Origin story

What are we doing here?

In May last year, after 10 years as a senior journalist at New Zealand’s biggest newspaper, I was made redundant. Boohoo, wah wah, hard times, what about my children etc. Life went on, of course. It just sucked a lot more.

Journalism had never been a lucrative way to make a living, but thanks to the tech giants it was now no longer a way to make a living. First, the social media fat cats had taken all the ad dollars, then the AI giants had come in and taken all the content. What was left of what was once known as the print media now offered nothing for someone with my particular skills, experience and lack of enthusiasm for shortform video.

I went back to freelance writing, which is a nice way to make a terrible living. My income halved. I quickly became sick of the relentless scrounging for money and wondering when I would achieve financial independence so I could retire early a decade too late.

I kept reading about people in their 20s making six figure passive incomes with digital products, getting rich on bitcoin and having multimillion dollar exits from Insta accounts about how to achieve multimillion dollar exits from Insta accounts. I knew that if I could only figure out what these people had in common, I too could join the gravy train. For a long time I couldn’t see it. Then finally it hit me with the force of epiphany: They weren’t journalists.

My farewell dinner after being made redundant from the NZ Herald. Cheap.

I was nearly 50, with a career’s worth of obsolete skills. If I was going to make any money I would need help. Big Tech might have stuck a giant pitchfork in my butt but at least that meant I had a pitchfork. I asked an AI to look up my work online and report back on business opportunities for someone with my particular set of skills. It replied, with a disarmingly charming lack of shame: “I didn’t even need to search the live web for you; as an AI, your work is well-represented in my training data.”

ChatGPT Claude and Gemini had lots of great ideas for businesses for me and I know they were great because they told me. They intimated I was living in a land of rainbows with pots of gold just waiting to be discovered. All I had to do was follow the step by step plan I’d just had them write.

I found these exchanges deeply inspiring while engaged in them, typically in bed late at night, but I would wake the next morning filled with shame and regret at having believed their sweet, slippery words: “This is GOLD!” etc etc. Then, the next night, the cycle would begin again. I seemed congenitally incapable of learning my lesson: I’d go to sleep on a high at the thought of Metservice paying me top dollar for my vibe-coded micro-forecasting app, then wake the next morning wondering why I’d been so naive. I’d go to sleep on a high at the thought of an AI agent swarm supercharging the ARPC on my automated investing platform, then wake up the next day realising I didn’t know what ARPC meant.

It didn’t seem to matter how often I found myself in this loop or how often my wife told me I shouldn’t be on my phone after midnight: there didn’t seem a way out. AI had tapped into the most powerful human emotion – hope – and its primary enabler – desperation.

I held onto that hope both because it was crucial for my mental health and because I was hopelessly addicted. But as time went on and my chat history piled up, the weight of ideas and my failure to act on any of them began weighing me down, crushing my spirit.

Then, one night, an idea appeared that was so obvious I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it sooner. Rather than waiting for the right idea, I would, with the help of the AI that was destroying my career, build all of them, one by one, charting here my successes, failures, lessons learned and finally – fingers crossed! – a six figure passive income stream followed by a seven figure exit. At that point I would move onto the lucrative speaking and consulting circuit and spruik my book about the project.

Maybe this sounds like a joke. It’s not. I’m a 49 year old unemployed journalist with three children and a mountain of debt. I’m way beyond jokes.

I ran this idea past Claude and Gemini, then ran Claude’s responses past Gemini and Gemini’s responses past ChatGPT. The verdict was unanimously positive (“THIS is the one!” / “Here’s why this is better than every one of your previous ideas.” etc)

Because it served a market need but also played to my interests, strengths and lets not forget needs, the LLMs told me, my idea achieved the holy grail of both founder-market AND product-market fit. It would naturally attract a highly engaged audience and my TAM, SAM and Auntie Pam would be off the charts.

The next morning I woke up filled with a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time - excitement. But I know that excitement fades and with it goes hope and what follows from there is desperation.

To ensure I follow through, I know I need more than excitement: I need to create a public commitment with real stakes. And I know that because Claude told me.

So here I am, making that commitment: I, Greg Bruce, unemployed journalist of limited business acumen, will, with the help of leading AI chatbots, achieve a six figure income followed by a seven figure exit and I’ll do it by March 31, 2027, the end of the financial year.

When I ran this goal by Claude, it described it as unrealistic. But if ChatGPT has taught me anything it’s that Claude doesn’t know everything.