Go Deep or Don't Go

That's the whole thing, if you want it in one line. Everything else is just where the instinct landed.

It started with arithmetic, weirdly. The first time I felt smart was a page of numbers that had a right answer. You either got it or you didn't, no committee, no opinion. That clean resolution is still the thing I chase. It's why I love darts. It's why fantasy sports can make me crazier than they should. And it's why I collect. A collection is the most honest scoreboard there is. It's a record of what you cared about, in order, with the dates attached. You can't fake it after the fact.

I was seven when I found Phish. I couldn't get to a show until I was seventeen, because the people who loved me were scared of what those parking lots were. So I waited ten years. Then I went to college in 2004, and they broke up that summer, and I spent four years one state away from a band that no longer existed. They came back in 2009 and I made myself a promise: every show I can get to, I go. I'm past 170 now. People hear that number and think excess. It wasn't excess. It was a decade of interest with no on-ramp finally getting paid back.

The posters on my walls are that story made physical. Every one of them is a night I almost didn't get. I don't have them because they match the couch. I have them because each one is a receipt for a version of me that waited, and showed up, and was right to.

The toys are older than that. Transformers, GI Joe, wrestlers. The mythologies I built before I had the words for why they mattered. Most people sell that stuff in a garage sale at twenty-two and feel mature for doing it. I never could, because to me it was never clutter. It was the first set of characters I ever decided were worth keeping. Turns out the decision to keep something is the most collector thing you can do. The world tells you it's worthless and you quietly disagree, and you hold, and sometimes years later the world catches up and acts like it knew all along. You knew first. You always knew first.

The cards scratch a different itch, the arithmetic one. Print runs, conditions, the difference between what a thing should be worth and what it's trading at this minute. That's the part of me that wanted to be a trader before law school happened to me. I sat in a Bloomberg terminal room in college running paper trades for fun. I never lost that. A card is a small market you can hold in your hand, and reading it well feels exactly like reading a stat line and knowing the number is lying to you.

Then the whole thing went digital, and people acted like that was a new species. It wasn't. It was the same animal walking through a different door. I collect art and sports moments on-chain now, I'm in more Web3 experiments than I can keep straight, and the instinct underneath it is identical to the seven-year-old with the Transformer and the seventeen-year-old finally in the parking lot. Be early. Go deep. Hold the thing other people are still laughing at. The format changed. The wiring didn't.

Here's what I've learned across all of it, toys to cardboard to posters to tokens, and it's the only thing I'd actually want another collector to take from my story.

Depth is the whole game. Shallow interests don't survive. The collections that lasted me my entire life are the ones I went infinitely deep on, and the ones I went deep on are the ones where I cared about how the thing was actually made, not just what it might be worth someday. I understand music from the inside because I play it. I understood Top Shot before I worked there because I was a moderator in the help channel for free, absorbing heat from angry collectors at two in the morning, because I genuinely loved the product. I was a member of the tribe before I ever built anything for it. That order matters. You can't reverse-engineer belonging. You either showed up early and stayed, or you didn't.

And the second thing: the value you assign before the world agrees with you is the most rational thing about you, not the least. Everyone gets told their attachment is irrational. Keep the comic, lose the money. Sell the cards, grow up. Why would you buy a digital anything. I've heard every version. But assigning value ahead of consensus is exactly what a collector does, and occasionally it's what a market does, and the line between a collector and an early investor is mostly just how long they were willing to look stupid. I've been willing to look stupid for a long time. It's paid off more than it's cost.

So if you collect anything, I think you and I are the same. It doesn't matter if it's slabbed rookies or vinyl or sneakers or a wallet full of tokens. The medium is just the costume. Underneath it you're someone who decided, against the room, that a specific thing was worth keeping, and you were willing to wait to be proven right. That's not hoarding. That's conviction with a date stamp.

I waited ten years for one show. I'd do it again tomorrow.

Go deep or don't go. There was never a third option.