yoga
• Exercise
• Walk
• YNAB
• Meditate

I don’t know why Daily Devotional is first and Readwise second because I always start with Readwise. It has my current longest streak. 450 days. Readwise (from readwise.io) is how I get my book highlights from my kindle to Obsidian (my digital second brain). Every morning it surfaces six quotes. I often copy a few of those quotes and paste them into my Daily Note. Spaced repetition and connection to relevant information is a great way to enhance learning. Or so the theory goes. Seems to work for me. But it is only part of how I learn.

You may notice there is both Bible Study and a Daily Devotional. The Daily Devotional is really my reading streak on Kindle. Every year I pick one or two books that I can read a page a day. One of my all time favorites is [[The Daily Stoic]] by [[Ryan Holiday]]. But past books have included, [[The Intellectual Devotional]], [[A Calendar of Wisdom]], and sometimes I will take a book that is just very hard to read and chip away at it over a year. Such as [[Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain]]. This year I have two, [[Jesus Calling]] by [[Sarah Young]] and [[The Daily Laws]] by [[Robert Greene]]. Bible Study is really about reconnecting directly with my faith through reading the Bible - I have read a lot of the “good book” but not all of it. For this, I usually go to the App Our Daily Bread where I pick up a passage for the day and a short story. I like this for two reasons. The obvious one is that it connects me with my own religious heritage and upbringing - my family was “loosely” Presbyterian. And second, they tell stories in five sentences or less every single day. I find that fascinating.

So there, I read to start the morning, then usually comes the writing. The Morning Pages. Started by [[Julia Cameron]], I have modified my morning pages to be 2 pages (instead of three), making it easier for me to find a notebook that is thin enough to travel with me. Twelve weeks of three pages a day at 8.5"x11" paper is a thick notebook. But this is my best chance of the day to use my fountain pens. I rotate them every day, so I get a chance to use some small part of my collection (horde - if you curate it’s a collection. If you keep your stuff in an unwieldy pile, you horde - I do a little of both. The very best pens make it to the kitchen table. The rest sit in display cases or cookie tins - waiting to be sold some day on ebay.) I tell myself a lot of stories about the things I’m going to do. For some reason I find that easier than dealing with the reality that 1. I have wasted money, and 2. I am never really going to do that, and 3. I should probably clean up my mess and let this stuff go.

Did I mention I have ADHD? Well, I’m not hyper, so I like to think of it as Attention Deficit Disorder instead of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. And according to [[Gabor Maté]], it’s not really a disorder, it’s more of a deficiency, like if you are not strong, we don’t say you have strength deficiency disorder. I think the word disorder for ADD folk like me is more literal, as in we struggle to achieve order, so it’s short had for “our attention deficit produces disorder.”. I never use the term Neurodivergent to describe myself. That to me doesn’t really help anyone know who they are dealing with, including myself. Hey, I am this hard to understand unspecified thing! Good luck. No, if I share that I have ADD people get it. And it reminds me to use systems to constrain some of my less charming habits. However, I also recognize that with that “big beautiful brain” of mine, comes some gifts, like creativity, energy, and some serious focus when I’m chasing thought rabbits down dark and twisty holes.

When I am done with my daily reading (and keeping my three streaks alive), I will then engage in a variety of other dialy-ish habits, such as walking around the block while listening to an audio book, or doing yoga (I need to get better at this), meditating (again, could do with some improvement), using ynab.com (You Need a Budget) to keep my finances from going off the rails. I can’t have my bank accounts looking like the kitchen table. And yes, while walking is technically exercise, there is some strength training that will help extend my health span. According to [[Peter Attia MD|Peter Attia]] author of [[library/Outlive|Outlive]], maintaining your strength is a good way to stay healthy longer. For example “grip strength”, your ability to hold your own wait or carry weights is unexpected highly correlated with longer healthy life spans. Why? Because the theory goes, you can catch yourself if you start to fall. Breaking a hip is nearly a death sentence. The mortality rates skyrocket after a hip break and many are dead within 10 years. Plus, my Uncle Tom passed away in a fashion I do not want to replicate. Put another way, I’m not going out like that. I want healthy bonus years, not artificially protracted medically induced suffering in the name of staving off death at all costs.

Don’t want to die. Don’t want to suffer while I wait to die. Let’s keep this life as healthy and energizing as possible for as long as reasonably possible. That’s the plan.

So, a day starts with:

• Deliberately taking in content and ideas I find interesting, spiritual, and reflecting.
• Moving my body to keep it healthy.

You may (or may not) notice, that what is missing is a few things many people do when they first wake up. What I don’t do is

1. Check social media (Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, TikTok, X)
2. The news (Ground News, Wall Street Journal, Apple News)
3. Email (Seriously I postpone this as long as possible.)
4. Messages (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)
5. Watch any video (TV, YouTube, TikTok, etc)

The one exception is texts. Texts sit at the top of my communication hierarchy. I now have a family extended by love that includes four Gen-Z kids and talking on the phone is a rare and special occurance for me, a torture for them. But texting is how we all stay in touch. So those get a special pass. Hearing from people I love fits my above criteria to only ingest healthy, loving, interesting, stimulating, positive content first thing in the morning. The outrage porn factories can wait. They get enough of my mindshare as the day goes on - much more than they deserve.

This is how I start my day, and since this tiny experiment is about how I learn, and I started this blog post to focus on questions, I haven’t gotten to the important part, what exactly is it that I am trying to learn? Well, I’m going to save that for tomorrow. This post is already extremely long, but it gives you a glimpse into how I deliberately, and intentionally set about my day. The great thing about a morning routine is that my morning always starts the same (so far). I wake up. And I nearly always wake up at the same hour of the day - between 5am and 6am (that’s why I hear the bird song every morning, the hour after sunrise is peak song time in the Novis neighborhood.). This lets me begin my sequence with a surprising amount of consistency for someone with ADD. Evening routines are much harder because my days rarely end exactly the same way leading up to sleep. The trigger to do an evening routine is just not as consistent.

But, it is within this context, of deliberately trying to learn, and improve myself in small quantities daily that I will try to tackle a few big questions. These are:

The Big Questions

1. How can I become a better story teller?
2. How can I reach parents to help them with their childs video game addictions (or avoid it all together without giving up on video games completely.)
3. How can I help the hundreds of thousands of young men who have failed to launch and become lost in video games (what the Japanese call Hikikomori, and Europeans called NEET - Not Employed, in Education, or Training).
4. How can I connect with other people trying to push back against how some big tech companies are stealing young kids attention to fuel their business model and leaving anxious, isolated, depressed, suicidal husks of humans in their wake?
5. How do parents think about, talk about, and experience these problems?
6. How do educators experience, talk about, and think about these problems?

Story telling is top of the list, because humans respond better to stories than facts, logic, and reasoning. (I have spent years trying to understand why and I think I have a handle on that.). And when I can see the problem through the eyes of the person I am trying to help, it makes it easier for me to come along side them and give them useful tips and tools to help them solve their problems.

Okay, good start. It’s not perfect, but it’s a snapshot of how I think, how I work, and what I am trying to learn. And if you’ve read this, I hope I successfully painted a picture for you minds eye to visualize as you join me on this journey.