Venture capitalists are always telling you what books they read. I don’t read much but I do watch a lot of movies and tv.
I find TV important because its both popular and immediate. It doesn’t feel like work and it’s a fast way in to examine the things which really matter.
If you haven’t watched Cobra Kai series you must watch it. Warning: the next few posts will have lots of spoilers, so if you don’t like spoilers, download Cobra Kai, make some popcorn and catch up right away. It’s worth it — I promise.
2020 has sucked but sometimes with misery there’s beautiful art. Two bright pieces of art that stood out during one of the worst years of our lives were Soul from Disney+—and I’ll argue Cobra Kai. Kai came out in 2018 but with all of the free time some of us have found it’s trending on Netflix and in its third season.
I’ll break down Soul soon because I think it is one of the most valuable pieces of art I’ve seen but I think Cobra Kai is altogether more timely.
Do you need to watch the Karate Kid in order to enjoy Cobra Kai? I would say yes but it isn’t absolutely necessary. The show does rely on you kind of knowing who the characters are and having something of a passing familiarity with the fandom. In fairness I can’t quite believe I’m begging people to watch a childhood movie that was more of a cult favorite than something that was actually good.
Martial arts were a big deal in the ‘80s. Everyone from Generation X remembers a strip mall somewhere with some flavor of martial arts in it. When I was a kid I took taekwondo, as it was the only class around but other kids in bigger cities had other options such as Karate, Jiu Jitsu and Kung-fu. Regardless of the flavor you picked we all took it for the same reasons—self-defense and to “toughen up.” We knew that life was a struggle – you could and would get beat up physically and perhaps mentally – and we had to endure it.
It’s hard to explain the 80s, but Cobra Kai captures what it was like beautifully, but through perspective of someone today. In order to understand what’s happening in the world around you, sometimes you need to understand the lived experiences of the generation before.
My generation is called “Generation X” or what we joke is the “forgotten generation.” We are often overlooked between boomers and millennials, but culturally we were and indeed are incredibly important. Our music, fashion and culture plays out everywhere around you today, yet we seldom talked about.
Our parents, the Boomers, often didn't know what to do with us, so we roamed free, often with very little oversight. We were taught to be tough and resilient. We didn’t need “safe spaces”. We often solved our problems ourselves without any parental intervention. Having your parents involved was beyond embarrassing, so we avoided it at all costs. Today we have parents helping their kids apply for jobs or even attending their child’s university entrance interviews. That was not Generation X’s experience. We latch key kids didn’t have helicopter parents; we were lucky if our parents were in the same zip code.
We’ve gone from free range kids to surveillance parenting in two generations, and we believe that coddling kids has long term devastating consequences. This is what Cobra Kai is about but it is also about something much more profound and deep, which I’ll explore each theme in my next few posts.
What does a fatherless family do to children?
When you don’t have a father, who do your father figures become?
When you coddle children, how do they figure out who they are?
How do cycles of abuse play out through generations?
What happens when you cherry pick what you think is “good” about what you’ve been taught but don’t question all of it? (You must question people who claim mastery.)
What happens if you don’t learn empathy and compassion?
Most importantly, what happens if you don’t learn how to forgive?
What can we learn from the generations before us? Why should we not condemn them?
Yes, I know it may sound crazy but Cobra Kai covers all of this and more. The question I’d like to ask you, is are you Cobra Kai or Miyagi-Do? The question isn’t easy to answer. Watch episode one and see where you land on that question.
In my next post I’ll deconstruct Season 1: episode 1. If this isn’t for you, worry not, I’ll move on to something else once I’m done with this. If nothing else you can glimpse how I think about the world and how I break things down. For many of you, your only exposure to me is on Twitter, which is a micro-blogging platform. It’s too easy to appear small on a micro-blogging site.
Those tiny snippets of information informed usually by lots of thinking or no thinking at all, so they don’t represent people really and totally. Twitter forces us to think in moments and therefore, has perverse incentives both for the consumer and the producer.
We try to write catchy slugs but unfortunately a lot is lost with it. We don’t understand how someone came to the conclusion they did and they don’t want to write back lots of limited catchy things back to you, so you’ll see people eventually give up. I’ve decided to move 100% long-form within the next few years.
I believe micro-blogging isn’t good for our world. At the time it seemed as if it would be, but unfortunately I think long-term it is not. In order to find world peace we need to understand nuance and we need to walk a mile in each other’s shoes. There’s no time or space for that on Twitter.
Empathy is essential for everything worth doing.
I've been having a deep feeling of something is not going quite right with twitter, you articulated it perfectly, looking forward to more of your long form content!
Cobra kai is campy and wonderful.