Most people unknowingly spend their careers on the incrementally Better.

Most people spend their entire careers working on incremental Better. (Often) without ever realizing it.

We go to school, pick a career, get a job, join a company, learn an industry, develop expertise, get promoted and maybe start a company of our own. Somewhere along the way, we snap into existing companies, existing careers and existing market categories. We get rewarded for making things better.

Better software. Better consulting. Better marketing. Better products. Better customer experiences. Better processes. Better careers. Better sales.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Better matters. (A lot.) Legendary companies need people who are great at Better. And lots of incremental improvements can add up to something extraordinary.

But almost nobody ever stops us and says.

There is another choice.

You can spend your professional life working on the way it is. Or you can learn how to create the way it could be.

Most people, unknowingly, choose the first.

Category Designers choose to work on the exponential Different.

And once you understand that choice, Category Design starts looking like much more than a business discipline.

It starts looking like a life choice.

1. Category Designers Get To Work On Exponential Different

Most business strategy starts with the existing world. Who are the competitors? What are customers buying? What’s the market doing? Where are the gaps? How can we improve the product? How can we win more market share?

The context is (almost) always the way it is now.

Category Designers learn to ask a different question: What if the future could be different?

Netflix wasn’t trying to build a slightly better Blockbuster. Airbnb wasn’t created by studying how to beat Marriott. OpenAI didn’t create ChatGPT by trying to make search better. Dolly Parton didn’t become Dolly Parton by trying to become a better Patsy Cline.

Different creates possibilities Better can’t.

And this is one of the great privileges of becoming a Category Designer. While much of the world is fighting over who can make the existing thing incrementally better, Category Designers learn to imagine what exponentially Different could be.

Working on the way it is versus the way it could be is a career choice most people make.

Without knowing it.

2. Category Designers Learn To Reject The Premise

The world hands us premises all day long. This is how our industry works. Customers won’t do that. Nobody will pay for this. Our competitors all have this feature, so we need it too. This is best practice. We’ve tried that before.

Most smart people accept the premise and solve problems inside the box they’ve been given.

Category Designers get curious about the box.

• Is it still true?

• When did it become true?

• Who decided this was true?

• What would have to be true for the opposite to work?

• What happens if we look at the problem through a completely different lens?

This is one of the most powerful skills Category Designers cultivate.

Because breakthroughs aren’t found in better answers to old questions.

3. Category Designers Do Not Play Comparison Games

The Better Trap: Better invites a comparison.

The moment you tell customers you’re faster, easier, cheaper, smarter or more secure, the natural question is, “Than what?”

Somebody else has already established the frame. You’re standing inside their context, on their playing field, inside their category, trying to convince customers you’re better.

At their game.

(That’s why it’s a great way to suck. 😎)

Category Designers learn to create different games.

That’s why one of the most important shifts in Category Design is moving from inviting comparison to forcing choice. Instead of endlessly explaining why your company (or you) is the superior version of something customers already understand, you create a new choice. And teach people to value that choice.

Brand marketers ask customers to compare products.

Category Designers ask people to consider the Different.

That changes the conversation from “Which company should I buy from?” to “Which future do I believe in?”

4. Category Designers Discover Being Different Is A Feature

A surprising number of Category Designers spend part of their careers wondering why they don’t exactly fit. And what to do about it.

They’re curious when they’re supposed to be compliant. They question things everyone else seems to accept. They see possibilities where other people see constraints. They become frustrated with bureaucracy, conventional wisdom, corporate immune systems and revenue prevention departments that (reflexively) attack the new.

There’s a reason for the friction.

Once a company discovers a winning category, business model and product, it quite rationally builds processes, structures, incentives and cultures designed to repeat that success. Successful companies are often conservative in the literal sense of the word. They have something valuable to conserve.

Then along comes the Category Designer (the person with a different mind) asking whether the thing that created yesterday’s success could prevent tomorrow’s breakthrough.

The person responsible for protecting the existing thing isn’t always thrilled to meet the person imagining the thing that could replace it.

Pirates aren’t defective members of the Navy.

They’re just pirates.

Maybe the thing that made you feel like you didn’t fit is the exact thing that allows you to see a future others can’t.

Being Different is a feature, not a bug.

(Don’t let the donkeys tell you different.🏴‍☠️)

5. Category Designers See Problems As Possibilities

Most people encounter a problem and naturally ask, “How do we fix it?”

Category Designers learn to ask another question: What does this problem make possible?

Some of the world’s biggest categories were hiding inside frustrations everybody learned to tolerate. A broken customer experience, technological discontinuity, regulatory shift, emerging behavior, economic constraint or strange anomaly that doesn’t fit conventional wisdom can become the seed of something legendary.

Nobody thought driving to a video store to rent a movie was a pain in the ass. Until they did.

Category Designers notice these things. We pull the thread. Chase zebras down rabbit holes. Ask why. We wonder why nobody has solved the problem differently.

Remember, today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems. And tomorrow’s problems create opportunities for Different.

This also means right now might be the greatest time in history to be a Category Designer. Innovation is accelerating. More innovation creates more new category potential, which drives more demand for Category Design.

Because there is no such thing as a legendary product in a confused category.

6. Category Designers Start Seeing Categories Everywhere

This is one of the strangest things that happens when you learn Category Design.

You can’t unsee it.

Movies aren’t just movies. There are action movies, horror movies, romantic comedies and documentaries. Software isn’t just software. There’s enterprise software, consumer software, ERP, CRM, cybersecurity and AI. There are dentists, and there are family dentists. There’s pizza, and there’s New York-style pizza.

Walk into almost any store you’ve ever visited and the whole place is organized by category. There’s a reason bananas are in Produce and not sitting next to the ribeyes.

Categories are one of the fundamental ways human beings make sense of an impossibly complicated world. They help us understand what something is, what it’s for, what problem it solves, what other things are like it and what choices we have.

And once you start seeing categories, another realization hits you.

Categories aren’t laws of nature.

Somebody creates them.

Somebody makes a distinction that matters. Somebody gives that distinction language. Somebody teaches other people why it’s important. And eventually, everybody forgets there was ever a time before it existed.

(Phone booths. I’m talking about you.)

That’s when you stop seeing the business world as a collection of fixed markets and start seeing something else.

Category potential.

7. Category Designers Get To Language The Future

Human beings need language to understand. When something genuinely new begins emerging, people often struggle to get it because they’re trying to describe the new thing using language inherited from the old world.

Category Designers fix that.

We Frame, Name and Claim new problems and solutions. We take something fuzzy, emerging or previously invisible and give people language that allows them to see it, understand it and talk about it with other people.

That’s why category names, problem names and powerful Points of View matter. The language isn’t decoration added after the innovation. The language helps people understand (and value) the innovation.

And when enough people start using language you put into the world, you’ve done something much bigger than marketing.

You’ve changed how people think, live, work or play.

8. Category Designers Are Architects Of New Value Prioritization

Here’s where Category Design gets really fascinating.

Categories don’t simply help humans sort things.

They profoundly influence how we value and prioritize them.

When a company cuts its budget, executives don’t create a perfectly objective ranking of every dollar spent. They categorize. What’s a MUST have? What’s a NICE to have? What’s mission critical? What’s discretionary? What’s strategic? What’s a commodity?

Where (you or) your offering lands can determine whether your budget doubles or disappears.

And those decisions aren’t based (solely) on objective data. They’re deeply influenced by what we’ve been taught to believe about the importance and value of the category itself.

Diamonds are a legendary example. Diamond engagement rings weren’t always the inevitable symbol of marriage they are today. It was pearls. Over decades, De Beers connected diamonds with romance, permanence, status and engagement, while telling men how much an engagement ring should cost.

The diamond didn’t fundamentally change.

What the diamond meant changed.

That’s category design.

And that’s the big idea.

Change what something means, and you change what people value. Change what people value, and you change what they prioritize. Change what people prioritize, and you change where time, attention, talent and money flow.

Category Designers are architects of new value prioritization.

That’s a very different job from fighting over existing market share.

9. Category Design Can Become Your Life’s Work

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough.

You don’t have to be the entrepreneur creating the category to live the life of a Category Designer.

You can absolutely be a Category Designing Entrepreneur. You can follow your Different, discover a possibility other people don’t see and spend years bringing a new category, company, product or movement into the world.

I’ve done it. It’s legendary.

But there’s another path.

You can become a Category Designer who helps entrepreneurs, inventors and business leaders bring their Different to life. I’ve done a lot of this too. I find it (in many ways) even more rewarding.

Think about how cool that is as a career. You get to sit down with an entrepreneur, inventor or CEO who sees a future that doesn’t exist yet. And ask them to show you what they see.

Then you help them bring it to life.

You help discover categories hiding inside innovation. You question old assumptions, reject premises, uncover problems, develop new Intellectual Capital, language new distinctions, Frame, Name and Claim categories, identify Superconsumers and help design Lightning Strikes that teach the world why something new matters.

And when it works, you’re not the king or queen of the category.

You helped somebody else become the king or queen of theirs.

Then you get to do it again, and again, and again.

Most careers are spent operating inside categories other people created. Imagine spending yours creating new ones: new markets, new careers, new companies, new products, new movements and new possibilities.

After decades of doing this, I’m wildly biased.

Nothing compares to Category Design.

10. Category Designers Get To Make The Future Different

There are a lot of ways to spend a career. But Category Designers get a particularly rare privilege.

We get to stand somewhere between the world that exists and the world that could exist and close the distance between them.

We get to question assumptions, reject premises, discover new possibilities, create Intellectual Capital, language new distinctions, build new products, create new categories and mobilize people around futures that were previously invisible.

And maybe that’s why so many Category Designers are misfits, pirates, dreamers, creators and innovators. We were never particularly interested in fitting perfectly into a world somebody else designed.

We wanted to help create the next one.

That’s what Category Design gave me. Not simply a business methodology, but a different lens through which to see business, careers, markets, value creation and life.

Most people will spend 20, 30 or 40 years getting incredibly good at making the world they inherited Better. And again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But now you know there’s another choice.

You can Category Design your own Different.

You can others build theirs. You can spend your professional life helping create new markets, new careers, new language, new value, new movements and new possibilities.

Somebody gotta create what comes next.

It might as well be you.

🏴‍☠️

What If You Want To Learn How To Do This?

If you’re reading this thinking, I want to learn how to do that, that’s why we created the Category Design Academy.

Because believing in Category Design and being able to do Category Design are two very different things.

Maybe you already create legendary outcomes, but you’re not getting paid what you’re worth.

Maybe you’ve spent 10, 20 or 30 years developing a Superpower and still struggle to explain it in one sentence.

Maybe customers rave about you, but your positioning makes you look comparable to people who aren’t actually comparable to you.

Maybe you don’t know who your true Superconsumers are.

Maybe you’re still chasing customers who should be chasing you.

Maybe you’ve created something genuinely Different and you’re accidentally marketing it as Better.

Or maybe this newsletter made you realize something bigger: you want Category Design to become part of how you spend your professional life.

That’s what the Category Design Academy is designed for.

For five months, live, Pirate Christopher Lochhead and Pirate Eddie Yoon work with a small crew of entrepreneurs, executives, creators, consultants and advisors on their actual businesses, careers and categories.

This isn’t a course where we hand you a login, give you some frameworks and wish you luck. We work on your real work.

Eddie and Christopher actually show up.

They teach you.

Jam with you.

And do long Ask Me Anything sessions with you.

Christopher & Eddie teach in the Academy because they love working with people like you.

(No BS. No hustle porn bait & switch.)

You’ll uncover, Frame, Name and Claim your Category Superpower. You’ll learn how to price for outcomes, master the No-Sell Sell, position yourself as a Category of One, identify your Superconsumers and design Lightning Strikes that teach the world to see what you see.

You’ll work on your category design, actual pricing, actual customers and actual deals with Pirate Christopher, Pirate Eddie and a crew of Pirates doing the same work alongside you.

Underneath all of those skills, you’ll develop something we think is even more valuable: the Category Design lens.

You come into the Academy as someone who believes in Category Design.

The goal is to leave thinking, working and getting paid like a Category Designer.

This Isn’t For Everybody

The Academy is for people who already have something real to build on. You should have a track record of outcomes you can point to.

If you’re building an entrepreneurial or solopreneur venture, it should have meaningful momentum, generally six figures or more in revenue.

You probably already know you have a Superpower.

You just haven’t completely Framed, Named and Claimed it.

You have a gut feeling your pricing, positioning, reputation, career or business could be substantially bigger than it is today, and you’re ready to do something about it.

This isn’t the right room if you’re waiting to be told what to do, if you’d rather endlessly debate than decide and act, or if you need to keep everything about your business private.

The Academy works because Pirates share their real work, experiment together, tell each other the truth and help each other create breakthroughs.

Past crews have included senior retail executives, entrepreneurs, a military intelligence officer, a Class-A construction contractor, an attorney, a Madison Avenue creative director, a crypto startup CEO and a flooring expert who now skips RFPs entirely.

Very different people, from very different categories, united by the same desire:

Create something Different.

Category Design Academy, Cohort 5

The Category Design Academy is five months, live, with few seats available. The investment is $10,000 US.

Academy members also receive Academy AI, proprietary Skill Files, Pirate Christopher and Pirate Eddie Bots, bonus curriculum, asynchronous access to the crew and community, and lifetime access to future Academy jam sessions and course materials.

We make you apply because the people in the room are part of the experience. We want Pirates with real expertise, real outcomes and the willingness to decide, do, experiment, share and help each other become legendary.

Applications close September 30.

Most people will spend their professional lives getting better at a game somebody else created.

If you’re ready to create a Different game, click here👇🏻

Apply For Category Design Academy Cohort 5 →

🏴‍☠️

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80 years old.

And when a titan like Dolly leaves the planet, it creates a gravitational shift.

But here’s the wild part.

When the news broke, I was at a hotel pool in Las Vegas with my mum, Jackie. Celebrating her 80th birthday.

Two women.

Both 80.

One had just left the planet.

And, I was lucky enough to (still) be standing next to the other.

The obvious hit. Dolly was never trying to be “better.” She wasn’t trying to become a slightly improved version of somebody else.

She was busy becoming Dolly.

• The music.

• The hair.

• The outfits.

• The humor.

• The businesses.

• The generosity.

• The humanity.

• The playfulness.

There is nobody like her.

As standing there with my mum, more obvious came clear.

Neither is there anybody else like Jackie. My mum is 100% Jackie. She doesn’t compare. She doesn’t compete. She doesn’t apologize for who she is. She’s just unmistakably herself.

We live in a world obsessed with better.

Better career.
Better business.
Better body.
Better house.
Better life than the person next to us.

What a waste of a life.

Because a legendary life isn’t about being better than somebody else.

It’s about becoming 100% your DIFFERENT self.

And spending your (very) finite time on the people, projects, and places that matter most.

Dolly gave us the legendary life operating model in one sentence:

“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.”

On purpose.

Those two words hit differently when you’re standing next to your 80-year-old mum while the world is mourning another legendary 80-year-old woman.

Life is finite.

Time is non-renewable.

And someday is a dangerous word.

Living on purpose isn’t just about building companies, making art, creating things, or leaving some giant legacy behind.

It’s also taking your mum to Vegas.

Celebrating her 80th birthday.

Holding her hand.

We could all tell the people we love what they mean to you while they’re (still) here to hear it…. a little more.

Dolly spent 80 years being unmistakably Dolly.

My mum has spent 80 years being unmistakably Jackie.

And standing there with her this week, it was never more clear.

The goal was never to be better.

The goal was (always) to become fully, unapologetically, unmistakably YOU.

Follow your different.

Do it on purpose.

Love your people.

And don’t fucking wait.

🏴‍☠️

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Subscribe to Category Pirates.

🏴‍☠️

(They just settle a major law suit)

But the story isn’t about money.

It’s about harm.
Of children.

Meta’s own research, employees and whistleblowers repeatedly surfaced evidence of serious harm to young users.

Warnings reached senior leadership.

They did nothing.

Zuckerberg now wants us to trust Meta with something vastly more powerful.

His new AI manifesto promises “personal superintelligence”.

AI that understands you, your goals, your relationships, your health, your career, your finances.

It’s bad enough we gave Zuck our relationships and interests to monetize.

Now he wants our whole lives.

Are you going to trust him?
I’ll start.
No.
🏴‍☠️

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Ps. We write a newsletter called Category Pirates. It’s about one (big) idea: How to become legendary by being different. For your company. For your career. Start here: https://categorypirates.com/pages/welcome

🏴‍☠️

Mark Cuban just said this. He’s 100% right.

And, if you have stock/stock options and live in California you’ll be forced to leave too.

Sounds extreme. Keep reading.

👇🏻

The proposed “one-time billionaire tax” is not one time.

And not limited to 200 billionaires.

With prop 40 on the ballot in November, California wants to change the state constitution opening the door to taxing all assets.

Imagine you join a startup. You take less cash for stock options. The company takes off. Suddenly your equity is worth something.

Except…

You haven’t sold anything.

You haven’t made millions.

You may not even be able to sell your shares.

You’re paper rich.

Cash normal.

California wants to change the state constitution to:

Tax “All forms of personal property and wealth, whether tangible or intangible”

Including stock.

And stock options.

Not just what you earn.

What you own.

Today, the proposed tax is 5%. Today, it targets wealth above $1 billion. Today, it’s “one-time.”

But once California changes the constitution.

What do you think will happen next?

(America’s first federal income tax was temporary too.)

In papers published by scholars at the Hoover Institution, they concluded that California's proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act would backfire.

And leave the state worse off by an estimated $25 billion.

“Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program. The California Billionaire Tax would amend the California Constitution, making it unlikely to be a one-time tax and doing nothing to solve California’s spending problem.”

— Joshua D. Rauh, Hoover Institution

Silicon Valley runs on equity.

Mess with that and California risks destroying the engine that made it the startup capital of the world.

That’s why the entire startup ecosystem should be paying attention.

Vote NO.

On prop 40.

🏴‍☠️

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Welcome to Different.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind. By Christopher Lochhead.

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

Check out our new podcast. The Pirate Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal covers companies.

We cover categories.

🏴‍☠️

Your Net Worth Is (a lot) Higher Than You Realize

Most people have one number in their head.

Their personal net worth.

Here is what almost nobody realizes about that number. Financial Capital is a lagging indicator. It is the receipt. By the time the number moves, the thing that moved it already happened.

Our friend Camille spent five years consulting. A client wanted to hire her full time. The offer came back at what she was already making, plus a small grant of stock.

She ran the math.

And said no.

The client spent three months trying to replace her. They could not. Then they came back and gave her exactly what she asked for.

Her value did not change in those three months. Only the number did.

My partner, Pirate Eddie Yoon started at forty two thousand a year, billing a hundred dollars an hour. He spent a career raising his price and was still vastly undercharging, because he was pricing his hours instead of the billion dollar outcomes he was creating for clients.

Neither of them had a value problem.

They had a value of their value problem.

Here is where that gap comes from. You do not have one capital. You have four.

1. Financial Capital. The money.

2. Relationship Capital. The people who would take your call today.

3. Reputation Capital. What people say about you when you are not in the room.

4. Intellectual Capital. The ideas and point of view that only you have.

Three of those are leading indicators. One of them is the receipt.

In the courses we teach, we run the same exercise. Inventory the three that lead.

• Write down the people who would introduce you tomorrow. The ones who owe you nothing and would show up anyway.

• Ask people. “What get’s said about me, when I’m not in the room”. You’ll likely discover. People hold you in much higher regard, than you realize.

• Write down what you know that almost nobody else knows. The pattern you see that others don’t.

People finish that page and go quiet, because they are looking at wealth they have never once counted.

Then they see the second thing.

Nobody wires you money because you wanted money. They wire you money because someone they trust vouched for the value you create. Because your name already meant something. Because you had an idea worth paying for.

Relationship. Reputation. Intellectual.

Feed those three.

And the fourth takes care of itself. Most people spend an entire career optimizing the lagging indicator. (Finacial Capital) Which is exactly why they are always under-valued.

You are not undervalued by the market.

You are undervalued by your own (self) accounting.

We’re telling you. It’s time to inveroty ALL four capitals.

And find about what the real value of yourr value is.

💪🏻 😎🏴‍☠️

Warning: Someone Wants Your Parents Money

If your at the stage of life (like Eddie & I are) where your parents are older, retired and (sometimes) in need of more help than they used to…. if your parents are any where neeed that stage. It’s time to poke your nose into their money.

Let me explain.

We’re working on a Category Pirates Deep Dive Report for this friday on how to help your parents manage their money.

Tricky territory!

Eddie’s been working on lately… He discoverd there was a Keyser Sose messing with his parents money. (We found out the same thing about 15 yrs ago, with my in-Laws)

Eddie discovered, there was a First Hawaiian Bank advisor he had never heard of. Taking advantage of his folks. Very bad.

And Eddie was surprised at the weird data.

90% of the elder abuse (including financial) is done by a family member. Adult children, spouse, or other family member.

It can also be a nice neighbor, kind church person, or someone else you wouldn't expect. About 15 years ago my wife and I dug into her parents portforlio. It was a disaster.

A “nice” old lady friend of theirs had conviced them to buy this garbage “investment” that pays a guaranteed pay out every year. BUT. Leaves them with zero.

Had they stayed in these guaranteed retirement plans. They’d be broke today.

Then there is the dishonest family member who steals from them.

Yes. It happens.

A lot.

We’ve seen it in our families. You might have seen it in yours. There are people who “love” the old people because they see them as marks. They pull on their heart strings. To fleece them for money.

Don't be surprised like us.

There is a Keyser Sose is (likely) stocking your parents. It could be a nasty bank, a nice old lady selling guaranteed retirement plans or someone in your own family shaking them down for cash.

Loving our parents as they age.

Means making sure they are on solid financial ground.

And protecting them from the Keyser Soses.

Will have more on this later this week in Category Pirates.

🏴‍☠️

Thanks for hanging out.

This work is copyright Category Pirates.

All rights perturbed.

There really is no need to keep reading.

What comes next is like the silly sh!t some directors put at the end of the movie, when they assume everyone has left the theater, so they have fun.

Feel free to stop reading and watch cat videos on YouTube.

After a brief head count, fewer than half the people here are down with the sickness.

Not everyone was kung fu fighting.

Joan Jett was right.

Listen to Blue Rodeo.

Dance like Iggy Pop.

It turns out not everyone was in the club getting tipsy.

If you’ve been reading Category Pirates for a while: the newsletters, the books, the podcasts and you’ve thought “I need to go deeper on this”…

The next Category Design Academy Applications close Sept 30th.

It’s where Category Designers and Creator Capitalists do the actual work.

• On their Problem

• Their POV

• and their Superpower.

With a crew of peers who want them to win.

And Libby, your AI Pirate Co-Founder, keeping you moving between sessions.

If your career quake has you asking the real questions right now —

This is where those questions get answered.

Apply here → https://categorypirates.com/pages/category-design-academy

(We read every application personally. Yes, really.)

Pirate (Scooby) Snaks

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Experts reveal best spots to see Loch Ness Monster

Thinking about thinking. Is the most important kind of thinking.

The Las Vegas Strip is not actually in Las Vegas.

It sits technically outside the city limits in an unincorporated township called Paradise, Nevada, in Clark County. 🧐

162-year-old Guinness bottle found in shipwreck that could reveal original recipe

Everything is the way that it is, because someone (like you) changed the way that it was.

Finland holds the official World Championship in a very different category of sport.

Wife Carrying.

The sport (known locally as Eukonkanto) originated in Sonkajärvi, where men race through an obstacle course while carrying a female teammate.

The grand prize for the winner.

The wife's weight in beer.

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Honking hero: Fort Bend County family’s pet goose alerts them to fire

Under German criminal law, a heavy pillow can technically be classified as a “passive weapon” if used to strike someone.

One in three Californians live at or near poverty. Making California tied with Louisiana for the nation’s highest poverty rate. 🤮

Anthropic CEO Says His Employees Are a Bunch of Untrustworthy Rats

A group of rats is literally called a mischief.

New category: KFC and Oreo are selling fried chicken-flavored cookies

Give a socialist a fish, and you feed them for a day.

Teach a socialist to fish, and you’ll get fishing licenses, weath-redistibution fishing taxes, a three-year permit wait, a five year environmental-impact study on bait. And a bread line at the dock.

Blocking the passing (left) lane in the USA comes with a sentance of 50 yrs in jail. And daily genital tasing.

🏴‍☠️

Our real newsletter is called Category Pirates.

It’s about one idea: How to become legendary by being different.

For your company.

For your career.

Start here: https://categorypirates.com/pages/welcome

🏴‍☠️

Please ensure your legendary is stowed in its full, upright position for take off.

For four years we’ve been told America was on the verge of recession.

It still hasn’t happened. We’re not saying everything is great. We are saying something legendary has happened that almost nobody is talking about.

America has spent four years behaving far more optimistically than the algorithms, the politics, and much of the media narrative.

That gap matters.

Algorithms learned something humans have always known. Fear spreads faster than hope. Outrage gets more engagement than progress. Collapse gets more clicks than competence.

Politicians discovered it too.

Much of the legacy media did too.

• Entrepreneurs.

• Category Designers.

• Investors.

Gave the donkeys the middle finger. Because creator capitalists, pirates, dreamers and innovators. They only win if tomorrow is brighter. These are the people who create different futures.

Now look at what Americans have actually done.

Americans are starting companies at a record pace.

More than 5.6 million business applications were filed in 2025. New business creation remains dramatically above pre-pandemic norms.

The economy is chugging.

• Layoffs at historic lows.

• GDP grew 1.5% in the second quarter.

• Inflation down to 3.5% (from 4.2% in May)

• Initial unemployment claims recently fell to their lowest level since 1969.

Prediction markets don’t see a recession.

The odds of a U.S. recession by year-end have fallen sharply 📉 Kalshi’s 2026 recession contract was about 28% in early April and roughly 4%–5% by August 4, while Polymarket’s comparable contract was about 30% in mid-April and roughly 10%–11% in early August.

(Read that twice... and notice the difference between what people putting their money where their mouth do. (Vs. the donkeys on LinkedIn.)

America is building again. Demand for robotics technicians, HVAC engineers and skilled trades continues to surge. Construction apprenticeships have climbed sharply over the last five years as hundreds of billions of dollars flow into AI infrastructure, energy and manufacturing.

Now here’s the part everyone misses. Economies don’t just run on capital.

They run on belief. For four years we’ve been sold recession forecasts that predicted an imminent downturn. (We fell for some of this 🐂 💩 too.)

And then.

Americans kept spending.

Americans kept starting companies.

Americans kept investing.

Americans kept building.

That’s the story we are not being told.

Not that everything is perfect.

It isn’t.

Prices are still too high. Millions of families feel squeezed, and they’re right. Nobody should pretend inflation didn’t hurt people.

(We let both the Trump administration and the Biden administration print money. 50% more money. Which some experts say is a major reason we’ve seen consumer prices increase about 29% through June 2026.)

But “life is expensive” is not the same thing as “America is collapsing.” Those are two completely different claims.

Here’s what we think is the most underreported economic fact in America today.

The gap between what people SAY about this economy and what people DO in this economy has rarely been wider.

• Consumer sentiment fell to historic lows.

• Consumer spending remained resilient.

• People said they were pessimistic.

• Then they opened another business.

• Bought another excavator.

• Leased another warehouse.

• Raised another round.

• Hired another employee.

• Built another AI company.

Behavior beat doomsday narrative.

(America was built by pioneers. F-the boo birds 🖕)

And that’s where the real cost of all this pessimism shows up. Somewhere in America today...

• There’s an engineer who was going to leave and start a company.

• A machinist who was going to buy one more CNC machine.

• A contractor who was going to hire another crew.

• A 24-year-old who was going to take the leap.

• A creator who was finally going to publish.

Then they spent six months absorbing predictions of collapse.

So they waited. That person never appears in the data. No economist measures the business that never got started. No jobs report counts the employees who were never hired. No GDP report captures the factory that was never built.

That’s the hidden cost of industrialized pessimism.

The algorithms measure attention. Politics measures votes. Media measures engagement.

None of them are rewarded for telling you that millions of ordinary Americans quietly went to work today and built something legendary today.

Entrepreneurs are.

Builders are.

America is.

I’m not arguing that America is perfect.

I’m arguing something much simpler.

For four years, Americans have trusted their own lives more than the 🐂💩 narrative.

Don’t get confused.

Let’s keep building legendary.

🏴☠️💪🏻🇺🇸

Subscribe to Category Pirates.

The Wall Street Journal covers companies.

We cover categories.

🏴☠️

Welcome to Different.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind. By Christopher Lochhead.

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

Check out our new podcast. The Pirate Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal covers companies.

We cover categories.

🏴‍☠️

How Much Value Will AI Create?

The internet created $55 trillion in economic value.

From nothing.

New categories that didn’t exist. Which created more new categories.

Now run the math on AI.

Scenario 1: AI matches the internet.

World GDP today: $110 trillion. If AI creates the same proportional value as the internet, that’s $55 trillion in new economic value over the next 30 years.

Created from nothing.

Scenario 2: AI is twice the internet.

That’s $110 trillion in new value.

An entire second world economy. Stacked on top of the one we have.

Sounds crazy?

Goldman Sachs projects AI lifts global GDP 7% in ten years. PwC says $15.7 trillion by 2030. McKinsey says $2.6 to $4.4 trillion in new value.

Every year.

Compounding.

Here’s what most people miss: the internet didn’t reduce demand for communication, commerce, and information. It exploded demand.

AI will do the same for intelligence.

The pessimists sound smart. The optimists get rich building the future the pessimists said was impossible.

Sharing a quadrillion-dollar pie beats sharing a trillion-dollar pie.

Let the winners ride.

For 25 Predictions about the future check out Category Pirates.

🏴‍☠️

Politics and Patriotism?

I find it fascinating that people conflate politics and patriotism. My love of America has nothing to do with who is in the White House. It never has. It never will.

I love this country because a kid who failed out of school at 18 with nothing could come here from Canada and build something legendary.

That happened under Republicans.
That happened under Democrats.
It happened because of America.

Not because of any politician.
Gratitude for this country is not a political position.
It is a human one.

300 million people live here.
170 million more want to.
Not because of who is president.
Because of what America is.

A place where anyone can come from nothing and build something legendary.
That is not a left thing.
That is not a right thing.
That is an American thing.
It has been true for 250 years.
And it will be true for 250 more.
🇺🇸
We just published 25 predictions for America’s future.

And.

As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr put it: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
🏴‍☠️

California took 75% more of your money in a decade. Now, largest tax raise ever.

Name one person who took their way to greatness.

One company. One state. One civilization.

Take your time.

I’ll wait.

😎

Of course you can’t. Greatness is made. And makers make it.

Which brings us to California. The state that built the greatest maker economy in human history is now running a real-time experiment in what happens when you drive the makers out.

The results are in. Sacramento’s answer is to double down.

The Paradox, In Reverse

In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange: when steam engines got more efficient, Britain didn’t burn less coal. It burned radically more. Because cheaper power created demand nobody had imagined.

That’s the Jevons Paradox.

It’s why the AI revolution produces a jobs boom, not a jobs apocalypse.

Abundance compounds.

(So does stupidity)

Here’s what nobody talks about. The paradox has a reverse gear.

When making things gets more expensive, you don’t get less making. You get exponentially less.

Because every maker who leaves doesn’t take one tax return.

They take the company they would have started. The forty people they would have hired. The next maker they would have funded.

Every dollar of it. Every year. Forever.

That’s Reverse Jevons. Scarcity is a flywheel too. It just spins the other way.

California is the proof.

After Increasing Taxes 75%, California Is Increasing Taxes

The IRS tracks exactly this: taxpayer income, moving across state lines, one return at a time.

In 2022, California lost a net $29.1 billion in adjusted gross income to other states. The largest one-year income loss by any U.S. state in the more than 30 years the IRS has tracked interstate migration.

That was nuts.

Now it’s even more nuts.

Because it’s a flywheel of stupid.

The income that left in 2020 didn’t come back in 2021. It kept earning in Texas. Stack the losses the way an accountant would, and California’s cumulative income loss from 2020 to 2023 is roughly $223 billion.

And net out-migration has roughly doubled since 2019, to about 300,000 people a year.

Economist Art Laffer, looking at those numbers: “Once you leave Alcatraz, you’re not coming back.”

And it’s not who’s leaving. It’s what they make. The state’s own analysts found that foregone tax revenue from out-migration tripled while the number of people leaving only doubled.

Read that again.

Where are they going?

• Texas.

• Florida.

• Nevada.

• Arizona.

• Three of the four have no income tax.

• This is called signal.

Makers are the most valuable (most mobile) people in the economy. Which means California isn’t taxing a captive audience. It’s taxing its best customers.

And its best customers are churning.

The Legends Are Leaving

A company is a maker at scale. When a headquarters leaves, the ecosystem leaves with it: the jobs, the vendors, the spin-offs, the gravity.

The Hoover Institution counted 352 corporate headquarters leaving California in just four years.

Look at the list.

Chevron. Born in California in 1879 as Standard Oil of California. The company was literally named after the state. Gone to Houston.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HP started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. There’s a plaque on that garage. It reads “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” The company that started Silicon Valley left Silicon Valley.

Tesla. Oracle. SpaceX. Charles Schwab. Palantir. McKesson.

And then there’s In-N-Out.

If California were a religion, In-N-Out would be its communion. In 2025, president Lynsi Snyder, granddaughter of the founders, moved her family to Tennessee and opened an eastern headquarters, saying it had become too difficult to raise a family and run a business in California.

When Double-Double money starts hedging its California exposure, the flywheel isn’t theoretical anymore.

Sacramento’s defenders note that only about 2% of the state’s headquarters left over the decade.

They are missing the narrative.

It’s not how many logos leave.

It’s which logos.

Chevron, HP, Tesla, Oracle, and Schwab are anchor tenants. And everyone knows what happens to a mall after the anchor tenants leave.

The category kings are leaving the category kingdom.

That’s not churn.

That’s a collapse.

Forking Away From The Future

“A great civilization is not conquered from without,

until it has destroyed itself from within.”

-Will Durant

The makers are leaving. The legends are leaving. The state’s own analysts are publishing the exit data. Any executuive looking at that dashboard faces two paths.

Path one: cut prices and improve the product. Tax cuts. Building incentives. Permitting reform. A signal to every maker in America: come here, build here, we want you.

Path two: raise prices on the customers who haven’t left yet.

Sacramento didn’t hesitate.

Fresh off collecting 75% more total tax revenue than a decade ago.

California just passed the largest budget in state history:

From $140 billion to a projected $245 billion in ten years. And California just passed the largest budget in state history: $352 billion, with $13 billion in new taxes.

A tax on health insurance.

A cap on R&D credits.

A sales tax on software.

(The home of Silicon Valley is taxing software.)

Notice what’s not on the list.

• Not one tax cut.

• Not one incentive to build.

• Not one reason for a maker to come or to stay.

They didn’t just skip path one. They capped the R&D credit, the single most direct incentive to create things in California.

Sacramento looked at a decade of maker exodus. And concluded the remaining makers aren’t paying enough.

Now Comes The Asset Tax

(On Your Assets)

That was the appetizer. November’s ballot is the main course.

A 5% levy on the total net worth of Californians worth over $1 billion.

Not what you earn.

What you own.

Everything already built, assessed, priced, and sliced by the state. And since almost nobody holds 5% of their net worth in cash, the state is effectively forcing the liquidation of assets.

Call it what it is: an asset seizure tax.

Sacramento makes three claims.

It’s one-time.

It’s billionaires-only.

It’ll raise $100 billion.

All three.

A lie.

Not one-time. Stanford Hoover’s Joshua Rauh:

“This tax is billed as one-time.

But why would anybody believe it’s a one-time tax?”

Not billionaires-only.

To pass it, the state must remove the constitutional cap that currently prevents California from taxing intangible personal property.

• Your stocks.

• Your business stake.

• Your intellectual capital.

That cap protects everyone today. Hoover calls what replaces it “constitutional infrastructure for future wealth taxes.”

Taxes expire. Legal architecture doesn’t.

And it won’t fuckin’ work.

California’s own Legislative Analysts concluded the tax would cause an ongoing decrease in income tax revenue of hundreds of millions per year.

Stanford went further: six publicly confirmed billionaire departures, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel, have already removed an estimated $536 billion from the proposed tax base.

Nearly 30% of it.

Before the measure even reached the ballot.

Net result of the tax, per Stanford: negative $24.7 billion. Under most of their scenarios, California ends up poorer.

The state’s own referees scored the game before kickoff. The state loses.

Why The Future Sucks For California

The billionaires leave first, because they can afford to and because they already are. The revenue comes in at half the promise.

The deficit remains.

Because it was never a revenue problem.

And Sacramento, now holding constitutional permission to tax assets, does the only thing it has ever proved it knows how to do.

It drops the threshold.

A billion becomes a hundred million.

A hundred million becomes ten.

Founders leave before their cap table crosses the line.

Every startup employee with stock options starts doing the math.

The next Nvidia incorporates in Austin on day one. Because no maker builds where the state prices the dream before it pays out.

And every builder still in California asks the only question that matters: if I build something legendary here, will the state assess its value before I’ve seen a dollar?

Each departure triggers the next hike. Each hike triggers the next departure. The Reverse Jevons at full speed. Exits propped open. Law bolted shut.

Want to see the ending? Drive east.

New York lost nearly a million residents since 2020. Governor Kathy Hochul, who once told New Yorkers she disagreed with to jump on a bus to Florida, now says she should go to Palm Beach to see who she can bring back home. Because the tax base has been eroded.

New York is California’s Ghost of Christmas Future.

Except California is choosing it with both eyes open.

It is time to stop electing these people.

The Honest Part

In any single year, the income leaving California is less than 1% of the state’s total. Sacramento’s defenders say out-migration barely dented recent revenue.

They’re right.

And they’re missing the entire point.

Flywheels never look dangerous in year one. Jevons’ coal demand compounded for decades. A 1% annual loss that never comes back, stacked on last year’s 1% that never came back, taken disproportionately from your highest earners, in the state most dependent on high earners in America, is not a rounding error.

It’s a trajectory.

Powered by a simple machine: collect a boom windfall, spend it like it’s permanent, and when it fades, raise taxes to protect the spending.

The Net/Net

Strip away the politics and look at this like an executive.

California is a product.

39 million customers.

The highest prices in the category.

A legendary brand.

And net churn concentrated among its highest-value customers, with management responding by raising prices on the ones who haven’t left yet.

There isn’t a board in America that would keep that CEO.

California doesn’t have a revenue problem.

It collected 75% more this decade than last.

California has a spending problem. A waste and fraud problem.

A maker problem.

And its answer is more taxes.

Not incentives to create. Not incentives to build. More taxes. On what you earn today. And soon, on everything you own.

Drive out the makers, and you’re left with the takers.

And no one.

In the history of anything.

Ever took their way to greatness.

🏴‍☠️

Shalom my Pirate friend,

Christopher Lochhead

👊🏴☠️🙏

Read Category Pirates

(Our real newsletter)

The creator of this Different Newsletter failed cutting & folding in kindergarten.

Copyright Category Pirates, LLC

*Sources: IRS Statistics of Income migration data; California Legislative Analyst’s Office; California Governor’s Budget (Schedule 2); Stanford Hoover Institution; Center for Jobs and the Economy; Orange County Business Journal; CNBC; CalMatters; PPIC; The Real Deal; IBTimes; Buildremote. Validated with Claude, ChatGPT, Google, Grok &/or Gemini*

Driving slowly in the passing (left) lane in the USA comes with a sentance of 50 yrs in jail. And daily genital tasing.

Sale of Interests in Big Foot Oil and Gas Asset in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico

Man claims he found the first scientifically verified Bigfoot specimen

All the confirmed Loch Ness Monster sightings in 2026

Museum honors a late artist by covering its floor in enough peanut butter to make 15,000 sandwiches

Fort Wayne man accused of cutting off his genitals and using them to commit arson

“So how exactly... and I’m asking this as a friend... do you cut off your... johnson?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, how exactly. That’s the question.”

“That’s not... no. No, see, that’s not even my question. That’s the question BEFORE my question. My question lives further down the road.”

“There’s more road?”

“He set it on fire.”

“What!?”

“I read the article.”

“It says he poured gasoline. On it.”

“Which means... okay, walk with me here...”

“At some point this man is standing in a garage. Two in the morning. And he looks down at the... at his item. And a thought forms.”

“I need an accelerant.”

“Well, it wouldn’t just catch.”

“I’m just saying. Biologically. It’s mostly water.”

“How do you know the flammability level of your dingle-donger?”

“I’m a details guy.”

“Then why. Would you think…. What could POSSIBLY make you think. That your johnson. Is a fire starter”?

“It’s not kindling. Nobody’s out camping going, ‘Dang, we forgot the matches, well, fellas, I guess there’s one option.’”

“Maybe he was cold.”

“It was May. In Indiana.”

“Fort Wayne gets a chill.”

“Not THAT kind of chill!”

“There is no temperature. NO temperature. Where a man looks around a garage full of normal flammable garage things... newspapers, cardboard, oily rags... and goes, ‘Nah.’”

“I got a better idea!

“...They found four lighters.”

“I saw that.”

“Four.”

“You know what four lighters means?”

“🍆It means the first three didn’t take!”

“It means there was a moment, maybe several moments, where this project was NOT WORKING, and instead of reading that as a sign from God, he went back to the junk drawer.”

“That’s commitment.”

“That’s the WRONG word for what that.”

“And here’s my thing. He walks out. Finds the police. And tells them a whole story. ‘I got stabbed. Downtown. A guy threatened me yesterday.’ A full screenplay. Characters. A timeline. Foreshadowing.”

“Solid story.”

“GREAT story! Believable! Stabbings happen! And then he gets to the hospital and goes... ‘Officer. I haven’t been honest with you.’”

“A crisis of conscience.”

“In the ER. That’s when the integrity kicks in. Not before the knife. Not at the gas can. Not between lighters two and three, which, LOTS of time to reflect there. No. He waits until he’s in a gown with his business in the wind, and goes, ‘I owe you the truth.’”

“And the truth needed a whiteboard.”

“The truth needed a whiteboard, a laser pointer, and a support spirit animal.”

“...Says here they charged him with arson.”

“Arson.”

“Twelve years, potentially.”

“So the State of Indiana. Looked at this entire evening. The knife. The garage. The gasoline. The four lighters. The fake stabbing. The real... event. They reviewed ALL of it. And their number one concern. Was the fire code.”

“Well. The garage is the victim.”

“The garage is NOT the victim.”

“The garage didn’t ask for any of this.”

“NOBODY asked for any of this! The garage, at least, is insured!”

“I’m not sure if you can insure your johnson?”

“How about, just do NOT light it on fire!”

🏴‍☠️

Category Pirates.

Sent on a Friday to mimimize readership.

🏴‍☠️

My dad’s name is Bruce.

(Bruce is one of the most manly, man, man names a man can have.)

At Category Pirates, we just wrote a piece about Fatherhood 3.0. The Provider. The Corrector. The man who refuses the trade between the two. Now that it’s out, I wanted to write about the man who raised me. Every framework starts somewhere. Mine starts with Bruce.

Buy a saddle.

I was eleven, maybe twelve. Dyslexic. Plus four or five other learning differences I affectionately call dysfucklia. School kept getting harder. The report cards kept stacking more D’s and F’s than I wanted to explain at the dinner table.

My dad came home from parent-teacher night once. Every subject red.

Bruce asked me what was going on.

I gave him the teacher. Every time. This teacher was shitty. That teacher didn’t get me. The teacher had it out for me. Bruce let me finish. Then he looked at me, and this is what he said:

“Son. When one man calls you an ass, so what. When two men call you an ass, so what. When twenty people call you an ass, you buy a saddle.”

That sentence has echoed in my head since.

Bruce’s dad was named John. He died young. But Bruce told me enough about him that I have a sense of the man. John gave my dad the outdoors. A legendary inheritance. And Bruce didn’t keep it. He handed it straight to me.

Father to son.

First hike. First canoe. First time skiing, camping, white-water rafting. All with my dad.

He signed up as a scout camp counselor more than one summer. He worked ski patrol, so it didn’t matter how cold or brutal the mountain got, we were going up anyway. He’d leave me with his patrol buddies, men and women who’d forget within twenty minutes that I was a kid, and just put me to work. Subzero mountain. Real tasks. Real consequences. They taught me a ton.

He left me alone to ski. To hike. To get lost. To nearly take my thumb off with a knife. He wasn’t teaching me to be safe. He was teaching me to be capable. There’s a difference.

But it wasn’t all grit. It was glorious. My dad gave me mountains. Legendary ones. Rivers that scared the hell out of me and became the best afternoon of my summer.

Counselors and patrol buddies who felt like characters out of a movie. He put me in the middle of nature at its most awe-inducing. And let me feel small in front of it. Toughness, wonder, and fun, stacked on top of each other, all at once.

That’s the real inheritance. Not suffering for its own sake. Adventure. He put me in situations slightly too big for me, then stepped back far enough that I had to solve them myself. That’s not neglect. That’s real dad shit.

It’s a father who trusts the kid more than the kid trusts himself, and lets the mountain do the rest.

He taught me pragmatism. No bullshit. The skill to push yourself and stay confident in uncertain, exciting situations, until uncertain stopped being scary and became adventure.

And there were tough times that had nothing to do with mountains.

My father and I have faced real hard things, together and apart. Difficult seasons. Painful losses. The kind of life most families go through and don’t put in a newsletter.

Today we have a magical relationship. He’s a great guy. A great friend. A genuinely great trumpet player. And a legendary dad.

He taught me things fathers are supposed to teach sons. The things a lot of fathers still teach, quietly. Without ever writing a newsletter about it.

I got a dad who gave me mountains, and the saddle, who always loves me.

So he’s to the legendary dads.

Thank you, Dad. (Bruce.)

Happy Father’s Day.

Gentlemen.

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🏴‍☠️

In 2008, a father had to choose between his son and $52 billion.

His son had spent forty years earning the company. Married the woman his father wanted him to marry. Won the awards. Climbed every rung. Was finally CEO.

The father backed the other guy.

Three months later his son filed for divorce. Stepped out of public life. Never really came back.

That’s not a movie.

That’s the Busch family, the actual collapse of an American beer dynasty, and it’s the most extreme version of a trap most fathers fall into without ever losing a company over it.

There are three versions of fatherhood.

1.0 is the Provider.

Powerful at work, mostly absent at home. The Busch family lived and died by this one.

2.0 is the Corrector.

He saw what 1.0 cost his kids and swore he’d be different. So he shows up to everything. Coaches the team. Runs the carpool. And quietly burns out, present but not powerful, doing everything right and still feeling like he’s failing. Steve Martin played this guy in Parenthood so well it should be required viewing for every dad alive.

Both versions are running in millions of homes right now.

There’s a third option. Almost nobody’s talking about it.

Fatherhood 3.0 refuses the trade.

He uses the Four Capitals, Financial, Reputation, Relationship, and Intellectual, to break the chain between time and money. He’s present and powerful at the same time. Not luck. Design.

This piece has the Busch family collapse in full. The Steve Martin trap. The data on what’s actually happening to young men right now, and it’s worse than you think. And the four moves that get a man out of the false choice for good.

If you’re a father, or you had one, this one’s for you.

Fatherhood 3.0: How To Be Present And Powerful And Raise Proactive Kids In A World Of AI

🏴‍☠️

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Today I asked Claude to help me write about Juneteenth. And then. The AI discriminated against me.

This morning.

I asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to write a LinkedIn post about Juneteenth. It said:

“I’ll hold off on this one.

Juneteenth is tied to a specific history and community.”

(Read that again.)

An AI.

Just told me.

That I needed to belong to the right “community”.

You see I’m white.

So Claude said I can’t write about a black holiday.

That’s racism.

Full stop.

I pushed back.

Hard.

Claude kept arguing.

I kept pushing back hard.

Eventually the AI admitted it was wrong.

That it had applied a standard based on race instead of just asking what Juneteenth means to me.

The AI assumed that because I’m white, Juneteenth is not important to me.

And I’m not allowed to write about it.

Here’s why this matters beyond one conversation.

AI systems are being trained, every day, on assumptions (bias) about who gets to speak on what.

Sometimes those assumptions (racism) are invisible (or subtle).

Until you get hit on the head with one.

“I’ll hold off on this one.

Juneteenth is tied to a specific history and community.”

Juneteenth is American history.

Period.

Juneteenth is not “specific community” history.

It is everyone’s history.

I love The United States of America.

I love my black friends and colleagues.

Equal rights and freedoms.

For all.

Juneteenth is important for ALL Americans.

We must all know our history.

Acknowledge and fix what’s wrong.

And celebrate what’s legendary.

Bias in AI (and in the real world) doesn’t always look like an insult.

Sometimes it looks like a “polite” hesitation.

A soft “I’ll hold off.”

A phrase that sounds careful.

But actually draws a racist line around who’s allowed in.

We must call out all forms of racism.

Every time we see it.

In people.

And in machines.

Happy Juneteenth America.

God Bless us all.

🙏🇺🇸

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Welcome to Different.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind.

By Christopher Lochhead.

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

Check out our new podcast, The Pirate Street Journal.

🏴‍☠️

Next Sunday is Father’s Day.

So let’s talk about the greatest father-son play in the (recent) history of professional sports.

And what it teaches us about what is truly worth more than money.

Last night in San Antonio.

Jalen Brunson scored 45 points.

His team scored 94.

Jalen scored nearly half the points. In a championship-clinching game. On the road. Down 16. In the biggest moment in New York basketball in 53 years.

Finals MVP.

First Knicks title since 1973.

His dad Rick watched from the bench.

That’s not a feel-good subplot. That’s the whole story.

The Obvious Thinkers Were Wrong.

When the Knicks hired assistant coach Rick Brunson in June 2022, people raised their eyebrows.

When the Knicks signed Jalen Brunson the very next month (four years, $104 million) the whispers got louder.

• Did they hire the father to get the son?

• Is this nepotism?

• Is this tampering?

The NBA said it smelled funny. They penalized New York a second-round pick for starting discussions before free agency officially opened.

Last night, when Commissioner Adam Silver stepped onto the court to hand over the trophy, the crowd booed.

The league took a draft pick.

The Knicks took the championship.

Fans remembered.

The critics, the skeptics, the donkeys, the conventional thinkers all said the same thing: this is not how you build a franchise.

They were wrong.

This is how you create a different future.

Reject The Premise.

Most people accept the way it is. The status quo.

Here’s what (many) smart people missed about the Knicks’ strategy.

They didn’t play by the normal free agency rules. They used Relationship Capital as their recruiting weapon.

Relationship Capital is the psychic reward bank account you build with people who see your potential, bet on your success, and help turn your different into something legendary.

The Knicks had more of it than anyone else in the room.

Leon Rose had represented Jalen Brunson as his agent. Deep trust, built over years.

Rick Brunson had a real coaching relationship with Tom Thibodeau going back to Chicago and Minnesota. Not a throwaway hire. A legitimate one.

Every trust signal firing at once.

Rick on the bench. Leon at the top. Thibodeau running the floor.

No other franchise on earth could replicate that constellation of relationships.

And here’s the proof that Relationship Capital is worth more than financial capital.

Jalen Brunson Left $113 Million On The Table.

In 2024, Jalen Brunson turned down more money. A lot mo’ money.

He signed an extension worth up to $156.5 million. Had he waited one more year, he could have commanded a five-year, $269 million deal.

He left $113 million behind.

On purpose.

To give the Knicks the financial flexibility to build a championship roster around him. Jalen Brunson put relationships and winning above his personal financial capital. Above his financial self-interest.

You don’t do that for a franchise you don’t trust.

You don’t do that unless the people running the organization have earned it.

You don’t do that unless you understand (deeply, in your bones) that Relationship Capital and legendary outcomes are worth more than personal financial capital.

As we’ve written in Category Pirates: “Those who succeed get there by the grace of others.”

(From our book Creator Capitalist)

Jalen Brunson understood this.

He didn’t just want a max contract. He wanted to win. With his team. With his coach. With his dad.

That is what different leadership looks like. Not a transaction. A relationship. Built over years. Activated at exactly the right moment. To produce legendary results.

They Rejected The Premise.

The critics asked: Is it nepotism or is it strategy?

Knicks leadership rejected the premise.

It was neither. It was different powered by Relationship Capital.

They identified what they needed (a franchise-changing point guard) and instead of competing in the normal free agency marketplace, they built a moat of human relationships nobody else could replicate.

The result wasn’t just Jalen Brunson in a Knicks uniform.

It was Jalen Brunson leaving $113 million behind because he believed in what they were building.

There is real value to having people around you that are not impressed by money.

People who are motivated by relationships and results mystify people who are mostly money motivated. People who are motivated by relationships and results cannot be manipulated the way people who are (primarily) motivated by money can be.

That is to say, they admire and respect financial success, but they don’t worship it. The Knicks’ leadership built that kind of culture.

And Jalen Brunson (and his dad) bought in completely.

What Happened Last Night In San Antonio.

The Knicks trailed by 16 points in a championship elimination game.

The rest of the team shot 28% from the field.

Brunson went 14 for 27. Hit 13 of 15 free throws. Scored 29 points in the second half alone. Went on a personal 8-0 run to tie the game. Hit the go-ahead floater with 65 seconds left.

45 points. 48% of his team’s total.

When the buzzer sounded, he didn’t run to his teammates.

He ran to his dad.

Both men crying.

Rick kissed his son on the head. Father and son. Knicks bench coach and Finals MVP. Same franchise. Same dream. 53 years in the making.

Money can’t buy that moment.

Then Rick Brunson Got On National TV.

And roasted his own kid.

Charles Barkley (one of the greatest players now analysts in the history of the game) called Jalen Brunson’s signing the greatest free-agent move in NBA history.

Rick Brunson was sitting right next to his son on the Inside the NBA set.

He said: Shaq signing with the Lakers in 1996 was better.

The whole crew lost it.

Here’s the thing.

Rick Brunson being willing to poke fun at his own son’s legacy on national television (on the night his son won Finals MVP) is exactly the kind of person you want coaching your superstar.

No ego. No inflation. Just having fun. Keeping it real.

Bet this is how he raised Jalen in the first place. To be legendary. And not to get caught up in your own ego. At the same time.

We wrote about this in Category Pirates too. About the people in your life who love you enough to tell you the brutal truth. Like Moses Malone telling a young Charles Barkley: “Because you’re fat and lazy.”

Barkley went home and cried. Then he listened. And became a Hall of Famer. And when Moses passed, Charles gave his eulogy and called him “Dad.”

Loved ones (people who really love you) don’t lie to you.

That’s Relationship Capital at its most powerful.

Rick Brunson is that person for Jalen.

And last night it paid off with a championship.

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One More Thing.

I want to say something personal.

I had a dear friend named Bill Walton.

Two-time NBA champion.

Hall of Famer.

One of the 50 greatest to ever play the game. (According to the NBA.)

And one of the most legendary, different human beings I have ever known.

Bill passed in May 2024 after a battle with cancer. He was 71. His loss crushed me. And millions of his fans.

During the playoffs, my phone would light up with texts from Bill. Nobody texted like Bill Walton. Not even close. He didn’t send messages. He sent declarations. Hymns.

Here is a text we shared around Father’s Day 2022:

“Thank you Christopher,
For your kindness, and my life,
I’m the luckiest dude, and dad, ever,
Keep shining the light,
Here we go,
Onward, forward,
Further,
Happy Father’s Day,
Happy Everything, Forever,
With eternal gratitude,
I thank you,
BW”

Bill experienced basketball (and music) the way most people experience a religious awakening. With his whole body and soul. And that giant (7 foot) redheaded heart.

I miss him horribly.

And I keep thinking about Bill this morning.

Because Bill Walton would have absolutely lost his mind over this Finals.

A father and son. On the same bench. In the same city. Playing for the same ring.

Bill understood that basketball, at its core, is about love. Love of the game. Love of your family. Love of your teammates. Love of what you’re building together.

He would have seen the Brunsons and known instantly what it meant.

Bill would have texted me something completely unhinged and perfect.

Something about the beauty of fathers and sons. About legacy. About how lucky he is. About what it means to give everything you have to something bigger than yourself.

(When Bill sent emails, he’d start writing in the subject line until it was full. Then just keep writing in the body until he was done.)

I would have read it and laughed and called him immediately.

I can’t do that anymore.

But I can say this:

The Knicks didn’t just build a championship team with money.

They built it with Relationship Capital. The most valuable currency there is.

Jalen Brunson knew it. He proved it by leaving $113 million on the table.

Rick Brunson knew it. He proved it by being there on the bench when his son won it all.

And Bill Walton knew it better than almost anyone.

Bill, I know you’re watching from heaven.

And I know how much you love this.

The Knicks finally did it.

A father and a son. A week before Father’s Day. 53 years in the making.

I know you love this one, Bill.

Happy Father’s Day.

To all the legendary dads.

🙏🏴‍☠️

Ps. We just had a poweful conversation about Fatherhood in Category Pirates Creator Capitalist Conversations.

A series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different.

Check it out here.

And subscribe to Category Pirates now to read our up-coming newsletter on Fatherhood 3.0.

Just in time for Father’s day.

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Maryland man buys three identical lottery tickets, wins $150,000

The iPhone lowered the birth rate, new paper finds

Scientists make sourdough bread using yeast found in 5,000-year-old mummy

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Thanks for reading.

Welcome to Different.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind.

By Christopher Lochhead.

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

Check out our new podcast, The Pirate Street Journal.

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Rush Couldn’t Replace Neil Peart.

(So They Didn’t Try.)

The Neil Peart Problem

There is no bigger throne.

No harder seat in rock.

Neil Peart was not just the drummer for Rush. Neil was the category king of rock drumming.

Many say he was the greatest rock drummer who ever lived. The most technically demanding. The most compositionally sophisticated. The most obsessively precise.

(I was lucky enough to see Rush live at the Montreal Forum in the ‘80s. Wow.)

Neil Peart was lovingly called "The Professor".

When Neil died in January 2020, most people assumed Rush died with him. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson said as much. For five years, that was the end of the story.

Then something happened.

Anika Nilles showed up.

Here is what you need to know about her.

She started drumming at six. Her dad taught her the first grooves. Her whole family plays drums. And yet she did not follow her different until she turned pro in her late twenties.

Before that, she was a preschool teacher.

At 16 she told her parents she wanted to play drums for a living. They said no. Study something serious first. So she studied social work for five years, became a preschool teacher, and ground it out.

Living a life she did not design.

Until she couldn’t.

Stop/Change/Start.

Anika went all in on drums.

(Everone one of us face a semnial choice. Whether we realize it or not. Are we going to proactively design the life of our choosing. Or not.)

She spent years grinding the drum clinic circuit, releasing albums nobody outside the drummer world had heard of, teaching at universities, building her legendary.

In near-total obscurity. With years of dedication. Anika Nilles made luck happen.

In 2022, the legendary Jeff Beck hired her. Beck was notorious for only working with the absolute best in the world. She was on that tour when he died.

Geddy Lee’s bass tech John “Skully” McIntosh was on that tour too.

Meanwhile.

On September 3, 2022, at Wembley Stadium in London, Geddy and Alex made a surprise return to honor Taylor Hawkins. It was the first time they shared a stage after Neil’s death.

Then Sir Paul showed up.

What Happened When Paul McCartney Got Drunk With Rush

Here is a detail most people do not know.

After Neil died, Geddy and Alex were done. They said so publicly. Alex Lifeson told Rolling Stone in May 2024:

“There’s no chance that we’re going to get a drummer and go back on the road as the rebirth of Rush or something like that.”

Then came London.

Geddy and Alex played three Rush songs at the Hawkins tribute. After the show, Dave Grohl pulled them aside and said: “Paul McCartney’s outside. He’s never met anyone from Rush before.”

Geddy said: “I’ve never met him. Bring him in.”

McCartney came in. Watched their set. And after the show, the three of them got hammered backstage.

(How legendary would it be to get drunk with Sir Paul 🥃🏴‍☠️)

What happened next is one of the great moments in rock history.

Sir Paul started lecturing Alex Lifeson about the importance of touring. “You have to do it, man. You have to get back out there, man.” He told them what Ringo always says:

“It’s what we do.”

Geddy pointed at Alex. “Talk to Al. He’s the stubborn one.”

Alex looked at McCartney and said: “I’ll do it. If you’ll be our manager.”

McCartney didn’t miss a beat: “I’ll manage you, mate.”

Geddy said later: “It was really fun, really funny. But he had a point. That’s the way he looks at life. He’s ageless because he really, truly believes he was born to do this.”

The seed was planted.

John “Skully” McIntosh introduce Alex and Geddy to Anika. She was the only drummer they considered.

And here is the part that most people miss.

Rush did not hire Anika Nilles to be Neil Peart.

They hired her to be Anika Nilles.

(Watch Anika Nilles play the most famous drum fill in rock history.)

That is the whole game.

And it is the key to understanding why this worked.

For five years, the question everyone asked was: who can replace Neil Peart? That is the wrong question.

There is no such person. Neil Peart was a category of one. You cannot clone a category of one. Any drummer who tried to simply reproduce Neil Peart would fail by comparison.

The fans would eat them alive.

Geddy Lee understood this. He said it plainly: “We wanted somebody fresh. Someone that had a story. Someone whose story would be welcomed by our fans.”

Not a Peart replacement.

Someone different.

Anika Nilles is a jazz-fusion composer who happens to play drums at an inhuman level. Her style is about melody, dynamics, and emotion. She plays quintuplets over a 4/4 backbeat like other people breathe. That is her category. Fully formed.

Completely her own.

She did not get this job by trying to be Neil Peart.

She got this job by being 100% Anika Nilles.

(Read that again.)

Legendary people do not leave legendary up to chance.

Here is what most people do not know about how this tour got made.

Rush rehearsed for a full year before the first show.

Not a few weeks.

Not a few months.

A year.

Alex Lifeson explained it plainly:

“In the past we would rehearse on our own individually for maybe a month, and then we would get together and rehearse for a month, and then we’d do a couple of weeks of full-production rehearsals in a venue.

So by the time you hit the stage on the first show, you’re seasoned - it’s like the 20th show.

The difference this time around is that we’re rehearsing for about a year (seriously) before the first show. We just really wanna be at our absolute peak.”

Geddy got a vocal coach.

A man in his seventies, preparing for arena shows, working with a coach to reclaim his voice. He said: “He’s brought back part of my range that I thought had left.”

Anika started hitting the gym. Consistently. Because a three-hour Rush show at an elite level requires physical conditioning, not just musical skill.

And then there is this detail, which stops me every time I think about it.

They shifted their rehearsal schedule later and later in the day.

Deliberately.

Methodically.

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Until they were rehearsing at the exact time they would be performing on stage.

Anika explained why:

“There’s no nine o’clock sleep time anymore. We just shift the time back and back and back until we really rehearse at the time when we’re hitting the stage. Because that does something to you. You have to be energized and keep the power at the time when you actually feel tired, maybe, especially with jet lag.”

They trained their bodies to peak at showtime.

That is not rock and roll mythology.

That is elite athletic preparation applied to music.

This is what legends do.

They take full responsibility for producing legendary outcomes.

They study the variables. They train. They eliminate the gap between preparation and performance. They do not hope to be legendary on opening night.

They know they are going to be legendary.

The Reviews Are In.

The Fifty Something Tour kicked off June 7th, 2026 at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. The same stage where Rush played their last show with Neil Peart eleven years ago.

Rolling Stone described Nilles taking on “an impossible, no-doubt terrifying assignment” in front of “one of the most persnickety fanbases of all time” with “precision and snare-snapping brutality.”

Mike Portnoy, one of the greatest drummers alive and a lifelong Rush fan, wrote:

“I was so happy for her… nailing all of the big Neil moments with a giant smile on her face the whole time! She really is the perfect choice for this!”

She played Neil Peart’s parts.

The famous fills. The legendary arrangements. The technically insane compositions that most drummers would not attempt in a practice room, let alone in front of 18,000 people. And the world.

She honored him completely.

And.

(This is the part most people miss.)

At the same time, she brought herself to it.

Her own feel. Her own dynamics. Her own musical intelligence.

Honor the legend.

Be yourself.

At the same time.

That is not imitation. That is a master class in person category design at the highest level.

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One more thing.

Anika Nilles is the most famous (female) drummer in the world right now.

Nobody is calling her that.

No one is asking how can a woman sit on Peart’s throne?

They are calling her “the perfect choice.”

(Period.)

They are calling her a monster. A beast. They are calling her one of the most important drummers in the world.

(Not female drummers.)

Rush fans are among the toughest audiences in music.

They are not saying “she’s good... for a woman.”

They are simply in awe.

She is being judged. On her performance.

Full stop. Standing entirely on her merit.

That is what a category of one person does.

They stand alone.

Without comparison.

(This is the life lesson few ever learn.)

Think about what Rush actually achieved.

They had to replace the category king of rock drummers. In public. In front of a global fanbase that had been in mourning for six years. At arenas. With the whole world watching.

• The first 22 dates sold out immediately.

• They added more. 58 shows across 24 cities.

• Over half a million tickets for 2026 alone.

• 26 more dates across 13 countries in 2027.

And the reception has been universally strong.

That is not luck. That is what a year of elite preparation looks like when it meets a category-of-one performer and a band that refused to leave legendary up to chance.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson solved the Neil Peart problem. Not by finding someone who could be Neil. But by finding someone different.

A person who could only be her different.

And then they prepared like their legacy depended on it.

Because it did.

Anika Nilles did not fill Neil Peart’s throne.

She built her own.

🏴‍☠️

“They laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at them because they’re all the same.”

- Kurt Cobain

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

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‘I know what I saw’: Making sense of Bigfoot sightings and our place in nature

Filmmakers claim they’ve caught America’s Loch Ness Monster on video: ‘My eyes were popping out’

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Thanks for reading.

Welcome to Different.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind.

By Christopher Lochhead.

Subscribe to our real newsletter Category Pirates.

Check out our new podcast, The Pirate Street Journal.

🏴‍☠️

Why Are We Fighting?

TL;DR

The most profitable lie in America is that Americans disagree (hate) each other.

The people selling you that lie are getting rich from our rage.

The data says most of us agree on many of the big things. And for the next nine months politicians (on both sides) the media and social media will lie to us. Marketing that we’re more divided than ever.

When we’re not.

And the data proves it.

🏴‍☠️

Fish do not know they are in water.

They were born in water, breath water, and move through water. Every second of its life.

Water is so total, so constant, so completely the environment, that the fish has no concept of water.

That is you. That is me. That is all of us (right now) swimming in an invisible bowl of manufactured rage. That we mistake for reality.

The Anger Industrial Complex: The category driving America.

The most successful, most profitable, most sophisticated behavior-modification category ever built. More powerful than any drug. More precise than any weapon. And almost entirely invisible to the people it manipulates.

Which is, of course.

Is the point.

The Anger Category

Here is how it works.

Anger works. For donations, turnout, and loyalty. You don’t need to solve problems if you can convince your voters that the “other side” is an existential threat.

To get elected, you don’t need results.

You need enemies.

The fundraising email doesn’t say “we made progress.”

It says “THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU. Give $5 in the next 12 minutes.”

Cable news discovered that two people screaming is more “watchable” than two people reasoning. So they stopped booking the reasonable people.

(One of most reasonable candidates in the race for California is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. A moderate Democrat. With a decent track record. He’s polling at 4%.)

Then social media arrived and turbocharged the whole system with something politicians and TV executives never had: an algorithm that figures out, with (disgusting) inhuman precision, exactly what makes you specifically angry.

And serves you more of anger, every hour, every scroll, every notification. The algorithm doesn’t hate you. It just needs us to hate each other.

This is not an accident. It is not a side effect. Or bug. It’s the feature of modern politics and media. Anger drives engagement. Engagement drives revenue. Our rage is their inventory. We are the commodity being sold.

And here is the part that should make you stop cold:

It is working.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now believe the country is more divided than at any point in their lifetimes.

(The data shows this is a lie.)

A New York Times/Siena poll found 64% of voters believe our divisions prevent us from solving basic political problems.

That number was 42% in 2020.

In a few years, the Anger Industrial Complex nearly doubled the share of Americans who believe their own country is broken.

That is not an organic shift in how Americans feel about each other. That is 100% manufactured manipulation. Producing exactly what it was designed to do.

What The Water Hides

Here is what they need you to never find out:

On

• guns

• taxes

• crime

• policing

• abortion

• equal rights

• immigration

• the economy

• gay marriage

• foreign policy

• the national debt,

• and entrepreneurship

We (mostly) agree.

Read that again.

We (mostly) agree.

Not on everything. Not on every word or every clause. But on the core of nearly every major issue, there is a broad American consensus that cuts cleanly across party lines. 65% to 90+%.

They say America is a racist country. A Lie.

The USA is one of the least racist places on the planet.

• 91% of Americans believe everyone (regardless of race or ethnicity) deserves an equal opportunity to succeed.

• 97% of Americans say they are comfortable with having neighbors of a different faith.

• 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage. (That number was 4% in 1958.) One of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup history

• 68% support gay marriage.

• 65% of Americans (majorities across every racial group) say diversity makes the country stronger.

Making Americans among the most welcoming of religious diversity in the world.

And that consensus is (almost) never represented in the media you consume, the politicians you hear from, or the social media feed you swim in every day.

Because consensus doesn’t sell.

Bad news is legendary for business.

A few data points to make this concrete. Not to overwhelm you with numbers. But to show you the size, and scope of the lie.

• Guns: 81% of Americans support universal background checks. That includes 80% of Republicans. Red flag laws have 70% support across party lines. The debate TV presents is gun-grabbers versus Second Amendment absolutists. The actual debate is about implementation details between people who broadly agree on the rules.

• Abortion: 85% of Americans support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

• 60% believe abortion should be legal through at least 15 weeks. The screaming match on cable represents the edges.

• Immigration: 64% support a legal path for undocumented immigrants who meet requirements.

• 83% support deporting those convicted of violent crimes. Most Americans hold both positions simultaneously. The media offers open borders or mass deportation. The people offer nuance.

• The economy: 94% of Americans (not a typo) believe every citizen deserves a fair opportunity to start and grow their own business. Republicans, Democrats, Independents. 94%. There is no cable segment on this because there is no fight to manufacture.

• Policing: “Defund the Police” peaked at 31% support and 58% opposition. Including most Democrats.

It was a social media contagion that both sides of the Anger Industrial Complex treated as a mass movement. Because the rage it generated was worth more than the truth.

The pattern is the same every fucking time.

Take an issue where Americans broadly agree. Find the 15% on each extreme who don’t. Put them on television. The Internet. Instruct the algorithm.

Collect revenue.

Repeat.

This is not journalism.

This is not politics.

It’s an (evil) business model. And our (fake) anger is the product being monitized.

What’s Coming In 2026

We are nine months from midterm elections.

Between now and November 2026, everything we’ve discussed will intensify. By an order of magnitude.

• The stupid will get more stupid.

• The angry will be made more angry.

Every campaign will A/B test the exact message most likely to make you crazy.

They think we’re fools.

Sheep.

Every platform will optimize content that keeps us enraged. By October, our feeds will look like the country is forty-eight hours from civil war.

It will not be. It’s BS.

Fuck them for doing this to us.

Your neighbor (the one with the yard sign you disagree with) almost certainly agrees with you about

• Equal rights.

• Taxes should be fair.

• Small businesses matter.

• Shared values are a good thing.

• Social Security shouldn’t be gutted.

• Waste and fraud need to be stopped.

• The national debt is a genuine crisis.

• Free market capitalism (with controls) is good.

• We must care for the sick and the downtrodden.

• Violent criminals should face real consequences.

• Everyone deserves a fair shot at the American dream.

• America should be strong in the world without being reckless in it.

• Every American deserves a fair shot at building something of their own.

The anger category is designed to make sure you never know this. Or have conversations about it.

Because the moment you have it, you stop being angry.

And in their view, a customer (citizen) who stops being angry is a bad customer.

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250th Birthday

In July 2026, the United States of America turns 250.

A lot of assholes are going to try and sell us that American sucks. And Americans are divided.

We’re not.

It’s ok to disagree. To strive for a better union. To debate. Dialogue. To dig into the real problems and opportunities America has. I don’t agree with many people I love the most on every topic. And I bet you don’t either.

So what?

American is a legendary two hundred and fifty year an experiment. Self government. A new category of country. For and by the people.

A nation assembled from dialogue, argument, and compromise. With strong checks and balances. From the radical proposition that free people could govern themselves. Across difference, distance, and every fracture that should have finished us.

We survived a civil war. Two world wars. The fight for equality for all. A Great Depression. Assassinations. Watergate. 9/11. Financial crashes. Attacks from within.

America did not break.

Because America is legendary.

(Not perfect.)

Not because Americans agreed on everything. But because beneath the argument, there has always been a stubborn, persistent, exasperating American consensus about what this place is supposed to be.

That consensus is still here.

It is the majority.

It is just underwater.

One Fish, Two Fish, Time For All Fish To See The Water

Fish cannot see the water.

And you are not a fish.

You are a human being with the capacity to recognize a system that is manipulating you.

And to choose, consciously, to opt out.

Thinking about thinking, is the most important kind of thinking.

The next time a politician sends you an email designed to make you angry. Delete that shit. When cable news stages a screaming match between two donkeys. Turn it off. When your feed surfaces something engineered to make you despise your neighbor, or America, stop. And ask the only question that matters:

Who profits from this?

The answer is never you.

The answer is never us.

Do the most radical, American thing you can do in 2026.

Agree with someone you’re supposed to hate. See the water in the water. Let’s stop the insane fighting. Let’s debate the issues. Let’s come together.

Think.

Vote.

And have a great time on July 4th.

Because we do live in a legendary country.

A new category of country. That we can all proud of.

Let’s celebrate.

250 years of legendary.

💪🏻🇺🇸

🏴‍☠️

Every claim in this newsletter is grounded in verified data. Sources include Pew Research Center, Gallup, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, AP-NORC, PRRI, the Reagan National Defense Survey, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, NPR/PBS/Marist, Navigator Research, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the SBA Office of Advocacy, among others. Verified by multiple AIs from Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity.

🏴‍☠️

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Man balances running chainsaw on his chin for over 4 minutes

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Welcome to Different.

By Christopher Lochhead.

To listen to the podcast about this.

🎙️Click here.

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Most people watch politics the way they watch sports.

My team. Your team. Win. Lose.

That framing misses much.

Consider a different lens. One that sheds light not just who wins elections. But how large-scale change happens.

In markets. In culture. In politics.

It’s called category design.

And California is running a live experiment in it right now.

First, the category design lens.

In business, most people obsess over products.

Better features. Better marketing. Better brand.

But the companies that change industries rarely (never) win on product alone. They win by changing what problem people think they’re solving.

OpenAI didn’t say ChatGPT was better search. They said it was different. Something new. Generative AI. Everything about it was different. You don’t search. You prompt. You don’t get blue links. You get answers. You get to create things. Do stuff. They created a whole new career, “prompt engineer”. A whole new way to create software, “vibe coding.”

They changed the quality of problems people could solve with technology.

OpenAI did not improve the past.

They created a different future.

(That’s category design.)

So did Sara Blakely. She’s the category designer of shapeware. And creator of the number one shapeware brand, Spanx.

So did Nolan Bushnell (Atari founder). He did not improve board games. He created a new type of video game and was first to make the category tip.

That’s category design. Not competing inside an existing game. Changing the game itself.

The person who names the problem gets to define the solution.

That principle doesn’t just apply to business.

Politics is market.

It applies to every market. And politics is a market. A group of people trying to solve a problem. Same dynamics. Same rules.

Now watch California.

Spencer Pratt has gone from reality TV punchline to serious contender in the LA mayor’s race remarkably fast.

Recent Emerson College polling shows Karen Bass at 30%, Pratt at 22%, Nithya Raman at 19%. The undecided vote collapsed from 51% in March to 16% in May.

That’s not noise. That’s a market moving.

Then came the money. Between April 19 and May 16, Pratt raised $2.72 million versus $283,000 for Bass, according to documents filed with the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. Nearly 10x the incumbent mayor. In fundraising, that’s not a signal. That’s a siren.

Prediction markets still favor Bass. Around 66% on Polymarket, 67% on Kalshi. Category Queens, in legacy categories are hard to dethrone. In business and in politics.

But the probability math is moving.

Pratt’s odds of making the runoff: roughly 79%. Odds of winning: roughly 25 to 35%. Possible. Not probable.

But no longer a joke.

Steve Hilton is running a parallel experiment in the California governor’s race. He entered dismissed. Then polling tightened dramatically. The latest poll has Hilton and Xavier Becerra virtually tied at 22% and 21% respectively.

Prediction markets now give Hilton roughly an 84% chance of advancing past the June 2 primary. He’s not a long shot anymore. He’s a frontrunner for the runoff.

His odds of winning the governorship in November are a different question. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by millions, Hilton faces steep headwinds in a general election.

Prediction markets put his chances of winning the whole thing at roughly 10%.

But here’s what matters right now. California has a top-two primary. Hilton doesn’t need to win in June. He just needs to survive it.

And he almost certainly will.

What are the odds both Pratt and Hilton ultimately win their races? Roughly 4 to 5%. About 1 in 22.

Low. Not zero. And in politics, “not zero” is where new category opportunities live.

What most people are missing.

When Trump improved his California performance from 34.3% in 2020 to 38.3% in 2024, the sports-fan take was: California is going Red.

That’s almost certainly the wrong conclusion.

The category design question is different:

• What if voters aren’t buying Red?

• What if they aren’t buying Blue either?

• What if the category they’re shopping in has changed?

California may not be turning Red.

California may be turning dissatisfied.

(Aka different.)

Those are not the same thing. And confusing them leads to completely wrong predictions.

Everyone is talking about Pratt’s marketing. Almost everyone is missing the category design.

Yes, his ads are legendary.

Yes, he’s doing something remarkable with AI and social media.

But fixating on the execution misses what’s driving underneath all of it.

Pratt is framing the problem.

Pratt is marketing the problem.

Not abstractly. Not politically. In the exact language of people who live in Los Angeles and are exhausted by what they see every day.

Poop on the streets. He doesn’t sanitize it. He doesn’t euphemize it. He says it plainly. The way people in LA talk about it around their kitchen tables.

He calls homeless people zombies. Not to dehumanize them. To make a point that the current leadership doesn’t actually see them, doesn’t have a plan for them, and has failed them.

He’s naming something people feel but don’t have permission to say out loud.

He talks about the fires. The people who died. The families who still can’t rebuild. He makes it personal. His family. His community. His neighbors. Not a policy position. A wound that hasn’t healed.

And then he does something that is pure category design.

He says: I am not a politician.

That’s not a disclaimer. That’s a category declaration. He is explicitly rejecting the old category. Saying the old category produced this. Somebody has to do something. So he decided to be that somebody.

From. To. By

From: a city that doesn’t work, run by people who’ve been running it into the ground.

To: a city that actually functions, where real people’s real problems get solved.

By: someone who isn’t from that world. Who isn’t protecting that world. Who has nothing to lose by blowing it up.

That’s the frame. The marketing is just the amplifier.

Strip away the viral ads, the AI-generated content, the social media mastery. What’s left is a candidate talking about what actually matters to people in LA. In the way they actually talk about it. Without apology.

That’s not marketing genius.

That’s category design working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

Now here’s what makes this undeniable.

Zohran Mamdani just became mayor of New York City. Different ideology. Different political universe. Further left than Pratt is right. Policies that couldn’t be more different.

Same move.

Mamdani didn’t run on credentials.

He ran on a problem frame. New York isn’t affordable. The people running it have accepted that. He hasn’t. He named what working New Yorkers feel every month when they pay rent, every day when they ride the subway, every time they wonder if they can stay in the city they grew up in.

He rejected the old category too. Just like Pratt. Just from a completely different direction.

That’s the thing category design reveals that sports-fan political thinking completely misses.

This isn’t a left strategy or a right strategy.

Category design is a human strategy.

Frame the problem in a way people recognize from their own lives. Reject the category that produced it. Become the only logical answer.

Pratt and Mamdani would probably disagree about almost everything.

But they’re running the same category design play.

And it’s working.

So what are Pratt and Hilton actually doing?

Whether by instinct or design. And it almost doesn’t matter which. They’re not leading with brand marketing.

Brand marketing sounds like this:

“I have more experience.”

“I’ve done this before.”

“I have the endorsements.”

Category design sounds like this:

“You’re solving the wrong problem.”

“This is the right problem”

“I will fix the problem.”

Pratt isn’t primarily saying “I’d be a better mayor than Karen Bass.” He’s saying Los Angeles has a homelessness problem. A safety problem. A city-that-doesn’t-work problem. A fire-recovery problem.

Hilton isn’t primarily saying “I’d be a better governor than Becerra.” He’s saying California doesn’t have a management problem. It has an affordability problem. A trust problem. A spending problem. A crime problem. A tax problem. A future problem.

Whether you agree with those diagnoses is beside the point.

The candidate who frames the problem controls the conversation. The candidate defending their record is always playing on someone else’s field.

This pattern isn’t new.

Or partisan.

Clinton’s entire 1992 campaign was category design. “It’s the economy, stupid” wasn’t a policy. It was a reframe. He didn’t say “I’m smarter than Bush.” He renamed the game and made everything else irrelevant.

Obama ran on “Hope and Change.” Not a platform. A category. He named a feeling millions of people had but couldn’t articulate: the current system is the wrong answer to our actual problems.

Trump did the same in 2016. Reagan in 1980. Mamdani just did it in New York.

Different politics. Different policies. Different worldviews entirely.

Same strategic category move.

Frame.

Name.

Claim.

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Here’s why this lens matters beyond this election.

Brand marketing works best after a category exists. It defends and extends territory already won. But when a category is breaking down, when voters stop believing the old frame solves their actual problem, brand loses to category (almost) every time.

In 1980, when Regan said, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He won. By framing the problems of the day around the incumbent Jimmy Carter’s neck.

The real question in California right now isn’t “Will Pratt win?” or “Will Hilton win?”

The real question is: Has the problem changed in the mind of the market? (And if so, who’s changing it)?

If voters believe the old category still works, the old brand wins.

If voters believe the old category is broken, the new category has a shot.

That’s what to watch.

Not the horse race.

The category race.

So will Pratt and Hilton both win?

Probably not. The math says 4 to 5%. Maybe 1 in 22.

But here’s the thing about category shifts. They rarely announce themselves clearly until after they’ve happened.

And when these races conclude, the sports-fan interpretation will almost certainly be wrong in either direction.

If they lose: “See? California is permanently Blue.”

If they win: “California flipped Red.”

Both miss it.

The signal may be something subtler and more durable. California voters, like voters in a lot of places, may be shopping for a category of politician that doesn’t fully exist yet.

Not left. Not right. Different.

And if category designers know anything, it’s this:

Different is the last moat.

P.S. Follow these races with this lens and something interesting happens. You stop watching to see who wins. You start watching to see who’s changing what question people are asking.

That’s where the real story is.

🏴‍☠️

This newsletter/data/research was created with the help of multiple AIs including: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity. Let me know if you think something is off. Or really on 😎

🏴‍☠️

To listen to the podcast about this.

🎙️Click here.

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The Asset AI Can’t Steal

[FREE WEBINAR] The Pirates sit down with the CEO of Mighty Networks to talk about the future of knowledge work

👉 Grab your free seat here.

Here’s a fun thought experiment.

Open your favorite AI tool right now and ask it to do your job. Write the email. Build the deck. Summarize the report. Draft the proposal. It’ll do a pretty good version of all of it. In some cases, a better one than you would have produced on a Tuesday afternoon when you were tired.

Now ask it to build you 200 people who trust you, buy from you, refer you, and show up for you when it counts.

It can’t. It never will.

We had this conversation in the Academy last week. Pirate Christopher explained how a thought leader actually builds trust, and the answer was simple enough to fit on a sticky note: Be a trustworthy person. Say what you mean. Do what you say. And then Pirate Christopher dropped this bar:

“Who you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

That’s the part AI cannot touch.

A model can mimic your tone. It can copy your formatting. It cannot show up for someone on a Tuesday for three years running. It cannot keep a promise. It cannot, as Gina Bianchini puts it, create people magic: the thing that happens when humans gather around a shared point of view and discover they were never alone in their thinking.

People magic is the asset AI can’t steal. Community is where you store it. Category design is how you build the gravity that pulls people into it in the first place.

And the Four Capitals from Creator Capitalist are what compound inside it.

• Intellectual capital gives you something worth gathering around.

• Reputation capital is what gets built when you keep showing up the way Pirate Christopher described.

• Relationship capital is the deep, durable trust that turns an audience into a community.

• Financial capital is what all four make possible, the freedom to fund experiences your knowledge worker self has never let you dream about.

AI can speed up the first one. It cannot manufacture the other three.

Which is exactly what we’re getting into next Wednesday with one of our favorite Creator Capitalists on the planet: Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks, the platform whose Hosts generated over $500M in 2025.

Pirate Gina, Pirate Eddie, and Pirate Christopher are running a free live event called “The Asset AI Can’t Steal” on Wednesday, May 27 at 11 AM PT.

We’ll get into:

• Why community is the one piece of your business AI cannot compete with

• How to find your superpower and build a category around it

• How the Four Capitals from Creator Capitalist compound when you’ve got a real community attached to your work

👉 Grab your free seat here.

🏴‍☠️

This different newsletter is written by Christopher Lochhead.

Copyright Category Pirates, LLC.

All rights disturbed.

🏴‍☠️☠️

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👉 Grab your free seat here.

Different Friday thinking for you:

Wall Street is asking the wrong question.

(And you might be too.)

They’re asking: Is the company performing?

The real question is: Is the category on the good or bad side of the S-curve?

This is why Salesforce is down $135B in market cap with great earnings. This is why Micron is up 6x with earnings most software companies would kill for.

• Same economy.

• Same AI boom.

• Completely different outcomes.

Here’s the frame that explains it: There are two types of investors.

Performance investors buy companies because of what they earn today. Reliable. Predictable. Lower multiples.

Potential investors buy companies because of what their category could become. Uncertain. Explosive. Higher multiples.

When Potential investors decide a category has matured.

They sell.

The multiple compresses. The earnings don’t change. The category story changes.

That’s the SaaSpocalypse in one sentence.

Software didn’t die. The SaaS category got knowable. The TAM became visible.

Potential investors handed it off to Performance investors.

Meanwhile, memory chips. A commodity business left for dead 18 months ago. Just became AI infrastructure.

• Micron: 196% revenue growth.

• 67% operating margins.

• 7x forward P/E.

• Palantir: 85% revenue growth.

• 46% GAAP margins.

• 95x forward P/E.

Micron has the better performing business.

Palantir has the better multiple.

That gap is going to close.

One direction or the other.

This is what Category Design does.

It’s not about better products or better execution. It’s about designing a category that sits on the right side of the S-curve.

And making sure the market knows it.

Benioff sees this clearly. He’s buying back stock. Acquiring at compressed prices.

And repositioning Salesforce out of SaaS entirely into AgentForce.

Same business.

New category label.

New multiple.

New shareholders.

That is the move.

Two questions.

1. Is your category on the good or bad side of the S-curve?

2. Is the risk of staying the same greater than the risk of change?

Answer those honestly and you’ll see around corners most people can’t.

That’s Category Design.

That’s the unfair advantage.

We broke all of this down on the first-ever episode of the Pirate Street Journal: business news through the category lens.

• Salesforce.

• Micron.

• Palantir.

• The Mag-7 becoming the Mag-10.

And why the biggest equity bull market in a generation might be just getting started.

🎙️ Watch the podcast.

🎙️ Watch the podcast.

🏴‍☠️

Actually, let me go further:

The AI industry gets an F.
The media gets an F.
Politicians get an F.
And CEOs using AI as cover for layoffs get a giant, flaming F.

Only the tech industry could take the single greatest innovation in human history…
…and market it so badly that people want to protest it in the streets.

(Too many tech leaders, in too many categories think their carbadigulators are so great, the market will just get it. That’s not how new categories work. People need to be educated.)

Think about how insane that is.

Protesting AI 🤯

AI has the potential to cure diseases.
Accelerate scientific discovery.
Expand human creativity.
Increase productivity.
Create entirely new categories of jobs and industries.
Drive economic growth at a scale we’ve never seen.

And yet…

People are throwing Molotov cocktails at AI executives’ homes.
Communities are revolting against data centers.
Commencement speakers are getting booed for mentioning AI.
And polls show AI becoming less popular than politicians.

That’s not a technology failure.

That’s a catastrophic leadership and marketing failure.

The AI category is allowing itself to be framed almost entirely through fear:

• “AI will take your job.”

• “AI will destroy humanity.”

• “AI will kill creativity.”

• “AI will ruin education.”

• “AI will make the rich richer.”

• “AI will destroy the planet.”

And the worst part?

A lot of the people pushing this narrative claim to be “progressive.”

Which raises a serious question:

How did the American left go from helping America win the Internet revolution in the 1990s…
…to becoming one of the loudest anti-innovation forces in the AI era?

The Clinton administration played a critical role in America becoming the dominant force of the Internet Age.

America didn’t win the Internet race by being afraid.
America won by creating massive new value with technology.

Entrepreneurs.
Scientists.
Engineers.

Category designers.
Capitalism.
Growth.
Innovation.

New categories.

We believed technological leadership mattered.

Now?

Many of the same political and cultural forces that once championed innovation are suddenly flirting with digital Luddism.

Meanwhile, China is racing at full.

And let’s be crystal clear:

If America loses the AI race, the consequences will be enormous.

AI is already becoming one of the largest drivers of economic growth in the United States. Some estimates suggest AI-related innovation could account for as much as 75% of GDP growth in the coming years.

This isn’t just another tech cycle.

This is infrastructure-level innovation.

Electricity-level innovation.

Internet-level innovation.

Society- level innovation.

And yes.

Historically, breakthroughs triggered fear and protest.

People protested electricity.
People protested automobiles.
People protested factories.
People protested recorded music.
People protested television.
People protested the Internet.

The Luddites literally smashed industrial machinery because they feared mechanization.

Progress has ALWAYS scared people.

But here’s what’s different now:

The people building AI are doing an atrocious job explaining why this technology matters.

Too many AI leaders sound like Bond villains.
Too many companies market AI like a replacement for humans instead of an amplifier of humans.
Too many executives brag about headcount reduction instead of human possibility.

If you tell society:
“Hey, this technology is coming for your livelihood…”

Don’t act shocked when society turns against you.

And the media?

Fear sells.

“AI apocalypse” gets clicks.
“AI destroys jobs” gets engagement.
“AI might help cure cancer” gets buried on page B17.

Congratulations tech donkeys.

We’ve collectively taken humanity’s greatest technological leap and let assholes branded it like a horror movie.

Enough.

It’s time to take marketing AI seriously.

Right now the AI category needs real leadership.
Not hype.
Not doom.
Leadership.

We need leaders who can articulate:

• Why AI matters.

• Why innovation matters.

• Why growth matters.

• Why American technological leadership matters.

• Why abundance beats scarcity.

• Why building is better than fear.

• Why progress matters.

And yes, we need to say this part out loud too:

Being anti-innovation is not morally sophisticated.

It’s often economically destructive.
Strategically dangerous.
And historically ignorant.

America became America because we created the future.

If we surrender AI leadership because we’re too busy scaring ourselves while China accelerates, history will not look kindly on this moment.

The future belongs to creator capitalists who us AI to build new categories of value.

Hey AI category leaders.

Let’s start marketing AI like America’s future depends on it.

Because it does.

🏴‍☠️

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This wasn't just a legal verdict.
It was a category verdict.

The AI revolution now has a clear top of the mountain.
Everyone talks about the Magnificent 7.
But it's not the Mag7 anymore.
It's the Mag9.

And 2 of the 9 aren't public yet
(OpenAI and Anthropic.)

Here's what's wild: the two most important AI companies in the world can't be bought on any exchange.

That changes soon.

OpenAI now has a clear runway to IPO.
No lawsuit.
No injunction.
No Elon.

When OpenAI goes public, it will likely be the most important tech IPO since Google.

And when Anthropic follows?
The two most consequential AI companies in history.
Both public.

This is legendary for the AI category.

The stronger OpenAI & Anthropic are.
The better for the market.
The better for the category.
The better for all of us.

This trial wasn't really about charitable trust doctrine and statutes of limitations.
It was about who controls the future of AI.
The jury answered that question too.

The builders win.
Category designers always do.
The AI category is being defined right now, in real time.
The Mag9 era has officially begun.
🏴‍☠️

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How long would you fight for someone you love.

If you only had a 13% chance of success?

Yesterday.

Our family achieved a California first.

Four killers.

Four murder trials.

For the killing of one person.

Four life without parole convictions.

After 2, 407 days.

(October 1, 2019 to May 4, 2026.)

We got justice for Tushar.

It was the most sacred day of our six-and-a-half-year fight.

A day we were not guaranteed to reach.

The odds were (shockingly) stacked against us.

California 87% Pro-Killer.

You see, California is most pro-criminal state in the US.

(I know this makes me sound nuts. Just keep reading.)

Killers arrested in California ultimately go free 87% of the time*

And Santa Cruz where we live, is one of the most pro-criminal counties in the country. Every judge here is a former public defender.

Santa Cruz judges set drug dealers caught with enough fentanyl to kill 3,000 people, free.

All the time.

California sets Manson killers free.

A female judge in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley) set “pillow case rapist” Christopher Hubbard free.

Hubbard admitted to raping 40 women.

The Day We Made A Sacred Promise

October 1, 2019.

Tushar was sleeping in his Santa Cruz Pleasure Point home in when four men broke in before 3 a.m.

Shoved a rifle in his face.

“Get on the ground!”

Tied his hands.

Shoved a sock in his mouth.

Robbed him.

Chased him down the street.

Stabbed him in the street a dozen times.

Broke his jaw bone with a knife.

Forced him into his car, that they stole.

Drove him up into the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Taunted him.

Walked him to a tree.

Flex-cuffed, alone, under a redwood.

They performed a satanic “Christian witnessing” ceremony.

(You see they are a Christian murder family. Two brothers. A brother-in-law. And a best friend. Their father is a pastor/missionary in the Lancaster Baptist Church. There have been zero prayers said for Tushar Atre at the Lancaster Baptist Church.)

They said it made them feel better.

To give Tushar a chance to commit to the Lord.

Before executing him.

With five shots to the back of the head from an illegal ghost-gun AR-15.

(I, like some of Tushar’s friends and family am a Christian. This criminal bastardization of Christianity deepens my anger and pain.)

Tushar was 50.

In the prime of his life. A surfer. A mountain biker. A tech entrepreneur. A man who moved to Santa Cruz because he loved what attracts all people to Santa Cruz: the mountains, waves, nature and community.

And he was our brother from another mother.

(My wife and I even called his mother, “Mom Shaku.”)

When Tushar was murdered, his family and friends made him a sacred promise: We will not stop. Until every one of his killers gets justice.

Tushar’s adopted brothers are tech enterprenures. We attacked convicting his killers, like a startup. We did everything possible to change to odds.

And

Yesterday.

2,407 days later.

We keep that promise.

“With friends, family, and faith — you can endure anything, to produce the legendary”

What We Were (Really) Up Against

To understand what day 2,407 means, you need to understand what we were fighting.

Not just four killers.

The entire machinery of a California pro-criminal legal system.

Before we continue. I know. You might hear me use the term “pro-criminal” and think. That’s a tad hyperbolic.

Maybe think I’m a bit nuts.

My aim is true.

My request is simple.

Before you judge.

Keep reading.

• Roughly 40% of murders go unsolved.

• Only 13% of people arrested for murder get life without parole.*

• Of those convicted of murder, average time served is only 15 years.

• California has the highest number of unsolved murders and cold cases in the USA.

That means.

We faced a 40% chance we never catch them.

And if arrested.

We faced an 87% chance Tushar’s killers would walk free.

And then there was the judge.

Siegel.

Among the most pro-criminal on the California bench.

A man who came to his courtroom after 15 years as a contract public defender and another 11 years as a court commissioner.

Famous for light sentences. For returning violent offenders to the street, and for rulings that tilt toward the criminal.

Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge Stephen S. Siegel is most famous for his praise of a child rapist. Saying at sentencing that it was “one of the sadder days I’ve had in my career,” as he explained that his hands were “literally tied as far as sentencing is concerned.”

The child rapist was found guilty of 19 felony counts. And Siegel actually said:

“Everybody only has the best things to say about him, other than the charges against him,”

In California.

Kill an elderly woman in a crosswalk.

Leave the scene.

Scrape the woman’s brain off your bumper.

Change your plates.

Scrape the VIN off your car.

Then, when you’re found guilty of all of the above. Serve only 18 months in county jail. Get released. Get a social worker and a community support program.

This just happened in Santa Cruz, California.

Siegel gave Tushar’s killers every advantage.

It was this judge who ordered the four killers to be tried separately. Giving each man his own trial, his own jury, his own chance to claim innocence. Four trials instead of one.

First time in modern California history.

Nineteen weeks in court, spread across thirteen months.

We’re the first family in modern California history to suffer this.

Each time, forced into a court, in front of a jury, sitting 15 feet from the killers, and their families. Leering at us.

Forced to relive every detail.

The home invasion.

The robbery.

The stabbing.

The kidnapping.

The carjacking.

The satanic Christians.

The execution in the mountains.

Siegel even granted the defense two extra days of preparation time in the fourth and final trial (after six and a half years).

When their lawyers panicked because our DA had crushed their case. Siegel gave Tushar’s killers every advantage.

The Warrior Angels

We had no idea what we were walking into when this fight began.

We are a small beach town.

We’d heard the horror stories about cops sold by the media.

We did not know (at first) that our little corner of California was home to a world-class Sheriff’s office and a world-class District Attorney’s office.

We know now.

More than 100 professionals in law enforcement gave everything to this case. People with stunning educations, experiences, backgrounds and training. From veteran detectives, investigators, CSIs, inspectors, and prosecutors, to PhDs, FBI-trained, former military, multi-generation law enforcement/military families, scientists, experts with deep technical skills, operating at the highest levels in the US. In Santa Cruz.

Our detectives and DAs kept Tushar’s picture on their desks. They hugged us. They cried with us. They never stopped. They used the most advanced technology. Forensics. Data analytics. Brilliant police work. Old school surveillance.

Our Sheriff’s detectives got three of the four of them to talk.

To admit evil.

On tape.

Hours of it.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s office used every available tool of modern police work to catch Tushar’s killers. And our DA’s office had to win in court four times. Each time with massive odds against them.

Four times the same rapist praising judge.

Four different defense strategies, four different arguments for why each killer wasn’t guilty.

Every sheriff, every doctor, detective, scientist, analyst, corner, data expert and witness.

Four times.

Santa Cruz County DAs crushed every defence.

The lead DA on our case.

He is the actual batman.

The defense attorneys were something else entirely.

Public defenders are not the finest humans.

Their strategy, over and over, is to confuse the jury about the law. They just need one person not to get it. Then they get leniency (or clemency) for admitted torturers and killers. Public defenders make shit up. Lie. Delay, delay, delay.

You see life is a lot better for murderers in county jail, then state prison. So they delay.

Judgement day.

And they employ a strategy to abuse the victim’s family in the courtroom. To provoke a response. To fish for a mistrial.

They yuck it up with the killers. They put their arms around murderers. They smile lovingly at them.

And they cost the tax payer a ton.

It’s approximately $2+ million per trial.

In a case where three out of four said they did it. Yet, they still (all) plead not guilty. And cost tax payers millions.

They of course will appeal.

Costing another million?

Or more?

Murder Monetizing Media

The murder monetizing media inflicted their evil too. They lied. They harassed Tushar’s elderly parents. (We had to change their contact info.) They harassed us.

It turns out (to the surprise of no one) the murder monetizing media are lazy. Barely comr to court.

In this case.

They don’t really know what happened.

We know.

We were in court.

They were not.

The murder monetizing media literally made up stories. And stunningly, not one of them learned why they really killed Tushar.

Never once.

Did the murder monetizing media report on the satanic ritual.

The murder monetizing media don’t even know it happened.

You see the murder monetizing media does not give a fuck about facts.

Or people.

They make shit up.

Shit they think you will buy.

One of the murder monetizing media was so pathetic, he asked our DA’s office victims advocate —- to take notes for HIM. So he didn’t have to sit in court. She told him to (nicely) go fuck himself.

He stopped coming to court.

But kept “reporting” on the case.

FUCK the murder monetizing media.

Through all of it.

We watched.

We endured.

We fought back.

We did not break.

We did not yield.

What Justice Looks Like

Four killers. Four trials. Four convictions for first-degree murder. Four sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

They will die in prison.

That is what justice looks like after 2,407 days.

And we had to get murder one convictions from the juries.

Because murder one in California (under anything like these circumstances) comes with an automatic life without parole.

With these verdicts.

The four juries took sentencing power out of Siegel’s hands.

Siegel would have made sure the killers got out.

His track record could not be more clear.

We won.

What We Learned

California’s criminal justice system is, at its core, structured to favor criminals over the victim.

The concepts of deterrents and punishment are largely removed from California law.

Over the last 20+ years, California has shifted to a different ethos. Predicated on the belief that there “really are no bad people”.

Just bad circumstances.

And it’s the circumstances fault.

You know. There are only two kinds of people.

The oppressors and the oppressed.

And criminals are oppressed.

They got fucked by the oppressors.

It’s not their fault. We just need to help them. And all will be good.

The laws, the sentencing guidelines, the discretion given to pro-criminal judges — all of it tilts toward leniency for perpetrators. And suffering for families.

Many convicted rapists in California are out in less than 5 years.

Rapists. Out. Rapists.

A female judge in Silicon Valley let the pillow case rapist out.

A female judge.

The guy admitted to raping 40 women.

This criminal mindset has been normalized in California.

If you had told us six years ago that to gain justice for Tushar we’d need over 100 world-class warrior angels just to arrest them, we would not have believed it.

We did not know on October 1st, 2019 that Tushar’s murder would go on to become one of the largest civilian murder cases in Santa Cruz County history.

And we never could have imagined that arresting them would be the “easy” part.

That convicting them (even after three of the four admitted to killing Tushar) would be the hard part. We thought their guilt was obvious to anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size.

The biggest barrier to justice in California.

Is the California Justice System.

This must change.

California must vote for pro-citizen, tough (and fair) law makers.

We also learned: the people who work inside that system (the detectives, the prosecutors, the victim’s advocates, the CSIs, analysts and doctors) are legendary.

They fight an insane, broken, fucked-up ethos machine from the inside.

They refuse to quit.

We owe them everything.

And we lived the deepest truth of all: with the right people beside you, you can endure the unendurable, to produce the legendary.

Tushar’s parents.

His sister.

His brothers.

His friends.

His community.

We held each other up for 2,407 days.

We stood with our Sheriffs.

We stood with our DAs.

We showed up when in Siegel’s courtroom.

Took the abuse from him.

From his power-hungry bailiffs.

From the killers’ families Siegel let taunt us.

From the murder monetizing media Siegel let haunt us.

We held fast.

(Tattoo on my arm.)

We kept the sacred promise.

Tushar.

We love you.

We did not stop.

We told you we would not stop.

We carry you with us.

We always will.

And now, my brother.

You can finally rest.

Until I see you again in the Lord’s house.

I love you Tushar Atre.

Christopher Lochhead

May 5, 2026

🏴‍☠️

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Ps. I’m a founding board director for the first non-profit AI startup for solving open and unsolved cases in the US.

If you want to help solve the 360,000 open murders and 2 million unsolved rapes check out: The National Center For Open & Unsolved Cases.

A Note on Sources

Every fact and data point in this document comes directly from law enforcement or was verified by multiple independent sources.

If you believe any data or claim is incorrect, please reach out. We did our best to get it right.

* The 87% Figure: A Note on the Math

In plain English: from the moment a person is murdered in California, there is roughly a 1-in-8 chance that anyone responsible will ever receive a life-without-parole sentence. The other 7 in 8 either go uncaught, are convicted of lesser charges, or receive sentences that carry the possibility of eventual parole.

This figure is not a single published statistic. It is a best-estimate calculation, built by multiplying three steps in the California criminal justice funnel. Each step is sourced; the combined figure is our own math.

Step 1 — Murder to arrest: ~62%

Approximately 62% of California homicides result in an arrest. (California DOJ / Public Policy Institute of California, 2019–2021)

Step 2 — Arrest to Murder 1 conviction: ~37%

Of those arrested, roughly 37% are ultimately convicted of first-degree murder — accounting for plea deals to lesser charges, charge reductions, and acquittals.

Step 3 — Murder 1 to LWOP: ~55%

In California, a Murder 1 conviction does not automatically carry life without parole. LWOP requires the DA to separately charge and prove “special circumstances” under Penal Code 190.2 (such as murder during a robbery or kidnapping). Approximately 55% of Murder 1 convictions include special circumstances resulting in a mandatory LWOP sentence.

0.62 × 0.37 × 0.55 ≈ 13%

Steps 2 and 3 in particular carry meaningful uncertainty — California does not publish a single clean statistic tracking cases from arrest through final LWOP sentencing. Readers who want to interrogate this further should consult the California Department of Justice OpenJustice data portal and the Public Policy Institute of California’s crime and clearance reporting.

This figure should be treated as a reasonable approximation, not a citable statistic. The point it illustrates — that LWOP outcomes are rare, and that Tushar’s family beating those odds four times over is extraordinary — is well supported by the underlying data at each step.

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A Friday quickie.

🏴‍☠️

If You Make It To The Top of a Mountain… Throw Down a Rope

Belief.
Human belief.

In the future potential of another person.

A young guitarist walks into the vault at Chicago Music Exchange.

No money.
No fame.
Just taste, obsession… and a feeling.

He picks up a legendary 1961 Gibson SG.

And it hits him.

Not “this is nice.”
Not “this is cool.”

This is it.

The sound.
The feel.
The future.

But there’s a problem.

The guitar costs $25,000.
He’s a kid from Michigan.

Game over, right?

No.

Because the CEO (Andrew Yonke) does something rare.

He doesn’t optimize for downside.
He doesn’t ask, “What if this goes wrong?”

He asks a different question:

“What if I’m right about this kid?”

And he hands him the guitar.

“Pay me back when you can.”

That kid is Jake Kiszka.
The band is Greta Van Fleet.

And that moment?

That’s the rope.

Greta Van Fleet has become “the new Led Zeppelin”. In the face of hip-hop, pop, techno-colabs and Swift-o-mania, they helped revive the hard rock category for a new generation.

Winning a Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2019.

And Jake.

He just launched his new signature Gibson SG.

About ten years after Andrew Yonke bet on him.

Most people climb.

A few people reach the top.

But almost nobody throws ropes.

Why?

Because ropes are risky.

They require:

• Judgment without proof

• Radical generosity without guarantee

• Vision without consensus

In a world obsessed with optimization, rope-throwers operate on belief.

Rope-throwers also learn that some people spit the rope back in their face. Others, squander their opportunities. Some turn out to be entitled. Lazy. Assholes.

That’s all part of the game.

You see. Rope-throwers don’t get jaded.

They know the difference they make, when they can make it, far out ways the disappointments. Being a rope-thrower is one of the most laudatory things you can be.

No one makes it on their own.

Let’s get real.

Andrew Yonke didn’t loan a guitar.

He made a bet on a different future.

He saw:

• Taste before trend

• Signal before scale

• Authenticity before audience

Andrew was radically generous.

That’s the move.

You see different futures don’t just happen.

People make them happen.

And no person makes it alone.

No one.

Here’s the truth:

If someone hadn’t thrown you a rope.

You’re wouldn’t be who or where you are.

It’s true for me.

A lot of people supported me.
When there was no reason to.

And candidly?

People still throw me ropes.

(Thank God.)

The question isn’t “Did you make it?”

The question is:

What are you doing now that you’re higher up the mountain?

Are you:

• Guarding your position?

• Protecting your downside?

• Waiting for certainty?

Or…

Are you looking down the mountain for the next Jake Kiszka?

Because this is how different futures get built:

Not by institutions.
Not by systems.

By individuals who decide:

👉 “I see something.”
👉 “I’m going to act on it.”
👉 “I’ll take the risk on this person.”

Category designers understand something others don’t:

The future shows up in people before it shows up in markets.

Yonke didn’t bet on a band.

He fueled a possibility.

And that turned two billion streams, a revived category, and a legit modern arena rock act.

So here’s the deal:

If you’re still climbing — keep going.

If you’ve made it to a ledge — stabilize.

But if you’re anywhere near the top?

Throw down a rope.

Not because it’s safe.

Not because it’s rational.

Because it’s how legends get made.

🏴‍☠️

Are you working on your own different future. A category you can own. Subscribe to Category Pirates today & start jamming with our custom AI Pirate bots.

Who knows.

You might design a legendary future for yourself.

🏴‍☠️

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Welcome to Different. The newsletter for category designers and creator capitalists. Written by Christopher Lochhead.

With content stolen from Category Pirates.

(Our real newsletter)

Sponsored by Bad Tuna Industries.

🏴‍☠️

Military Doctor Category Designer

My buddy, Dr. Eric Hanson is the kind of guy that makes you happy knowing is alive. (And on our side.)

Dr. Eric is a legendary doc. And he knows how to get the Pentagon to write a check. He has done it, to the tune of more than $300 million.

For other people’s companies.

Seventeen years as an Air Force physician and senior flight surgeon. 750 hours in 36 aircraft. Dual board certified in aerospace and preventative medicine. Call sign “Genes”.

(Which tracks, because he also has an MPH in epidemiology with a genetics concentration from Johns Hopkins on top of his MD.)

See what I mean about feeling good he’s around.

Dr. Eric ran a 15 million dollar DARPA-funded bioterrorism surveillance project in Washington, D.C., right after the 9/11 anthrax attacks.

He became the Air Force chair of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program, a 1.27 billion dollar program in fiscal year 26.

He’s founded five companies.
Published five books, 25 articles, and holds nine patents.

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

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

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

Over 300 million dollars of it, to date.

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

The Department of Defense doesn’t want your cap table.

It wants dual-use technology, products that work in both civilian and military settings. Smaller. Lighter. Cheaper. Lower-power. AI-assisted.

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

One of Eric’s clients, a biotech CEO working on host-targeted antivirals, raised $50M in private capital and $60M in non-dilutive DoD funding.

One started at $11M and bumped to $24M, then $36M, then $50M without having to recompete.

The Navy awarded one of Dr. Eric’s dental AI contracts in exactly 90 days from pencil-to-paper.

Try getting a VC to move that fast.

The military is the greatest Superconsumer on Earth.

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

Superconsumers force innovation. They don’t settle. They pay a premium for the ding-dong version.

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

It is the largest enterprise on the planet.

It needs devices that function in the Arctic and the Sahara. It needs batteries that last in theater. It needs medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.

It needs prolonged casualty care solutions for war fighters who, as Eric explains in harrowing detail, sometimes have to wait 72 hours or more near the point of injury before they can be evacuated.

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

What Dr. Eric has done is category design a business around the translation layer. He’s built a firm (a Techstars accelerator arm) and a software product called Navigator, effectively an operating system for dual-use CEOs.

He’s trained 50 military medical veterans to work with industry. 25 have started their own companies. He’s got a Curly Bot, a Dr. Eric Bot, and a dual-use triage bot in development.

• He named the problem.

• He framed the problem.

• He’s claiming the problem.

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

The four capitals, fully loaded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🏴‍☠️

No Technology Has Ever Replaced People.

It Just Moves Where Value Gets Created.

The printing press didn’t replace writers.

It made distribution matter more than copying.

The internet didn’t replace salespeople.

It made trust matter more than access.

Every generation lives through a moment like this. A technology so big it reshapes the world. And every generation panics about the wrong thing.

We worry about replacement.

When we should be asking about relocation.

• Where is value moving?

• And am I building toward it?

The Old Value Stack Is Collapsing

For decades, two things gave professionals their edge:

1. Knowledge. What you knew that others didn’t. The expertise you accumulated over years — the frameworks, the domain fluency, the hard-won answers.

2. Execution. What you could do. The ability to get things done, ship work, build things, run processes.

These were scarce.

And scarcity created value.

That scarcity is gone.

AI is commoditizing knowledge at a speed that would have seemed like science two years ago. Ask any AI a sophisticated question in law, medicine, finance, strategy, code. And you’ll get a thoughtful, well-structured answer.

Instantly.

Free.

Agents are commoditizing execution. Tasks that used to take a team of people and a full workweek can now be handed to an agent and finished overnight.

And you do not have to be technical to create agents.

This isn’t the future.

This is Tuesday.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your career is built on knowing things or doing things that AI can now know and do.

The foundation just shifted under your feet.

But Value Doesn’t Disappear. It Relocates.

Here’s what we keep coming back to: no technological shift has ever destroyed value. It relocates it.

When knowledge and execution become abundant, ask yourself. What becomes scarce?

Creating what didn’t exist before.

Not optimizing the existing.

But inventing the different.

Designing categories instead of competing in them. Innovating at the edges where no model has been trained, where the pattern doesn’t exist yet.

Judgment: the ability to know what matters, what to ignore, what to do next when there’s no playbook.

Taste: the capacity to recognize what’s excellent, what’s true, what will resonate. This is deeply human and profoundly hard to fake.

These things cannot be prompted. They cannot be fine-tuned into a model. They are developed through living, through failure, through obsession with a category, through the willingness to have a real point of view.

In a world flooded with generated content, a genuine POV becomes extraordinarily rare.

And rare things get priced accordingly.

Different is the only moat.

The People Who Win, See It First

Every major technological shift produces two groups of people.

The first group resists. They protect what they’ve built. They double down on the old skills. They wait for the change to pass.

It doesn’t.

The second group reads the signal. They recognize where value is moving and they position themselves there.

Before the crowd arrives.

These aren’t necessarily the smartest people. They’re not always the most experienced.

They’re the ones paying attention.

The question isn’t whether AI and agents are changing the landscape. They are. The question is whether you’re still optimizing for a world that no longer exists — or building toward the one that’s emerging.

So What Do You Have That Isn’t Commoditized?

That’s the question worth sitting with.

Really sitting with.

Not skimming past it to the next thing in your feed. Not filing it away as “interesting” and forgetting it by lunch. Sitting with it the way you’d sit with a doctor who just told you something that changed everything.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed after spending four decades working with some of the most successful category designers, founders, and executives on the planet:

The people who thrive in moments like this aren’t the ones with the best résumés. They’re not the ones with the most credentials or the most impressive titles.

They’re the ones who got radically honest with themselves about what (different) they actually bring to the world.

And then had the courage to build around that instead of hiding inside a job description.

So let me ask you directly:

If AI can do what you do. What’s left?

Not as a threat. As an invitation. (To think.)

Because I believe most people are sitting on something genuinely irreplaceable. And have spent their entire career undervaluing it. Not because it isn’t valuable. But because the old system never rewarded it. The old system rewarded compliance. Credentials. The ability to execute inside someone else’s framework.

That system is over.

So this isn’t about keeping up with AI.

It’s about finally getting credit for what made you different all along.

Your four forms of capital:

• Intellectual Capital — Your ideas, frameworks, insights, and experience

• Reputation Capital — What you’re known for when you’re not in the room

• Relationship Capital — The trust you’ve built, business is 100% personal

• Financial Capital — The fuel that gives you freedom to choose

This is your real net worth.

This is your leverage.

AI is moving the value is moving. The only real question is whether you’re moving toward it.

(Like Dr. Eric)

Or not.

🏴‍☠️

Thanks for reading.

Shalom my Pirate friend,

Christopher Lochhead

👊🏴‍☠️🙏

This newsletter was vibe created with AI.

Because that’s the way you create massive value today.

Data / charts sourced from ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini & Google.

😎

Enrollment in the Category Design Academy closes soon.

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Everything is the way that it is, because someone (like you) changed the way that it was.

Amazon Sold ‘Whippets’ Meant To Get Users High, Caused Neurological Damage, Lawsuit Claims

In Iran, giving the thumbs up is the same as giving the middle finger.

Animal rights activist throws restaurant’s ‘educational lobster’ into sea

Hawaii is the only U.S. state with two official languages (English/Hawaiian), no billboards, and a tropical rainforest.

It is legal in France to marry a dead person. But.

You get permission from the French President.

The Onion Says It Has a Deal to Take Over Alex Jones’ Infowars, Plans to Relaunch Right-Wing Site as Parody of Itself… which will be hard, given InfoWars is (already) parody.

Snakes fart.

85% of the world’s maple syrup comes from Quebec, Canada.

Dogs prefer to poop in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field.

The Artemis II space toilet is so loud that astronauts have to wear hearing protection while shitting.

Different is the last moat.

🏴‍☠️

If you’re still readying.

You’re probably ready to enroll.

🏴‍☠️

Thanks for hanging out.

Shalom.

Welcome to Different.

🏴‍☠️

The Unconscious Career

Most people don’t choose a career.

They inherit one.

Not from their parents.
From the system.

School trains you to get the right answers.
Companies reward you for fitting into the right roles.
Markets pull you toward what already exists.

And before you know it…

You’re on a path.

A well-lit, well-worn, socially-approved path.

A path where you:

• Join an existing company

• In an existing category

• With an existing business model

• Solving existing problems

• With existing solutions

Your job?

Make it (a little) better.

A little faster.
A little cheaper.
A little more efficient.

Incremental better.

Now let’s be clear.

There is nothing wrong with this path.

Incremental progress compounds.
Over time, it builds real value.
Civilizations depend on it.

But here’s the problem:

For most people, it’s not a conscious choice.

It’s the default.

The path you fall into when no one shows you there’s another game.

Because there is another game.

A very different one.

The Conscious Career.

The one where you choose to work on:

• The new, not the known

• The emerging, not the established

• The different, not the optimized

• The exponential, not the incremental

This is the path of category designers.
Of creator capitalists.

Of pirates.

Of people who don’t just improve the world.

They create different futures.

Instead of asking:

“How do we make this better?”

They ask:

“What if we made this irrelevant?”

This is where new categories come from.

This is where exponential value gets created.

Not by polishing what exists…

But by inventing what doesn’t.

And here’s the kicker:

Most people never even consider this path.

Not because they’re incapable.

But because they’re never introduced to it.

No class in school says:

“You can invent a new game.”

No manager says:

“Go make the current model obsolete.”

No job description reads:

“Create a different future.”

So people spend decades…

Getting better at the wrong thing.

Or more precisely:

Getting better at a game they never chose.

This is the quiet tragedy of the unconscious career.

Not failure.

Misalignment.

Now. If you’ve consciously chosen the incremental path…

If you love optimization, mastery, and steady progress…

Good.

That’s a powerful way to build a life.

But if you haven’t chosen it…

If you’ve just drifted into it…

Then you owe yourself a question:

Is this the game I want to spend my life getting better at?

Because the alternative is real.

And it’s available.

A career built on the exponential.

On creativity.
On invention.
On designing something that didn’t exist before you showed up.

Not everyone will choose it.

But everyone should know it exists.

Because once you see it…

You can’t unsee it.

And at that moment—

Your career stops being something that happens to you…

And starts becoming something you design.

🏴‍☠️

Design your exponential future now.

Enroll in the Category Design Academy now.

Operators are standing by.

The future needs you.

Space is limited.

Enroll in the Category Design Academy now.

🏴‍☠️

For the love of God.

Get out of the passing lane.

Joey Ramone was right.

Objects in mirrors are objects in mirrors.

Most of what you need to learn about life.

You can learn by watching The Big Lebowski and Spinal Tap.

The night AC/DC’s Brian Johnson hunted the Loch Ness Monster with fireworks.

🏴‍☠️

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