My take: A product VP told the Verge: there aren’t expectations for Plus to become a “material new revenue source.” I find this bizarre, feels like CYA, and an out: “if it doesn’t work out, we didn’t have high expectations”. Snapchat feels the pain of ads becoming less valuable over time, and this is likely a bet to see if a subscription product can work. This feels very similar to Twitter Blue, which I used for a few months, but found pretty useless. But even Twitter Blue had features that sounded like killer or at least interesting features on paper (undo tweet, NFT pfp). To be fair, I don’t use Snapchat a lot, but these don’t seem like valuable features, and I don’t expect teenagers to pay for them.

Also, I feel like + branding is overplayed.

📷 Product: Facial Recognition on Kids?

🗽 Creator News: Emma Chamberlain is Back

Instagram Is Making A Creator Marketplace

Our friend Mark shared several updates across Meta’s product surfaces that were focused on supporting creators. A lot was announced, including Facebook taking no cuts for paid items on their platform until 2024, more monetization opps for Reels, and expanding access to NFTs on Instagram and soon Facebook.

What I found most interesting was the “Creator marketplace.” I’m only aware of third-party marketplaces, like Grapevine Village, where creators and sponsors can be matched up. If this works in a big way, I can see these third-party solutions becoming significantly less valuable in the future.

Using Facial Recognition to Detect Age

Axios has reported that Instagram is working with Yoti to use facial recognition to determine the age of users. This is specifically being used to prevent users from editing their age in the app from below 18 to over 18. What confuses me though is that you can submit any age when you sign up for an account. I made one just a few minutes ago to confirm. This seems like a massive investment to NOT actually prevent someone under 13 to create an Instagram with an email address and lie about their birthday.

Emma is back after six months

In May, Colin and Samir had a video describing creator burnout and potential models to help address it, including some new fields on YouTube channels. I thought the Pause / On Break indicator they described was a great idea.

In the video, they use Emma Chamberlain as an example, who had gone on break from making videos. Announcing a break is extremely common for YouTubers, which is an odd paradigm when you think about it — it feels like something you wouldn’t have to tell the world. And it flies in the face of the advice that you hear about the creator economy: “Just make comment and you don’t have to work on a regular schedule anymore!” But really you have to keep churning out content or the algo gods will reject you.

Anyway, Emma published a video yesterday after a six month break. Tbh, I didn’t understand why Emma’s videos were so popular, but earlier this year, something clicked and I thought Emma’s editing style and videos were just so good. And I liked the latest one!

👻 Product: Snapchat Spotlight Replies

🪑 Crypto: Commandeering a Whale’s Wallet

How Creators Are Also Affected by the Downturn

Companies have conducted layoffs, slowed hiring, cut costs, and reduced ad and marketing spend. Given that these organizations spend on influencer marketing and sponsorships, we’d expect the creators to be affected. Well, we don’t have to extrapolate any longer. Ezra Cooperstein — the president of Night, a media talent management company and venture studio, which works with creators like Mr. Beast — confirmed their creators were affected: “We had several brands cancel signed deals with creators. Buckle up.”

Replies in Snapchat Spotlight

Axios reported that Snap is testing text replies for Snapchat Spotlight, its TikTok competitor. It’s wild to me that replies as a feature are now coming out for the platform that was released in 2020. It’s one of the most engaging parts of TikTok, seeing how people respond to the video. There is definitely comedy gold in TikTok comments. I do respect Snap’s approach to slowing down and being intentional about moderation, but dang, so much engagement missed over the last 1-2 years.

Interesting tidbit: in screencaps from their earlier newsrooms (Dec 2021), you can see replies were already designed (at least mocked up) - see the rightmost image here:

WTF, you can take over wallets?

Solend, a Solana DeFi product, submitted a now approved proposal in their DAO to temporarily take over a wallet with a massively leveraged position. The Solend team indicated that if liquidated, the account would put a huge strain on the network and they themselves would liquidate the account in a way to avoid battering the Solana network.

TBH, I don’t understand what happens now that the proposal is approved. How are they getting this emergency power, I imagine not the secret key of the wallet? Do they hardcode and deploy a new contract that lets them act as this wallet? Can this every happen at the Solana level if something unsafe was ongoing on the network?

Looks like I have some reading to do.

I get why it’s happening. It feels like a push to get more creators to create Reels and bolster the ecosystem against TikTok, and Instagram is already a huge hub for static memes. But it feels weird that there aren’t any officials comms about MemeCon or this push. I wish some of the panels were recorded and shared. What type of content are they trying to promote?

At Kapwing, we helped proliferate the “video meme” over four years ago and have decided to broaden our target use case since then, and for good reason. I’d love to hear what Instagram considers a “video meme.” The reason memes proliferate so quickly is because of how easy it is to create them, you take a screenshot and you add text, images, emojis, etc. The same thing works for video memes - instead of an image you take a clip. Reddit is home to the majority of the internet’s video memes, but they don’t fall into Adam Mosseri’s definition of the future of video on Instagram (not 9:16).

So I’d love to know what Meta/Instagram considers a video meme, and what type of content they’d like to see more of on their platform. Is it the typical starwarsprequelmemes, where you take a movie or show clip and add text? Or is it like TikTok, where a “trend” or sound is like a video meme? I feel like that’s what they actually want, but they’re calling it a video meme. I dunno, but I’d like to know! If you or someone you know went, I’d love to hear about it!

🎵 Kanye’s “Fungible Physical Good”

🔒 Avoiding Collisions Makes Crypto Possible

🚚 Truckers, COVID, Crypto Wallets

Donda 2 Only Available on Stem Player#

Kanye West’s Donda 2 Will Only Be Available on a “fungible physical token.” I have to imagine Kanye would not like me using that terminology given his perspective on NFTs:

The new album will be available on the physical Stem Player that was also released with the original Donda album. Part of the reason seems to be Kanye’s dislike of how little musicians extract from the value of their music: “Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes.”

Two thoughts — Kanye has reasonable distaste and skepticism of NFTs and all things web3. One goal of web3 is letting artists extract more value of their work, which is a lofty goal. We’ll see what turns out happening. Second, physical goods are cool! Musicians do make money on merchandise, but it is tangential to their actual content — I like the idea of the work being embedded into a physical product. Tbh, I think Hit Clips were rad.

Avoiding Collisions Makes Cryptography Work#

Plug, but my article on Collision Resistance is on Hacker Noon! Pulling out an excerpt below:

Hash functions typically take pretty long things, like long sentences, and encode them into something much smaller. For example, encoding the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” into something like “x3G5.” This is useful because “x3G5” is shorter, which is useful for transportation or storage. Also, it is useful because “x3G5” effectively hides the value “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” If I was the one encoding that info, I could reveal at a later time that “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was my sentence and you can conduct the same encoding and say, “huh, it really did encode to ‘x3G5’.”

This is significantly less valuable if lots of other long sentences also resulted in the encoding “x3G5.” Compressing and identifying items is a lot less useful if something that’s supposed to be “unique” really isn’t. And if a bunch of sentences result in the encoding, I could lie and later say I was using a different sentence, if it benefitted me.

You might be thinking, okay, well why don’t we just use an encoding that is always guaranteed to have different encoded values? If we want the encoded version to be smaller, this is impossible. Why is that? Well, our original sentence used over 30 letters, but our encoding used only 4. Intuitively, we know that the number of “possibilities” for the sentence is a lot more than the “possibilities” for just 4 letters. This means we can’t uniquely encode all the sentences, some of them will have to result in the same encoding (if you want to see why watch this!).

So, to get around this, a lot of smart people came up with an encoding where it’s “really, really, really hard” to find two things that result in the same encoding. That’s what “infeasible” in the above definition means – “yes, some stuff results in the same encoding, but I bet you can’t find one!” And you know what, they are right, it is really hard to find two values with the same encoding for these functions.

Governments Need to Understand Wallet Software#

Nunchuk tweeted out an email they sent to some body of the Canadian government. The crux being, Canada wants to freeze assets of individuals, and they asked Nunchuk, a non-custodial wallet software provider, to comply. I imagine the government went with the spray and pray approach, and Nunchuk wants to paint the picture of them being incompetent. But who knows! Maybe no one in the Canadian government understands that they cannot do anything about these individuals access to transacting, and that’s the point

🐵 Crypto: Backlash of BAYC Doxxing

📱 Product: Android Follows the Privacy Path

Russian Stockpile Is On TikTok#

You know how you check Twitter to see if anyone else felt that earthquake? Well, on TikTok, you can see if World War III is starting. Videos of military equipment stockpiling and troop movement made rounds on TikTok for over a year and has increased recently. It’s becoming more difficult for governments to conduct large covert operations — which I think is a good thing, since it tends to be a requirement for war and genocide. If a country has free and open access to the internet, it’s harder for large scale bad actors to operate. Though there is a flip side, it also allows for the amplification of emotional, inflammatory, and wrong information. Can’t have everything, I guess.

(This was a creator-ish snippet)

Who Is Allowed Anonymity and Pseudonymity?#

Vice released a piece this week about reactions to BuzzFeed’s doxxing of the Bored Ape creators. The original piece highlighted that the two creators were building a multi-billion dollar business, and asked if it was okay to be operated pseudonymously. The web3 community was not happy about the doxxing. There’s a wide gamut of responses, but reverse doxxing of Katie (original author) is bad.

This whole debacle raises an interesting question of who is allowed anonymity or pseudonymity. As a society, we certainly seem to believe that individuals deserve privacy. Websites don’t force us to share our identities — you can amass huge followings and an audience as a pseudonymous creator and wield “soft power”. On the other hand, we expect heads of state and leaders to be real people with skin in the game. So where do we draw the line? Is it when money is involved? And who gets to decide?

Google Fires Up the Privacy Engine#

Similar to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes, Google is planning to update how it deals with ad tracking on Android phones. The biggest difference to Apple’s approach is the speed and amount of lead time other organizations have before the change. Google is proposing a “multi-year initiative” to flesh out “Privacy Sandbox”. This makes sense — users expect this change, Google is facing antitrust issues, and nobody wants another third party issue like Cambridge Analytica.

What I find interesting is that the actual implementation and how the ad-serving mechanism will work, is still up in the air. But I expect, now that third parties can’t really track or segment users, Google wins by providing its own segmentations and being the sole owner of it. Overall, this feels like the right move for the industry, it seems other ad providers (Meta/Facebook, Snap) are losers in this situation, and Google’s ad business will only get stronger — but we’ll see what level of segmentation they plan on surfacing.

🏦 Crypto: BlockFi Gets a $100 Million Fine

🔒 Product: You Don’t Own Your Logins, Story of Getting Locked Out

Snapchat Mid-Roll Ads Give Creators a Cut of Ad Revenue#

Snapchat is introducing mid-roll advertisements later this year. It’ll only be available for Snap Stars initially, who are creators who have large followings. I believe this is the first time Snapchat is enabling monetization that is a cut of ad revenue, and feels like a direct contrast to how TikTok operates, specifically how TikTok (and Snap currently) have avoided giving creators a percentage of ad revenue by putting ads BETWEEN creator content - not on top or in conjunction with individual content. See my post last week and Hank Green’s video for more on that.

BlockFi Hit With Big Fine#

BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million in fines yesterday. The two primary allegations are that BlockFi misrepresented how safe or over-collateralized their loans were, and that the company was not registered to offer securities, yet still did. BlockFi intends to register its new lending product correctly with the SEC, and if approved will be the first “proper” interest-bearing crypto security (in the eyes of the government).

Losing One Login Could Lock You Out of Everything#

A popular Hacker News post today detailed a user’s experience responding to spam in their gmail inbox and immediately having their account locked. This prompted a conversation about how valuable one’s email is to work, authentication, records, receipts, etc.

With your gmail and Google account locked, chances are you’re also locked out of several other services, especially if you haven’t set up a secondary method of access with important services. I have a proposal that Sign in with Cryptographic Key should become as prevalent as social logins in the near future. Or at least an option for account recovery. It’s one of the few items you can totally control — you can’t really say that about phone numbers, social logins, or emails.

🏈 Creators: Drake Will Not Be in the State Farm Super Bowl Ad

😢 Crypto: Accountability vs. Cancellation in Crypto Culture

📅 Product: How to Visualize the ~3,000 Weeks of Life

No Super Bowl Ad for All State, TikTok Instead#

Colin and Samir released a conversation about how State Farm is opting out of a Super Bowl ad and instead spending money on a large TikTok campaign. On the surface, this makes sense, a company who had Drake in their last Super Bowl ad isn’t even doing one now —the story itself is newsworthy, but I have a hypothesis that the reach with 18 - 49 year old people will be larger and cheaper with this strategy. Some light googling shows the 18 - 49 viewership seems to be decreasing for the Super Bowl, and general peak viewerships seems to have been five-ish years ago.

I think “Super Bowl” ads are going to be a category of high-quality campaigns and creatives in the future, but won’t be as tied to actually airing during the game in the future. Let’s see if that pans out. But tying it to creators, massive top tier companies are paying TikTok for huge campaigns, yet, there isn’t a clear cut for the creators themselves - read yesterday’s daily for more info.

Canceling Cancel Canceled Canceler?#

Drama more than news, but it touches an important problem that has to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Balaji retweeted a piece by a pseudonymous writer “indian bronson” — not linking the piece, but I’m sure you can find it. In the piece, indian bronson calls out dame.eth as a hypocrite for pushing for accountability for individuals’ past behavior, while Dame had grown up conservative evangelical who held beliefs counter to their current opinions. Transparently, I’m a fan of dame.eth and the Q&A that Dame regularly holds to answer questions and onboard people to web3 — Dame has been very nice about answering my naïve questions and I appreciate that. It’s obvious how much of a presence and soft power Dame has in the space and it has be wielded carefully. I don’t agree with everything Dame has said and done, but in general I think Dame’s heart is in the right place.

I do believe Twitter is prone to outrage and exaggeration, and everyone who has influence should be extra careful because there is a tendency on the bird app to take opinions to extremes. And I think all three people I’ve talked about so far have portrayed and pushed great ideas in packages or tied with half-baked, unverified claims that detract from the whole thing. I think the way we have discourse, talk about ideas, acknowledge and talk about how we behaved in the past (2005 - 20015 was a raunchy time, admit it, our world views were different) has to happen in an honest and transparent way moving forward so we can avoid the vitriol and work together in more cohesive and honest ways.

You're Dying Soon#

I’m going skiing soon, so I don’t have a great product digest, but I’ll share one of my products! A few years ago, I was all about the quantified self, and loved the idea of measuring your life in weeks, which I initially found on a waitbutwhy post. Seeing your life in weeks makes you realize how finite your life is, which is both scary but makes you appreciate life more.

So I created an interactive way to visualize your life in weeks, you can try it here: https://www.failflow.com/life

📈 Crypto: “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins” — But I Lost It!

🛍️ Product: Creator Platform Shopping is Happening

Creator Monetization Needs to Evolve

In January, Hank Green released a video highlighting the flaws of TikTok monetization. Several large creators followed suit this month, talking about their own earnings and how cross-posting on other platforms generates orders of magnitude more cash. The core criticism is around how the Creator Fund stays static while more creators start pulling from it. This creates a zero-sum game for creators, AND as TikTok gets larger and attracts more users and creators, existing creators make less. Meanwhile, on a platform like YouTube, the they are transparent about the take rate, which is a percent of ads running on your videos. This means as YouTube gets generally more popular, creators generally make more as well.

Even as we’re decades into creator platforms existing, we haven’t solidified “standard” monetization practices. Specifically we haven’t agreed on what the appropriate or fair take rate for ads, subscriptions, and now “creator funds" should be. With the winner-takes-all pressure for social and consumer products, companies like TikTok can unilaterally make decisions. Yes, creators can migrate, but they leave massive audiences behind or aren’t where billions of people already are. I don’t know what the right answer is, but creator monetization needs to evolve in the next few years.

Friends Can Save Your Wallet

Warning, not news, just interesting math that I wanted talk about! A common saying in crypto is, “Not your keys, not your coins,” meaning, if you have the key or “password” to a wallet you effectively own the coins because you can transact with them. Given how crypto works, it doesn’t make sense to have “Forgot my password” flows, or SMS one time codes, which is a conversation for another time. So how can you protect yourself? One idea is to split your key with other friends and family, so that no one can individually act but if you get retrieve the shares of the key, you get the whole key. But how does that work? It’s scary to just chop it into pieces, because that reveals info about the key itself. Time to talk about middle school math!

When you put a point on a graph, that point can be on any line on the graph — you can draw a line going up through the point, you can draw a line going down through the point, there are infinite lines! But the moment you have a second point, only one line can go through both of those points. If we think about our key or secret as just a secret number, we can define it as the value where the x axis is 0. So once we know the line, we can find the value where x = 0. You can share the two points with two different friends. Either friend will not get information about the secret, but if you retrieve both you can get the secret!

That’s cool, but can we do more than two — let’s do some high school math! If you remember parabolas, you might remember for two points, an infinite number of parabolas can exist, but when you have three points, only one parabola is defined. And this pattern holds for polynomials with increasing degrees (functions where exponents look like x^3 + x^2, etc.). So you can share 3, 4, 20, X number of values, as long as you define a complex enough function!

A better and more detailed explanation, Samir’s Secret Sharing

YouTube Shoppable Videos

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, shared the company priorities in January, and most people focused on the NFT news, but the Live Shopping experience seemed to slip under the radar. YouTube is enabling a “creator tagging pilot program that gives viewers the chance to browse, learn about, and shop products featured in their favorite videos.”

What this means to me is a UX to quickly tag items with shopping links with affiliate tags to take a cut of purchases. This isn’t new for blogging and written content, but seems to be lagging in a big way for larger creator platforms. I’m interested to see how larger platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Shout out to my friend David who’s working on this at Twitter!

👩🏽‍🎨 Creators: Moonlighting at Creator Companies is ... Complicated

🔐 Crypto: Can’t Launder Like Al Capone, Couple Launders $4.5 billion in Bitcoin

💰 Product: Apple + Stripe = World - Square? Accept Direct Payments on Phone

Moonlighting at Creator Companies#

Today, The Information wrote a piece about the complications of being a creator while working for the platform itself — such as having a TikTok following and also being employed by TikTok. The majority of these platforms allow you to monetize your personal accounts with some restrictions. If you’ve read doubtiswelcome’s About, you’ll find that I dislike how certain employers can feel that they own you and your time. The fact that these creator companies don’t straight up bar personal accounts and monetization, knowing very well that creating content is hard and time-consuming is already a great step in the right direction.

Still, some of the restrictions can be frustrating. TikTok for example, doesn’t allow you to be part of the creator fund and they can block certain brand partnerships. Just the friction of running it through the company every time is annoying in itself. It begs the question, for a platform as ubiquitous as TikTok or YouTube, how much should the company restrict “personal usage”? And what counts as broad “personal usage”? If I worked for Stripe, and they restricted how I could use the Checkout product, I would be pissed. So why can’t TikTok employees be part of the Creator Fund, especially if they are framing it as the primary monetization mechanism? I get there are some optics issues around it, “oh are the employees being favored by the algo?!?” The platform should be transparent about these issues and concerns.

This warrants its own conversation, but the same The Information article highlighted a study about “Empowerment from Side-Hustles and Its Effects on Full-Time Work Performance” yet employers definitely frown upon it, or even worse champion it, but claw back their support when you actually start doing it. A conversation for another time!

Can’t Launder Crypto#

Law enforcement arrested a couple for trying to launder $4.5 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. 4.5 BILLION DOLLARS. That’s more than the GDP of several small countries, and estimates have Al Capone laundering south of a billion dollars.

Twitter is going wild over the web3 rapper wife and seemingly normal engineer/YC husband, even though it’s interesting, I won’t be talking about that. What’s more interesting to me is how the two of them “employed numerous sophisticated laundering techniques” and still could not turn this into cash. This flys in the face of the public opinion that “crypto is for criminal activities and money laundering.” I think this makes it pretty clear that a public ledger makes it possible to track these funds and the moment it hits an exchange, law enforcement can do what they need to do. It also proves to me that law enforcement isn’t as incapable as politicians had them out to be when referencing crypto. Not only were they able to arrest these “sophisticated launderers,” but they managed to seize $3.6 billion worth of the assets too.

Apple + Stripe = World - Square?#

Apple and Stripe announced yesterday that businesses could accept payments with just an iPhone. My first thought was how you wouldn’t need the clunky Square point-of-sale block anymore, but I imagine sellers will have both just in case they need to read the magnetic strip.

First of all, this is great for solopreneurs and smaller businesses, who can reduce the one-time costs of starting a business and accepting payments quickly. I’m excited to see this used more at farmers' markets and food trucks (yes that’s my life).

Secondly, I was curious how much revenue Square actually made from sellers, so I pulled up their quarterly report.

It’s clear the hardware of the blocks and POS devices aren’t the bulk of it, it’s the cut they take from transactions (someone correct me if I’m wrong). So this is substantial to Square’s business if Apple can cut out a lot of this. My guess is this includes online storefronts and other products, but time will tell if this carves out some of the pie for Square. What’s more wild to me is the Cash App Bitcoin revenue, what does that mean?? And how is more than Seller transaction revenue?? I’ll have to do some more reading.

I studied math at Cornell, and even though I was in the bottom half of my cohort, I still felt I learned some decent maths. Specifically, we spent a lot of time doing “proof-based” mathematics, where you start with simple properties and with clear, logical steps, we started proving more complex properties. It took a while for me to get used to it, but eventually I learned to enjoy it.

Why is this valuable? You could prove a property about a set of numbers, say even numbers or prime numbers, and then you could claim the property held for every single item in that set. You could keep coming up with examples of prime numbers, and those properties would hold. That’s really cool! This felt concrete and it was amazing how elegant the proofs were.

During my last semester, I decided to take “Applicable Algebra”, where we learned about information encoding and how RSA encryption worked. Things got a little harder to prove as we started to use terms like “infeasible” or “close to impossible.” Things started to feel less concrete, but we were still able to prove powerful properties.

Recently, I started reading about cryptography again and was reminded about these terms. Specifically, I came a definition of collision resistance:

If you’re not familiar with the above notation, I’ll provide some basics. Hash functions typically take pretty long things, like long sentences and encode them into something much smaller. For example, encoding the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” into something like “x3G5.” This is useful because “x3G5” is shorter, which is useful for transportation or storage. Also, it is useful because “x3G5” effectively hides the value “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” If I was the one encoding that info, I could reveal at a later time that “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was my sentence and you can conduct the same encoding and say, “huh, it really did encode to ‘x3G5’.”

This is significantly less valuable if lots of other long sentences also resulted in the encoding “x3G5.” Compressing and identifying items is a lot less useful if something that’s supposed to be “unique” really isn’t. And if a bunch of sentences result in the encoding, I could lie and later say I was using a different sentence, if it benefitted me.

You might be thinking, okay, well why don’t we just use an encoding that is always guaranteed to have different encoded values? If we want the encoded version to be smaller, this is impossible. Why is that? Well our original sentence used over 30 letters, but our encoding used only 4. Intuitively, we know that the number of “possibilities” for the sentence is a lot more than the “possibilities” for just 4 letters. This means we can’t uniquely encode all the sentences, some of them will have to result in the same encoding (if you want to see why watch this!).

So, to get around this, a lot of smart people came up with an encoding where it’s “really, really, really hard” to find two things that result in the same encoding. That’s what “infeasible” in the above definition means – “yes, some stuff results in the same encoding, but I bet you can’t find one!” And you know what, they are right, it is really hard to find two values with the same encoding for these functions.

This was an adjustment for me and my mental model. I was used to the concreteness and definitiveness of the proofs we learned at school, but nothing in the real world is concrete or definitive. Everything is probabilistic, whether you believe it or not. When you walk outside, there is a non-zero chance that you will come back home, yet we still go outside. I came to understand the probabilistic nature of the physical world and the risks I take on a daily basis, but I still thought that there was concreteness in math and computers! So it took another set of mental adjustments to get used to hash functions and collisions. So, given their probabilistic nature, how confident should we be?

For a rough idea of how hard it is to find two colliding values, a popular Stack Overflow answer indicates, "A mass-murderer space rock happens about once every 30 million years on average. This leads to a probability of such an event occurring in the next second to about 10-15. That's 45 orders of magnitude more probable than the SHA-256 collision."

So it's practically impossible – some would even say "infeasible" to find colliding inputs, which is great because these functions are the ones that hide your passwords, encrypt your emails, and obscure national secrets. And it all works because smart people are playing a game of, “bet you can’t!”

For eons the two lived in this nothingness and the older brother was content. One day the younger brother said, "I want change. I want excitement. I want something."

The older brother rebuked him, "No. With change comes disorder and eventually suffering." The younger brother did not abide, he clapped his hands and there was something.

The older brother was irate. "What you have done is irreversible, but I will fix it."

Billions of years later, there was life, entropy, emotion, change — all these inherited the will of the younger brother.

There was also death, stasis, the ever expanding and impending heat death of the universe — all of which inherited the will of the older brother.

The greatest folder humanity created. A Dragon Ball Z folder. The cover is filled with muscle-bound men with cool hair (though not all of them). And in full color, Goku, the savior of the world was in the middle of the group. I had to have it — there was no way I was going to have a solid green Oxford folder after seeing this.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I loved Dragon Ball Z growing up. We didn’t have cable, yet we tried consuming as much of the universe as we could: the games, DVDs from friends, downloading off Kazaa; whatever we could get our hands on.

I guess cool hair, muscles, power-up transformations, and saving the world were awesome to me as a kid. I wasn’t the only one.

As I become a teenager, I thought less and less of Dragon Ball Z and Goku. I started to consider it childish — all this cartoony stuff about grown men fighting. I would see adults wearing t-shirts and hoodies with Goku on them and thought everyone wearing them were nerds.

I Was Wrong

In late 2017, I moved across the country to California. For the holidays, I decided to stay in San Francisco to be available for work and save on flights. In a bout of boredom and loneliness, I decided to watch Dragon Ball Super, the latest entry to the series.

SF in winter. There was no snow. That was surprising to me.

After 131 episodes and only a few days later, I must admit, I did not understand Goku growing up.

Goku is addicted to progress in the martial arts. To pare that down, Goku is addicted to progress, i.e. incremental growth. Sure, he saved the world several times, but every time he talks about it, he references them as opportunities to fight someone at the highest level.

It really hit me in the middle of the series when (mild spoiler warnings) his son Gohan has his first child — making Goku a grandfather. When Goku visits his granddaughter for the first time, Goku inadvertanly learns that Vegeta (his sparring partner and rival) is training with a literal god without him. Goku then makes every effort to go train with them leaving his family and his newborn granddaughter behind. His wife is initially irked by this, but eventually expresses that Goku would want nothing more in this world than opportunities to grow, and she understood.

Dang. I moved across the country for the same reason.

I didn’t play sports growing up, so when I hear sports metaphors, like Coinbase’s “championship team” mentality, I find it cheesy and don’t really understand. But I can understand Dragon Ball Z.

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