300th Episode: Reject the Premise to Unleash Creativity with Christopher Lochhead

 You're listening to the Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast.
 If it's radical, we cover it.
 Here's your host, Ryan Alford.
 Hey guys, what's up?
 Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast.
 I'm excited, man.
 We do a lot of interviews.
 I get to do a pick and choose.
 We're getting to do whatever the hell we want on the Radcast these days.
 And when I can have Christopher Locke hit on my fucking show, I am having him on.
 Christopher, what's up brother?
 It's great to see a big sexy man.
 Haha, dude.
 I mean, it's funny.
 I mean, I've been in the business and people go, well, who do you listen to?
 What do you read?
 What do you do?
 Kind of like, I drown a lot of it out, but there's one voice, one voice that literally
 9.5 out of 10 is the closest thing to 100% there is in life.
 I said, you need to fucking go follow Christopher Locke on LinkedIn.
 You need to fucking go subscribe to category pirates.
 And you know what?
 Send me $100 and thank me later.
 Haha.
 Haha.
 Thank you, Ryan.
 That's very kind of you to say.
 I know, but I people know I don't blow smoke.
 I'm a nice guy.
 I got Southern charm, but I kind of tell it like it is in my own way.
 And it's the truth.
 13 time best seller.
 Probably more than that now.
 Full podcaster of the universe and the most legendary category designer of every fucking
 met.
 I could go on and on the titles.
 I'm going to stop blowing smoke.
 Because I want people to hear some of your brilliance.
 I really, you know, we've been talking and, you know, I nod my head every day at the
 daily, you know, Bible verses I get from my head on on LinkedIn.
 But there's been a few topics of late.
 I want to get into them.
 But I do want to just first, Christopher, I mean, let's set the table, you know, what's
 been just gathering your attention, you know, with the newsletter and with your team.
 And I don't know, I wouldn't mind maybe just getting a preamble of where you're at in
 the state of the world of business in general.
 Well, you know, our little business is doing great.
 So we're very fortunate about that.
 The big topics on our minds right now really start with our inability in America and a
 lot of the world now to dialogue with each other.
 And there's never been a point in history where Americans hate other Americans like they
 do now.
 And so on our mind a lot is the power of dialogue and is getting people to understand that just
 because somebody disagrees with you doesn't mean you need to hate them.
 And we need more conversation.
 And what most people call a dialogue in our country today is actually just called waiting
 to talk or even worse waiting to yell.
 So you know, that's on our mind a lot.
 That's a big one.
 We think there's implications in the way our politics are in this country right now.
 I find very terrifying.
 Not because of, you know, a left direction or a right direction or any of that, it's,
 it really it comes down to an inability to have a conversation about anything of substance
 with almost anybody any time.
 You know, you can pick a topic, guns, people are going to lose their minds, abortions,
 people are going to lose their mind, immigration, people are going to, you know, we can't have
 a thoughtful discussion.
 And more, even in addition to that is we all need to understand steel sharpened steel.
 I don't want to live in a world where everybody agrees with me, you know what?
 I'm not always right really.
 And and I have changed my mind or I have changed my positions, you know, people today call
 that flip flopping, it used to be called learning.
 So that's a big one.
 The other one, the sort of the biggest hiding in plain sight that nobody's talking about,
 of course, is the shift to a whole new category of human, the emergence of native digitals
 and the fact that those of us who are 35 or older are native analogs and we are the last
 native analogs that will ever live.
 And it has profound implications for us in marketing, but really it has profound implications
 for everything about the way we live, work and play.
 Chris, let me ask you this, you know, because I can't wait to dive into that, that last one.
 And I know that's going to be a lot of the meat of what we talk about today.
 But you know, we live in such a world where there's a lot of damn gray, you know, like the
 and we've gotten to this point of drawing these hard lines like you said and it couldn't
 be more polar opposite than what reality is, which is there's nuance to everything.
 And how the hell did we get, I mean, I know we could, there's been this firebrand of politics
 and other things and I'm sure we can have a whole opposite on this, but I just, I really
 value your mind and so I like to to pick at it when I have you here.
 But like how the hell did we get here?
 Like when we all know, like I think if you have and you can like get someone discharged
 for half a second, they'll agree with what I just said, you know, but it's everything's
 charged, everything's fired up.
 Like how did we, is it, are we just compounding?
 Is that what, I don't know, what's your, why did, how do we get here?
 Well, I think it, and it may sound more trite than I mean it.
 In a very real way, we don't know how to think.
 And so a lack of learning about thinking causes this.
 And Roger Martin, who's considered to be the number one business management thinker in
 the world, the quote unquote new Peter Drucker, he's got a book out that's fairly recent
 called The New Way to Think.
 We were lucky enough to have him on the podcast.
 And he makes a very important assessment, which is he delineates two types of thinking,
 reflexive and reflective.
 And as the name suggests, reflexive is from a reflexive.
 So if you go to the doctor and she bangs your knee and your knee is going to do that and
 she's going to say your reflexes are good.
 And there are many points in our life where reflexive thinking and action associated with
 that reflex are very, very important.
 If you and I are driving and somebody cuts us off or something, you know, an animal jumps
 out into the road or something like that, we're going to hit the brakes, we're going to
 swerve.
 And we will take a reflexive action based on a reflexive thought that might save our life
 or the lives of others.
 And so that's very powerful.
 Reflexes are a very powerful thing.
 We train ourselves to become unconsciously competent to things.
 And you could argue much of that is reflexive.
 However, and then reflective, as the name suggests, is you say, okay, wait a minute.
 What do I really fucking think about this?
 Not what have I heard or what got tweeted yesterday or any of that?
 And when you stop and think, it takes some work.
 And around here, one of our expressions is, one of our favorite expressions is thinking
 about thinking is the most important kind of thinking.
 And in business, some of us got taught early, if we want to really think, ask why five
 to seven times.
 So now if you bring that to our world, you say, okay, guns, I bet you have a position
 on guns, right?
 And I have a position on guns.
 And if we wanted to get to the heart of why you think what you do about guns, if we
 don't have to ask why seven times, but we for sure have to ask why three or four times.
 And here's the incredible thing.
 When you ask a lot of people and do it in a friendly way, not in a confronting way.
 Why five to seven times on a belief that they hold, most people can't get past two or
 three y's, right?
 So you know, if you use guns as an example, you say, well, what's your position on guns?
 I support the second amendment.
 Okay, great.
 Why?
 Well, I believe that we have the right to defend ourselves.
 Okay, great.
 Why?
 Well, and then they start to break down.
 Yeah, somebody told me I should care about it.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 And then you say, okay, well, we have the right to defend ourselves.
 Are we going to draw a line there somewhere?
 So for example, nobody can stop me from taking boxing classes.
 That's self-defense.
 Nobody can stop me from going to a Krav Maga class.
 That's self-defense.
 But we as a society have decided that regular citizens can't own tanks.
 So we've already drawn some lines, right?
 We're allowed to go boxing.
 In most of the country, you're allowed to buy a handgun or a shotgun or a rifle.
 And there's different bars you have to get over in different parts of the country.
 But to the best of my knowledge, there's no part of the country where you can legally
 acquire a tank.
 So we've fought in South Carolina where there might be one in the backyard.
 Maybe in Arizona.
 Maybe parts in Nevada.
 All the whole, I think you're right.
 And so my point is at some stage of the game, as it relates to guns, collectively, we decided
 there was going to be some rules and there was going to be some lines that we were going
 to draw around what citizens can and can't do.
 Well, we're no longer able to have a discussion about that.
 In any level of detail, without people yelling, pick another one, abortion.
 Well, people immediately, and this is the other interesting thing, people immediately
 start conflating things.
 So you ask somebody about abortion.
 You say, well, what do you think about abortion?
 And they give you their opinion.
 And let's say they say, oh, I think abortions find up until the 20th week.
 I'm just making shit up.
 You say, OK, why do you believe that?
 Well, because at week 23 or whatever, I'm not an expert, so I'm guessing.
 That's when the fetus becomes quote unquote viable or likely to be viable outside the womb.
 And that's the cutoff point.
 OK, well, why do you think viability is the cutoff point?
 People don't answer that question.
 And then people who are pro-choice say, well, it's fine up until viability, because it couldn't
 survive on its own.
 OK, well, why is that the line?
 I'm not agreeing or disagreeing.
 I just want to understand.
 Right?
 And they say, well, you know, here's the other one I love.
 I don't believe that life begins a conception.
 OK, well, then you're a moron, because what the science tells us is when the sperm gets
 to the egg and does its thing, or the two do their thing, if it plays out over nine months,
 it's going to be a person.
 And I'm no doctor or scientist, but best I could tell, that is when life begins.
 Now you can say that viability is the line, and you can argue for why you think that's
 the line if that's what you think.
 But don't say, you know, so somebody says, yeah, but life doesn't begin a conception.
 OK, well, come on.
 We have to have, we have to have some intellectual honesty in our discussion.
 I understand that you're, that you're pro-choice.
 I'm pro-choice too for the record, but I'm not an idiot.
 Life begins at fucking conception, because when conception happens, barring something horrible,
 if the pregnancy goes relatively well, we're going to have a person.
 So life begins at conception, and just because your pro-choice doesn't mean you have to
 say dumb shit, because we, most people who are smart understand that life basically begins
 at fucking conception, or another one I really love, just to, you know, get on all the
 tough topics.
 They say, well, what we need is an assault weapons ban.
 OK, well, you do know the minute you say that, you've exposed the fact that you don't
 know what you're talking about, and people say, what do you mean?
 There's assault weapons, AR-15s, and that's what all these school shootings happen with,
 and we need to get rid of the AR-15.
 OK, well, do you know there's only three kinds of guns.
 There's handguns, there's shotguns, and there's rifles.
 There's those such thing as an assault weapon.
 All in AR-15 is a scary looking semi-automatic rifle.
 Technically, that's what it is.
 So when you say you want to get rid of the AR-15, what you're saying is, well, black cars
 kill more people than any other color of car, and they're the scariest kind of car, so we
 need to get rid of the black cars.
 OK, well, a rifle is a rifle, and yes, they have different features, and some of them
 are this, and some of them are that, but if you get, if you say we want to get rid of
 the AR-15, a sense what you're saying is we're going to make rifles illegal in the United
 States.
 Is that what you're saying?
 Oh, well, no, we don't, we just bit, well, OK, so my point is the minute they say something
 like that, and you say, well, why?
 They don't even understand what they're fucking talking about.
 Now, maybe we should outlaw rifles.
 Let's, if that's what you mean, let's have that conversation.
 All I'm saying is we accept reflexive thinking that makes us feel good, and we're
 as thinking, and it's not, and when I say to people on the pro-choice on the abortion
 issue, you know, part of the reason we're having the problem that we're having in America
 is because of the pro-choice movement that they lose their fucking mind, or when I say
 to the people who want more gun control of which I am one, you realize the anti-gun people
 are the reason that there's no movement on guns.
 Well, they lose their fucking minds.
 Well, it's the gun owners, this is the NRA.
 Yeah, I understand their position, but you know that every time you say you want to ban
 something, it's going to cause people to believe in it, to dig their heels in.
 So the more you say it, every action has an opposite and equal reaction.
 And so when you present a case to the groups in our country who want more what they call
 quote unquote responsible gun laws, which I want, well, they don't know what they're talking
 about because they say what they want to assault weapons ban.
 And I say to them, when you say that, you make quote the other side crazy and go, we're
 not going to give you an inch because if we do, we're going to give you a mile, the reason
 they say that is when you say assault weapons ban gun owners, look at you and go, you don't
 even know what the fuck you're talking about.
 And so my point is whether it's those topics or others, if we want to have a three to
 five to seven wise conversation about any topic, most people stop listening and they immediately
 have reflexive thoughts and those reflexive thoughts calcify over time.
 And that's of course what's happened on the internet.
 We can now what an echo chamber is is people passing back and forth reflective or excuse
 me, reflexive thoughts and there's almost no reflective thinking happening at scale either
 on the internet or off the internet, which is what makes you know radical dialogue so
 powerful.
 That's why I'm reflecting on what you just said literally.
 And I think this is where a lot of your practical ability to, and we're going to talk about
 business and marketing, but I think this is what really I think encapsulates the brilliance
 of a lot of your approach and what you do.
 You talked about just some fire brand topics right there, some super, but the thinking
 part of it and the reflective, refractive, all of those, that aspect is the problem that
 channels through everything that drills down into business and marketing eventually.
 And I think people can understand that because of how you just encapsulated it.
 Thank you.
 And a core tenant in category design is listen to the words, listen to the words.
 You know, I assume this is going to come out after the midterms, right?
 So the Democrats have been painted by the Republicans as weak on crime.
 And the Democrats don't understand why they're weak on crime.
 They point to all these facts that show that crime is moving in the right direction in
 a lot of the country and so forth and so on.
 And look, we can argue about where the data is and where it is and so forth and so on.
 But here's the bottom line.
 Your party, and by the way, I'm a radical independent.
 So I'm neither Republican or Democrat and in the current midterms, I voted for both
 Republicans and Democrats on the same fucking ballot as I often do.
 But what they realize is you can't have a thoughtful discussion with these folks at any kind
 of a detailed level.
 And when the Democrats say defund the police, when that was going on, I was pretty vocal
 about how stupid I thought that was one of my best friends was murdered.
 And I'll tell you, when you sit there in front of the sheriff in the corner, in this
 case with my friend's family, his mother on one side and his sister on the other, and
 the sheriff confirms that it's him.
 In our case, Sheriff Jim Hart and Santa Cruz, California said, the one thing you want to
 hear in that moment, after you've heard the most horrible thing you could possibly imagine,
 which is the confirmation that one of your closest friends is dead, murdered.
 Sheriff Jim Hart said, we will stop at nothing until we get them.
 And they did.
 And it was a very large, very costly investigation that had great old-fashioned police work and
 technology and it was a massive project.
 If you had to hire a startup to solve this and do what has been done here in this murder
 case, it would have been over $10 million.
 Okay, why do I bring that up?
 Defund the police?
 Go fuck yourself.
 Because I know what you want to hear the cops say in that situation.
 Well, at the time, people on the left were saying, oh, we don't mean defund the police.
 What we mean is we know, and they go into all the stuff, and some of the stuff was valuable.
 Some of the stuff is right.
 Do we use police for things that we shouldn't maybe use police for?
 Maybe we do.
 Is there evidence around that?
 What are the experts?
 Okay.
 Do we need more healthcare worker?
 Do we need more homeless?
 What?
 I'm not an expert.
 Let's fucking have the conversation called, maybe we're asking too much of the police.
 But listen to the words.
 If you don't mean defund the police, if what you mean is we need more social services,
 or whatever the fuck it was, you think you meant?
 Don't fucking say defund the police, because I'm going to take you with your word.
 And so this becomes a stupidity.
 So one of the keys to thinking is language, because words create thinking.
 That's why we invented them, so we could share ideas.
 Because if you and I don't have language, we grunt and point.
 That's what we got.
 Right.
 So language was literally created as a way of sharing thinking.
 That's why we invented it as human beings.
 So listen to the fucking words.
 If I say to you, hey Ryan, I'm stoked to be on your podcast.
 Take me at what my word.
 And if I'm a Democrat who says defund the police, or if I'm a Republican who says I want
 my outlaw abortion in the country, I take them at their word.
 Words matter.
 Words matter.
 And words in marketing and words in category design change the future.
 Yep.
 And you know what?
 I gave myself, because I don't even take notes like anymore, but when Christopher Lockhart
 comes on my shows, I give myself a few things because I don't want to, you know why?
 It's selfish because I want to get stuff out of you.
 I want people to hear what you have to share.
 And literally you've gone down like the fucking, I have this word.
 It says, languageing on my sheet of paper in order, which is right down the path of what
 you're talking about.
 And I want to get in to our digital, our native digital's, native analogs.
 But I want you to go a little further down the language and path, because I think it's
 spot on right where you left it.
 So a demarcation point, so languageing is the strategic use of language to change
 thinking.
 And most people in business in marketing are lazy about the language.
 I'll give you a simple example.
 How many companies do you know who talk about what they sell in market as a solution or
 solutions to many?
 Right.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Well, here's an aha for you.
 In to the word solution, if somebody's going to buy a solution, they need to have a problem.
 And one of the biggest unlocks in category design as distinct from idiotic marketing is
 don't market your product, market your problem because the bigger, more urgent and more strategic
 the problem, the more time, money, and energy people will invest in solving the problem.
 So but we don't do that, do we?
 We don't marketing is not focused on customers.
 It's focused on us branding is about us branding our name in their head.
 That's what it's about.
 Well, that's a big mistake.
 Branding is terrible the way it's practiced today, even the word is terrible.
 Most people don't even realize where the word comes from.
 It comes from putting a stamp on animals to prove that you own them and it's painful
 and horrible to the animal.
 And a bunch of marketing idiots got together and said, oh, let's call what we do that.
 We want to we want to fire burn our logo into our customer's heads.
 Really?
 Don't don't market your brand or your product market the problem because without a problem
 nobody buys a solution.
 And so I guess my point is on a lot of things, if all you do is take a step back and go listen
 to the words, what are the words mean?
 And let's be thoughtful about, well, why are we using those words?
 How about this word, amen, praise the Lord, because I grew up, I grew up, it's other
 Baptist church and you know when the preacher would say something and you're like, you know,
 you're wanting to support them, you go, amen, the deacons are going, hallelujah, that's
 me.
 What are you talking about?
 It's so true.
 And look, I'm going to call myself out like I do.
 I use these terms even more and I have Christopher Locke in my head.
 I'm like using them and I say them and it's because I'm being lazy because I know people
 know what they think it means.
 And so I'm lazy and I use it.
 But in the back of my hand, I'm going to think of a different way to say this.
 I got to, I got to language this better, you know, but then there can people are conditioned
 to know what they know and so I guess I'm lazy in that regard, but I find myself doing
 it sometimes.
 Sure, it's easy to be a little bit lulled to sleep.
 I'll give you another great one in the agency world.
 We hear this a lot.
 Full service.
 We're a full service marketing agency.
 Okay.
 Have you ever, once, have you ever once heard anybody say they're a half-surgis service
 agency?
 We're a quarter service PR agency, you know, this guy was telling me about full stack.
 We're a full stack developer.
 We trained full stack developers, you know, sometimes when I go to have breakfast, I like
 a half stack.
 I can't eat a full stack.
 What the fuck's a full stack developer?
 Now, you know, if you're in that world, you know what that means, but outside that
 nichey little world, it's meaningless.
 And so they're all of these throw away things that we say.
 Here's another stupid one that never gets thought of in marketing.
 I always love this one.
 Don't take our word for it.
 So let me understand this, you are paying to put an ad in the world where you tell people
 to not take your word for it.
 You're telling people, you're paying to tell people not to listen to you.
 Fuck.
 That's dumb.
 Don't take our word for it.
 It is what the customer says or here's what Gartner says.
 Are you out of your mind?
 You're undermining yourself.
 And so my point is, they're all of these lazy uses of language that go unquestioned.
 And it can be damaging to our businesses because it's not differentiating.
 When we say the same things as everyone else, we create the impression, we are the same
 as everyone else.
 And being the same as everyone else is the core of not being differentiated.
 So if you're going to be differentiated, you have to fucking be different.
 And if you're going to be different, you have to say something fucking different.
 Exactly right.
 And I grew up in the nucleus of the ad business, but there is a more self-absorbed bunch
 in the whole world.
 I got to know.
 One of the things I love about the ad business is the ad business gives itself awards for
 creativity.
 Now if you're in the movie making business and you want to evaluate a piece of art, and
 give it an award, which I think is sort of dumb, but whatever do whatever you like, you
 want to give certain movies an Academy Award, have at it based on artistic merit, as decided
 by some group.
 But in the ad industry, it's really do other ad industry people think it's cool.
 Notice what's rarely part of the discussion.
 Did it sell anything?
 Don't ask that.
 Did it increase the market cap of the company that put out the ad?
 Nobody really used this awesome hue of purple in it.
 But don't you listen to you talk about that all day.
 It's just so true, the words matter, and I'm going to encapsulate for everybody listening
 because Chris is brilliant smart and you're going to go follow all his shit anyway.
 And hopefully you already did from me talking about him all the time.
 But encapsulating it all, he just did it there.
 Embrace your different.
 Find different.
 Challenge the norm.
 I mean, at the end of the day, I like to distill potentially complicated things down.
 And sometimes I, with you and like other things and the categories and all that, it's
 just like fucking embrace your day and the thinking part, I just think we've got it.
 I don't know what the Renaissance is going to be in that, but I hope we can bring it
 about.
 Maybe just talking about is what will help.
 I hope so.
 I mean around here, we're on a mission to do that.
 And on the political front, I make it very clear, I'm an independent.
 And B, I love people on both sides of the aisle deeply, who I disagree with deeply.
 And that's why I don't hate them because I have friends on the far right who have ideas
 that I think are absolutely fucking off the chart, wrong.
 And I have the same on the left.
 And what I know is, they're very good people who do very good things in the world, who
 care deeply about themselves, others in our country.
 You know, when I get into the abortion debate with everybody, well, my pro-choice friends
 are furious about what's going on.
 And I say, well, can we at least find some common ground to start?
 And they're like, there is no common ground.
 They want outlaw abortion.
 We think that's terrible.
 There's taking away women's rights.
 I get that.
 But can we start somewhere?
 How would we start here?
 Nobody wants one abortion.
 Everybody's anti-abortion, aren't they?
 I don't want one abortion.
 I don't want one woman to have to go through that.
 I don't want one potential life to be lost.
 I don't want any of that.
 So let's all start with, we care about women, we care about children.
 We'd rather these horrible things don't happen.
 OK, great.
 We can at least agree there, can't we?
 Now, we may disagree that when it happens, how we deal with it, OK, fine, let's have
 the disagreement.
 But my point is, if we look, can't we at least, we can come to a place where we understand
 that the other person, despite the fact that they have a different opinion, and isn't
 an evil person, even if we ascribe that to them.
 And oh, by the way, if you treat them and speak about them like they're evil people,
 they're never going to come and talk to you.
 Chris, we just want to jump to the end.
 Is that what it is?
 You know, like, because I heard you talk right there, and I'm like trying to distill it,
 like how people are.
 Like we just want to get to the end point, instead, the journey that it takes to find common
 ground.
 We just want to get to the end point of, again, like I said, the actual negative thing
 that has all the polarization around it, but there's like 30 steps before it, right?
 We just want to jump to the final conclusion that is so divisive, right?
 Well, and we're committed, here's the truth, we're committed to being divisive.
 Yeah.
 I was listening to a very popular political podcast recently, and the gal providing
 the analysis was talking about how the amount of vitriol in our politics has never been
 higher, and what a problem this is, et cetera, et cetera.
 And then she went on to talk about, and why it's all Republicans fault.
 And I said, like, I'm yelling at my phone, because I'm listening to a podcast going,
 you don't, you don't fucking, you're so dumb that this is a very smart person, supposedly.
 You're so dumb that you don't realize that you're now doing two seconds after you said
 it was the thing that needed to be not done, you're now doing exactly it.
 You just like being divisive in a democratic outfit, as opposed to a Republican outfit.
 And you just think the Republicans are more blatant about it or whatever you think.
 Well, you just, you're doing the fucking same thing.
 You're not going to make friends, in this case with Republicans by calling them assholes.
 Yeah.
 It's not going to work.
 I don't understand why President Biden doesn't come out and say to every mega person, we love
 you.
 We want to work with you.
 We want to understand you.
 Why wouldn't you say that?
 Look, I disagree with some things on the far left.
 You know, you happily have a debate with AOC about whether or not we need universal
 basic income, but I'm not going to call our names because she says that we need that
 and I think it's nuts.
 Let's talk about it and I don't hate her because of it.
 I might not like her position.
 I might not like her style.
 I might not like whatever, but Americans hating Americans because we have different opinions
 really.
 That's what we're doing.
 And that's the key.
 Americans hating Americans isn't good for anybody if you're an American.
 Well, no.
 And look, why would you have you ever sat down and talked to an American?
 You know, I live in a very Democrat area.
 Well, have you ever been to the middle of the country?
 No, I mean, really.
 I was just in Arizona.
 I asked people how they think about the election.
 I want to hear what they say.
 I might not agree with everything.
 You know, by the way, just because I'm from California, it doesn't mean anything.
 People can paint anybody with any kind of brush that they want.
 And so I personally believe we need a breakthrough in listening and a breakthrough in real dialogue.
 The ability to ask five to seven wise and have a thoughtful conversation about stuff.
 And in marketing, it's everything because roughly 90% of the marketing that we see is
 not something that somebody thought was legendary.
 It's something a committee could agree on.
 You've made my life harder, my friend.
 I just want you to know that because I know I joke earlier and I know I'm going to keep
 saying it, but like literally every time I'm in a meeting with a client now, and we look,
 I name my agency fucking radical.
 I didn't name it radical because I gave everyone in my agency license to call bullshit and
 to push the envelope when you name your agency radical.
 So there was some thought in that.
 However, I said never meeting now and your voice is in my head and I'm going, are we really
 pushing it?
 Are we trying to, you know, we speeds and feeds?
 Are we trying to be better than the competition?
 Are we trying to completely damn demand and fucking, you know, I like literally and that
 practical thought though, I think there's not enough of it.
 It's hard.
 It makes you think.
 It makes you work harder, but it's not also supposed to be easy.
 Yes.
 And in category design, one of the thing, one of our core tenants, another one of the core
 tenants is reject the premise.
 So whenever we go to do thinking work, creative work, strategic work, we start with
 reject the premise.
 So we look at, well, what's the premise for this, right?
 What does everyone else say about this topic or about this market or about the, this type
 of product or service or what does everybody say?
 Write that shit out and look at it and go, okay, let's reject all of it.
 Let's just, let's start with, it's all wrong.
 And look, you might reject the premise, do some real thinking about thinking and come
 back and fully accept the premise after you've gone through that exercise.
 That's fine.
 Yeah.
 If you really go through the exercise, because the only way we know to open the aperture
 of our minds and consider something radically different, I say those words on purpose, is
 to start by rejecting our own premise.
 And now we're free.
 And my friend, the legendary designer, John Bielenberg, says, start by doing the opposite.
 That's his way of rejecting the premise.
 So he teaches university courses on innovation and creativity and all this good stuff.
 And one of the exercises he does with university students, Ryan, is he gets them to build a bike.
 And the bike only has one design point.
 They can do anything they want with the bike, except there's one thing that the bike's
 got to do.
 It cannot be rideable.
 Go.
 And the reason he does that is to have them go through an exercise that is a hundred percent
 reject the premise.
 I love that man.
 I love it.
 And all right, I've got to talk, I got to get the native digitals and native analogs.
 But last thing, one of the first exercises I went through when I was in the ad game,
 this was in like 2000, 2001.
 And literally, it was worked on Verizon, and we taught one of our first campaigns.
 And there used to be this thing, I don't see it as much anymore.
 And maybe because we work with medium-sized companies, I'm not working with Fortune 10
 companies like I did in the past, BDI and CDI, you remember that exercise?
 Brand development index and category development index.
 I want you to hammer this home for me, but I thought I had this thinking back because
 when Verizon, when we were kind of kicking everybody's ass in 2000, 2001, and couldn't
 you hear me now was one of the first campaigns I worked on, it was the premise was we had
 to develop the category, which was walking around the cell phone that actually worked, you
 know, because, and we didn't, they did talk about their network and it became chest,
 it got worse and worse on the chest beating.
 But it was all about category design at the beginning with wireless, right, because
 no one had fucking known, what would I do with Selfa, why do I need that?
 And so it was all category design.
 In your mind, is it, should it just always be 100?
 Is it 100 to zero category design versus, or category development versus brand development?
 I'm going to say yes, but not 100% mean it.
 But here's why I'm going to say yes with a little bit of an asterisk.
 Let's pretend I 100% mean it for a second.
 Here's the big aha.
 And very few marketers understand or can understand this, and the minute you do it changes everything.
 When you're the company evangelizing the category, that is to say evangelizing the problem,
 that is to say talking about legendary marketing creates a different future, it moves the
 world from one place to a new and different place, right?
 So you're evangelizing, we call them photos, those from twos, right?
 It doesn't have to be this way, it could be, it could be a lot different, right?
 When you're the company and or the person doing that, here's the interesting thing.
 The consumers of that message assume you're the category leader because the only person
 and or company they've ever heard evangelize a category in and I'm going to use these words
 very purposely, missionary way like that is the company and or person bringing the idea
 to life.
 And so here's the irony.
 When you evangelize your category, people assume you're the category queener king.
 And so you get brand for free because you watch no one else in your space is evangelizing
 the category.
 You know, I just spent the better part of 20 minutes or whatever it was going off on our
 need for real dialogue.
 Well, follow your different is a real dialogue podcast.
 How could the guy who has a real dialogue podcast not be an ambassador and evangelist for
 fucking dialogue?
 And oh, by the way, when you do that, I happen to believe it, it's not just a technique.
 But when you do that and you go, oh, yes, and he's a dialogue podcaster in the business
 and marketing space, well, yeah, and then people go, well, shit, he must be one of the leaders
 at least because he just spent 20 minutes talking about how important real dialogue is
 and making me think about topics that I don't normally like to think about and probably
 slightly pissing me off.
 And so my point is when you evangelize the category, you don't have to say to people, and
 by the way, I'm one of the leaders in business dialogue podcasts, they get it for free.
 And it's more powerful than if you actually promote yourself or your product or your brand,
 you're promoting an idea, you're promoting what's possible in the future for your prospect
 or customer.
 That's a way more powerful thing to talk about than, hey, isn't my fucking carbonylator
 on them?
 I love you, man.
 All right, man, it's been plain sight and it's hitting us and it's smacking us in the face
 every day.
 And I was like, I was getting smacked around like the last few years in certain meetings.
 And I didn't know what it was, but it was like bringing in the back of my head and then
 you distilled it so eloquently in the last year, 18 months, I don't know, I know you've
 been talking about it for a bit now, but what's this wave, man?
 We got native digitals and native analogs.
 There's so many implications.
 Let's hit it.
 All right.
 So let's start basic principles.
 The aha for me came a few years ago, my friend Paul was visiting from the UK with his
 family, his wife and his two kids.
 And the kids were teenagers at the time, you know, 13, 16 kind of sort of in that ballpark
 where some of your rug rats are.
 And we just live a couple of blocks from the beach, it's very beautiful here and so my wife
 carry being the amazing person that she is is let's do a wonderful beach dinner.
 We can have fires on our beach here.
 So we're going to roast some weenies and we're going to do some smores or we're going to
 watch the sunset and I'm going to have a great old time on the beach.
 So that's exactly what we do.
 So we go out there and we're looking at the sunset and we're enjoying the beach and
 we're enjoying the waves and we're getting dinner ready and we're having a nice conversation.
 What are the kids doing?
 They're on their phones, yeah.
 So me being there unwanted, unwanted uncle, she don't mapes.
 You might look over there.
 There's this big orangey pinky red, ready thing in the sky.
 It's looking pretty cool right now and now they look up.
 Maybe they take a picture of it and then they go back to the phones and a few minutes
 later I'll slap them on the shoulder and say, hey, there's this amazing greeny, bluey
 thing right there, flopping on the sand.
 It's called the Pacific Ocean.
 You don't have one of those in London.
 You might want to take a look at it and then go back to their phones.
 So we do this for a bit of the night and that's that.
 And here was the aha.
 I sit to myself the next morning, I said, why is it one of the most beautiful things that
 happens ever a beach sunset is not powerful enough to pull them away from their device for
 more than a few seconds.
 How can that be true?
 And the aha is because that's where their life is.
 And that unlock unlocks everything.
 And so the big difference between native analogs that is to say people who are plus or
 minus over 35 and people who are under 35 is not an age thing.
 It's a where you experience life thing.
 And what you'll notice and look, there's always outliers and exceptions and I get all
 that.
 But what you'll notice is there's a 180 degree difference for those of us native analogs.
 We would always prefer to be in person.
 We're always going to watch the sunset and maybe we'll take a picture in a video of it too.
 But our primary experience is an analog experience.
 You go to a rock concert today and young people are watching the concert through their phone
 as they tape it.
 It's there.
 They're right there.
 They're right fucking there.
 And you're watching them through your fucking phone.
 Why?
 Because their primary life experience is on a screen.
 They came of age with these things.
 And so the aha is, if you came of age with the primarily smartphone in the cloud, you
 are a native digital.
 You're the first generation of humans whose primary life experience is digital and secondary
 life experience is analog.
 And if you're older than that, you're the last native analogs to live on planet Earth.
 And once you realize how different that is, I'll give you a simple example.
 Why this matters?
 So we did a little bit of work.
 It turns out in the S&P 500 companies, there's 500 companies.
 And the average age of the average S&P 500 CEO is 58.
 Now most 58 years old, and by the way, I'm 54, so I'm a radical native analog.
 So I can throw all of us under the bus, exactly.
 This native analogs don't understand this is happening.
 Well, that's a problem for two reasons.
 Number one, you can't hire.
 And number two, you can't market.
 Because you can't get to anybody under 35 if you don't understand this.
 Now, it's interesting to me how small business owners adapt so much more quickly than bigger
 and big business owners.
 I'll give you a favorite example of this.
 It was during the pandemic, I talked to a, as the pandemic was ending.
 And I talked to a restaurant owner who was having a very hard time hiring people.
 And he was telling me he used all these job sites and this and that and the other.
 And he said it wasn't working.
 So you know what he did?
 He and his management team set up Tinder profiles.
 So they could, so they could meet young people.
 And they used Tinder to recruit employees and they may be very clear.
 That's what they were doing.
 But well, how many, how many hiring managers in the S&P 500 are doing anything like that?
 Zero.
 Now, the reason small business owners, restaurant owner in this case does it is he realizes
 he can't get to them because they're nowhere that he usually used to go in the past.
 So you must go to where they are and this is a massive unlock for people.
 If you have young people that you love in your life, you have to meet them in the digital
 world.
 They won't come to you.
 You have to go to them.
 And if you have young people in your life and you discipline them by taking away their
 screens, which may or may not be a bad thing, I'm not going to decide whatever you want
 to do.
 My point though is when you take a screen away from a younger person, you're taking them
 out of their regular world.
 Now this unlock is everything because every time you see a television ad, what you're seeing
 is either a category of product or service that's not targeted to anybody over 30 younger
 than 35 or be wasted marketing dollars because nobody over 35 watches any fucking TV.
 And so once you understand that the way they live life is different, once you understand
 that if you're native digital, you got to have digital game to meet a significant other.
 When you and I were kids, we had to have analog game.
 You had to figure out how to go ask the girl to dance or whatever.
 Well, today you got to have you got to have a moji game.
 Right, and and emojis, emojis are the fastest growing language on planet earth and might
 be the fastest growing language ever.
 And I just found this out as a native analog.
 Do you know that if you give somebody a thumbs up and they're a native digital, you just
 insulted them?
 They think it's a passive aggressive kind of pat on the head.
 And so my point is, right, well, if you don't know that and you're managing a team with
 native digitals on it and you send them a thumbs up, they're going to think you're a donkey.
 And so that's how big the difference is.
 And so the big aha is if we want to build legendary categories, companies and products into
 the future, we must realize the following.
 We are now in a native digital first world.
 And you can't recruit people and you can't market and sell to people who are native
 digitals using analog approaches.
 And it's it's right, it's so apparent.
 You know, like people probably just, you know, or anyone listening now was listening to
 you talking, they're going, and it's been in plain sight.
 But the brands are so freaking, they're not agile, man.
 And they're not, they don't get it.
 So unless they've got someone on their team like feeding it and they think, well, let's
 just run some more organic Facebook posts.
 Well, that's the solve.
 It's just so bigger than that.
 I mean, like correct.
 So like if you're counseling, I'm going to get, I'm going to get a new gritty Christopher.
 So, you know, we have some executives listening to this, I know.
 So we're going to, we're going to take him to school.
 Like, what are we, your counseling brands, beyond, okay, I need to run more Facebook ads.
 Take it a level deeper of implication, maybe, or opportunity.
 Yeah.
 So I think running more Facebook ads is often a very big mistake.
 Having spent 35 years in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, startup ecosystem, their
 startups over the last couple of years who spent approximately half their venture funding
 on Facebook and Google ads.
 And so we need to understand when we do that, we're playing a game called demand capture.
 And she who creates the demand wins.
 And so, so here's the first to have marketing.
 The number one form of marketing was, is and always will be word of mouth.
 And nobody in marketing talks about it because you're brethren in the agency business, don't
 think they can make money on word of mouth.
 They make money placing ads and doing all that shit.
 Well, it turns out marketing can help tremendously with word of mouth.
 And when you realize that it's all about word of mouth, then you realize a couple things.
 Marketing's job is to put the right words in the right mouth.
 Marketing's job is to use marketing campaigns and strategies to create and multiply
 one word of mouth.
 And here's the beauty, one scales in the digital world in a way that it never could scale
 in the analog world.
 And so if you understand that what we need to do is find who our ideal customer as we call
 them in category design super consumers, they're typically eight to 10% of the category
 who are most forward leaning, most progressive in their thinking, most willing to experiment
 with new ideas and new things.
 You find who those people are and you deliver them, I'm going to say these words on very
 much on purpose, content that is based on a different point of view and you interact
 with them digitally where they live in the digital world.
 And you get a small percentage of them talking and buying.
 You can create radical, rapid digital warm in digital communities.
 And then when you get a certain community to tip, away you go.
 We're working right now with a company called Lomi and Lomi is, in my opinion, the most
 important new home appliance in more than a decade, it's the first smart home composter.
 You take your food waste, you put it in this thing, you press a button and three to four
 hours later you get some of the most nutrient dense dirt on planet earth as opposed to creating
 more waste and more CO2 and more bad shit.
 I thought you were going to say Doc Brown like turning it into a time machine, but you
 know, like, in fact, the future three comes back with, you know, you just pour the
 pour trash down in it like turning it, but that's cool too.
 Well, and the reason I bring them up is because Matt and Brad, the founders of the company
 CEO and chairman are really legendary at direct digital marketing.
 And they're now at a point where they're level of precision and being able to measure
 how much digital warm they need to create to get it to a certain point that a certain
 area will tip, they almost have it down to the penny.
 And so when you know that, when you know who your perfect super consumer is and you know
 how to get to them through digital channels and be part of their digital community.
 And you take an education oriented approach with a point of view that is thoughtful and
 capture their attention and imagination.
 All of a sudden they will interact with your content and your company.
 And then they'll then you open the aperture to them trying something different.
 And when you get very good at this, the amount of precision that you have in your marketing
 is extraordinary and your cost of acquisition goes down exponentially because the more
 warm you drive, the more you have customers doing your marketing for you.
 And so the folks at Lomi are getting to a point where we call it category science.
 The category science analysis is so tight that we know if we spend a certain amount of
 money in a certain amount in certain type of digital community over a certain amount
 of time, we will drive revenue.
 And once revenue in that digital community gets to a certain point, we don't have to invest
 anymore because the warm will do the rest of the work for us.
 That is the most legendarily powerful kind of marketing that I've ever been associated
 with.
 And so the aha here is if you understand category design, if you understand super consumers,
 if you understand digital communities, if you understand native digital versus native
 analog, and that you can't get to native digitals in other ways, this is the way to get
 to them.
 And that native digital is more than ever, more than any kind of human being ever, they're
 not going to go to some unknown source for information.
 They're going to ask a friend, they're going to be part of a digital community and they'll
 ask that digital community if they don't have a specific friend to ask.
 And so today success is very clear, but it has to be digital first, it has to be focused
 on supers.
 It has to have a thoughtful education oriented point of view, aka legendary content.
 One of the things we like to say today is the content is the marketing.
 The content is the marketing.
 And people engage with your content, it's going to create affinity, it's going to create
 scalability of that warm.
 If you're creating new languaging to get back to that, the new languaging that you're creating
 will have some real lift to it because of the warm.
 And because digital warm happens at scale around the world, you can really do something legendary
 in a fairly short period of time if you understand some of these core principles.
 Big man, and the implications are so big.
 And I'm going to just still it.
 Not Facebook ads, Facebook groups or Discord groups, and or, and you know what, there's
 the second thing that I took away there.
 I'm a fucking Christopher Locke, super consumer.
 I mean, you know, like who do I am, I'm the living breathing, you know, like super consumer
 for Christopher Locke and category pirates.
 Well, and here's the interesting thing you tell me is as one of our supers.
 Here's the other thing most people don't realize about supers.
 Supers will spend a giant amount of money with you if you let them.
 You know, you think about music.
 People want to go to the shows, they want to buy the t-shirts, they want to get the DVD,
 or not DVD, the streaming video of the fucking concert back behind the scenes, you know,
 the biographies are like, if you, if you think that, that Lizzo is unbelievable, you want
 to consume all things, Lizzo.
 And so most people leave a tremendous amount on the table.
 That is to say they don't give their supers enough to buy from them.
 This is why how, this is why so many of these digital creators are being so successful.
 Mr. Beast is a legendary example.
 You become a fan, you buy almost anything from the guy.
 My kids would.
 That's why when you get pirate sauce, I'm going to be the first one in line.
 You heard it here first, we're launching pirate sauce bourbon.
 Yes.
 Vartee by radical.
 Oh, man.
 Get, get, get, get sauceed on the pirate sauce.
 It's so good, man.
 I know I've taken you over time.
 You've been very generous and I know we could talk forever, but I think you unlocked a lot
 for our listeners there.
 And the great thing is, you're one quick way for them to get more on those.
 So let's tell everybody where to do that.
 The simplest thing is just go to lockhead.com, lockhead.com.
 We'll have that and everything moves off that.
 Yeah.
 And do yourself a favor, go follow this guy on LinkedIn, it'll be the smartest move you
 make.
 Look, you might be listening, we have people all over the place, we're kind of the
 mainstream marketing and business podcasts, we got people over the map, but the thing
 is you'll learn from this guy.
 Like, as you heard on today's show, the passion, the energy, the knowledge, it just, it transcends
 the marketing and the business, which is why I love Chris.
 And I'm going to keep asking him on my show and hopefully you'll be lucky enough and he'll
 say yes.
 I'll come back anytime, Ryan.
 Yeah, man.
 You know where to find him, lockhead.com, search category pirates, you can find him anywhere
 on that.
 And if you look, if you follow me, you'll hear it one way or another.
 You can also see the highlight clips from all of these shows at the radcast.com.
 You know where I'm at?
 I'm Ryan Alfred on Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, trying to break category design with
 Christopher in my head every day.
 Thanks for all you do, Christopher, really appreciate you coming on.
 Thank you, Ryan.
 I deeply appreciate it, brother.
 We'll see you next time on the radcast.
 To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at the radcast.com or follow us
 on social media at our Instagram account v.rad.cast or at Ryan Alfred.
 Stay radical.