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What you’ll learn in this episode:
Several years ago, I stumbled into an idea that completely shifted how I think about business, growth, and what it really takes to stand out.
It wasn’t about doing more.
It wasn’t about better marketing.
It was about becoming different in a way that actually matters.
In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Lochhead, co-founder of Category Pirates and co-author of Creator Capitalists, to talk about what it really means to design your own category, and why that might be the most important skill you develop in today’s world.
We go far beyond traditional business strategy and into a bigger conversation about AI, creativity, value, and what the future actually rewards.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re capable of more, but the traditional ways of growing your business feel heavy, saturated, or harder than they should be, this episode will open up a completely different way of thinking.
If this episode resonated, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Creator Capitalists and diving deeper into this work from Christopher Lochhead.
And if you’re ready to apply this to your own business – uncovering where your “different” translates into real revenue and growth – that’s exactly what I help my clients do. Grab a Profit Strategy call with us.
During this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why competing in an existing market is often the hardest and least profitable path—and what to do instead
- How AI is changing the value of knowledge, execution, and what actually makes you valuable going forward
- The concept of “category design” and how becoming different (not better) creates exponential opportunity
- What it means to be a “creator capitalist” and how to turn your unique perspective into impact and income
- How to identify and leverage the assets you already have (your “four capitals”) to build momentum faster
Mentioned in this episode:
Work/Connect with me:
Meet Christopher Lochhead
Christopher Lochhead is a thirteen-time #1 bestselling CoAuthor, #1 charting business dialogue podcaster, co-creator of Category Pirates and is best known as a “godfather” of Category Design.
He’s been an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups, is a venture capital limited partner, who is a former three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO (Mercury Interactive, Scient, Vantive).
He has Co-Authored:
Creator Capitalist
Play Bigger
Niche Down
Snow Leopard
22 Laws of Category Design
Category Design Toolkit
A Marketer’s Guide To Category Design
Thinker’s High
Lightning Strike Marketing
Category Pirates mini-book newsletter
Jessica Miller (00:03.803) Welcome to the It’s Your Offer podcast, Christopher. I’m so excited to have you here.
Christopher Lochhead (00:09.976) Jessica, it’s my pleasure. Blah, blah, maybe if I could talk. It is absolutely my privilege, pleasure, and honor to be here. I’m stoked to be here. I think you’re wonderful.
Jessica Miller (00:19.673) Yeah, me too. What a pinch me moment. I was actually reflecting this morning like, OK, where did I first see Christopher? How did we get here? And it’s been a long journey of following your work, following category pirates, being scared to death about playing guitar on stage and sending you messages about it. All those things. My god.
Christopher Lochhead (00:40.782) I love that you’re playing guitar on stage.
Jessica Miller (00:46.285) Me too, most of the time, except when I’m in it and I’m panicking.
Christopher Lochhead (00:50.338) Do you have this experience ever, particularly playing music, where you get up on stage and all of a sudden everything is foreign to you? Like you don’t know how to play your instrument anymore. Everything that is completely familiar is totally unfamiliar and is freaking you out.
Jessica Miller (01:09.531) Yes, exactly. And I’m like, how exactly did this happen? And what am I supposed to do next? So just breathe. Exactly. I mean, your advice was great. I don’t know if you remember what you said, but you were just like, take a deep breath, you know, do your thing and just have a good time. Like hold it loosely. And I kept that in my brain with my bottle of water. It’s sitting there. So it was really good.
Christopher Lochhead (01:13.89) Like I can’t play a G chord, what’s going on here?
Christopher Lochhead (01:33.474) It does help to walk up on stage, look at the audience, take a second, take a sip of water, and then start. And it’s interesting, what did you notice happens for the audience when you give yourself that little pause? What’s happening for the audience when you’re orienting yourself like that?
Jessica Miller (01:38.064) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:43.545) Yeah.
Jessica Miller (01:54.555) Yeah, I think they’re like leaning in. They’re kind of engaged. They’re waiting.
Christopher Lochhead (01:58.54) Right. And this is the thing a lot of people don’t understand when they walk up on stage. With rare exceptions, the audience wants you to do well.
Jessica Miller (02:08.366) Yeah. Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (02:10.734) Nobody wants to watch somebody bomb, whether they’re playing a guitar, giving a business speech, or a stand-up comedian, or whatever they’re doing, a politician. Nobody wants to really see somebody bomb there because they want to see you do well. And the interesting thing about giving yourself a second, looking at them, not rushing, maybe taking a sip of water, it creates that little bit of anticipation. If you’ve ever watched any of the sort of celebrity talent shows, the X-Factors and
Jessica Miller (02:38.501) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (02:40.608) American Idols and the things along those lines, right? A lot of the top performers, they get up and they give themselves a minute and the whole audience is like, what you got?
Jessica Miller (02:50.127) Yeah, what’s gonna happen next? That’s so true. Yeah. And I think, you know, for me, and I suspect you’re similar, you you want it to be really good. You want to deliver on your promise. You want to do a good job. And so we bring all that to the table when we’re getting up there. But then there’s also the piece of just having a great time and being in the moment and being great for what it is, which, you know, I know you know something about being great. And you talk about, I was thinking, since I’ve known Christopher, I’ve used the word legendary.
More than I ever have in my whole life. Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (03:24.267) The L word and there’s a word that begins with F. I think those are my two favorite words. And often together.
Jessica Miller (03:27.643) Ditto. I try not to stay on the air too much, but yeah. But I mean, circling back to that, the idea of category design was something that I think I mentioned to you all that, you know, Todd Herman was a mentor of mine and he told me about you all and I signed up for your newsletter and that’s how I found you. But the thing that really caught my eye, which I think is important to everybody who listens to this podcast, because otherwise they wouldn’t want to hear my voice anymore.
is this idea of doing something that is uniquely you and doing it really well. In this corner of the universe, quality matters, the impact matters, and the idea of finding that place and that thing and doing it really well. And so when I came across category design, we have these moments where we’re reading things and it’s like speaking to us. I was like, yes, this is what I’m talking about. So maybe share a little bit.
Like, where did this come from? Where did you first stumble upon it? Yeah, I want to hear all about that.
Christopher Lochhead (04:34.626) Well, I think for many people, they find their place in the world. And that’s what we get taught to do as young people. You could argue in many ways, it’s an oversimplification, but in many ways school is about helping kids find their place in the world. And some people find their place in the world pretty quickly. I have a friend who’s a vet, and she knew from the time she was a very little girl she wanted to be a vet.
and she’s a legendary vet and she’s an entrepreneur. She has her own practice now and she’s doing great and she’s who takes care of our hens, our dinosaurs, our chickens, Dr. Hillary and she’s a wonderful woman and she’s known her whole life. And if you’re somebody like that, that’s great. And particularly if you’re called to, if you want to use that phrase, work that is powerful, it connects you’re different to the world in a way that makes a difference.
You’re satisfied, you’re fulfilled, and you’re making a difference and a contribution in the world and you’re getting paid for it. That’s the ultimate ideal. And for many people, that’s what happens. However, as you well know, Jessica, there’s many of us where there is no place. And so if you’re a different person for whom there is no place, school or life for that matter, never mind business,
can be quite upsetting because you’re like, well, wait a minute, everybody else is finding their place, doing their thing, following their passion. And there is no place for me. As a matter of fact, some of us, myself included, got negative feedback about that, what you can’t do. I have five or six learning differences, so I got told a lot of things that I couldn’t do. And so here’s the aha. There is another group of us, smaller percentage, who have to make our place.
Jessica Miller (06:07.515) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (06:32.814) because there is no place to be found. And so I’m one of those people, one of those different people who had to and has to on an ongoing basis make my place in the world because there is no box that I fit in. So that’s just my reality of life, of how I’m built and so forth. From a business perspective, as a result of that, you might call it, Jessica, a different lens, I’m somebody who asks a lot of questions.
A lot of questions that start with why. Well, and I have, as somebody who is always looking for a place, looking for why things are the way they are and why do they have to be the way that they are, as a very young child, I developed what today I would describe Jessica as a healthy disregard for the status quo.
Jessica Miller (07:04.293) Mm.
Jessica Miller (07:24.667) What I like about you most
Christopher Lochhead (07:28.773) Thank you. And I learned something reasonably early. You know, I started my first company at 18. I got thrown out of school. I don’t have a high school diploma or a GED. And so for me, entrepreneurship was not a way up like it is for many people. It was a way out of a life of struggle. You know, working class, I grew up, single mother from the time I was five years old. So I sort of…
My choice at 18 years old was manual labor. I was working as an orderly in a hospital. My mother got me a job there. And so I’d gotten thrown out of school. And so my options were literally start a company or shave guys’ balls for a living. So I decided to start a company. And so I think my entrepreneurial story is very similar to most people’s.
which is you get to a place in your life, I got there early, where the risk of making the change is greater than staying the same.
And that’s where personal status quo, you give the middle finger to. And what category design ultimately is about is rather than playing existing games in existing markets where we fight for competition, we fight in competition, we fight for existing demand, which is what most people do. When most people say marketing, when most people say entrepreneurship, when most people say career, what they really mean is I’m going to train myself and or create a thing.
And as a result of creating that thing and or training myself, I’m going to enter a market and I’m going to compete for a job, a career, or to sell a product or service in that existing market. And I’m going to compete on the basis of better. I’m a better employee for you than so-and-so. My product’s better. My service is better. And I’m going to play what’s called a comparison game.
Christopher Lochhead (09:35.82) I’m going to fall into what’s known as the existing market trap. Now, this sounds wise because if you want to make, as my mother said, you got to make something of yourself. And if you’re to make something of yourself, your career and or your company, it makes sense to say, okay, well, what are the things in the world where there’s lots of demand that maybe I could fulfill and go pursue those things? And here’s the aha.
Jessica Miller (09:48.367) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (09:58.053) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (10:05.858) That doesn’t work.
Jessica Miller (10:07.237) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (10:10.434) Because competition is a fool’s errand. For our first book, we did a set of category science research where we looked at every tech company started from 2000 to 2015. And we asked the question, what percentage of total value created as measured by market cap goes to the leader, or what you might call the category queen? The category queen earns 76% of the total value of the market.
Jessica Miller (10:31.259) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (10:38.159) Amazing.
Christopher Lochhead (10:39.63) And so once you understand that business is pretty much a winner-take-all game, right? Google has no competition in search. There’s just no competition, right? Apple has almost 80% or 90% of the profits in smartphones. Right? And so in space after space after space, one company takes the vast majority of the economics. It’s also true in one’s career.
Think about it. If you ask, if you ask me, do you know a great realtor? Yeah, I do. But I don’t know lots. There’s probably one, maybe two that stand out in my mind. And so the way the human brain works is when faced with a massive amount of choice, which we all are increasingly, of course, we look for oversimplifications. The number one oversimplification is, well, who’s
Jessica Miller (11:21.53) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (11:40.45) the market leader in this. So if you’re going to buy a new vacuum cleaner and you say, I really want a state of the art vacuum. What should I look at? Well, you do a little bit of research. You’re probably going to hear the name Dyson.
Jessica Miller (11:54.992) That’s what came to my brain in the second you just said it. So crazy.
Christopher Lochhead (11:57.206) Right. And so I could do it, you know, I could spend two hours researching on the internet or even asking one of the AIs and doing all this or doing that. Or I could just say, you know, I’m pretty sure that those Dyson folks make the most advanced cool shit. I’ve seen some of that shit. I’ve heard some of my friends told me they just got a Dyson. I’ll buy a Dyson. And so the category queen often becomes synonymous with the category.
Jessica Miller (12:03.675) Thank
Christopher Lochhead (12:24.876) And here’s the mistake people make both in their businesses and their careers. They market themselves.
And there’s an interesting thing, Jessica, in the way the human brain works, which is market your product, market your service or yourself, and I think you want my money. Market my problem, and I think you want to help me. And so category designers create a unique place in the world for themselves by clearly defining a problem.
For somebody that matters to them in category design, that’s called a super consumer. That is to say the top 8 or 10% of who might buy your offering. And so when you solve a meaningful problem for somebody and you focus on the people that matter the most, that have that problem that you care the most about, your top 8 to 10% customers, because they’re the ones that drive 70 to 90% of your revenue, margins, and earnings, right? And we’ve proven that, you know, our second big book.
was written by Eddie and was called Super Consumers and all this is laid out and the math is stunning. And so when you have a defined customer with a defined problem and you care about that, you’re a missionary about that, you want to make a difference in that. And then you frame, name and claim that problem in a unique and different way and connect your different superpower to solving that problem that you framed, named and claimed for that
Jessica Miller (13:42.267) you
Christopher Lochhead (13:57.123) customer that you really care about that you’re on a mission to help. When that happens at the personal level or at the company level, that’s where Legendary lives.
Jessica Miller (14:07.867) I love this so much. I think there’s also an element that you’re talking about in this, which I think is really important is it’s visceral for you, the person. It becomes visceral for your customer, but when you care about it, when it’s your mission, when it’s something you really are passionate about, and I use that word like, you know, loosely, but when it matters to you, and then you can connect all those dots. And if you’re someone who has a business that helps people connect those dots,
It is huge. It is huge. Because there’s a whole like tidal wave of connection and emotion behind that. And people can see it really clearly. And it just seems like like, duh. That’s supposed to be how it is, you know?
Christopher Lochhead (14:52.562) Yeah, and the interesting thing, so I love entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship saved my life in a very real way. And I believe if you’re lucky enough to make it to the top of a mountain, throw down a rope. And so I’m spending the back half of my life, as is Eddie, with the back half of his life trying to throw down that rope. And when one entrepreneur rises up,
She doesn’t just change her future. She changes the future of her customers, her people who work with and for her, potentially her community, and potentially much more than that. And so I’ve spent the bulk of my career in Silicon Valley working with what you might call biggie entrepreneurs, geniuses who come up with a new carbidinolator and they go to Sand Hill Road and they get a top-tier venture capitalist firm to give them an ungodly amount of money and
Then they go forward to build a massive new category and go public and become zillionaires and so forth. The traditional Silicon Valley game, I’ve spent the better part of the last 40 years doing that. And I love that world. And I have a very special place in my heart for small e-entrepreneurs. I love small business people. I love anybody who starts anything. And we’re lucky enough to live in a community where we have a lot of great
small local businesses and restaurants. And if you just think about, if you’re lucky enough to have a family-owned or small business-owned restaurant in your neighborhood that you love, we have our favorite one. It’s a few blocks from our house. It’s an Italian restaurant, Italian folks. It’s just unbelievable. It’s like eating in Northern Italy and it’s four or five blocks from the house we can walk. Yeah. And you know how I feel about Italians and Italian food.
Jessica Miller (16:42.701) What luck. I do. Me too. Me too. Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (16:48.63) I can eat Italian food for the rest of my life very happy.
And, and please Brunello Tuscan Reds, please. Anyway, the restaurant’s called Lago Tacomo. And the first time we ever went to this restaurant, it’s a long story, but the net of it is we didn’t have a great experience and we were going to leave. And one of the senior folks there saw that there was a bit of a problem and came over and she unfucked the situation and she unfucked the situation with a lot of love and a lot of attention. And then from that second.
The entire restaurant strategy with us was to love us. Well, it turns out that’s their strategy with everybody. Duh. And today when we go to this restaurant, it takes me 10 to 15 minutes to sit down because that’s how long it takes to hug everybody in the restaurant. Including going back in the kitchen and hanging out with some of the line chefs and saying hi to them and asking about their families and the like. And so what’s my point?
Jessica Miller (17:27.683) Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (17:39.899) Yeah.
Jessica Miller (17:44.667) Mm.
Christopher Lochhead (17:51.455) At Lago DiComo, like all legendary small e-businesses, you can feel the level of give a fuck is very high.
Christopher Lochhead (18:03.904) And so if you’re somebody who discovers what is your different superpower and you connect that different superpower to making a giant difference for others and you give a fuck about the others and the difference.
you will have a career and or a company, you will design a career and a company that is radically unique. And the most important word in all of category design is the word different.
Christopher Lochhead (18:40.47) Because different forces a choice. You know, like, hey, Jessica, would you like to go out for Italian or sushi? That’s a choice. What’s not a choice is would you like to go out for a thin crust or deep dish pizza? That’s a better. And so legendary entrepreneurs, legendary marketers, legendary creators, and people who have legendary careers of any kind.
Jessica Miller (18:58.073) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (19:06.914) become known for a problem they own. And the way they do that is they name, frame, and claim a problem in a different and unique way. And they propose a solution in offering a product, a service to meet that different in a unique and powerful way. And when you can connect your different to making a difference at scale, particularly in scaling with AI today as a creator capitalist,
then you will have the greatest career of any human that lived.
Jessica Miller (19:40.528) Sounds epic. I love this. In your experience, how, so I think being different is hard for people. Just say it flat out, for numerous amounts of reasons. I think a lot of times we want to be not too different. We want to be accepted and similar to others, but different enough that we’re unique without standing out too much. So I think that’s one piece of it. And then the other part is,
I think sometimes we think we’re different, but we’re really not that different. You know, because we’re seeing it from inside the bottle out versus outside in. How do people tease this out? Like, is there a certain type of person that does this better than others? Like, what do you need to do to be able to unearth that?
Christopher Lochhead (20:30.67) So is there a specific kind of person? No, absolutely not. We’ve seen people from all different walks of life, from all different backgrounds. This is not some people who are introverted sometimes hear this as, fuck, you got to be an extrovert. No, it’s not like that at all. Here’s the aha in the AI. We’re living in a post-AI world. And here’s the aha in AI as it relates to different versus better.
Jessica Miller (20:44.547) Right,
Jessica Miller (20:54.426) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (20:58.363) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (21:00.362) Human beings are naturally flock or pack animals. Because you realize really quickly if, we have chickens, we call them dinosaurs because they’re little t-rexes. And you see this with the little t-rexes, we have five of them. And let’s say four of them are over here, they’re normally all together, almost always when they move around the garden. Let’s say four of them over here and one of them is way the hell over there.
Jessica Miller (21:10.874) He he.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (21:21.017) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (21:28.576) at a certain point, the one that’s way the hell over there, and you can see her do it. She looks around, her sisters are nowhere near, she goes, fuck, where are my sisters? And she takes off and goes to where they are. Okay, what’s happening when that happens? Well, it’s real simple. Safety in numbers. We have hawks. Well, if there’s five together, that looks a lot different from the hawk’s perspective than if there’s one over here alone. So,
Jessica Miller (21:37.359) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (21:46.031) Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (21:55.994) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (21:57.559) Human beings are exactly the same way. We’re flock animals. That’s why every donkey gets up and stands in line to buy the shit on Black Friday. It’s the dumbest idea ever. Why the hell would you do that? You want 20%? Who cares? You stand in line and get into a boxing match at Walmart, but we do it, right? Because human beings have safety in numbers. It’s primordial. Okay. So we need to know that. And here’s the aha.
Jessica Miller (22:05.051) Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (22:27.246) AI has done two profound things that most people have missed. The first is AI makes the value of existing knowledge close to free. What is a large language model in LLM? Well, it’s a repository of information. Well, the big LLMs, Anthropic, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, et cetera, et cetera.
Jessica Miller (22:42.01) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (22:56.194) are essentially LLMs of, if not all human knowledge, mass amounts of human knowledge, right? And they get smarter and smarter every single time you and I use them. That’s why AI gets exponentially improved on a weekly basis. Okay. So what’s happening there is AI is sucking in all human knowledge and making it available at as close to free as it
has ever been available. So that’s the first thing AI is. That’s generative AI. That’s what ChatGPT created the category, November 2022. What’s been happening primarily over the last eight to 12 months is the next wave of AI are these things called agents, right? And all an agent is is a small piece of functionality that’s been automated. But the thing about AI is you can ask AI to go
Jessica Miller (23:27.29) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (23:33.147) Thank
Jessica Miller (23:46.117) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (23:54.767) build an agent to do something, and it will go build sub-agents underneath that. And you’ll have agents building agents that interact with agents that interact with agents that other people built and so forth and so on. That’s called agentic. And we’re moving to a world where if you’re an executive, you will be managing more agents than you will people. I saw a post yesterday on X. There’s a guy who claims to have created multiple 100% agent-based
home businesses who’s doing $6 million a year and the agents are doing it. He’s got agents building agents to deliver the agents, to sell the shit, to market the shit, to finance the shit, to da da da da da da. And he has, if you will, instrumented multiple lines of business that go ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And all he’s doing is managing some agents. My friend, Ray Wong, the founder of Constellation Research.
Jessica Miller (24:30.948) Wow.
Jessica Miller (24:38.074) Wow.
Christopher Lochhead (24:53.388) considered by many to be the number one tech analyst in the world. Well, he and I have been talking for quite some time about when will we see the first one person, $1 billion value, net worth, valuation company built on AI. We think that might happen this year. In our most recent discussion, Ray said to me, yeah, that’s the old discussion, Lochhead. You know what the new discussion is?
Jessica Miller (25:10.349) Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Jessica Miller (25:20.219) Thank
Christopher Lochhead (25:21.92) When are we going to have the first $1 billion ARR revenue company?
And he thinks that’s coming in the next couple years. And you can begin to see it. OK. So when you understand these things, Jessica, you take a step back and here’s the big aha. Number one, AI is making existing knowledge closer and closer to free every day. And number two, agents are making the ability to execute and scale any kind of a business process that you can imagine closer and closer to free every day.
Jessica Miller (25:43.504) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (25:57.763) So now you take a step back and you say, well, wait a minute. In a world where existing knowledge and ability to execute with that existing knowledge is getting closer to free every day.
What does the future look like? And here’s where the big rub is.
All of us grew up, whether we realized it or not, living inside a category of work called knowledge worker that was invented by Peter Drucker almost 70 years ago. I think it’s 67 or 68 years ago. And here’s what Drucker said. And he was very smart and he was absolutely right. He created the term, the category of work called knowledge work to distinguish between those of us who work with our muscles and our minds.
And if you look at the definition of knowledge worker today, you’ll see that’s essentially what it says. Somebody who acquires high value knowledge and gets paid to apply that knowledge, AKA execute, to affect some kind of an outcome. That’s why your mom wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or a nurse or some kind of profession. And in a pre-AI world, how you were successful
Jessica Miller (27:05.487) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (27:17.166) Just listen to the mantras. One of the things we teach category designers, as you well know, Jessica, is listen to the words. Listen to the words. Right? So knowledge work.
We grew up in a world that said knowledge is power. It was everywhere. It was repeated like a mantra. It’s on the walls of learning institutions.
Jessica Miller (27:34.797) Our, everywhere. Universities,
Christopher Lochhead (27:44.439) As a matter of fact, when the printing press was first created, many people were against it. Why? Because they didn’t want the knowledge to get spread. They wanted to keep people stupid and the printing press could educate more people, that is to say, give people more knowledge. And when you had the knowledge and others didn’t, you had the power. So this goes back a very long time. Well, guess what? I can go to Claude right now and ask him almost anything.
Jessica Miller (28:06.766) Yeah.
Jessica Miller (28:13.977) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (28:15.158) and it’ll know more than my doctor does.
And if you talk to our custom LLM about category design, you’re going to have a more powerful conversation with the LLM that category pirates created about category design than you will with me because it knows more than me because I don’t remember everything and it does. And then some, right? Okay. So now knowledge is not power. Knowledge is free.
Jessica Miller (28:35.035) Right.
Christopher Lochhead (28:45.176) That’s why the value of a university education is, to quote some of my friends from Texas, falling like a turd from a tall cow.
Jessica Miller (28:51.951) Hahaha.
Christopher Lochhead (28:55.266) Because if you want to study trigonometry, you sit down with Claude or ChatGPT and you can learn a lot about trigonometry. And by the way, if you want to write code, I’m not a software developer. As a matter of fact, I have this thing called dyscalculia. It’s one of the many differences I have. It’s the dyslexia of math. Math was over for me in grade three. Well, guess what? I can do math and I can write code. Right? And so the aha is we were taught knowledge was power. Knowledge is not power today.
Jessica Miller (29:00.443) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (29:17.861) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (29:26.304) Second, we were taught ideas are a dime a dozen. I bet he has an idea. It’s can you execute? One of the most powerful books of the last 25 years was written by a legendary CEO named Larry Bossidy and the book’s called Execution. So we grew up in a world where for 70 plus years, the truth, it wasn’t an opinion. It wasn’t a point of view. It was the truth, like the existence.
Jessica Miller (29:31.771) Totally.
Christopher Lochhead (29:54.255) of oxygen and gravity kind of a truth, knowledge is power, and ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s all about the ability to execute. Well now AI has those two things.
Jessica Miller (29:57.091) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (30:01.968) Yep.
Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (30:07.576) So what do you do?
Christopher Lochhead (30:11.416) Well, what you do is you become known for a problem or an idea that you own. This is why different is the last moat. See?
Jessica Miller (30:26.883) I hung it on my computer right here, Christopher. Different as the last moat. There it is, a little sticky note on my computer.
Christopher Lochhead (30:29.462) What did you say?
You
Different is the last moat. AI represents existing thought. Most people compete, this is the problem with marketing, this is the problem with most careers, they compete in existing markets. Well, when you create net new, you category design a new market by presenting a new lens, new thinking,
Jessica Miller (30:44.217) Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (31:06.218) on a problem that people either A, understand but never had thought about that way or B, a problem they didn’t know they had.
Christopher Lochhead (31:15.534) that now they go, wait a minute, once I hear about that problem, I can’t un-hear about that problem. Right? In 1995, nobody ever thought about, how do I wash my hands in the absence of soap? That wasn’t a thing that anybody ever thought.
And then the folks at Gojo Industries created a category called hand sanitizer and a product and a brand called Purell. And now there are people who, you know, slather their babies in the shit. Right. That problem didn’t exist in 1995. Right. And so when you become a person who says, I’m not going to compete with the AI. See, if you had a career.
where you’ve been successful by acquiring knowledge and executing against that knowledge and AI shows up, most people revert back to their winning formula. I’m going to outsmart and out-execute the AIs.
Jessica Miller (32:09.317) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (32:13.762) Let me know how that turns out. So the moat is, what different do you bring to the table? Because the AI can’t compete with human creativity.
The AI can’t and won’t connect non-obvious dots. The first law that we teach in the 22 laws of category design is law number one, thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. Thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking. And the only way you can think is if you unencumber your mind from the status quo. And the way you do that is a concept in category design called reject the premise.
So I look at an existing career path. I look at an existing market that interests me. And I think, okay, what does everybody else do? And then I reject all of it. I don’t have to permanently reject it, but in order to free my mind from being chained to the status quo, because we’re all chained to the status quo, whether we like it or not, we have to say, that, I reject it, and start asking why. Well, why is the problem framed that way?
Jessica Miller (33:21.147) Totally.
Christopher Lochhead (33:30.082) Why do people think about it that way? Well, what if we thought about it this way? What about that? Who said it had to be that way? Why do tables have to have four legs? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, right? And in category design, we teach people to ask why five to seven times. Continuous, well, why that? Well, you know, because la, la, la, la. Okay, well, why that? Well, because da, da, da, da, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To get to the core and to see is there, and I’m gonna use these words on purpose, Jessica.
Jessica Miller (33:40.421) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (33:45.626) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (33:59.777) a different insight that can be gleaned here that might lead to a more powerful and different answer that will be an unlock of sorts. And category design is a new lens on business and frankly it’s a new lens on life. And once you have it, so let me ask you this question. When you first started to learn category design and you felt like it snapped in, what we would call
Jessica Miller (34:12.857) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (34:22.139) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (34:28.866) Got the lens? What happened in your life and in your business?
Jessica Miller (34:29.882) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (34:34.691) Yeah, it felt like being sort of unshackled. I mean, I feel like I needed, well, I would say for me, and I think many people that I work with, we’re being drawn to that different thing. It’s there. It’s like this visceral thing in the back of your mind and in your body where you’re being pulled toward it. It’s hard to recognize it. And for all the reasons that you were saying earlier,
You’re like, I don’t know if this is a good idea. There’s that part of you that’s like, this is, this is me being the chicken walking away from the flock. I’m not sure. Like there’s no path. And it, and it is sort of meta. Like you said, you’re thinking about the thinking. So you’re thinking all these things and you’re like, I don’t know if this is just crazy sci-fi or I didn’t get enough sleep last night, but there’s a visceral reaction to the recognition that there’s something sticky about this different idea.
I think the way that you all talked about it as well, it allowed me to connect the dots. It was so logical in the explanation of why does this matter? Why is it powerful? I’m a very data-driven person. It’s like, look at the numbers. Like this is what’s happening in these examples where here’s a category king or queen. Here’s another one. Here’s market share. Here’s… So all of those things, I think, when I stumbled upon what you were talking about.
It felt like being seen and it was very, very visceral. And then the logic allowed me to carry it forward for myself so I could start playing with it. And I liked that. I liked doing that.
Christopher Lochhead (36:13.078) And did you find you saw categories everywhere?
Jessica Miller (36:16.759) Yes, I saw categories everywhere. They popped out. And then I quickly started realizing like I was not in a category of one. And I like being in a category of one.
Christopher Lochhead (36:26.082) Yes. And most of us are lazy. We let the world tell us what category we are. So I’ll give you an example. I was just talking about this with a friend of mine this morning. So there’s a new category that’s emerged over the last handful of years. It’s a fascinating category to me. The category is called prediction markets.
Jessica Miller (36:32.218) Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (36:47.91) And the category king is called Polymarket. And here’s the idea. So if you think about a Venn diagram, often categories are a combination of two existing things that haven’t been combined or haven’t been combined in an existing way or multiple things, maybe two existing things and a whole new idea on top of it. But it’s often the blending of things new or the blending of existing things in different ways or some combination thereof. OK, so what’s a prediction market?
Well, we all understand gambling. Gambling is the ability to make a bet on a future outcome. And for the most part, that’s been in sports.
Well, and then in the stock market, there’s this thing called the quote futures market. So if you and I want to make a bet that the price of oil is going to go up or down or sugar or any commodity or even any stock, Nvidia stock is going to go up. Nvidia stock is going to go down. We can make future bets in that regard on up or down. And with commodities, there’s a whole futures market. So in
Jessica Miller (37:39.205) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (38:02.954) On the personal side, betting, there’s a way to make predictions and make money on those predictions in sports. And there’s a way to do it with many financial assets. So a prediction market is, well, what if we could do that with everything and anything? What’s the outcome of the next election going to be? Here’s one I’ve heard recently. Is the president of the United States in 2026 going to visit Iran or not?
Right now, I think 60% of people are betting he will. Okay. I don’t know whether he will or not, but they’re betting on it. So a prediction market takes a betting paradigm and a, let’s just call it futures-oriented investing paradigm, swizzles them together on any kind of outcome. You know, is Taylor Swift’s new record going to sell 20 bazillion or 40 bazillion? You know, whatever you want. And here’s the interesting thing about a prediction market.
Jessica Miller (38:33.275) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (38:58.102) Right.
Christopher Lochhead (39:02.026) You could have an idea and say, you know, is my kid’s soccer team going to be the champion in the community this year? Theoretically, anybody can create a prediction market about anything. OK, well, that’s a new category.
There was an aha that says, if we can bet on the future of certain assets and commodities and we can bet on the future outcomes of certain sports, why couldn’t we bet on the future outcome of anything? That question and the understanding of two other, what you might call adjacent categories opens the mind up to say, well, holy shit. And now ta-da.
Jessica Miller (39:31.291) Yeah.
Jessica Miller (39:41.421) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (39:47.629) A whole new category that didn’t exist a few years ago called prediction markets is out. And interestingly enough, the prediction markets today are beginning to show a more accurate track record of being right on election outcomes than many polls. Anyway, my point in sharing all of that, Jessica, that’s a whole new category. Most people didn’t think about that.
Jessica Miller (40:11.908) Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (40:15.03) Most people never connected the dots that I just shared with you that the category designers, the creators of this different future, this new market called prediction markets saw, and then they went and did something about it. So what’s my point? The future is not about applying existing knowledge to execute and produce existing outcomes. The machines and the robots can do that. The future.
Jessica Miller (40:30.043) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (40:43.151) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (40:44.768) is going higher upstream. What problems should we solve? What are new and different ways about thinking about X? And that if we solved X in those ways, what might then be possible, et cetera? And so the shift is from knowing and doing to deciding, to creating, to framing, to the use of judgment, to the use of taste.
Jessica Miller (40:54.766) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (41:06.267) Mmm.
Christopher Lochhead (41:13.902) Who decides this is the hot thing? Whether it’s in business or in fashion or in music or any domain you want. Who sets the taste? Who sets the agenda? Who creates the frame that then people use to think about things? Who decides what’s going to be valuable going forward and what isn’t going to be valuable? The reality is…
Jessica Miller (41:17.017) Right.
Yep. Anything.
Christopher Lochhead (41:39.15) If you are a knowledge worker who spent most of your career, turns out 70% of what most executives do is execute with existing knowledge. Well, now that’s free. And so you need to do something different with 70% of your time. And the something different…
Jessica Miller (41:51.106) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (41:56.194) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (42:00.609) is the different thinking, the different questions, connecting things that hadn’t been connected before. That’s the Polymarket example, right? That’s where the future is. And so in a world where knowledge and execution are close to free, creation is close to priceless.
Jessica Miller (42:20.003) Hmm, which is such great news for all of us creative people and people who want to have a big impact because it doesn’t get better than taking your thing and amplifying that in a way that’s new and powerful. Do you find that people break through or identify those things alone? Like are they asking themselves the why? Is it in think tanks together? Like you have communities, you have your newsletter. Where are you seeing this?
Christopher Lochhead (42:32.854) Yes. Yes.
Jessica Miller (42:49.615) happen in the most powerful way.
Christopher Lochhead (42:53.614) So with anybody who thinks, and I’m going to make a crazy statement, most people don’t think.
Jessica Miller (43:02.189) Mmm.
Christopher Lochhead (43:03.746) No, like ever. Even smart people. Because what most people call thinking is actually called mental retweeting of things that I like, that I heard. Right? So, well, what does school do? School teaches us what to think, not how to think. Right? So if I’m going to teach you to skydive, I’m going to teach you how to think about and then execute skydiving.
Jessica Miller (43:17.595) Tell me more. Tell me more about this. Yeah.
Mmm.
Christopher Lochhead (43:32.473) There’s no creativity in learning to skydive on purpose for good reason. Well, that then becomes true in most things. So thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking is where we start in category design. Well, why is it that way? Who says so? Right? This idea of reject the premise. So for example, with AI, here’s another giant mistake that most people are making.
Jessica Miller (43:35.161) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (43:53.787) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Great.
Christopher Lochhead (44:02.114) And again, listen to the words. Listen to what the vendors call AI. I say, it’s an AI assistant. You got an AI assistant. Now you have an assistant. It’s a co-pilot. It’s a co-pilot. Now you got a co-pilot. You’re doing an AI co-pilot. And all these terms. What do all of those kinds of terms, what’s the mental scaffolding that they create in our minds? Well, when you say assistant, when you say co-pilot,
Jessica Miller (44:11.323) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (44:31.372) What you’re saying is there’s the thing over here, the main thing I’m doing or the main software I’m using to do the main thing that I’m doing. And then there’s this thing, sidecar onto it, this thing connected to it, but over here called the AI.
Jessica Miller (44:46.883) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (44:49.294) Well, if you think there’s the real thing you’re doing here and then this thing in the sidecar to help the thing you’re doing over here, the emphasis is on the wrong syllable. Here’s the aha. What if AI was the co-founder of your career? What if it was the co-founder of your company? What if it was the co-creator of your product?
What if it was the co-designer of your market category? What if AI sat in the center of everything you did? And if you did that, what would be different, not just in terms of the way you do things, which is where most people are focused, there’s value there. However, what if AI is not about AI? What if AI is about
creating different futures. What does this tool allow me to do that was not possible before? And what if I, instead of just bolting that onto what I did before, made that core to what I do now and therefore completely rethink what I do now?
Jessica Miller (46:08.719) Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (46:10.348) And this is what’s required to become a creator capitalist who owns a category that you design. You want to be somebody who creates net new things as opposed to a knowledge worker who applies old things. And you want to be able to monetize the things that you create, thus capitalist. And one of the things that we’re putting our middle finger to is you and I also grew up, in a world that said, there are the creatives over there and there are the suits over here.
Jessica Miller (46:18.383) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (46:22.874) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (46:36.973) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (46:39.606) Right? There’s the finance guys and the marketing guys. Right? There’s the money people and the designers or the creatives or whatever people. Right?
Jessica Miller (46:41.635) Yep. Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (46:52.012) Bullshit! And I’ll give you a very simple bullshit aha. One of the greatest category designers of all time is largely considered to be by most the greatest English language writer of all time.
His name’s Bill. And Bill was not content to be a starving writer, to be a creative. No, you know what Bill did? As Bill started to make money, he bought his way into the theater that was putting on his plays. He owned 12% of the theater and the production company, and then he made more money, and then he bought real estate.
Jessica Miller (47:19.451) Mm.
Christopher Lochhead (47:39.522) and he made more money and more money. And when Bill Shakespeare died, he was an incredibly wealthy man. And the reason you and I know who he is is he did not leave it up to chance for us to discover him.
Jessica Miller (47:54.363) Hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (47:55.938) He was a creator and a capitalist.
Jessica Miller (47:59.278) Yes, I love this so much.
Christopher Lochhead (48:03.0) The modern day version of this, by the way, is Taylor Swift.
Jessica Miller (48:07.897) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (48:10.382) When she realized the contracts that she’d signed and the way she had set herself up was inside the traditional music industry paradigm. You’re the creative over here and the suits are over here and we’ll figure out the money and you just shut up and sing. And she said what every legendary entrepreneur, what every legendary category designer and creator capitalist has ever said, to quote the Big Lebowski, this aggression will not stand,
Jessica Miller (48:25.519) Yep.
Jessica Miller (48:38.971) you
Christopher Lochhead (48:40.46) And she did what Prince did. She said, I want to own my music. This is my music. And she took responsibility for the business side of her career. And here’s the fallacy, Jessica.
They’re not two sides and they don’t have to exist in two different brains. Andy Warhol said, being good in business is the most fascinating.
Jessica Miller (48:56.315) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (49:04.538) Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (49:05.354) Andy Warhol called his company Andy Warhol Enterprises. He called his studio the factory on purpose. Why? Creator and capitalist. And so when we reject the premise that some of us are good with math and numbers and some of us are creative, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s bullshit. Most legendary business people are incredibly creative.
Jessica Miller (49:19.649) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (49:30.071) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (49:34.349) And the most legendary creative people are legendary business people. And the unlock here is the way you do that in a post-AI world is you look for what’s missing and you name, frame, and claim a problem that connects to your radically different superpower, a place where you can make a material impact, a material difference for others. And you scale that difference using AI.
Jessica Miller (49:39.001) Yes.
Jessica Miller (50:01.624) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (50:05.24) That’s what a creator capitalist is. And when you become that, you become among the most powerful, successful, both economically and creatively, human beings that ever lived.
Jessica Miller (50:07.077) That’s everything.
Jessica Miller (50:18.555) And to this point, I want to go back when you were asking like what, when I came in contact with Category Pirates and I came in contact with Category Design, what was like, what did I see? What was the sort of the hook? For me, I talk about the idea of growth and making money and building things and having an impact and doing this in a way that is reverse engineered from the life that you want.
the money part is really, really important to me. Like I believe everyone should make as much money as they can. And if more of the awesome people that I know in this world had all of the money that they could possibly ever need to do all the awesome things they ever did, we would be in a very different place. So I am like team money, build that impact and that value. And that was something that really jumped out at me when I started to think about this category design. And when I picked up Creator
Capitalist, which I’m still halfway through because I am highlighting the damn thing even though I’ve taken the course and I’ve been through all of it. You know, this idea, you know, you talk about this idea of, you know, impact and creation and all of the amazing capitalist pieces that come out of this type of work. And I think that’s incredibly important because in this world, money is the exchange medium. It is power.
It doesn’t have to be designed in the way we all think about it in the mental models we’re in now or the way that it’s been painted for us. And frankly, the easier, more leveraged and more you uniquely do it, the more, right, abundance, whether that’s money, time, value, whatever it is, you create it, you put out in the world. And I think the structure and the book really like,
It gives you everything you need to do that. To me, that was also such an important through line is that there’s a financial component to it. You can be a business owner that is making money. It can be easy. It could feel good. It could have a huge impact. Like, let’s friggin’ go. Like, that was a huge part of the model that I really like.
Christopher Lochhead (52:19.491) Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (52:25.805) Yes.
Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (52:34.914) Well, and it’s why we put capitalist in the title, right? We are unabashed about this. Capitalism is under attack right now in much of the Western world, right? And look, capitalism run amok is not what anybody wants. Of course not, right? We need guardrails and we need laws and we need transparency and we need the best we can create as humans an equal playing field. And
Jessica Miller (52:37.583) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (52:51.067) Sure. Agreed. Mm-hmm. Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (53:04.482) There are some ills of capitalism. Of course there are. Unbashed greed is disgusting. Capitalism is the greatest force for good created by humans. There’s just no question about it. And look, some people have theoretical discussions about this. This is not a theoretical discussion for me, Jessica. Single mother from the time I was five, working class, right?
Jessica Miller (53:09.637) Sure.
Christopher Lochhead (53:33.803) Anybody who grew up in struggle, anybody who grew up with a reasonable amount if not a meaningful amount of lack, knows what it’s like. It fucking sucks. Listen, I got a call this week, Jessica. I got a text and then a phone call. We have some dear friends in Hawaii. We love Hawaii and we have some friends who live in Maui or on Maui and Hawaii just got hit with this horrible rainstorm and
Jessica Miller (53:45.466) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (54:02.666) Maui amongst others, but Maui got really badly hurt. Well, this friend of ours is a wonderful woman. She’s a mother. And she is a community college teacher, professor on Maui. And she now doesn’t have a place to live. And her car got washed away. Her building is condemned and her car is gone. And she has three children. And suffice it to say,
community college teachers, professors on Maui are not exactly rolling in bucks. So she reached out in fear.
And Carrie and I said, we’ll just call her Lori, to our dear friend Lori, we got you. I said, text me your banking information. We’re going to wire you some cash right now.
Jessica Miller (54:51.515) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (55:00.357) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (55:02.466) Well, when you make money, your ability to be that person in other people’s lives is extraordinary. So there’s a lot of fun that comes with money. I never thought I’d own a car. I’ve owned a lot of really great cars in my life and I drive whatever fuck cars I want to drive, right? I never thought I’d go anywhere in my life. I’ve traveled over six million miles in my life. I never thought I’d own nice shit. I have a lot of nice shit. I really like watches and I like to drink nice bourbons and
Jessica Miller (55:15.959) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (55:31.82) La la la. And so there’s some real awesomeness about that. The other piece of it, and you mentioned it briefly, is when you say, I am going to create abundance for myself and my family by making a difference to others.
Jessica Miller (55:48.443) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (55:51.931) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (55:55.798) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (55:57.261) Right? What most people don’t understand is the only way capitalism works is the following. You create something that I say is valuable. So if we go back to your favorite restaurant and let’s say you and I go out to a very nice dinner together. How much money might we spend if we had a very nice dinner? Just the two of us. Just a wonderful time talking about all our favorite shit.
200 bucks, 300 bucks? Let’s say we bought some really ding-dong wine. Let’s say it was 300 bucks, we went mental. We bought some really serious Brunellos and you and I talked about all this stuff and we had a great time. Spent thinking about thinking all night long and we spent 300 bucks on a super ding-dong dinner. When we do something like that, what we’re saying is this 300 bucks, which will by the way cost me 600 bucks to…
Jessica Miller (56:21.893) Yeah, I will. Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Jessica Miller (56:32.357) thinking about thinking.
Jessica Miller (56:38.245) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (56:50.159) to make. That’s right.
Christopher Lochhead (56:50.574) pay you, right? Because we’re 50% in business with Uncle Sam. So I worked hard and I made six or Jessica and I made $600 together and we decided to give you the fruits of that labor, which is the 300 bucks because we value this wonderful dinner that you gave us to have this wonderful time together more than we value what it took us to make the 600 bucks.
Jessica Miller (57:18.651) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (57:20.76) We decided that, and I’m going to use this phrase on purpose, that that was a fair exchange of value. We left happy.
And if they’re running a good business, we left them happy because they made a good margin on the service that they provided. That’s capitalism. We do something that someone else says is of tremendous value for them. And because we created massive value for them, we keep a small amount of that value for us. That’s capitalism.
Jessica Miller (57:37.061) They left happy too.
Jessica Miller (58:00.314) Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing.
Christopher Lochhead (58:02.424) And when you can connect that to your different, your superpower, and your superpower is not your passion. Your superpower is the thing others come to you for. It’s the thing others say makes you unique and that uniqueness matters.
Jessica Miller (58:05.019) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (58:20.665) Yeah. And I love how you talk about the four C’s in the book. It’s really like this foundation that’s so powerful, because it’s not just about one thing, right? It’s multifaceted. It’s about your finances. It’s about your relationships. It’s about these other pieces in your life that round out the experience. And to that end, I think they’re all connected. You know, when you’re abundant and you’re sharing that with other people, your relationships get better. And then, you know, it’s
it affects their life. It’s really an amplification tool. I think that is a hell of a lot more fun. It’s so logical in the way that it fits together. The other thing that I love about the model that you talk about in the book is that I tend to be very simplistic. And I think when you have a model that is simple and clear, you can follow it. You can measure against it.
What am I doing? Do I need to do more in this area or that? Have I touched all the points? Like it makes bringing your different to the surface and then optimizing it for results in your life really easy to follow. Even if it’s 600 pages, it is very clear. I think even the examples of people who have been successful with this allows you to pull it through.
Christopher Lochhead (59:43.81) Yes.
Jessica Miller (59:44.773) So it reminds me of like, it’s a book, it’s a textbook, it’s like a learning manual of life. Like, how did you guys back into that? Was it intentional that you did that or?
Christopher Lochhead (59:53.197) Yeah, the book’s very, very intentional. So it’s over 600 pages, as you know, which is everybody says, that’s crazy. See, no one’s going to read that. So it’s actually three books is really what it is. But the reason it is what it is, and it took us over three years to write it. Hundreds of interviews, multiple deep rounds of primary research going through
Jessica Miller (59:57.423) Mm-hmm.
No one’s going to read that.
Christopher Lochhead (01:00:22.808) tons of secondary research, dozens of interviews, like way more work than we could have ever imagined. And way longer, it’s the longest we’ve ever spent writing a book, right? Because we started off with two ridiculous BHAGs, big hairy audacious goals that were sort of ridiculous, but we didn’t realize how ridiculous. The first one was, can we create, standing on Drucker’s shoulders, the lens for the future that Knowledge Worker was?
Jessica Miller (01:00:34.139) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:00:51.95) the lens for the past. So when you set out to sort of create the next Drucker insight, and you’re going to stand there in front of the world and say, well, it used to be knowledge workers, and now it’s creator capitalists. Well, if you’re going to do that, it turns out you better do your homework, because otherwise the world’s going to call you a raving maniac. So that took a lot more work than we thought. And then the second is the following.
Jessica Miller (01:01:00.443) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:01:13.145) Right. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:01:21.846) And this is something that has us to this day perplexed and is a big part of why we’re on this creator capitalist mission with people. Right now, 47% of the American population has a negative view of
Jessica Miller (01:01:35.727) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:01:36.258) And look, there’s some valid reasons to have concerns that are very real and we can talk about them and are very important to talk about and work very hard to get right on. Security, privacy, there’s a lot there. And there’s fear of job loss. In some cases, very rightfully so. And here’s the…
Jessica Miller (01:01:53.113) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (01:01:59.779) First of all, this is harsh but true.
Nobody was ever replaced by a technology.
They were replaced because the work they did became devalued. That’s what happened.
Jessica Miller (01:02:15.0) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:02:22.722) The next piece is, well, the people who are most successful say, well, what is the work that is valued most now?
And AI is the greatest creation technology invented by humans. And so, well, there are some very good reasons to be concerned.
Most people are having the wrong conversation about AI. What if we don’t over-rotate on the negative? It’s important to focus on some of those topics, absolutely. However, the next part of the conversation for the most part isn’t being had, which is what does AI make possible for the world, for our companies, our institutions, and our careers, and our families?
What can we now do that we couldn’t even have dreamt of doing? And so too many, in our opinion, are focused on the downside and are in fear, are frozen, as opposed to saying, ha ha, I’ve just been given the most powerful value creation technology ever invented. Man.
Jessica Miller (01:03:44.983) Yes. What can I do now? What can I do now with this? Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (01:03:52.303) And I’ll tell you, so last week I was in San Diego at Dynamic Communities, AI and Agent Summit, beautiful Torrey Pines. And it was the first time Jessica, I got to, you know, cause as you well know, we just launched Creator Capitalist and it was the first time I got to get up and do a keynote and lay this all out for seven, 800 people. And, um,
Jessica Miller (01:04:02.277) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:04:22.334) I have never given a business talk in my life that had that many people hug me afterwards.
Jessica Miller (01:04:30.521) Hmm… Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:04:33.102) The response was, wow, you guys are saying and writing about what I’ve been trying to convince my fill in the blank partner, friend, company, boss, spouse for the last 18 months. You said the thing that we’ve been trying to say. Thank you for saying the thing that needed to get said. And it’s interesting the difference between men and women. It is a side note, Jessica. The guys will come up to me and they’ll shake my hand. They’ll go, hey, bro, and then we’ll shake my hand. They’ll sort of.
Jessica Miller (01:04:42.277) Yep.
Jessica Miller (01:05:00.826) you
Christopher Lochhead (01:05:02.168) put their right or their left arm up and say, can I give you a hug, bro? That was awesome. And then the women will just come up and they just look at me and say, you know, I’m six feet. So I’m taller than most women. They’ll just kind of look at me and go, can I give you a hug? I just need to hug you.
Jessica Miller (01:05:03.439) The armor on you. Yeah.
Jessica Miller (01:05:16.091) I’m gonna hug you, yeah.
Jessica Miller (01:05:19.929) Yep. Yep. And I think that is the reaction in real life that I was talking about. Like you’re thinking it, you hear, and then you hear it, right? It’s like a homing device. It cuts through all the noise, right? People are speaking your language. It’s a signal. And in a time where people, to your point, are really freaked out about this, it is the voice of reason, that grounded voice of reason that’s connected the research.
with the dots and all of the things to provide a like beacon of hope. It’s ringing all that in.
Christopher Lochhead (01:05:55.363) Yeah, and look, and you mentioned the four capitals, right? So we’re not just sort of floating around in the ether here having a theoretical conversation, right? So one of the big insights around Creator Capitalist is all of us have created this flywheel of four capitals, whether we realize it or not. If you have any kind of a career going, right? You have some intellectual capital that you’ve created. No matter how small, if you created a template,
Jessica Miller (01:06:03.757) Right, exactly.
Jessica Miller (01:06:16.155) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:06:23.958) If you built a PowerPoint, if you created a spreadsheet, you have created some intellectual capital in your life, right? Well, as you well know, because we encourage people to do it when they start thinking about how they can become a category designing creator capitalist, somebody that becomes known for something they own that matters, and then they monetize it, right? Say, okay, so let’s start to take an inventory of all the intellectual capital that you have either personally created or helped create over your career.
Well, when people start to do that, they go, holy shit. Okay, well, it’s called intellectual capital because it’s thinking that you turned into a something that has value for others. That’s why it’s called intellectual capital, right? Okay, so that’s one. Then you say, well, you know, have you worked with people? Yeah, I’ve worked with people.
Jessica Miller (01:06:56.943) A lot.
Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:07:04.304) Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:07:18.222) Do those people value you, respect you, admire you? Have any of those people showed back up and wanted to work with you again? Oh yeah, that happens of course, yeah. Okay, well great, you have this thing called relationship capital. And it’s not this bullshit about, can I network with you? No, no, no, no, no. You did stuff, you worked on stuff, you worked with people, you worked for people, and together you did a thing.
You produced intellectual capital that produced some kind of an outcome and they respect and admire you for that thing. And they want to work with you again because they like you. That’s called relationship capital. Now, when you have intellectual capital and relationship capital, it’s normally based on the fact that you created value for others. Well, then that gets you reputation capital.
Jessica Miller (01:07:53.423) Yep. Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:08:13.498) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:08:14.604) And this is the difference between reputation capital and personal branding. Personal branding is bullshit you spew about yourself to tell everybody how awesome you are. Reputation capital is what other people say about you when you’re not around.
Jessica Miller (01:08:18.532) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:08:23.205) Mm-hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:08:31.824) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (01:08:33.154) And if you’ve had any kind of career or you’ve delivered any kind of value for others, you have a reputation that’s valuable. And then of course, the fourth is financial capital. You have made some money. And if you’ve had a career of any kind of consequence, you have more than likely made massively more amounts of money for others than you have yourself.
Jessica Miller (01:08:55.919) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:08:57.496) So when somebody who’s, you know, even if you’ve only had a few years of your career, certainly if you’ve had a couple of decades, and you step all the way back just going, okay, relationship, reputation, financial and intellectual. Holy shit, I have a lot of those capitals. And you’ve been building them and building them. And to your point, they work together in a flywheel, right? They spin. The more intellectual capital you have and the bigger difference you make with that intellectual capital, you strengthen the relationships, you strengthen the reputation.
Jessica Miller (01:09:17.146) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:09:26.36) which leads to more money and that more money goes and away we go, right? And so one of the unlocks around creator capital for people is, hey, when I take an inventory of my four capitals and how they work together, I’m a lot more successful and powerful than I even realize. And so what was that like for you?
Jessica Miller (01:09:45.8) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was, I mean, there’s nothing that I like more than feeling like I’m winning, I’m being completely honest. So, when you start to plug into that, um, again, you can really see it. Like, the data doesn’t lie. And I think a lot of times, you know, we’re caught in our own heads about where our life is going, what’s happening in the world, all the things, but…
Yeah, it was huge. It was huge. And it was a moment to really see the data around what I’ve created and what the possibility of that was. And that was everything. And it’s still happening, right? It’s iterative because you see more things. You start thinking about more thinking things and then it’s just fun. I think you get that shot in the arm of momentum. Then the rest is just like, okay, where can we go with this? Let’s hold it loosely and have a good time with it.
Christopher Lochhead (01:10:29.837) Yes.
Jessica Miller (01:10:39.193) You know, so it’s been huge.
Christopher Lochhead (01:10:41.422) Well, and this unlock, love it so much Jessica, because what’s happening because of AI, all the things we talked about is the value of people’s historical value is being devalued, which makes them as individuals feel devalued. And that’s one of the most horrible feelings we can have. When they begin to work on becoming a creator capitalist, making a difference,
Jessica Miller (01:10:53.645) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:10:58.691) Yeah, horrible.
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:11:07.98) by connecting your superpower different to the world and scaling it with AI in a category that you can own. And you realize, you take inventory of your four capitals and you realize, wait a minute, the value of my value is massive. I’ve just been executing the value of my value in the old way and now I got to think about it in the new way, not as a knowledge worker, but as a creator. When that unlock happens for people and they go from being
Jessica Miller (01:11:19.726) Mm-hmm.
Christopher Lochhead (01:11:37.91) demoralized because they can feel the value of their value being devalued, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. And then they have that aha. And then they do the work to inventory their four capitals and they realize the value of their value is really high. And all they have to do is figure out how to deliver that value in the new way. Right.
Jessica Miller (01:11:44.259) Yep.
Jessica Miller (01:11:54.809) Yes. Yep.
Jessica Miller (01:12:00.986) Legends are born. That’s how it goes.
Christopher Lochhead (01:12:04.27) And can I ask you this? This is something that Eddie and Bri and I didn’t expect when we launched this. So when you create something, you put it in the world.
Jessica Miller (01:12:05.616) Mm.
Jessica Miller (01:12:09.497) Yeah.
Christopher Lochhead (01:12:14.814) You have no idea what other people are going to think about that thing and what it might mean or not mean to them that it has meant and means to you. And when you put it out in the world, it stops being your thing and it starts being everybody’s thing, right? So one of the things that’s come up since Creator Capitalist launched, particularly mostly from women, although some men. And the first time I read a post about this, and I don’t know if I should say who, but
Christopher Lochhead (01:12:44.43) It’s a wonderful, wonderful woman who we know. She did this really heartfelt post. I believe she’s in her 40s or 50s, if I’m not mistaken. And she’s done a lot of legendary things in her career, an incredible executive and entrepreneur and just had a stunning, stunning career. She wrote that as a woman,
she read this part of the book and started to do this part of the work, she had a profound insight that she had been devaluing her value. And she had let others teach her to devalue her value. And that by having the conversation about the value of your value and what difference it really makes, and also being able to make that difference in a post-AI modern context,
Jessica Miller (01:13:14.084) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:13:30.394) Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (01:13:32.396) was a massive breakthrough. So I’m reading this post on LinkedIn and I’m fucking tearing up,
Jessica Miller (01:13:35.738) Hmm.
Jessica Miller (01:13:39.556) Sure.
Christopher Lochhead (01:13:42.21) Did that land for you or how did that land for you?
Jessica Miller (01:13:45.591) Yeah, I mean, I think…
it goes back to that feeling of sort of being seen in this modern era. It’s taking all of the things that I think for me, I’ve always been reminded, I could thank my parents for this, reminded of my value. Like don’t let anyone ever devalue you. Remember who you are. Like always go for it. Don’t worry about it later, kind of a thing. So I think I grew up with that mantra in my ear. We all have doubts as humans and entrepreneurs and we look,
to the people around us and compare ourselves to it all the time, which is totally killer. It’s really important the rooms that you’re in, in my opinion, and the people that you hang around with. So I think that was always kind of the wind at my back of you are valuable, what you do matters. But the noise gets loud and you start to doubt it. I think when I started reading your work and when I was reading Creator Capitalist,
Again, I felt like I was seen. I was finding that path through that ambiguity in a way that felt really real and hopeful and simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple. Like you can see it, which is why I was so passionate about sharing about it, which is why I’m passionate that everybody should buy this book. They should really lean into this model. And I’m not just saying that because you’re on the podcast with me. Again, it’s something that tapped into my own
you know, that own homing device. But it doesn’t have to be hard. You can make a huge impact in the world with the right tools and the right people. And you can have everything that you want. And I think in the world that we’re in now for a variety of reasons, we need more people who are killing it, who are hopeful, who believe that sometimes times are hard, but it’s awesome. And we’ve got each other and it’s not the end of times.
Christopher Lochhead (01:15:31.618) Yes.
Jessica Miller (01:15:47.609) So for me, it was really important, really important. And I think the work is huge, huge.
Christopher Lochhead (01:15:47.831) No, it’s…
Christopher Lochhead (01:15:52.483) Thank you. And this is the biggest hope that we have, right? Is we think the emphasis is on the wrong syllable, not to discount any of the concerns about AI in the future. They’re real. And for the most part, the conversation called, what if AI is not about technology? What if it’s about what different future can we create together? What net new value can we create? And
Jessica Miller (01:16:03.259) Of course not. That’s right. Yes. Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (01:16:20.818) I for one am not afraid that machines will outvalue me.
Right? Look, the truth is we’ve all been using technology our entire careers to increase the value that we create. Right? That’s what the wheel is. The wheel means we can haul more shit. We can go more fast. And if we create this thing called an engine and light that engine on fire, we can make the wheel go really fast with a lot of shit. Right? And so…
Jessica Miller (01:16:33.061) Forever. Yes.
Jessica Miller (01:16:39.899) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes.
Jessica Miller (01:16:52.793) Yep.
Christopher Lochhead (01:16:57.228) being empowered by the technology and the tools to say, what difference can we now make that we could never have even dreamed about before?
Jessica Miller (01:17:06.127) Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yes.
Christopher Lochhead (01:17:09.09) That’s what a creator capitalist is. That’s why this is the greatest time in history of humanity to be alive. We are here at the dawn of this. And everybody who’s doing anything innovative, creative, creating new categories of the future with AI is part of creating that different future.
Jessica Miller (01:17:30.159) Yes. And I think, you know, we should all go for it. We should all go for it. And we should stay in that place where we’re hopeful. We lock arms together. We create amazing things. And yeah, there is a creator capitalist inside of all of us. And I think that is the most beautiful thing. Chris, I could talk to you about this for another two hours. This has been unreal, amazing. And I know that people that are listening are going to want to know where to find you guys. So where should they find you?
Christopher Lochhead (01:18:00.696) CategoryPirates.com.
Jessica Miller (01:18:03.867) Creator Capitalists.
Christopher Lochhead (01:18:04.202) Everything hangs off of there. We’re not hard to find. You can get to creatorcapitalist.categorypirates.com. It’s on all the major book platforms, et cetera, et cetera. But if you come to creatorcapitalist.com, or if you come to categorypirates.com or creatorcapitalist.ai, but categorypirates.com will get you there. We got a bunch of Scooby snacks there that you won’t be able to find in other places.
Jessica Miller (01:18:25.423) I love this. Thank you so much for coming on. This was awesome. Thank you.
Christopher Lochhead (01:18:27.778) Jessica, God bless you. We love working with you. We love all things Jessica. And no, really, you’re wonderful. And thank you so much for this time.
Jessica Miller (01:18:35.512) Yeah, likewise. And for everyone listening, until next week, we’ll see you then.
