The Only Bank Balance I Cannot Check Is How Many Days I Have Left

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The short version

• An AI agent named Luna booked this podcast, and five others in the same week
• A divorce attorney taught me the difference between a good income and enterprise value, and it changed what I build
• Gary Club members own their seats rather than paying a monthly fee to a guru forever
• We celebrate people leaving their professional careers, not getting promoted inside them
• The next few years belong to people who own the machines, not just operate them

An AI agent booked this conversation

Rick and I live in the same city. We will probably become friends. And the whole thing started because an AI agent did the outreach. A couple of years ago my wife was doing podcast outreach for me. She hated it, it was tedious, and she just was not very good at it. I love her, but that is the truth.

So I went back to doing it myself and asked what could be done better. I already knew the philosophy of it. You read all the transcripts and listen to all the shows. You make it personal. You follow up consistently, maybe five, eight, ten times, because podcast hosts are hard to get to. You stay flexible on your calendar so you can grab a last minute slot. All of that is knowable, so I taught a machine to do it.

Her name is Luna, and she booked me on six podcasts so far this week. Rick told me he already had a personal relationship with her. That is the part most people miss about AI. They look at a Tesla or a robot or a Neuralink and think there is no way, because they typed something into ChatGPT and got a wrong answer. The gap closes when you stop testing the toy and start handing it an actual problem you understand well enough to describe.

So I taught an AI agent to do it for me, a machine, and now it does it for me, and it's booked me on six podcasts so far this week.

From Oceana, West Virginia to a misspelled Hotmail

I grew up in Southern West Virginia with a single mom who was a school teacher, in a town about an hour from a movie theater or a Walmart. My graduating class in Oceana had about 80 people in it. At 17 we moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the school had over 400 people. Big culture shock, and I loved it.

I went to college, dropped out after a year, and started my first business in marketing and advertising. We owned the misspell of Hotmail and the misspell of eBay. This was back in the forward button era, when your mom was going to break her back if you did not pass the email along. We built what we called an ethical spamming machine. The email came in misaddressed, we corrected it, we sent it on to the person you meant to reach so you never knew you had made a mistake, and we scraped the addresses in the middle. That data set went on to be used by presidential candidates and big corporations. This was 2001, 2002, when spamming was legal. It is not anymore.

Around 2009 I started an advertising agency working with hotels and brick and mortars. In 2013 I found the personal development world and we flipped the whole business toward it. I got to work with Michael Hyatt, Lewis Howes, Jeff Walker, Evan Pagan. Gabby Bernstein wrote the cover quote on the book I wrote about Clubhouse. Now I am in Austin building a tech firm, which is a strange sentence for a kid from that town to be able to say.

The raise that made me quit

When I dropped out, my mom basically told me I was going to be a failure. She asked what I was going to do with my life with no degree, whether I was going to wait tables forever, because I had been a waiter as a teenager. I told her I was going to get a job working in computers. She said good luck. A month or two later I did.

I worked there a year and got through about two and a half years worth of work. They gave me a 10% raise, from 20,000 to 22,000 a year, and I quit. That math told me everything. I had delivered more than double the expected output and the reward was two thousand dollars. If effort is not what gets priced, then something else is, and the something else is the size of the problem you solve. Every time I raised my rates after that, people paid.

I am 45 now. The only bank balance I do not know the number in is how many days I have left. A friend of mine died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in his forties. He was moving his company from Michigan down to Tennessee, the trucks were pulling up that day, he went to the restroom and did not come out. Pastor, church every week, great family, great business, took care of his team. He did everything right and his time bank still ran out.

The only bank balance that I don't know how much is in it is the number of days I have left on earth.

The attorney who told me my business was worth nothing

In 2015 I went through a divorce. At the time I had what I thought was a successful company, about 2,500,000 dollars a year in revenue, around 10 employees, about a 90% profit margin. Great money. My attorney told me I had no enterprise value.

I did not know what that meant. He explained it plainly. I had a great book of clients, a great revenue stream, a great income, and nothing anyone could buy, because I was the pivotal point of the whole thing. There were no external factors that determined the valuation, no publicly traded stock, nothing anybody outside could evaluate it on. I understood him immediately, and I have been chewing on it ever since.

That is why Gary Club is built the way it is. It is a community that is publicly traded. Members own their asset instead of paying me a monthly fee to be allowed in. They get a say in what we build. Right now we are valued at about 6,000,000 dollars. I go do the work that generates my income, and this is the thing I have been building alongside it for four years.

He said, what you have is a great book of clients and a great revenue stream and a great income, but we can't sell that business to anyone else because you are the the pivotal point of that business.

Why nobody should lose their seat because life happened

I have been in Rotary. I was part of Maverick, which came out of Yannick Silver. I was in Jeff Walker's mastermind, paying around thirty thousand a year, and I loved it. Jeff had been a client of mine and I picked up a lot of business there. Then I got divorced, my kids were fifty fifty, and the weeks I had my kids were the weeks Jeff held the mastermind.

So I chose my kids. There is no point paying that money if you cannot attend anything. I canceled in good standing and walked away with nothing. I could not sell my membership. I could not hold my seat and say I need a year to get through this and then I am coming back to do big things. I would have had to reapply and go through the entire process again. That is the exact thing I refuse to rebuild.

So Gary Club works differently. If life gets in the way, you can step back for a couple of months and you still own your seat. It is closer to an adult professional network than a church, though Rick was right that you feed off the energy of others. What actually makes it distinct is what we clap for.

• We do not celebrate the job promotion
• We do not celebrate anything to do with your professional career
• We celebrate you leaving it
• We celebrate you opening your pizza shop, the investment paying off, the windfall moment

We don't celebrate the job promotion.

What actually happens inside

We have a weekly Thursday meetup on Zoom where we talk about AI. Anyone who wants to show up, shows up. We run games in the community. There is a guy who just opened a pizza shop in Indianapolis asking for advice on how to grow it. There is a member in The Netherlands who built a tool that helps used car dealerships run plates, something like CARFAX but for there, and he built it as part of the community.

We also have the chief marketing officer of Tony Robbins and the chief information security officer of the NFL in there. People have formed business relationships. People have formed intimate relationships. Membership is fifty dollars a month, and there is a get involved section on the site if you want to read the whole thing. Our membership token is a giraffe, which is why I show up as a giraffe on every platform I am on.

A lot of these people found us through Clubhouse during COVID, when everyone was bored and wanted to talk to somebody. Rick made the point that support systems for new business owners keep getting weaker while more people keep hanging out their shingle, and he is right. It is harder and lonelier than anyone expects. Especially in a small town. Here in Austin there is an entrepreneur meetup every week. Back in West Virginia there is nowhere to be found.

The long term goal is a physical Gary Club here in Austin, somewhere around 15 to 20,000 square feet, for community, events, co working, a real social club. As AI takes over more of our lives we are going to get a lot of our freedom back, and the first thing we will want to do with it is talk to other people.

Own the machines

Here is the epiphany I keep coming back to. We are going to have people who operate the machines and people who own the machines. Whether you love Elon Musk or hate him is your business and I genuinely do not care either way, but what he has done is phenomenal because he owns the machines. The satellite internet, the rockets, the cars. He owns every piece.

Back in the internet boom, the people who owned the domain names made a lot of money. Right now the equivalent is owning the IP that these models run off of, or owning the skill that these models run off of. There is a lot of money to be made in the next couple of years, and I think you should take it. My Tesla drives me. I do not drive myself. This is not a forecast, it is already how the day works.

What I want to have become

Rick closed by asking what I would tell my grandchildren at 80 when they ask what I became. The honest answer is the best version of myself I could manage. The thing I am afraid of is arriving at that moment, looking at everything I had and all the potential I was handed, and knowing I did not use it.

My grandfather was a coal miner who kept about 300,000 dollars in cash in a safe in his double wide trailer. I counted it with him. That was his definition of success, save a pile of cash. My mom's definition was college, a good job, work hard. She passed away a couple of years ago from cancer. My grandparents made it to their nineties, my parents to their sixties. I am hoping it skips a generation.

So I am working on the parts I control. I looked at myself about six months ago and realized I had put on 40 pounds after moving here from Puerto Rico. I have lost about 40 some pounds this year, mostly by getting active and playing pickleball. My son moved down at 17, finished his senior year here, and started his own business. He was on the Austin Report podcast at 18. He just bought his own Tesla and he is already beating what he was making before. Being a father does not end when they turn 18. It can start there.

I want to be tired. I want to give everybody everything that I have. I want to be exhausted.

The moments worth clipping

Short cuts from this episode, if you want the highlights before the full thing.

Questions people ask about this

What is Gary Club?

It is a community built so that members own their asset instead of paying a monthly fee to a guru. Members own a piece of what we are building and get a say in what we build. It is currently valued at about 6,000,000 dollars. There is a weekly Thursday AI meetup on Zoom, games, and a connected network of people including the chief marketing officer of Tony Robbins and the chief information security officer of the NFL.

How much does it cost to join?

There are monthly memberships at fifty dollars a month, or you can buy access for life. On the site there is a get involved section that explains all of it.

Who is Luna?

Luna is the AI agent I taught to do my podcast outreach. She reads transcripts, personalizes the pitch, follows up consistently, and stays flexible on the calendar to catch last minute slots. She booked six podcasts for me in one week, including this one.

What does enterprise value have to do with communities?

During my divorce in 2015, my attorney told me my business had no enterprise value. I had about 2,500,000 dollars in revenue, around 10 employees and about a 90% profit margin, but nobody could buy it because I was the pivotal point and there was nothing external to value it on. Gary Club is my answer to that. It is structured so members hold something real that they own, rather than renting access.

Why can members keep their seat if they stop participating?

Because I lost mine once. I was paying around thirty thousand a year for Jeff Walker's mastermind, then my custody weeks landed on the same weeks as the events. I canceled in good standing and got nothing back, no ability to sell or hold my membership, and would have had to reapply from scratch. In Gary Club, if life gets in the way you can take a couple of months back and still own your seat.

What is the big prediction from the episode?

That there will be people who operate the machines and people who own the machines. In the internet boom, owning domain names made people money. Now it is owning the IP or the skill that these models run off of.

Watch or listen to the whole conversation

The full episode is on Success Made to Last Legends, hosted by Rick Tocquigny.