Welcome to Creator Capitalist Conversations, a series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different. Our new book, Creator Capitalist, is available now. Get your copy here.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Dr. Eric Hanson knows how to get the Pentagon to write a check. He has done it, to the tune of more than $300 million, for other people’s companies.

Seventeen years as an Air Force physician and senior flight surgeon. 750 hours in 36 aircraft. Dual board certified in aerospace and preventative medicine. Call sign “Genes”. (Which tracks, because he also has an MPH in epidemiology with a genetics concentration from Johns Hopkins on top of his MD.)

He ran a 15 million dollar DARPA-funded bioterrorism surveillance project in Washington, D.C., right after the anthrax attacks. He became the Air Force chair of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program, a 1.27 billion dollar program in fiscal year 26. He’s founded five companies. Published five books, 25 articles, and holds nine patents.

And somewhere in there he decided he wasn’t done serving.

So he started MilMed Connect, a Techstars portfolio company, to do one thing most founders don’t even know is possible:

Help life science CEOs raise money from the U.S. government without giving up a single point of equity.

Over 300 million dollars of it, to date.

The Pentagon deploys more than $40 billion a year in research funding. The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program alone is $1.27 billion. That’s a bigger annual deployment than most VC funds have under management. And it doesn’t cost you equity.

The Department of Defense doesn’t want your cap table. It wants dual-use technology, products that work in both civilian and military settings. Smaller. Lighter. Cheaper. Lower-power. AI-assisted.

The military calls it C-SWaP: Cost, Size, Weight, and Power.

One of Eric’s clients, a biotech CEO working on host-targeted antivirals, raised $50M in private capital and $60M in non-dilutive DoD funding. One started at $11M and bumped to $24M, then $36M, then $50M without having to recompete. The Navy awarded one of Eric’s dental AI contracts in exactly 90 days from pencil-to-paper.

Try getting a VC to move that fast.

The military is the greatest Superconsumer on Earth.

If you’ve read our work, you know what a superconsumer is: the highest-intensity user in a category, the one whose demands pull the entire product forward.

Superconsumers force innovation. They don’t settle for average. They pay a premium for the extreme version.

The U.S. military might be the ultimate one.

It needs devices that function in the Arctic and the Sahara. It needs batteries that last in theater. It needs medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. It needs prolonged casualty care solutions for war fighters who, as Eric explains in harrowing detail, sometimes have to wait 72 hours or more near the point of injury before they can be evacuated.

And when the military finds a solution that works, it writes a check.

What Eric has done is category design a business around the translation layer. He’s built a firm, a Techstars accelerator arm, and a software product called Navigator, effectively an operating system for dual-use CEOs. He’s trained 50 military medical veterans to work with industry. 25 have started their own companies. He’s got a Curly Bot, a Dr. Eric Bot, and a dual-use triage bot in development.

He named the problem. He framed the problem. He’s claiming the problem.

That’s what a Creator Capitalist looks like in uniform.

The four capitals, fully loaded.

One of the things we love about Eric’s story is that he is running the full Creator Capitalist playbook, whether he planned it that way or not.

Financial capital. Non-dilutive government funding, deployed to founders who would otherwise be stuck on the VC treadmill.

Reputation capital. 17 years in the Air Force, an affiliate professorship at OHSU, a seat as a Uniformed Services University military medical ambassador. The kind of credibility that opens doors inside the Pentagon that nobody else can even knock on.

Relationship capital. A network of 50 trained military medical vets, each with their own networks. DoD program officers he’s worked with for over a decade. CEOs he’s placed inside the most exclusive buying room in the world.

Intellectual capital. The Navigator product. The dual-use triage framework. The C-SWaP lens applied to civilian tech. The books, the patents, the IP.

The reason we wanted Eric on the show isn’t because every listener is going to start raising non-dilutive DoD funding tomorrow.

It’s because Eric is a walking proof point that the Creator Capitalist playbook works in the most bureaucratic, credentialed, gate-kept industry on Earth.

If it works inside the Pentagon, it works in legal tech. It works in real estate. It works in consumer health. It works in whatever industry you’ve been told is “too traditional” or “too regulated” or “too old school” to do something new in.

The playbook doesn’t care about your industry. It cares whether you’re willing to name, frame, and claim a category before anyone else does.

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

* 02:14 – Jack Ryan meets Michael Crichton: Why Eric’s resume reads like a thriller and how the Uniformed Services University path got him through med school without a dime of debt.

* 04:59 – Medical countermeasures, explained: What “dual-use” actually means when the threats are chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear and why COVID blew the doors off Eric’s 5-client model overnight.

* 09:45 – The cap table that isn’t: How a founder raised $50M private and $60M non-dilutive and what the government wants in return that isn’t equity.

* 13:59 – C-SWaP and the super consumer: Eddie’s hearing-aid story and why the military is the most demanding product development partner a founder could ever ask for.

* 18:30 – The 1-in-10 CEO: 1,500 companies evaluated, 300 worked with directly and the one trait that predicts who actually gets funded.

* 23:00 – $40 billion a year: The DoD funding landscape, the Small Business Innovation Research program, and how it stacks up against NIH, Andreessen Horowitz, and every VC fund you’ve heard of.

* 26:27 – DoD vs. VC, side by side: A 90-day Navy contract, million-dollar awards, and what happens when a government program officer is more founder-friendly than your Series A board member.

* 35:45 – Navigator: The operating system Eric is building for dual-use CEOs and the Curly Bot naming moment you’ll have to hear to believe.

* 40:04 – Ukraine as the accidental R&D lab: Why prolonged casualty care changed everything about military medicine and why nothing has been the same since.

* 46:30 – For the 18-year-old considering med school: The advice Eric would give his own kid, including a year in Korea, six months in Hungary, and a week on a paddle wheeler in Brazil studying parasites.

* 49:34 – What the Academy actually did for him: Eric on his Category Design journey from Substack subscriber to Cohort 3.0 graduate to reading the Creator Capitalist book with both of his sons.

To connect with Dr. Eric:

* Follow Dr. Eric on LinkedIn

* Email: [email protected]

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S. — Eric didn’t become a category of one by accident.

He took 17 years of military medical expertise, named the translation gap nobody else was solving for dual-use CEOs, and built an entire category around it. Bots, software, a Techstars accelerator, a trained army of veteran entrepreneurs.

He’s also a Category Design Academy Cohort 3.0 graduate. Which means the frameworks he’s using to scale Navigator and train the next generation of military medical Creator Capitalists are the same ones we teach inside the Academy.

Academy 4.0 applications close in 10 days. The next cohort starts in May.

If Eric’s story resonates, if you’re sitting on a superpower the rest of the world hasn’t named yet, that’s exactly the work the Academy is designed to do.

→ [Learn more about the Academy here.]

→ [Apply here.]

Welcome to Creator Capitalist Conversations, a series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different. Our new book, Creator Capitalist, is available now. Get your copy here.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Most people think there are two kinds of people in the world.

There are the creatives. The artists, the writers, the builders, the visionaries. The ones who make things.

And then there are the capitalists. The business people, the operators, the money minds. The ones who monetize things.

We have been told these are two separate buckets for so long that almost nobody stops to ask whether it is actually true.

It isn’t.

It’s a lie that you have to choose a side. That you are either a creator or a capitalist. That the two cannot live in the same person. Most people fall into this trap without ever realizing it, and it quietly limits everything: how they price their work, how they describe themselves, how much they believe they are allowed to claim.

William Shakespeare co-owned the Globe Theatre. Twelve and a half percent equity, purchased while his contemporaries were getting paid per play. He did not write in isolation hoping posterity would find his genius. He built an enterprise around his work and retired wealthy.

Andy Warhol called his studio the Factory. On purpose. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” he said. He was not being provocative. He was making a precise observation from someone who had dissolved the boundary between creativity and commerce entirely.

Taylor Swift did not just perform. When her masters were sold without her consent, she re-recorded her entire back catalog and turned the act of ownership into a cultural statement that made her Taylor’s Version releases more commercially successful than the originals. She was asleep in a hotel in Buenos Aires. And her thinking was making a difference to millions of people simultaneously.

Different centuries. Same model.

A creator and a capitalist are not opposites sitting on either end of a spectrum. They are the same person operating at full power.

Shakespeare did not stop being an artist when he bought his equity stake. Warhol’s art still created an abundance of feelings when he ran the Factory like a business. Swift did not stop being a musician when she became a mogul.

The myth that they are separate was about control.

Keep the creatives over here focused on creating. Keep the business people over there focused on the money. When you split people in two, they are easier to manage and easier to underpay.

Creator capitalists reject that split entirely.

This week Pirate Christopher sat down with Jessica Miller of the It’s Your Offer podcast to lay this all out from first principles. If you have ever felt the pull of both worlds and been told you had to choose, this is the conversation that names what you have always known.

We keep our best thinking for our Substack.

We do not get promotional here often. But we also know where the real value lives and we would be doing you a disservice if we did not point you toward it. We would not be breaking that rule today if we did not believe this is the most valuable thing we have put out.

If you already see categories everywhere. If you are already doing this work. If you read that and thought yes, that is exactly how I see the world: then it is time to go deeper.

Here is where you go from here.

If you are building toward six figures and you are still finding your superpower, still learning to see your category, still figuring out what only you can offer the world: the Creator Capitalist book and course are where you start. This is the thinking that makes everything else possible.

Get the Creator Capitalist →

If you are already doing six figures and you are ready to stop being compared to people who do not deserve to be in the same sentence as you: the Category Design Academy is where that work gets done.

This is not a course. It is not a coaching program. It is a small, hand-selected room of founders, consultants, and operators who already see the world the way you do and are ready to build with it. Three working sessions a month with Pirate Eddie and Pirate Christopher. A community that does not end when the cohort does. People who will see your category before you can fully articulate it yourself and help you name what is already there.

If you are ready to stop competing and start creating. If you are ready to build something the market has never seen before. If you have been waiting for the room where people think the way you think: this is the only room where that happens.

Jessica felt that pull. She did not hesitate. She enrolled in the 2026 cohort early because she knew she was ready to stop explaining herself and start owning her category. She will be in the room when it begins May 4. If you have been feeling that same pull, that you are ready to stop competing, start creating, and become a category of one: we have the room where that happens.

The investment is $10,000. We hand-select who gets in. Applications close April 27.

Apply to the Category Design Academy →

Not sure which is right for you yet?

Learn more about the Academy →

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

* 00:00 — The contradiction nobody questions: Most people assume creators and capitalists are two different kinds of people. Pirate Christopher explains why that assumption is costing you everything.

* 10:10 — The existing market trap: Pirate Christopher walks through why that is a losing game and what the data from every tech company started between 2000 and 2015 actually reveals.

* 18:40 — Different forces a choice. Better only creates comparison: The most important word in category design is not better. It is different. Italian or sushi is a choice.

* 27:00 — Different is the last moat: AI is making two things that used to define professional value close to free: existing knowledge and the ability to execute against it.

* 35:00 — AI is not your assistant. It is your co-founder: Most people are using AI wrong and you can hear it in the language the vendors use.

* 44:00 — The four capitals flywheel: You have been building intellectual capital, relationship capital, reputation capital, and financial capital your entire career whether you realized it or not.

* 52:00 — The value of your value: A woman with a career’s worth of accomplishment read the Creator Capitalist book and realized she had been letting others teach her to devalue her own value.

* 1:01:00 — The greatest time in history to be alive: Why the people most afraid of AI are having the wrong conversation and what becomes possible when you stop asking what AI will take from you and start asking what you can now create that you never could before.

This is one of the most complete articulations of the creator capitalist philosophy Pirate Christopher has put on record. If you have people in your life who are wrestling with what AI means for their career or their business, this is the episode to send them.

Connect with Jessica:

* Follow her on LinkedIn

* Listen to the It’s Your Offer podcast

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S. — If you have been thinking about the Academy…

You are already doing real work. You are already in the market. You have a point of view the market has not fully caught up to yet. And you have been in enough rooms to know that most rooms are not built for people who think the way you do.

This one is.

A small group. Hand-selected. Three working sessions a month with Pirate Eddie and Pirate Christopher. People who will challenge your thinking, amplify your work, and see your category before you can fully name it yourself. This is the room you have been looking for, applications close April 27.

If you are still building toward six figures and the Creator Capitalist framework is new to you, the book is your next step. The Academy will be here when you are ready.

Apply to the Category Design Academy →

Shelly Rood is Jane Bond.

Captain Shelly is a 16-year Army intelligence officer who spent her career doing one thing: reading situations most people couldn’t see, synthesizing what it meant, and briefing decision-makers on what to do about it.

She was exceptionally good at it.

She was also in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.

Just like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Not the decorated hero walking a linear path. The lovable character who keeps ending up in the middle of someone else’s mess, getting arrested for a riot he was just standing near.

Pirate Shelly was very generous she was with her pain and Career and Life Quakes. She shared how her marriage to a fellow ROTC officer that unraveled into infidelity and abuse. The insecure male superiors who punished her for outperforming them.

So she pivoted. She went to seminary. She became a chaplain. She built a course on moral injury. A community of 154 female veterans with 1,600 conversations in a single year. A bot, called Digital Shelly. A Substack. A second marriage she describes as life-changing.

What Shelly has done, without necessarily using this language until now, is category design her own life. She took a superpower the Army trained her for, named the problem nobody else was solving for female veterans, and built an entirely new category of support around it. A peer intelligence system, where women who’ve been through it brief the women who are currently in it. She named it. She framed it. She’s claiming it.

That is what a Creator Capitalist looks like. The woman veteran narrative has always been handed to someone else to write. Shelly became a category of one and picked up the pen herself.

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

05:05 – Jane Bond and the bunker in South Korea: What a tactical all-source intelligence officer actually does, and why Shelly’s version of the job was cooler than most.

08:18 – The Little Tramp: Why Shelly Rood is Charlie Chaplin’s character, not the decorated straight-line hero, and why that framing is more honest and more useful.

10:21 – Detroit rooftops and the freshman 15: How she ended up in ROTC, a sorority, and the rifle team all at the same time.

15:16 – Institutional betrayal: The sorority incident that made her choose the uniform over the Greek letters.

17:20 – Sharing of partners: Christopher asks her to repeat herself. She does.

22:18 – Ten years and a son: The marriage, the infidelity, the drinking, the divorce. And what it looked like from inside a military community where that behavior was normalized.

31:51 – Accused of forgery. Accused of plagiarism. Failed grenade training: The pattern of being punished for competence, and the five years of hard thinking it took to understand why.

38:56 – The news director who couldn’t finish the phrase: Shelly’s television career, the insecure boss, and Eddie on what it costs to be right versus what it costs to keep your job.

43:10 – Moral injury: The concept that’s only been named in the last decade, why the only path through it is understanding the why, and why Charlie Chaplin’s audience always understands what the Tramp doesn’t.

47:16 – Who takes care of the women: Shelly on the woman veteran narrative, what’s wrong with how it’s currently told, and what she wants to write instead.

To connect with Shelly:

Follow Shelly on LinkedIn

Listen to the Hardcore and At Ease Podcast

Check out Mission Ambition

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S.—Shelly is a living example of what happens when someone takes their lived experience, names the problem only they are positioned to solve, and builds a category around it.

If you’re ready to do the same, the Academy 4.0 is where that work gets done. If you’ve been watching from the sidelines wondering whether the Academy is the right next move for you, Shelly’s story is probably the most honest answer we could give.

→ Learn more about the Academy here.

→ Apply here.

This is a 🏴‍☠️ Founding Members–Only 🏴‍☠️ post. Founding Members get access to the Pirate Eddie Bot to ask category design questions, weekly actionable insights, the full library with 30+ audiobooks, 250+ mini-books, and more. See the Founders Deck here.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Last week, the same day Creator Capitalist launched, Pirate Christopher gave a keynote in San Diego. He built the entire speech around what happens when knowledge and execution become free, and creation becomes the only thing that matters.

He closed with something that won’t leave people’s heads:

“If you connect your different to making the biggest possible difference at scale with AI, you will have a different career. If not, you’ll suffer the fate of a knowledge worker.”

There’s no third option.

He’s given many a monster keynote.

But this was different. Multiple men and women came up to ask if they could just hug him. He clearly struck a chord.

The decades old Knowledge Worker deal is done

For 67 years, the Knowledge Worker deal was simple: acquire valuable knowledge, get paid to apply it. Knowledge is power. Execution is everything.

You were raised on that deal. You were rewarded for it. Promotions, titles, salaries—all of it is designed to keep you applying existing knowledge to existing problems. The system told you that knowing and executing were valuable things. And you believed it, because the paychecks confirmed it.

Creating—the thing every five-year-old does without thinking—got relegated to the margins. To the weekend. To the “when I have time” pile. The thing that used to come naturally became the thing you needed permission for.

Now knowledge is free. Execution is free. And creating—having a point of view, naming a problem nobody else has named, building a framework that didn’t exist before, designing something so different that people reorganize their thinking around it—is the only thing that’s scarce.

The irony is brutal: the thing the system trained out of you is the only thing the market will pay for now.

A five-year-old creates naturally. A fifty-five-year-old has been trained out of it.

Get a few kids together. Give them paper and crayons. Leave the room for 20 minutes.

They’ll draw. They’ll invent. They’ll argue about whose drawing is better. They’ll make up stories about what they drew. They’ll collaborate, compete, and create—without anyone telling them to. Without a framework. Without permission. Without a strategy meeting first.

Every five-year-old is insanely creative. They won’t shut up. They’re full of ideas. They have more curiosity in a single afternoon than most boardrooms generate in a quarter.

So you’d think by the time they’re 55, with decades of experience and knowledge layered on top of that natural creativity, they’d be the most creative people alive.

The opposite happens.

Somewhere between five and fifty-five, we got trained to stop creating and start executing. To stop asking “what if?” and start asking “what’s the deliverable?” To stop seeing what isn’t there yet and start optimizing what already is.

The system rewarded us for it. Promotions, titles, salaries, corner offices—all of it designed to keep us applying existing knowledge to existing problems inside existing structures.

AI just made that entire reward system obsolete. The executing and the knowing—the things the system trained us to prioritize over creating—are now the cheapest things on the planet.

The creating—the thing every five-year-old does without thinking—is now the most valuable.

This is either terrifying or the greatest opportunity of your life.

It depends entirely on whether you have a framework for it.

If you’re still trying to outsmart AI by knowing more, or outwork AI by executing harder, you’re going to lose. You’re playing the 67-year-old game with 67-year-old rules, and the rules just changed.

If instead you connect your different—your superpower, the thing people come to you for, the thing that makes the biggest difference possible—to making a difference at scale with AI, everything changes.

One person can now build what used to take an entire company. The Silicon Valley conversation has moved from “when will we see the first billion-dollar one-person company?” to “when will we see the first billion-dollar ARR one-person company?”

The tools are here. The moment is here. The question isn’t whether AI will replace you.

The question is: what should you create?

Three things to sit with before Friday.

1. When was the last time you created something that didn’t exist before?

Not edited. Not optimized. Not iterated on someone else’s work. Actually created—from scratch—a framework, an idea, a point of view that was yours. If you can’t remember, that’s the signal. The system trained the creating out of you. It’s still in there. But you have to go looking for it.

2. What do people come to you for that you’ve never charged for?

The thing colleagues ask you about in the hallway. The thing friends text you about on weekends. The thing you do so naturally that it feels like it shouldn’t count as expertise. That’s your superpower. And it’s probably the most valuable thing about you—precisely because you’ve never treated it that way.

3. If you could only do one thing for the rest of your career, what would it be?

Not the thing you’re good at. Not the thing on your resume. The thing that—if everything else went away and you could only keep one piece of what you do—you would choose. That’s where the creating lives. That’s what AI can’t replicate. And that’s the foundation of everything a Creator Capitalist builds on.

Write your answers down. Don’t type them. Don’t ask AI. Sit with them.

Friday: Career Quakes drops.

AI is the biggest career quake in a generation. Maybe the biggest ever.

We keep using that word—quake—because it’s precise. Not a disruption. Not a trend. Not a “shift in the landscape.” A quake. The kind that shakes all three rings of your life simultaneously: the global forces you can’t control, the organizational forces reshaping your workplace, and the personal forces that decide whether you break or build.

Most career advice picks one ring and pretends the other two don’t exist. The business books obsess over global disruption. The leadership books obsess over promotions. The self-help books obsess over purpose. None of them talk about what happens when all three rings go red at the same time.

On Friday, we’re releasing a new mini-book called Career Quakes. It’s about the moments that shake your career—and the framework for using them to build instead of break.

Career Quakes is a paid publication. More on how to access it below.

If you’re ready to become a Creator Capitalist through this quake—not just read about it—the Creator Capitalist course closes Friday.

Everything in this email—the five-year-old who stopped creating, the 67-year-old Knowledge Worker deal that just expired, the question of what you should create next—the Creator Capitalist Course is the system for answering it.

Your superpower. Your Four Capitals. Your offer ladder. Your pricing. Framework by framework, with AI tools built into every step. The course includes the $100 Complete Collection of the book (hardcover, ebook, audiobook) plus three guided modules.

119 people went through this course last year. They uncovered $425M in quantified outcomes they didn’t know they had.

The course closes Friday, March 27 at midnight. We haven’t opened it in over a year. We don’t know when we’ll open it again.

This is the week to go all in on being a Creator Capitalist.

Already bought the book and want to upgrade? Email [email protected] with your receipt for a discount code.

Not ready for the course? Join the inner circle.

If you want to start jamming on these ideas with the thinking partner that makes them personal—and get access to everything we publish, including Career Quakes on Friday—the Founding Membership is the way in.

Founding members get:

* The Pirate Eddie Bot—the only AI trained on Category Design and Creator Capitalism

* 30+ audiobooks

* Free copies of our six full-sized books (A Marketer’s Guide to Category Design, The 22 Laws of Category Design, The Category Design Toolkit, Snow Leopard, Thinker’s High, and Lightning Strike Marketing)

* Invites to founder-only virtual workshops (held two to three times a year)

* The Category Vault and the full 250+ mini-book library

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S. — Not ready for the course or Founding? Get the book:

* Paperback on Amazon — $35

* Ebook — $35 (instant access)

* Audiobook — $35 (instant access)

* The Complete Collection — $100 (hardcover + ebook + audiobook)

Lydia Flocchini is a lawyer who decided the law wasn’t enough.

Nick Kringas is a restaurateur, SEO pioneer, and serial category designer.

Together, they walked into a legal tech conference with a $24,000 budget, a two-week runway, and a question that stopped attorneys cold: Are you AI invisible?

They left with a signed client with $90,000 in revenue, 15 warm prospects, and a pipeline trajectory toward $300,000 to $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue.

That’s a lightning strike. And it's exactly what a Creator Capitalist looks like in action.

If you read Lightning Strike Legends, you already know their receipts. This conversation is where you hear them tell it themselves—and where the story gets a lot more interesting.

Lightning Strike Legends: One Strike, Two Creator Capitalists, Three Weeks For A 4x ROI

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

·

Mar 13

Read full story

The value of a business bandmate.

We borrowed these words from a LinkedIn post by Pirate Lydia

Most people build careers. Very few find their business bandmate.

One of the most important and rare things in business is finding someone you’re meant to build with. Not just collaborate. Not just partner. But someone who sees the world the way you do and challenges you to see it differently.

I found my bandmate through the Category Design Academy. I still remember when Pirate Eddie Yoon said, “Lydia, you need to meet Nick Kringas. He’s also in legal.”

What began as a few conversations quickly turned into a shared point of view.

We talked about the shifts reshaping hashtag#legal -AI, private equity, generational change, and how marketing and business development are evolving in an AI-driven world. We call this the 𝗔𝗜 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝘁.

Then Nick told me he was rebranding his company and asked me to help. The timeline was tight. He knew I had led rebrands before. I said yes.

From there, we got to work- building, collaborating, and sharing ideas leading up to the PILMMA's AI for PI Expo and beyond.

And somewhere along the way we formed a partnership with a shared mission and purpose to help law firms navigate the market siege.

I'm excited to share that Nick and I are now featured in 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁, 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟰: 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀.

“This is the story of how two solo pirates became bandmates—and why finding your bandmates might be the most important decision you make as a creator capitalist.”

This isn’t just our story. It’s about orchestrating a lightning strike, one of the most valuable skills you can learn as a creator capitalist.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲?

Shared language: We think in category design. We don’t follow markets, we create them.

Shared experience: First-generation. Children of immigrants. Shaped by the American Dream. That gives you resilience and a lens rooted in possibility.

Deep expertise: Nearly 50 years combined in legal. Millions in outcomes. Your intellectual and reputational capital are your leverage.

Challenge each other: A bandmate sharpens your thinking. We challenge ourselves all the time to think differently and reject the premise.

No ego: You elevate each other. Always.

Shared mission: We want to help the injured and the attorneys who serve them. Belief and conviction in your mission are everything.

We’ve also been fortunate to learn from Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead 🇺🇸🇮🇱🏴‍☠️,true bandmates we admire and aspire to.

I’m incredibly grateful to be on this journey with Nick, and part of a community that pushes me to think bigger and grow.

Your bandmate might be in our Pirate Ship

Lydia joined the second cohort. Nick joined the third. Eddie connected them. They started talking about the legal industry from opposite coasts—Lydia in Silicon Valley watching AI ads on every billboard, Nick in New York, talking to personal injury lawyers still measuring success in a different kind of billboard.

Same industry. Same category design lens. Complimentary superpowers.

What the Academy gave them individually was just as important as the introduction. Lydia said it plainly: it wasn’t just category designing her business. It was category designing her—who she wanted to be in this next chapter. Nick said that after joining the Academy, he started waking up in the middle of the night with ideas he couldn’t turn off.

That’s what deep thinking does when you’re surrounded by people doing the same.

Then Nick mentioned a conference. Two weeks away. Lydia said yes before she’d thought it through.

What you don’t get in the mini-book is the moment Nick knew he’d found his person. He’d been going back and forth with Lydia for days—him thinking about the long game, her pulling him back to earth with pipeline math. Then she showed him a languaging framework she’d built from weeks of their conversations, texts, and Slack messages. He had a tear in his eye. He called it a masterpiece.

That’s called Relationship Capital.

That lead to Intellectual Capital.

“Are you AI invisible?”

That’s the problem they named, framed, and claimed.

Law firms have spent years and fortunes on SEO. What Nick and Lydia discovered in their data: among the 80 law firms they analyzed, the ones that invested most heavily in SEO had a median AI visibility score of zero. The correlation between SEO authority and AI visibility?

0.076.

AI doesn’t respond to the same signals SEO does. The playbook that made you visible to Google actively makes you invisible to AI.

Every personal injury attorney who woke up at night worrying about where their next case would come from just got a new reason to worry—and a new category of solution to buy.

The minute the lawyers at the conference started using the words back at them—“wait, am I AI invisible?”—Nick and Lydia had already won the framing and naming game.

This is what the four Creator Capitals look like when they compound. Intellectual capital—a problem nobody had named. Reputation capital—two people already known in the space. Relationship capital—a bandmate found inside the Academy. Financial capital—a $24,000 bet with a 12x return. You don’t stumble into that. You build it. (And the book walks you through it.)

If their story resonates with you…

It’s in the book. The lightning strike playbook. The bandmate framework. What it means to be a creator capitalist who owns what they create instead of renting out their expertise to someone else’s company.

Creator Capitalist is out now. Nick and Lydia’s full story is one of the featured case studies. If reading this makes you think that could be me—that’s exactly who we wrote it for.

Get the book here: creatorcapitalist.ai/

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

00:00 – When the student is ready: Lydia’s Odyssey from maritime law to legal tech to the Academy—and why timing is everything.

10:59 – Nick’s superpower revealed: How 30,000-foot market thinking showed up in a Greek restaurant before he ever heard the words “category design.”

16:54 – The bar, the restaurant, and the borrowed $139,000: Nick’s origin story as an intuitive category designer—and why losing the bar shaped how he sees the world.

24:22 – How they found each other: Two different cohorts, opposite coasts, one industry, and an introduction from Eddie.

33:05 – From advisor to bandmate: How the partnership formed faster than either expected—and why the moment Nick read Lydia’s languaging framework, he had a tear in his eye.

41:09 – The lightning strike: Two weeks, $24,000, a corner booth, and “Are you AI invisible?”

47:05 – When they parroted the words back: The moment Nick and Lydia knew they’d won the framing and naming game.

55:52 – The first client paid for the strike: The ROI math on a category-designed lightning strike.

1:01:00 – The data that changes everything: 80 law firms, a 0.076 correlation, and why heavy SEO investment predicts AI invisibility.

1:09:37 – “The AI you use today will be the worst AI you use”: Christopher on the compounding returns of AI as a thinking partner.

1:15:07 – Finding yourself before finding your bandmate: Why the individual work in the Academy made the partnership possible—and why Lydia wouldn’t let Nick touch the flag.

This is what Creator Capitalism looks like in practice.

Not a side hustle. Not a consulting arrangement. A category, a co-creator, a lightning strike, and a business that didn’t exist 90 days ago generating six-figure recurring revenue.

Nick and Lydia are the case study. Creator Capitalist is the playbook. The course is where you do the work.

Creator Capitalist is available now—and the course closes March 27th. If you’ve been waiting for proof that this is real, you just read it.

→ Get the book and join the course here.

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S.—Nick and Lydia didn’t stumble into this.

They did the work—the Academy, the individual thinking, the willingness to plant a flag in a category nobody had named yet. Their bandmate was sitting in a different cohort. Their category was sitting in an industry everyone else had written off as change-resistant.

Our current cohort is graduating soon. The next one starts in May. If you’ve been watching from the sidelines wondering whether the Academy is the right next move for you, Nick and Lydia’s story is probably the most honest answer we could give.

→ Join the waitlist here.

And if you’re not ready for the Academy yet—start with the book. Creator Capitalist is available now. The course closes March 27th.

→ Buy the book and join the course here.

New research is showing what we’ve suspected for a while: on average, AI is making people stupider over time.

Not because AI is bad. Because most people use it badly.

They show up with radical obvious—”write me a blog post about the 10 smart things to do in marketing for 2026”—and get radical obvious back. They skim it, copy-paste it, and move on. Their core premise never gets challenged. Their thinking never improves. AI becomes a mirror that makes them look smarter without making them actually smarter.

That’s the trap.

AI is, by definition, a synthesis of all existing knowledge. When you ask it obvious questions, you get the average of everything that’s already been said. You get a very polished, very fast version of what everybody already knows.

Creator Capitalists do the opposite.

They don’t use AI to do their thinking. They use AI to help their thinking. And the difference between those two things is the entire ballgame.

When you live in the obvious, AI makes you stupider. When you live in the non-obvious—and connect it to the obvious—you create legendary magic.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

In this conversation, Pirate Eddie uploaded 20 Creator Capitalist profiles into Claude. Not structured data. Not a spreadsheet. Just stories—unstructured, messy, human stories about how 20 different people made the shift from Knowledge Worker to Creator Capitalist.

But here’s the part most people would skip: Eddie didn’t say “find me something cool.” He showed up with a hypothesis. A point of view. A specific lens he wanted to pressure-test.

That hypothesis is the difference between using AI to think for you and using AI to think with you. Without it, Claude would have produced a generic word cloud. With it, Claude produced category science—origin story buckets, career stage analysis, seniority distribution, company size breakdowns—that none of us would have created on our own.

Eddie brought the judgment. Claude brought the processing power. Together, they created Intellectual Capital that neither could have produced alone.

Creator Capitalist goes deep on how to use AI to scale your Intellectual Capital as a Creator Capitalist. The book launches March 17. Join the waitlist at creatorcapitalist.ai, and you'll get the Introduction and the opening of Section 1 for free, delivered to your inbox immediately. You'll also be able to order a full day early on March 16—before the public launch.

And then Eddie did something else that matters. He prompted the charts—”first one, horizontal bar. Second, vertical bar. Third, I don’t like pie charts, you come up with something different”—and Claude delivered visualization formats Eddie had never seen before. He said “look at our website, grab our color scheme” and got publication-ready graphics.

What would have taken a consulting team a week happened in one sitting. AI isn’t magic without thinking worth amplifying.

AI doesn’t need you to be clever. It needs you to give context. And context starts with having a point of view.

The conversation goes somewhere unexpected from there.

Bri didn’t recognize herself in the data. Claude categorized her as “accidental discovery”—but she would have placed herself in “frustration, trauma, survival.” Both are true. It turns out Creator Capitalist journeys look different from the inside than the outside. That tension—between how you see your own story and how the data sees it—opens up something none of us anticipated.

Christopher shares a moment of vulnerability that will surprise anyone who thinks confidence comes standard with success. And the Circleback Neenanana makes its official debut as a concept. (You’ll know it when you hear it. And you’ll immediately think of three people in your own life.)

The data itself—what the 20 profiles actually reveal about who becomes a Creator Capitalist and why—we covered in our mini-book last week.

This conversation is different.

This is what it looks like when three people sit down with AI-generated category science and start jamming on what it means, where it breaks, and what it tells you about your own path.

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

00:01 – The setup: the book is days away, the Founding 50 are in, and Eddie has done something with Claude that changes how we think about category science.

00:44 – Word crunching, not number crunching: why analyzing unstructured stories with AI is fundamentally different from everything consulting has done before—and why it only works when you show up with a hypothesis.

06:18 – The Circleback Neenanana: Christopher on the special fuel of “I’ll show you”—and why some of the best Creator Capitalists were forged in the fire of getting screwed over.

08:31 – The less-celebrated paths are the majority: why frustration, hobby, and accidental discovery outweigh deliberate professional reinvention in the data—and why that should give you confidence.

15:11 – “I would not have placed myself in that bucket”: Bri on why Claude categorized her differently than she would have categorized herself.

23:48 – The meta-lesson: Christopher names what Eddie is demonstrating in real time. One person creating publication-quality category science with AI. “That’s the definition of leverage.”

29:02 – What AI can’t do: the human work—writing the profiles, knowing the people, bringing a hypothesis—is still everything. AI organized the data. Humans created the data.

32:40 – Does pedigree matter? Rafi Mohammed (PhD from Cornell) versus Coffeezilla (nobody knows his real name). Both Creator Capitalists. Christopher’s answer will not be diplomatic.

AI can produce the same faster than any human ever could. The people who show up with obvious get obvious back at unprecedented speed. The people who show up with a point of view, a non-obvious lens, a hypothesis worth testing—they get leverage that didn’t exist two years ago.

This conversation is proof. One hypothesis. One AI. Twenty stories. And category science that would have been impossible without both the human and the machine.

Chapter 20 of Creator Capitalist is called “Vibe Creating”—and it breaks down exactly how to work with AI as a co-creator, not a content machine. The book launches March 17.

The book launches March 17.

Join the waitlist at creatorcapitalist.ai.

Here’s what you get:

The free opening of the book—immediately. The Introduction and the start of Section 1, delivered to your inbox the moment you sign up. Start reading today.

Early ordering on March 16—a full day before the public launch. You’ll be reading and posting while everyone else is still finding out the book exists.

A launch-week-only bonus we’re announcing soon that won’t be available after March 21. Waitlist members hear about it first.

👉 Join the waitlist here.

The people who show up to AI with thinking worth amplifying are about to have the most unfair advantage in the history of work. The book shows you how to be one of them.

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

Jeff Klimkowski didn’t plan on his career ending up in the toilet (pun intended.)

He was a Deutsche Bank investment banker. The kind of kid who made his sister drive him to school so he could read the Wall Street Journal in the passenger seat. He had the job. The trajectory. The spreadsheet-perfect life plan.

Then his childhood friends had too many burritos and a dumb idea.

Flushable wipes for men. They called it DUDE Wipes.

Jeff left banking to become CFO, co-founder, and—for a while—the company’s personal line of credit. His i-banking bonuses funded the working capital. His cash and DUDE’s cash were the same thing.

That detail matters more than anything else in this conversation.

When your money and the company’s money are the same pile, you think differently about every dollar.

You can’t be reckless. You can’t be timid. You have to be precise—because the category is moving faster than your spreadsheets and hesitation means someone else defines the future.

After Shark Tank, Jeff and co-founder Sean Riley pitched 20 to 30 VCs. Every single one said no. The biggest rejection? “You’ll never get guys to use wipes.”

So they got profitable.

Q4 2016. First profitable quarter. They haven’t looked back since. No outside capital beyond Mark Cuban’s original Shark Tank check until they hit escape velocity.

DUDE Wipes crossed $300M in annual retail revenue. They’re growing roughly 50% per year. And Jeff has never been more bullish in the company’s history.

Jeff didn’t just become CFO. He redesigned what the role means.

At DUDE Wipes, four verticals roll up to the CFO:

Finance and accounting

FP&A

Sales strategy

Supply chain.

The problem with how the industry defines the job is that most people think it’s just the first one.

Jeff sits in every major Walmart and Target line review alongside Sean. He hears from the buyer’s mouth what their long-term strategy is—so his forecasts aren’t built on salespeople’s optimism alone. He goes to co-manufacturer meetings so he can look at the whites of the buyer’s eyes before he commits working capital to inventory.

This is not how most CFOs operate.

Most CFOs sit in a skybox. Jeff is on the field.

And here’s his financial philosophy in one sentence: “EBITDA is the most overrated metric on the face of the planet.”

Zero free cash flow. That’s the goal.

Not because DUDE Wipes isn’t profitable. Because every dollar of EBITDA gets reinvested—into working capital, CapEx, and marketing—until free cash flow hits zero at year’s end.

Zero means Jeff is deploying capital at the exact speed the category demands.

Too much free cash flow? You’re not investing enough. You lack conviction. The category will outgrow you while you sit on cash.

Negative free cash flow? You’re over your skis. You’ll need to raise money, dilute equity, and lose control.

Zero is the surfer sitting in the pocket of the wave.

Jeff knows the max growth rate they can sustain in a given year because of this discipline. Right now: 50% per annum at zero free cash flow. When numbers get big, 50% is a big number.

And it’s not set-it-and-forget-it. They’re tweaking the plan constantly—rolling 12 months on the finance side, rolling 24 months on supply chain. New data in, new adjustments out.

The make-free-cash-flow button.

Eddie asked Jeff: when you need to push the free cash flow number, what do you press?

The first answer was boring and brilliant: cash collections from retailers.

Nobody was quarterbacking receivables. Invoices were getting lost in EDI transmissions. POs weren’t registering correctly between systems. Charge-backs went uncontested. It’s the kind of work nobody glamorizes—but hiring one person to own it improved cash collection by 40%.

Now they’re layering in AI agents to match invoices, flag errors, and automate the back-and-forth with retailer portals. The person quarterbacks. The agents do the grunt work.

Second answer: SKU-level demand planning. DUDE Wipes knows how much they’ll sell. The problem is the mix—selling the right product at the right time to the right channel. When a new innovation outperforms expectations, there’s a 90–120 day lead time before they can adjust production. AI that ingests retailer data and optimizes assortment by channel compresses that gap.

Real example: DUDE Wipes was running promotions at food retailers and only seeing 10–15% lift versus competitors. Why? They were selling out by Wednesday. Empty shelves for the rest of the week. High-growth category problems that only show up when you look at the data with precision.

Meet Diesel Dan.

Greg Brown, DUDE Wipes’ SVP of Ops and Technology, built an AI agent called Diesel Dan.

Here’s what Diesel Dan does: when the manufacturer finishes a production run, an automated report gets sent over. Diesel Dan reads the report, books trucks across three counterparties, maximizes weight and volume per load, and notifies the operations team. Fully automated.

Before Diesel Dan, inventory piled up at the manufacturer because trucks weren’t getting booked fast enough. That meant less production capacity. That meant slower growth. That meant working capital sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dan fixed the bottleneck. Stockouts dropped. Freight costs stabilized. And the operations floor went from reactive to predictive.

As Jeff put it: “Dan never sleeps, never guesses, and never forgets.”

This episode isn’t about spreadsheets.

Or accounting.

Or even AI.

It’s about what happens when the CFO stops being the department of no and starts designing the financial system that powers category creation.

Jeff’s approach works because the conditions force it. Skin in the game. A new category that didn’t exist. And a bootstrap discipline that makes every dollar earn its spot—or get cut.

That’s the Agentic CFO.

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

00:00 – From Deutsche Bank to DUDE Wipes: Jeff’s origin story—the Wall Street Journal in the passenger seat, the dream job, and the childhood friends who derailed everything.

01:59 – The four verticals of a real CFO: Finance & accounting, FP&A, sales strategy, and supply chain. Why most people only know about the first one.

09:06 – Investing 18 months ahead of demand: Writing checks for CapEx three years out. Why Jeff sits in every Walmart and Target line review. And why he’s been wrong on the downside of every forecast.

16:54 – The VC rejection that saved DUDE Wipes: 20–30 meetings after Shark Tank. Every one said no. “You’ll never get guys to use wipes.” So they got profitable instead.

18:48 – “EBITDA is the most overrated metric on the face of the planet.” Jeff’s financial North Star: free cash flow equals zero. What that means, why it works, and how it sets the pace for growth.

26:35 – The make-free-cash-flow button: Cash collections, AI-powered invoice matching, and a 40% improvement from one hire.

31:23 – SKU-level demand planning with AI: The working capital problem nobody talks about—selling the right mix at the right time.

34:50 – Selling out by Wednesday: Why DUDE Wipes’ promotions were underperforming and what they found when they looked closer.

36:30 – Diesel Dan: The AI agent that books trucks, maximizes loads, and turned DUDE Wipes’ supply chain from reactive to predictive.

41:53 – Jeff’s AI wish list: Sales strategy, demand planning, and why legal is about to get 70–80% automated.

44:59 – Why Jeff said yes: Credibility, alignment with strategy, and the only pitch that works—”here’s how many thousands of hours this saves.”

This conversation is the case study. The Agentic CFO is the system.

In the mini-book, we break down Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money, the four CFO archetypes (Arena, Dividend, Enabler, and Government), why free cash flow—not EBITDA—is the strategic metric of belief, and the five-step playbook for designing an Agentic finance system with AI agents.

Jeff is the Arena CFO. Which quadrant are you in?

Read The Agentic CFO

To connect with Jeff:

Jeff Klimkowski on LinkedIn

DUDE Wipes

Arrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

This episode is about the most undervalued skill in the world right now: thinking.

Not “consuming content” thinking. Not “I read a thread on X” thinking. Not “my algorithm told me what to believe” thinking.

Real thinking.

The kind where you sit with an idea long enough that it changes you.

We call this Thinker’s High.

Today, we’re talking about where it came from, why we turned it into a book, and why it might be the most important thing we’ve ever made—for you and for the people in your life who need Category Design but don’t know it yet.

This is the book you hand someone when they ask: “What is this Category Design thing you keep talking about?”

Gift it to your coworker. Your kid heading to college. Your work spouse for Valentine’s Day. (Eight days away. You’re welcome. Get it here.)

Or gift it to yourself so you can see the world through a category design lens every single day.

But first—a taste of what’s inside.

Three Proverbs. Three Ways To Think Differently This Week.

Every proverb in Thinker’s High comes with four layers:

What (the idea)

So What (why it matters)

Now What (what to do today)

AI Prompts (to jam on the idea with your AI co-founder).

Here are three from three different chapters:

“He or she who frames the problem owns the solution.”

(Chapter 1: Clarity—from the Position Yourself Or Be Positioned mini-book)

What: The person who defines the problem sets the terms of the game. If you frame the problem, you decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what the solution must look like. Everyone else is forced to play on your field. Think about Salesforce: instead of “CRM software,” they framed the problem as “the death of installed software.” That single move made “cloud” the only credible solution—and Salesforce owned it. The same is true in careers: if you’re the one who names the enemy and makes others see it, you become the obvious choice to solve it.

So What: Most people rush to pitch solutions. But in markets—and in life—the power lies in problem definition. Economically, whoever frames the problem first captures disproportionate value, because they shape how capital, talent, and customers flow. Emotionally, people rally around the person who says, “This is what’s broken, and here’s why it matters.” Culturally, movements are built not on shiny solutions but on reframed problems: climate change reframed as a climate emergency, phones reframed as life hubs, AI reframed as the new operating system. Own the problem, and you automatically own the path forward.

Now What: Stop pitching your product or résumé. Start framing the problem. Write a one-sentence enemy statement: “The real problem with [old way] is [painful truth].” Then create a FROM-TO contrast that makes the old way look obsolete and your way look inevitable. Use this language in every investor pitch, job interview, and customer conversation. Make your name synonymous with the problem you’ve defined. Once you do, the solution points straight back to you.

AI Prompts:

Draft 5 FROM-TOs that make the old way obsolete and my solution space inevitable.

Rewrite my pitch deck opener so it starts with the framed problem, not the product.

Show me examples of legendary companies that reframed their market’s problem and won.

Create a 7-day publishing plan that frames and names the problem I want to own.

“Reject the premise.”

(Chapter 2: Courage—from The Innovator’s Delusion mini-book)

What: Every category is founded on invisible assumptions. Coffee must be made one pot at a time. Dolls must be beautiful with great clothes. When it comes to vacuum cleaners, the more horsepower, the better. Most fail because they never question it. Keurig, American Girl, and Roomba all rejected the premise. “Disrupt yourself.” “Act like a startup.” “Build a skunkworks team.” These are smart strategies until you realize they’re based on the wrong premise. When you play by the wrong rules, you don’t just lose—you disqualify yourself from the game you were built to win.

So What: Following the default playbook leads to default results. Startups win because they reject the premise. Incumbents can stay the Category King by rejecting the premise as well. Amazon rejected the premise by niching down on e-commerce books. After they became the Category King of e-commerce, they rejected the premise of being a retailer via Amazon Marketplace, allowing competitors to sell on their platform. Janus Motorcycles is thriving at a stunning 62% growth rate in a mature market. Why? Janus has crafted a unique motorcycling experience called “rambling.” This isn’t just about hopping on a bike; it’s about embracing the journey and ditching the daily grind for a leisurely adventure on two wheels. Because they’re not competing on speed or price. They’re redefining what riding can mean—creating a new niche and attracting loyal Superconsumers who want more than just a commute.

Now What: Question everything. It takes asking ‘why’ seven times like an annoying toddler until you can actually see the fundamental premise with clear eyes. Gather your leadership team and identify one dominant industry belief you want to reject. Then, reframe the conversation. The companies that win don’t adapt to the narrative. They rewrite it.

AI Prompts:

What assumptions are we operating under that might no longer be true?

Are we solving a problem—or reacting to someone else’s framing of it?

What industry dogma do we need to reject to play our own game?

If we designed the rules from scratch, what would they look like?

“Marketing that does not produce revenue is called arts and crafts.”

(Chapter 5: Marketing—from The 3 Marketing Metrics To Rule Them All mini-book)

What: Marketing isn’t decoration—it’s a weapon. If your campaigns aren’t driving pipeline, closing deals, or creating exponential word-of-mouth, then they’re not a strategy. They’re theater. The job of marketing is to generate belief that moves the market—and belief that moves the market should move revenue. Otherwise, you’re just coloring inside the lines and calling it growth.

So What: Too many teams treat marketing like a cost center or a brand awareness sandbox. They chase vanity metrics, polish taglines, and publish content that makes the team proud—but not the cash register sing. The result? Bloated campaigns, budget cuts, and a credibility gap with the CEO. Marketing isn’t about activity. It’s about acceleration.

Now What: Audit your marketing backlog. What projects are tied directly to revenue outcomes, and what’s just brand therapy? Rebuild your roadmap around Lightning Strikes that generate attention, word-of-mouth, and strategic pipeline. Tie every campaign to a dollar goal and a belief shift. If it doesn’t move revenue, cut it or fix it.

AI Prompts:

Which of our current marketing activities directly drive revenue, and which don’t?

What belief do we need to create in the market to accelerate deals?

How can we turn our next campaign into a Lightning Strike that generates revenue now?

If we had to cut 80% of our marketing, what 20% would we keep because it pays?

That’s 3 out of 52.

Each one designed to stop you mid-scroll and start you mid-thought.

(Already know you need this on your coffee table? You can get it here.)

Thinking About Thinking Is The Most Important Kind Of Thinking

Everyone’s scrambling to learn prompts. Watching tutorials. Optimizing what they feed AI.

Nobody’s asking: What am I actually thinking—and why?

There’s a difference between reflexive thinking and reflective thinking. Reflexive is fast, automatic, unquestioned. It makes you feel productive while you recycle the same ideas everyone else has. Reflective is where you pause and ask: Where did that belief come from? Is it a fact, a filter, or a feeling?

Most of us were taught what to think our entire lives. By school. By media. By marketing.

Thinker’s High is what happens when you pierce through being told what to think and start doing the thinking yourself.

It’s the dopamine hit you get when you shift from consuming ideas to generating them. Shaping them. Turning them into value that changes someone’s life.

Once you experience it, you get addicted. You start asking “why” five to seven times. You start realizing the assumptions you had were never yours. You start designing new futures instead of decorating old ones.

It’s a runner’s high for your mind. Except the more you do it, the more valuable you become.

Why A Book Of Proverbs (Not Another Mini-Book)

We’ve written over 200 mini-books.

Some of our best lines—the ones we come back to in our own jams, the ones Pirates quote back to us—get buried inside 10,000-word pieces. Highlighted once. Never found again.

So we asked: what if we extracted the sharpest lines across everything we’ve ever written and built a book designed to be used, not read?

We started with AI. Ingested all 200+ mini-books. Extracted roughly 4,000 candidate quotes. Built a scoring system. Then we went in as humans and picked the 52 that made the final cut.

10 chapters: Clarity. Courage. Treasure. Creativity. Marketing. Relationships. AI. Future. Simplicity. Legendary.

Open any page. Find what you’re looking for. Start thinking.

👉 Order your copy of Thinker’s High here.

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

00:00 – What Is Thinker’s High? The origins of the concept and why human thinking is the most important skill in the age of AI.

04:59 – Thinking About Thinking: Why most of us have been taught what to think, not how to think—and why that distinction changes everything.

08:39 – The 10 Chapters: How we organized 52 proverbs across clarity, courage, treasure, creativity, marketing, relationships, AI, future, simplicity, and legendary—and how to use each one when you’re stuck.

11:47 – How We Used AI To Write This Book: We cranked the dial to 11, extracted 4,000 quotes, and learned what AI can and can’t do in the book creation process. A behind-the-scenes look at the process—useful for anyone writing books with AI.

14:57 – The Gift Strategy: Why this book was designed to be gifted—and why gifting is the most underused superconsumer strategy in the world.

15:24 – The Richard Bach Inspiration: How Pirate Christopher’s favorite childhood book inspired the serendipity design of Thinker’s High.

17:53 – Why It’s Not On Amazon: We walked away from the largest book retailer on earth. Because we practice what we preach.

You won't find it on Amazon.

On purpose.

This is a direct relationship between us and you—no algorithm, no comparison carousel, no middleman.

Grab Thinker’s High for yourself (or gift it) here.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

P.S. - Each proverb comes with AI prompts designed to be jammed on with the Pirate Eddie Bot.

The prompts work with any AI.

But they work best with the Pirate Eddie Bot—who’s trained on our entire mini-book library and can take the proverb deeper, apply it to your specific business, and walk you through the full framework behind each quote.

Book + Eddie = the full Thinker's High experience. If you're a Founding Subscriber, you already have the Pirate Eddie Bot. If you're not, now you know what you're missing.

Join the inner circle here.

P.P.S. - This is Volume 1.

There will be a Volume 2. Probably a Volume 3. We’re building a collector’s set because words matter and the more mini-books we write, the more legendary quotes we extract. But this is where it starts.

Get your Volume 1 copy → CategoryPirates.store

Good CEOs obsess over the scoreboard.

Great CEOs obsesses over how the game is played.

That’s the difference between managing a P&L and creating a category.

In this conversation, we sit down with Clint Carnell—a CEO who’s held the title six different times across 27 years. Not because he couldn’t make one company work. But because he mastered the category pattern that makes every company work.

Most people think being a CEO is about strategy, people, and financial performance.

Clint knows it’s simpler than that.

If your customer isn’t successful with their customer, you don’t have a sustainable business.

That clarity came from watching his father run a design firm in Seattle during the 70s and 80s.

Clint would play with Hot Wheels on the floor while his dad obsessed over what couples designing homes actually needed. Not what looked impressive. Not what won awards. What made them successful.

His father built a referral machine by operating out of abundance in a small town where you couldn’t cheat people and survive.

That became Clint’s operating system.

Across wildly different industries—from software to skincare—the same pattern shows up:

Lead with the customer’s customer. Most CEOs think about their customer. Clint thinks about who their customer serves. When you make your customer more successful with their customers, price becomes irrelevant.

Trust compounds faster than revenue. Clint’s companies don’t just have customers. They have superconsumers who bring him into every new company they join. That’s what happens when you help someone win.

The financials are the score, not the strategy. Everyone reads the P&L to see what already happened. Clint asks: “How did we play? What will we do differently next time?” Strategy predicts the score. The score doesn’t predict strategy.

This isn’t theory.

Clint’s made investors rich. He’s made employees rich. But most importantly, he’s made customers successful enough that they’ve built iconic businesses of their own.

Traditional CEOs are terrified of AI because it threatens to expose what they don't actually understand.

Clint’s excited because AI makes the job he’s always done easier.

He doesn’t use AI to automate away jobs. He uses it to:

Role-play with superconsumers before real meetings

Transfer decades of knowledge to new sales reps instantly

Pay salespeople more because revenue per FTE goes up

The question isn’t whether AI will replace CEOs.

It’s whether CEOs have been doing work worth keeping.

If your strategy is “copy the competitor and optimize the P&L,” AI will do that faster than you. But if your strategy is about creating a category where your customer’s customer wins, AI becomes your unfair advantage.

This is what we call the Agentic CEO—leaders who use AI to amplify judgment, not replace it.

Want to go deeper? Read this mini-book:

The Agentic CEO: How AI Agents Can Help A 1st Time CEO Become A Legendary CEO

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

·

Jan 2

Read full story

Here’s what 27 years in the chair taught Clint:

You’re not managing a company.

You’re managing what’s in bounds and what’s out of bounds. What’s rewarded and what’s a no-no. That’s culture. And culture is the predictor of every financial outcome people obsess over.

Good CEOs inherit culture and complain about it.

Great CEOs inherit culture and design it.

Clint designs companies where abundance is the strategy. Where helping customers win is the business model. Where taking price up isn’t extraction—it’s a reflection of the value you’re creating downstream.

That’s why his customers stay with him across companies. That’s why his teams follow him into new categories. That’s why investors keep betting on him.

Because the scoreboard always reflects how the game was played.

And Clint’s been playing a different game all along.

Every leader right now is making a choice: manage the scoreboard or design how the game is played. This conversation shows you what the second path actually looks like—and why it's the only one that survives AI.

(And this summary barely scratches the surface of what we unpack!)

Here’s how to navigate this conversation:

01:09 – The Three Jobs of a CEO: Strategy, culture, and financial performance—and why most people obsess over the wrong one.

04:17 – Operating Out of Abundance: How watching his father’s design firm in Seattle taught Clint that helping your customer win with their customer is the only sustainable business model.

08:31 – Driven by Respect, Not Fortune: Why Clint’s motivation has always been respect first, recognition second, and financial gain third—and how that shaped his career.

20:57 – Builders, Buyers, and Managers: The three types of CEOs, why none of them are bad, and how to align your talents with what the company actually needs.

26:03 – Finding the Simple, Overlooked Problem: How Clint framed and claimed categories by solving problems competitors ignored—from dialysis office space to “three steps, 30 minutes, best skin in your life.”

39:57 – The Meeting Cadence No One Talks About: Why rigorous Monday staff meetings, Friday huddles, and bi-weekly strategy sessions predict financial outcomes more than any P&L.

49:18 – The CEO User Manual: How sharing your triggers, communication style, and blind spots accelerates trust and unlocks high performance from your team.

1:13:18 – Taking Price Without Apology: The art and science of commanding premium pricing by creating value for your customer’s customer—not just your customer.

1:22:39 – AI as Your Competitive Advantage: How Clint uses AI to role-play with superconsumers, analyze patterns, and transfer 30 years of knowledge to new sales reps instantly.

1:27:37 – Building Your AI User Manual: Why the best results come from teaching AI about yourself the same way you’d build trust in any relationship.

If you’re in the chair—or want to be...

If you’re building companies, not just managing them...

If you’ve ever wondered why some CEOs make everyone rich while others just survive...

This conversation is your playbook. Not a template to copy. But a pattern to recognize. The scoreboard always reflects how the game was played. And 27 years in six different chairs taught Clint exactly how to design the game.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead

For 30 years, books have been one of the only products in the world that haven’t increased in price.

A hardcover business book in 1997? $27.

A hardcover business book today? $28.

Meanwhile:

Gas, meals, and movie tickets have doubled.

College tuition has tripled.

Book publishers are making more money than ever.

Where is all that value going?

Not to authors. Because the traditional publishing system is rigged. And until now, no one had the courage to call the bluff and raise the price.

This mini-book is both a battle cry and a blueprint.

It’s for authors, thinkers, and creators ready to stop selling their brilliance for $30—and start commanding what their ideas are actually worth.

Here’s what you’ll get inside:

[00:01:06] – Why Book Pricing Makes Smart People Look Stupid: Books are one of the only modern products that haven’t kept up with inflation. Not because readers won’t pay more—but because authors never challenged the system.

[00:08:10] – The Publishing House Always Wins—Even When You Don’t: Traditional publishers make money whether your book succeeds or not. They lean on old backlist hits, force authors to do their own marketing, and pay royalty rates that haven’t changed in decades.

[00:15:23] – Business Books Are Outcome Products: A great business book isn’t entertainment—it’s leverage. It can land a new job, inspire a company pivot, or generate millions in downstream revenue.

[00:22:38] – How to Reposition Your Book as a Premium Product: Pricing isn’t just a number—it’s a story. When you set a higher price, you teach people how to value your thinking.

[00:29:51] – The $100 Book Is a Category—Not a Gimmick: This is the new frontier of intellectual capitalism. The smartest creators are no longer playing by the old pricing rules.

This isn’t about gouging readers.

It’s about finally telling the truth: your thinking is worth more than $30. Your book is an outcome—not a product.

So price it like one.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Eddie Yoon

Christopher Lochhead