Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™

Jersey Mike’s went public this year after a Blackstone takeover, and Wall Street has put a price tag of about $7.5 billion on it. The chain has posted 20 straight years of same store sales growth and pulled in $4.3 billion last year. It sits right behind Subway as the number two sub chain in America. But here’s the catch. Roughly 70 percent of its customers are Gen X or boomers, and Gen Z makes up just 2 percent. The plan is to grow from 3,300 stores to 15,000, and that math only works if younge

James Dyson built his reputation on solving problems that other companies decided weren’t worth solving. He spent years perfecting vacuum cleaners when most manufacturers had moved on, and he turned a $400 hairdryer into a luxury category that nobody saw coming. Now, at 79 years old, he’s done it again. The Dyson Airow is a $499 toothbrush with a tiny camera in the brush head that takes 28 images per second, finds gaps between teeth, and fires a jet of mouthwash to clean them while you brush. W

We live in an age where fear is a product. It gets packaged, marketed, and sold to millions of people who never stop to ask who is profiting from their panic. Christopher Lochhead breaks this down brilliantly by taking us back to one of the most instructive fear campaigns in modern history: Y2K. Understanding how the Doomer Industrial Complex works is not about dismissing real problems. It is about developing the critical thinking skills to separate genuine risk from manufactured hysteria design

California’s November 2026 ballot carries one of the most consequential financial decisions in the state’s history. Marketed as a one-time 5% billionaire tax, Proposition 40 has drawn serious scrutiny from economists and policy researchers. Among those leading the charge in examining its true implications is Benjamin Jaros, a PhD economist and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who specializes in public finance, financial economics, and economic history. On this episode of Christo

The business press loves a simple story. A new product launches, a stock drops, a company stumbles, and the headlines write themselves. But what gets lost in that noise is the deeper logic driving these events, the category design lens that explains not just what happened, but why it matters. From the Apple Fold to the so-called SaaS apocalypse to Nike’s staggering collapse, the real stories are hiding just beneath the surface of what most journalists choose to cover. This episode of The Pirate

Dolly Parton was more than a voice. She was a strategist, a visionary, and arguably one of the greatest creator capitalists in the history of the entertainment industry. While the world mourned her passing and celebrated her extraordinary musical catalog, the most important tribute may be the one that focuses not on her songs, but on the decision she made decades before most people had ever heard her name. Long before the creator economy had a name, Dolly Parton was already living by its highes