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, launches March 17th. Join the waitlist.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
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.
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 🏴☠️
P.S. — If you listened to this episode and thought "I have a hypothesis I've never tested."
That's your Intellectual Capital talking. The book gives you the system for codifying it, scaling it, and getting paid for it. creatorcapitalist.ai. Free intro the moment you sign up.
