Episodes

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...

Twenty-five years after the September 11th attacks, the stories of those who lived through that day remain as powerful and necessary as ever. Tim Brown, a career firefighter and emergency management professional, was at the heart of it all. His new book, “The Greatest Love: Lessons for Living with Extraordinary Courage Even After the Worst Day of Your Life,” is a testament to the heroism and humanity he witnessed firsthand. In a recent conversation on the Follow Your Different podcast, Tim Brown...

The business world rarely slows down, and this week was no exception. From Meta’s landmark legal settlement to Nvidia’s jaw-dropping earnings report, the headlines are telling a story that most mainstream media outlets are getting completely wrong. When you look at these events through a category design lens, the picture becomes much clearer and far more alarming than the surface-level reporting suggests. Understanding what these stories actually mean requires stepping back from the company-foc...

The Los Angeles Lakers have just been sold for $12.5 billion, the highest price ever paid for any sports franchise in history. This blockbuster deal has sent shockwaves through the worlds of finance, technology, and sports culture alike. What does it mean when the most iconic basketball team on the planet changes hands under these circumstances? To understand the full picture, we need to look at who is buying, why they are buying, and what happens to a legendary franchise when its new owners are...

California has long been the heartland of innovation, home to some of the most transformative companies in history. But a new proposal on the ballot is raising serious questions about whether the state is about to undermine the very foundation that made it great. Mark Cuban recently made headlines by stating that only idiot startup founders will stay in California, and while those words may sting, they carry a weight worth examining. Prop 40, marketed as a one-time billionaire tax, could have co...

The business world was buzzing when Burger King posted 8.5% same-store sales growth in the US, beating McDonald’s by the widest margin in at least two years. Meanwhile, Wendy’s dropped 7%, losing its number two spot in American fast food. But is this turnaround as impressive as the headlines suggest? Through the lens of category design, the story looks very different from what most business journalists are telling you. On this episode of The Pirate Street Journal, Christopher , Eddie, and Bri b...

Money is one of the most emotionally charged topics in any family, yet it is also one of the most important conversations we often avoid. Many adult children discover too late that their parents have made significant financial decisions without any guidance, leaving families scrambling to fix problems that could have been prevented. Whether it is annuities, unclear estate plans, or unknown financial advisors influencing your parents, the time to act is now. Having an honest, loving conversation ...

The business world is obsessed with who has the biggest AI model, the fastest chips, and the most impressive benchmarks. But the real question shaping the next decade of technology is not about computing power. It is about trust. Meta recently made headlines when Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto outlining his vision for democratizing artificial intelligence, and at the same time announced plans to spend up to $145 billion on data centers. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is grappling with an ...

Most mainstream media outlets have spent the last several years convincing Americans that a recession is either here or just around the corner. But according to tech analyst Ray Wang and category design pioneer Christopher Lochhead, the real story about the US economy looks very different from what we are being fed. In a recent episode of Disrupt TV, the two thought leaders broke down the actual data behind American economic growth, the rise of AI-driven entrepreneurship, and a new investment pr...

Most business coverage focuses on companies, products, and technologies. Rarely does anyone ask the more important question: what is actually happening inside the market category that makes a business win or lose? The Pirate Street Journal exists to answer exactly that question. On this episode, Christopher, Eddie, and Bri unpacked three stories that expose how business really works, starting with one of the most surprising turnarounds in the restaurant industry: Chili’s is up over 500% since 20...

On this episode of The Pirate Street Journal on Chistopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, the trio tackled three major business stories that mainstream financial media fumbled. From Google’s record-breaking quarter to AI disrupting the legal industry and a historic merger of black-owned banks, the conversation offered a perspective that most financial journalists simply miss because they focus on companies rather than market categories. This is just one of the topics that Pirates Christopher ...

Political strategist and pollster Lee Hartley Carter recently joined us at the Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different podcast to share her sharp insights on the current American political landscape. As the founder of Carter Intelligence Group and author of “Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter,” Lee Hartley Carter brings a rare combination of research expertise and communications mastery to some of the most pressing questions facing voters and candidates today. Fro...

We are living through a fundamental shift in how businesses operate, compete, and create value. The Pirate Street Journal, hosted by Christopher, Eddie, and Bri, breaks down three major business stories through the category design lens, revealing a common thread that most mainstream business coverage misses entirely. That thread is AI data, and how the companies and individuals who understand it best are quietly rewriting the rules of entire industries. From energy infrastructure to ice cream sh...

Ted Dintersmith, legendary venture capitalist and education advocate, joins Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different again to talk about his new book “After Math: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You.” With decades of experience at Charles River Ventures and years spent championing education reform, Ted Dintersmith brings a refreshing and urgent perspective on why the math being taught in schools is almost entirely disconnected from real life. This conversation will make you re...

The Pirate Street Journal takes a sharp look at business through the category design lens, and this episode delivers three stories that reveal how the decisions made today will define economic winners and losers for decades. From data center legislation in New York to Apple raising prices and a Costco cashier becoming a millionaire, each story points to the same underlying truth: the category you choose matters more than almost anything else. Whether you are a governor, a tech executive, or an h...

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Bruce Cleveland, legendary entrepreneur and venture capitalist, joins us to discuss his powerful new book, “Market Engineering: Because Markets Don’t Build Themselves.” The conversation brought together two former competitors who have since become allies in a shared mission: helping founders and executives understand that markets, like products, can be deliberately designed and engineered. Cleveland’s insights are drawn from decades...

Business news rarely gets examined through the lens of category design, but when it does, the insights are striking. From charitable investing to the economic impact of the World Cup and the marketing brilliance of Black Rifle Coffee Company, a new way of thinking about business is emerging. At the center of one of the most compelling stories is Micron, a company that just made the largest corporate commitment of its kind to the Invest America program, seeding up to one million children’s invest...

Tesla dropped a 216-page impact report, and while most people were expecting a flashy product announcement, what they got was something far more strategic. The Pirate Street Journal team broke down three major themes from the report: privacy, climate, and safety innovation. Viewed through the category design lens, each topic reveals how Tesla is not just building cars but actively designing and dominating an entirely new category of company. Here is what stood out and why it matters beyond the h...

As America marks 250 years of existence, it is worth pausing to ask a question that most people avoid: what is actually true about this country versus what we have been conditioned to believe? The noise coming from cable news, social media algorithms, and political fundraising machines has created a version of America that feels perpetually on the brink of collapse. But the data tells a radically different story. America 250 is not a eulogy. It is a celebration grounded in economic history, huma...