You already have Intellectual Capital. You're just not getting paid for it.
The biggest shift in work in 70 years is here—and most people are responding by working harder at the thing being devalued.
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 2000+ mini-books, and more. See the Founders Deck here.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Your best ideas are making someone else rich.
Not because you lack knowledge—the opposite, actually. You’re swimming in valuable, different knowledge. You’ve spent years learning your craft, developing a unique point of view, creating processes, solving problems, and achieving results.
The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. It’s three mental traps:
“My knowledge is too specialized to scale.” It’s not. Every master was once a beginner looking for guidance. There are TikTok stars teaching quantum physics to teenagers.
“My work is too personal to systematize.” It’s not. Even the most bespoke services have underlying patterns. Therapists are building million-dollar online practices.
“I just know what works. I can’t explain how.” Not true. You just haven’t broken it down into learnable components. Fighter pilots break down split-second decisions into practical training.
These traps keep smart, experienced people stuck as Knowledge Workers—getting paid to apply what they know, instead of getting paid for what they create.
And here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable: every week you stay stuck in those traps, your knowledge inches closer to free.
AI is making existing knowledge and the ability to execute inside a system, process, or company closer to free every day. Roughly 70% of what most people got trained to do—memorize, respond, execute—AI can now do for close to free.
The value of your value got devalued.
Unless you turn it into something you own.
It’s the SAT problem.
Remember the SAT?
Reading, writing, and math—three completely different skills, one test.
Some people are great with words. Some people are great with numbers. Very few are great at both. And almost nobody can make it simple, clear and look good so it is easy to communicate.
The same thing is true for building Intellectual Capital.
That used to be a real barrier. If you wanted to go from Knowledge Worker to Creator Capitalist—if you wanted to take what you know and turn it into something you own—you needed a team.
Here’s what that looked like in the old world:
An analyst to turn data into insights: $80–120K/year on average
A writer or editor to turn insights into story: $50–80K/year on average
A graphic designer to make it all look sharp: $45–60K/year on average
That’s potentially a quarter-million dollars in support staff before you’ve earned a dime from your ideas.
No wonder most Knowledge Workers stay Knowledge Workers.
That world is gone.
We just ran a Creator Capitalist Outcomes analysis—pulling together qualitative feedback from course alumni, converting it into quantitative patterns, and identifying 25 key transformations people experienced.
That’s consulting-team work. Two weeks. Tens of thousands of dollars.
We did it in a fraction of the time with Claude.
And this isn’t about AI as a generic buzzy concept. It’s about what Claude specifically does that collapses three barriers at once:
Words → Numbers. It takes real human comments—messy, qualitative, unstructured—and converts them into structured, analyzable data. The kind of work you’d hand to a junior consultant and say “make sense of this.”
Numbers → Words. It takes data and builds narrative around it. What does this number mean? Why does it matter? What do you do about it? That’s the What / So What / Now What framework in action. Genuine analytical thinking you can direct and refine.
Makes both look good. Formatting. Design. Presentation. The stuff that makes people actually want to read, share, and act on your work. Like having a production team that never sleeps.
AI and the Creator Capitalist movement are happening at the same time because one enables the other.
The barrier between Knowledge Worker and Creator Capitalist just got radically smaller.
Good with words but not numbers? The gap closes. Good with numbers but can’t write? The gap closes. Have the ideas, but can’t make them look professional? The gap closes.
The old image of the solopreneur “wearing all the hats”—scrambling to do everything themselves, badly—is fading. Not because the hats went away. Because you finally have a co-pilot that’s genuinely good at the ones you’re not.
So here’s the uncomfortable question.
What is it costing you to wait?
Not in some abstract, motivational-poster sense. In real terms.
Every week you sit on an idea you haven’t published, someone else is publishing theirs. Every month you delay building intellectual capital, you’re paying the invisible tax of staying a Knowledge Worker—trading time for money, building someone else’s asset, watching your best insights evaporate inside a company Slack channel.
The tools are here. The playbook exists. The cost of entry just dropped by six figures.
A year ago, going from “I have an insight” to “I have a published, designed, data-backed piece of intellectual property” required a team, a budget, and a timeline. Today it requires a Claude account and a weekend.
The gap between “I should do this” and “I’m doing this” has never been smaller. Which means the opportunity cost of not doing it has never been higher.
There will never be a better time to become a Creator Capitalist than right now.
Not next quarter. Not when you “figure it out.” Not when you have more followers or a better title or a clearer niche. Right now—while the tools are new, the playbook is open, and most people are still frozen in the three mental traps we listed above.
The window where you can build a moat around your Intellectual Capital before everyone else catches on? That window is open today. It won’t be open forever.
That’s why we wrote Creator Capitalist.
694 pages. The entire transformation from Knowledge Worker to Creator Capitalist—how to discover your superpower, how to build the Four Capitals (financial, reputation, relationship, and intellectual) so they compound into each other, how to find the problem worth solving, and how to turn what you know into Intellectual Capital you own. Step by step. Frameworks, examples, and exercises you can use the day you read them.
This is the book that walks you through it. All of it.
And right now, 34 people are already reading it—weeks before anyone else on earth—as part of the Founding 50.
The Founding 50 is early access to Creator Capitalist, plus a front-row seat to our Lightning Strike.
We’re executing a coordinated book launch in public on March 17. The ad spend, the content calendar, the conversion numbers, the wins and the embarrassing failures—documented and shared as it happens. And we’re already posting learnings from the strike inside the community. Conversations are happening. People are sharing their own IC. The thing is live.
There are 16 spots left. The door closes tomorrow, February 26, at midnight PT.
Early access to Creator Capitalist is only available to our Founding Subscribers and Category Design Alumni. To sign up and become a Founding Subscriber, head here. Don’t want to join the inner circle? Join the waitlist and be the first in line on March 17th.
Total cost: $135. That’s the $100 Shopify bundle (hardcover + ebook + audiobook) plus the $35 Amazon paperback on Strike Day.
Step 1: Buy the $100 Shopify bundle now. The full ebook lands in your hands immediately. Hardcover arrives at your door in ~10 days. Audiobook drops before March 17.
Step 2: Buy the $35 Amazon paperback on March 17 (Strike Day).
Step 3: Join the war room sessions.
March 6 (8–9am PT / 11am–12pm ET)—War Room #1. Full game plan reveal. Strike schedule, content calendar, ad strategy—everything on the table.
March 13 (8–9am PT / 11am–12pm ET)—War Room #2. Pre-strike briefing. Final adjustments. The dress rehearsal.
March 17—STRIKE DAY. Christopher on stage in San Diego. All 50 buy on Amazon. Reviews go up. Everyone posting on LinkedIn.
March 20 (8–9am PT / 11am–12pm ET)—Debrief. The real numbers. What worked. What bombed.
16 spots. Early access ends tomorrow at midnight. Then the door shuts, and the war rooms start without you.