There's a bit in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (written in 1979) where the heroes come upon an intergalactic flight has been grounded for thousands of years.
Its automated systems told it not to launch until it was fully stocked up with lemon-soaked paper napkins, for the comfort of its passengers. But the surrounding civilization collapsed, and the napkins never arrived.
Consequently it put all the passengers into hibernation (waking them once every few hundred years for coffee and biscuits) until such time as another civilization might arise, and restock its lemon-soaked paper napkins.
The Guide is a more accurate and prophetic account of modernity than most Very Serious Science Fiction writers could dream of creating.
Logan Paul bought a Pikachu card in 2021 for $5.27 million. He sold it last February for $16.49 million. That's an $11 million profit on a piece of cardboard smaller than your phone.
Only 39 copies of that specific Pikachu were ever made, handed out at a 1998 Japanese drawing contest. Out of those 39, exactly one is in perfect condition. Logan Paul owned it. Now a venture capitalist named AJ Scaramucci does.
The pandemic explains a lot of this. Before 2019, the Pokemon Company was printing about 1.5 to 2 billion cards a year. In the year ending March 2024, they printed 11.9 billion. Of every Pokemon card ever made since 1996 (75 billion in total), almost 60% have been printed just since 2020. Adults stuck at home dug up their childhood binders and started buying again.
The classic example is the holographic Charizard from the original 1999 set. In 2019 a perfect copy was worth around $20,000. The pandemic hit, the price went vertical, and by late 2020 the same card was changing hands at $295,000. One sold for almost $400,000 in March 2021. Today they trade around $550,000. Only 124 perfect copies exist on the planet. Stack them up and that's $68 million worth of cardboard, more than the entire annual GDP of Tuvalu.
The reason this market works is grading. A company called PSA scores cards from 1 to 10 based on condition, and the 10s are what get the crazy money. PSA scored 15.34 million cards in 2024 alone. Once every card has a trusted condition score and a public sale history, the whole hobby starts working like a stock market. Buyers know what each card has sold for. Sellers know exactly how many copies exist at every grade.
Pokemon is also the highest-grossing entertainment franchise in human history, ahead of Star Wars, Hello Kitty, and Mickey Mouse in lifetime revenue. Last year alone, the Pokemon Company brought in $12 billion. Lifetime retail sales sit around $103 billion.
The demand keeps climbing. Walmart's trading card sales tripled between 2024 and 2025, and Pokemon specifically grew tenfold. Target was up almost 70%.
So a $140,000 Pokemon card stash for an Audi R8 sounds wild on the surface. Then you remember that one card just sold for $16.49 million, 124 perfect Charizards are worth more than a small country, and Pokemon now prints more cards every year than there are humans on Earth.
after spending all my teenage years in rebellion against everything that my parents told me, i now find myself paradoxically agreeing with almost everything i grew up rejecting
- yes, i should know how to cook. no, not for a man
- i go to sleep early, wake up early, voluntarily?!
- exercise is good for you (insane)
- junk food is bad for you (insane)
- i don’t drink or smoke, terrible use of my free will
- spending money ≠ happiness (sucks)
- i actually don’t like most men now, in spite of being boy crazy from 13-19
- i probably do want to get married, that too by 27, after years of arguing that i won’t get married & if i do it won’t be before 30
& so many more
crazy how ultimately you realise that some social constructs exist for a reason & maybe the narrative around them is wrong but the message is pretty sound
thinking about what the internet was like when justin bieber uploaded that first cover. youtube was three years old. twitter was two. instagram didn’t exist yet. tiktok wouldn’t exist for another decade. there were no “creators.” there was no creator economy. there was no algorithm feeding you a personalized slurry of content engineered to keep you scrolling for eleven more seconds. there was jus a website where people put videos, and sometimes those videos reached everyone and changed the creators life. this performance is a memorial for the internet we lost.
14 year old kid in my neighborhood came by my house.
Very sharp. Polite, “Yes Sir” and “No Sir”. Business card and everything.
Offered to power wash, soap, and clean out my garbage cans.
$25/can.
I said, sure. Why not. They’re gross. I’ve got 2, so gave him $50.
I asked how many houses he did in our neighborhood.
“All of them. About 60.”
And how often do you do them?
“I try to do quarterly.”
$3000 a quarter for a freshman.
Of course…he also does power washing, snow shoveling, window cleaning, all of the above.
Building a mailing list and referrals. Said he’s recruited two friends to help him do the work.
Savvy kid. Going to do well in this world.
GTA 6 is about to create more millionaires than most startups.
If you're locked in on release, you could change your life in a month.
Some ideas:
1. AI-powered RP servers: Use Claude to write entire storylines - characters, missions, gang lore, fake businesses, police scanners, side quests. One person can build what used to take a 20-person writing team. charge server access at $10-20/mo. 10k players = life-changing money.
2. UGC content factory: GTA 6 clips already go viral. Now use AI video tools to mass-produce cinematic shorts from your gameplay. Use Claude + Remotion to script and auto-edit. Post 10x what everyone else can. Own the GTA content niche on TikTok and YouTube before anyone else figures it out.
3. In-game AI NPCs (once PC is live): ElevenLabs voice cloning + Claude = NPCs that actually talk back. Build interactive shop owners, taxi dispatchers, gang leaders with real conversations. License your NPC packs to server owners.
4. Build the picks and shovels: Don't play the game. Sell tools to the people who do. Asset packs, logo generators, lore templates, server management dashboards. Use AI to build them fast, sell them on marketplaces, or direct to server owners.
5. AI coaching/strategy content: Use AI to analyse GTA 6 meta - best money methods, fastest missions, optimal builds. Be the first creator posting data-driven guides instead of vibes. Search demand will be insane at launch.
Being a gamer since the 90s and seeing how companies execute 10 year plans; here's how i speculate this will go:
Step 1: Over Price games.
Step 2: Make Digital games artificially cheaper. (We are here)
Step 3: Get majority users to buy digital.
Step 4: Abandon physical next generation since majority audience has been conditioned to purchase digitally. Expect cope comments like
"Who needed physical anyway? Digital has been the cheaper option for awhile now"
Step 5: Over Price Digital games.
Step 6: Check Mate. You no longer have a free market to trade or buy or sell preowned games. And now the market value of video games is 100% in the hands on the corporations.
Younger people wont even question it. It'll be a culture ingrained in their childhoods.
Warner Bros. spent $1.2 billion to make all eight Harry Potter films. The new TV series reportedly costs $100 million per episode, which would make it the most expensive TV show ever produced. Amazon’s Rings of Power cost $58 million per episode. House of the Dragon, $20 million. Game of Thrones started at $6 million.
HBO has planned seven seasons, one for each book, eight episodes per season. That’s 56 episodes. If the per-episode budget holds, the total production cost lands around $5.6 billion. Nearly 5x what all eight original films cost to make, and roughly three-quarters of what the entire franchise has earned at the box office ($7.7 billion) across 25 years.
Three weeks ago, Paramount Skydance signed a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $31 per share, valuing the company at $110 billion including debt. Netflix was bidding too but walked away in late February. Harry Potter sits next to Game of Thrones and the DC Universe as one of the most valuable assets in that deal.
WBD has about 132 million Max subscribers today and is projecting 150 million by December. The original films returned almost 7x their production budget at the box office. Generating that kind of return through monthly streaming subscriptions requires a completely different scale of audience, sustained over a decade.
They’re reportedly building a “mini city” in the UK specifically for filming, with a price tag around $1.3 billion. A school is being constructed on-site for the child actors. Hans Zimmer is scoring the series. Over 30,000 kids auditioned for three roles.
The average Harry Potter film cost $144 million to produce. A single episode of the new series reportedly costs $100 million. Warner Bros. is betting over $5 billion that a streaming franchise can match what a theatrical one did.
I don’t want any LLM running random applications on my computer, navigating my browser, or touching my spreadsheets. I don’t trust them to do the right thing all the time - and nobody doing serious work should.
Sandboxed, with a controlled blast radius, fine. Full control over anything you can’t afford to lose? Never.
I recently interviewed a junior in college. They started a takehome in Cursor, ran out of tokens, moved to Codex free tier, then put $20 into Claude Code to finish.
I’ve also interviewed data scientists who haven’t touched any of these tools because their company hasn’t procured them.
I can definitely tell you who I'm more excited to work with.
For that matter, imagine we aren’t getting another anime that’s as good, if not better than, one piece. I hope yall realize that there are other works of fiction out there. In manga alone there are thousands of stories waiting to be adapted but we’re doing one piece AGAIN.
Imagine, for a moment, that big studios stopped rehashing things that already exist in a different medium and actually fund new artistic endeavours.
Imagine we aren’t getting the next breaking bad because we’re doing one piece AGAIN (looking at you anime remake)
I hate that I'm saying this, and I know there are things that could have been better in the show but...
Guys, Netflix is cooking with this show
I would be incredibly delighted to watch 12 seasons of this live-action and follow along the journey of the cast over the next 15-20 years building it
I genuinely think this could end up being one of the greatest shows of all time. I know it's not the anime! But if you go into it expecting the anime, you'll be disappointed. Go in expecting a slightly different interpretation and appreciate it for what it is, and I think you really will have a lot of fun—this show is bordering on once-in-a-lifetime in my opinion