Ugh! The internet today, right?! Aren't you tired of the lack of magic on the internet?

By Mike Reid | April 2026

"Mike, you're got to decide who you want to be: Don Draper, Roger Sterling, or Bert Cooper," a friend implored me back in 2019 — back when the company I'd founded had rapidly grown to over $1 million dollars in revenue in just it's second year (without VC funding) and I was working on a plan to scale to $10+ million in annual revenue.

Don Draper is, of course, the creative but troubled genius in the TV series Mad Men, which aired on AMC from 2007 to 2015 and takes place in the glamorous 1960s world of Madison Avenue advertising.

In the series, Roger Sterling is the suave and charming (but far less creatively inclined) head of business relationships, who spends his professional life wining and dining potential and existing clients.

And Bert Cooper is the eccentric who plays a very minor role in daily affairs — but is quietly running the show behind the scenes.

And I know what you might be thinking right now, which is something like, "Ok Mike, back then you were one of those people sending emails to tens of thousands of people at once, demanding that they donate or else the United States would fall apart, so what, exactly, does that have to do with a Madison Avenue ad agency?"

And the reality is that you're wrong — it was more like hundreds of thousands of people at once. And the reality is also that — just like Don, Roger and Bert — I was in the advertising business.

But in any event, seven years (and one failed company) later, I'd like to answer the question: Don Draper, Roger Sterling, or Bert Cooper?

And my answer is this: None of the above.

Because instead, I'd like to be a combination of J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin — but while avoiding the fatal flaws of each.

(J.K. Rowling, obviously, wrote the Harry Potter books, and George R.R. Martin wrote the books that became the foundation for the HBO series Game of Thrones.)

And ok. I know what you’re probably thinking right now, which is something like: "Yeah....sure, Mike. Fat chance of that happening."

And perhaps you're right.

But you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, do you not?

And if you shoot for the moon, you’ll fall among the stars, right?

But look, I get it. J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin dreamed up, from their imaginations, out of thin air, two of the most magical worlds ever created in the history of magical worlds — at least among the magical worlds dreamed up over the last 50 years.

And isn’t creating magic out of thin air a good goal to aspire to?

"Yes. But Mike, you’re never in a million years, in a billion years, going to write the next Harry Potter or another Game of Thrones. That’s totally and completely outrageous," you might be thinking?

And yes, you’re right.

Because first of all, I’m obviously not going to do all the writing.

AI is, after all, already a faster and better writer than any human in history — and AI's writing talents are only going to improve over time, not get worse, right?

(According to ChatGPT, the seven Harry Potter books total 1,084,170 words. And the books that inspired Game of Thrones total 1,736,054 words. But ChatGPT says it can write 1+ million words of competely typo-free text in just a few hours.)
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And I know what you’re probably thinking: "But that’s slop! AI will NEVER write books as good as Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. All the people who professionally assemble words, letter by letter, the people whose jobs are about to get taken by AI say that AI is slop, and I trust them, because I still believe what I read on the internet."

But obviously we can't trust journalists (or Hollywood creatives, or YouTubers for that matter) regarding AI — because they have every reason not to have spent the last three years learning this powerful new creative technology while it was still in it's infancy.

(Advertisers, on the other hand, have no such creative qualms.)

Second of all, if you don’t think AI is going to improve rapidly, and you have money invested in the stock market right now, you’re about to be totally and completely screwed — because the market (and your 401k) is making a huge bet on AI's rapid improvement.

And third of all, I’m obviously not going to just try to create another Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. Obviously.

THAT would be extremely foolish.

Because here we are and it's the year 2026, and our reality most definitely doesn’t work the way it did in the 2000s, when Harry Potter became the most magical world kids had ever experienced.

And our reality in the year 2026 most definitely doesn’t work the same way it did in the 2010s either, when Game of Thrones became the most magical world that adults had ever experienced.

And — as you've probably noticed — there is a complete and total lack of magic right now in America in the year 2026.

And it seems to me that people are getting extremely desperate for any amount of magic in their lives at all.

I think, to be 100% honest, the bar for magic has never been lower.

Simply watching me attempt to create AI magic and failing could be enough at the very start — because we all love to be a critic, right?

But back to the fatal flaws that doomed J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin, because my goal is to create more magic than both of them combined while avoiding the pitfalls that each experienced.

So let's examine each creator's fatal flaw.

And let’s start with J.K. Rowling.
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And no, I don’t think that participating in the debate regarding the thing nobody wants to talk about anymore but rhymes with “fender bronouns” was the biggest mistake J.K. Rowling made, by the way.

I think her biggest mistake was that J.K. Rowling created a magical world that very much mirrored the seven-year misery of American middle school and high school, except J.K. made it infinitely better, with Every Flavor Beans instead of regular jelly beans, Quidditch instead of dodgeball, and potions class instead of chemistry.

But then, the best that J.K. Rowling could then do to create a real-life Hogwarts was to build an amusement park in Orlando, Florida.

Because, in fact, you cannot truly bring the magical world of Harry Potter to life in our current 3D reality.

That sad truth, is the #1 biggest disappointment of Harry Potter.

So the lesson we must learn from J.K. Rowling is this: If you’re going to go to the trouble of dreaming up a magical world — a world that is a lot like reality but vastly better — don’t dream up a reality that you can't actually bring to life in the 3D reality that your fans live in.

Because ultimately, you will disappoint many millions of people.

But when it comes to pouring years of creative work and your entire creative self into imagining a reality where magic exists, George R.R. Martin’s fatal flaw is totally and completely different from J.K. Rowling’s tragic mistake.

Because George R.R. created a world that none of us would actually want to step into, truly — obviously — because of just how fucked up things were in the world of Westeros and Essos and beyond.

And actually, the extremely fucked-up nature of what George R.R. imagined is exactly the appeal of the entire thing. And George R.R. Martin got to be the genius behind all of it, the creative weirdo, the guy who imagined in his head nearly every fucked-up scene you’ll find in Seasons 1–4 of Game of Thrones.

That was what made Seasons 1-4 of Game of Thrones so good.

Because the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were able to pull from a massive amount of world-building and narrative to distill into each episode of the first four seasons of the TV show.

And meanwhile, George R.R. Martin basically got a pass for being the guy who'd imagined all that crazy shit in the first place — so for a while, it was actually heaven on earth being George R.R. Martin.

But George R.R.’s fatal flaw was that he couldn’t finish the story.

It's not even that George R.R. couldn't finish the story fast enough.

The sad truth is that it's now been seven years since the last episode of Season 8 aired in 2019, and George R.R. has not published a book extending the Game of Thrones story since 2011 — now 15 years ago.

And although the showrunners, David and D.B., got most of the blame for the profound disappointment that Game of Thrones fans felt upon it's conclusion, it was George R.R. who spent 20 years of his life writing 1.7 million words, creating an extremely intricate world, only to have his life's work competely fall apart in the end.

Because what Game of Thrones is now known for is not the success of the first four seasons. Game of Thrones is now known for getting progressively worse in Seasons 5-8 — as the showrunners ran out of books to base the TV episodes on — culmulating in an ending to the show that most fans found truly devastating.

Yes, George R.R. Martin dreamed up a magical world.

But then, he couldn’t finish what he started. And now his fans are extremely disappointed and angry about his creative masterpiece.

How terrible it must be to be George R.R. Martin, don't you think?

Honestly, I think it's probably worse than being J.K. Rowling.

So, to summarize: Yes, I’m all in on magic.

I’m all for dreaming up realities that are vastly better, magically better, than what we're experiencing right now — especially on the internet — because right now our digital platforms paint a picture that is bleak beyond belief, bleaker than Harry Potter’s life was at Four Privet Drive, under the cupboard, before he met Hagrid for the first time, before he visited Diagon Alley for the first time, before he got his wand, before he ran through a brick wall at Platform 9 3/4, before he met Dumbledore, etc etc etc.

And look, the reality is that the internet is merely a combination of words, images, videos, and formatting — with everything sitting inside invisible boxes — and that's all just fine.

The problem — and we all know it — is the algorithms.

Because algorithms select what you see on X, the Instagram posts that show up in your feed, the YouTube videos that appear on your uniquely curated version of their homepage — and they now also choose the headlines of the New York Times.

In the year 2026, it’s easier than it’s ever been to create your own plot of digital land — and you certainly don’t need to know HTML to update your site — and yet nearly every creator is pouring their creative energy into performing for algorithms on rented land.

And every seems downright miserable, to be honest.

So why not curate your own plot of digital land — a space that is 100% free of the algorithms that we all now know stifle creativity?

That's right — now it only takes three days of focused deep work to create a brand new website, your very own plot of digital land.

And the reason we can do this in just three days is that we're not going to finish the project — we're not going to write the ending to the story like George R.R. Martin promised (but then failed) to do.

Our focus need only be on building a new foundation — and that starts with creating a brand new storyline — because humans and AI can color in the details from there, and because the content of your new website should evolve frequently over time anyway.

But there's more thing that's crucial here, because we all know that our lives have gotten far too digital these days.

So let's not just put things on the internet that only exist digitally.

Let's create digital realities that we can then actually build in our current 3D reality. (Because who wants to repeat the same mistakes that J.K. Rowling made, right?)

Here's what I propose:

First, let's imagine new realities that are vastly better than anything that has ever existed before.
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Then, let's share those new magically possibilties publicly via digital blueprints (aka, websites).

And then let's actually build what we've dreamed up in the physical 3D world — because our 3D reality is full of vastly more possibilities for magic than what exists purely in digital form.

Wouldn't that actually be magical? To read about something on the internet, something unfathomably better than anything up to this point in your life — and then to actually build that thing in real life?

And isn’t some magic — some real-life magic, some magic that you can actually experience IRL — isn’t that what you, what everyone in America, is so goddamn desperate for right now?

And of course, you can’t spell magic without AI — now can you?