Novistopheles

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.