Catherine Goetze teaches a million people to use AI, then sells them a landline to put the phone down

Two facts about Catherine Goetze that look like a contradiction until you hold them together for a second. One: as CatGPT, she is among the most-followed AI educators anywhere, teaching hundreds of thousands of people how to actually use these tools, with videos like how she got Claude to produce 7x ROAS and a running series where she gets Anthropic to answer the hard questions. Two: she founded a company that sells landline telephones.

Physical Phones makes Bluetooth handsets, corded-looking objects that sit on your desk, so you can talk on the phone without holding the slab that ruins your afternoon. Her AI education brand and her anti-smartphone hardware brand are not opposites. They are the same thesis, which her own tagline states plainly: learn to live in harmony with technology. Harmony, not surrender, and not abstinence either.

The non-patronizing tone is the product

AI education online is a swamp of two failure modes: breathless hype from people selling a course, and doom from people who have never opened the tool. Her positioning, in her own words, is non-pretentious and non-patronizing, and that turns out to be a real product decision rather than a personality note. It is the reason a Stanford grad's channel about large language models reads like a friend explaining something at a kitchen counter rather than a keynote.

The growth backs it up: reportedly past 400,000 followers and 24 million views within six months, now 850,000+ on Instagram, with a business she has talked about publicly in the region of $750K, plus Vogue Business coverage and a Cannes run organized around working with Claude. She is not covering the AI industry from a distance. She is running a media company on top of the tools she teaches, which is the only credential in this space that means anything.

Why the landline matters

The landline company is the part that makes her worth writing about rather than merely worth following. Anyone can pick a side: technology maximalist, or digital detox scold. Both are easy and both sell. Holding both at once, teaching people to get genuinely fluent with AI while also building hardware whose purpose is to reduce the hours your phone takes from you, is a harder and much more honest position.

It also happens to be the correct one, and almost nobody in the AI content economy is modeling it. Start with the AI explainers if you want the practical value. Then look at the phones, because that is where the actual worldview is.