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.

Overlapp of Missing Men Factors.

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.