Episodes
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Bruce Feiler on Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World
The people who are happiest don’t chase someone else’s dreams; they chase their own. That’s according to our guest, one of our favorite authors, thinkers, and people, Bruce Feiler. On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we look back to our dialogue with him on how to find...
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PSJ Special Segment: The First AI-Assisted Election | The Pirate Street Journal
The midterm elections wrapped up yesterday, and plenty of people are still sorting through the results. But the hosts of the Pirate Street Journal came away with a different kind of takeaway. This may have been the first AI-assisted election at any real scale, and each of them used the technology...
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Anthropic S1: Their biggest customers spend 0.1% of revenue on AI | The Pirate Street Journal
Most people assume Anthropic is bleeding cash. After reading the S-1, the hosts of the Pirate Street Journal came away with a different picture. The company pulled in about $23 billion over the first nine months of the year, compared with roughly $2.5 billion in the same stretch last year....
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Seth Godin on Breaking the Cycle of Competition by Winning Your Own Game
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we continue on our greatest hits with a conversation that seems very relevant today: marketing innovator and bestselling author Seth Godin. Seth Godin advocates for permission-based marketing, urging marketers to build genuine...
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Steven Kotler on The Art of Impossible
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we’re kicking off one of the greatest hits from the podcast with one of our most powerful conversations: a deep dive with renowned author and peak performance expert Steven Kotler. The conversation centers on Kotler’s book, “The Art…
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465 Growing Up With Radical Islam with Işık Abla
In this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Christopher sits down with Işık Abla, a Turkish-born Christian minister and broadcaster. Işık Abla grew up in Istanbul in a home full of tension, in a city shaken by political violence. She left an abusive marriage and came to the...
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464 Jersey Mike’s Is Worth $7.5 Billion And 2% Of Its Customers Are Gen Z | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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463 James Dyson built a $499 Toothbrush And Has No Idea How Many He’ll Sell | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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462 The Doomer Industrial Complex
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....
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461 California’s New Life Savings Tax Hiding in the “Billionaire Tax” with Hoover Institution Top Gun Benjamin Jaros
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...
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460 Apple Is Seven Years Late To The Fold And Takes 44% Of The Money | The Pirate Street Journal
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.…
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459 Dolly Parton Told Elvis No. It Was Worth $10 Million. | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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458 9/11 Hero Tim Brown
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…
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457 Meta Agreed To Pay $18 Billion For What Its Apps Did To Teenagers | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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456 The Los Angeles Lakers sold for $12.5 billion in 72 hours | The Pirate Street Journal
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…
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455 “Only Idiot Startup Founders Will Stay In California.” – Mark Cuban | Different
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…
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454 WSJ celebrated Burger King’s 8.5% growth, but doesn’t get BK’s Category Design is still broken | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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453 How To Talk To Your Parents About Money Before It’s Too Late | Category Pirates
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...
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452 Zuckerberg Is Spending $600 Billion To Buy The One Thing That Was Never For Sale | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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451 The US Economy Counter Factual, How to Make Your Kids Rich & More | DisruptTV
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…
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450 Chili’s Is Up 500% Since 2022 Betting On Basic Tech | The Pirate Street Journal
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,...
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449 Google’s Free Cash Flow Went Negative For The First Time. Does it matter with $242 billion in cash? | The Pirate Street Journal
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,...
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448 Mid-term Madness, Oprah or George Clooney Running For President? with Political Pollster & Advisor Lee Hartley Carter
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...
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447 Niching Down on Weird Data with AI Solves Ice Cream, Movies, and Power Bottlenecks | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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446 Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You with Ted Dintersmith
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...
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445 Count Your Blessings and Your Burdens When It Comes to Data Centers, Price Increases and Careers | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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444 Market Engineering with Bruce Cleveland
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…
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443 Micron Just Put $250 Million into a Million Kids’ Accounts and Made Charity Obsolete | The Pirate Street Journal
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…
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442 BREAKING NEWS: A car with eight cameras just claimed the word “privacy” | The Pirate Street Journal
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...
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217 America 250
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…
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441 America 250
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…
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440 Why Microsoft is Moving Into a Lower Margin Business | The Pirate Street Journal
The business world is shifting in ways that most mainstream financial media is failing to capture. From Microsoft launching a consulting arm to Starlink eyeing your cell phone and Europe refusing to adopt air conditioning, the stories shaping our economic future are being misread at every turn.…
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439 America is in the Middle of a Startup Super Cycle
America is in the middle of something extraordinary, and most people are not paying attention. Since 2021, Americans have filed more than 20 million new business applications. In 2024 alone, the U.S. averaged roughly 430,000 new business applications per month, which is approximately 50% above...
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438 State Farm just asked 19,000 agents to take up to a 40% pay cut. Progressive took its crown without a single one. | The Pirate Street Journal
State Farm recently made headlines by flying thousands of its agents to Las Vegas for what turned out to be a dramatic announcement. Behind the Pink concert and Jimmy Fallon selfies, CEO quietly told 19,000 agents he was tearing up their contracts. Anyone staying past 2027 would face lower...
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437 What’s Going To Happen In Tech Next with Ray Wang
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we welcome back Ray Wang, Chairman and CEO of Constellation Research, and widely regarded as one of the most insightful technology analysts in the world. In a recent conversation with Christopher Lochhead, Ray Wang shared his...
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436 A 25-year-old is now worth more than SpaceX’s COO | The Pirate Street Journal
This week's Pirate Street Journal episode covered three topics that, on the surface, seem unrelated: the SpaceX IPO and its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, the rise of plug-in solar panels for everyday consumers, and KFC's ambitious brand overhaul. But at the end, each story carries a...
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435 The Fatherhood 2.0 Trap | Creator Capitalist Conversations
Fatherhood has never been a static concept. From the Leave It to Beaver era of distant breadwinners to today's hands-on, emotionally present dads, the role of fathers has shifted dramatically over the decades. But are we truly optimizing fatherhood, or are we simply swapping one set of trade-offs...
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434 97% of Consulting is Monkey-See-Monkey-Do. Gartner just Lost 70% Proving It | The Pirate Street Journal
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we talk about how the consulting and research industry is facing a reckoning. Gartner, once a $42 billion empire built on telling companies which technologies to buy, has shed more than $30 billion in market value. Trading around…
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433 Who are the Category Kings of AI Going To Be? | The Pirate Street Journal
The conventional business press obsesses over company rivalries and product launches, but almost never asks the more important question: who is the category king of every market? The Pirate Street Journal flips that lens entirely. On this episode, Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Bri Clark...
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432 “Lowest Consumer Sentiment” Is Good News? | The Pirate Street Journal
The American consumer is being misread. Surveys say people are panicking, but their behavior tells a completely different story. On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we take a page out of The Pirate Street Journal, as Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Bri Clark…
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431 What Most People Don’t Know About Politics: How Big Change Actually Happens | Different
Most people watch politics the same way they watch sports. Your team, my team, win or lose. We wear our colors, red or blue, and cheer accordingly. But that framing misses something profound about how real change actually happens in political landscapes. There is a different lens worth…
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430 Why the Best Teachers Are Different — and What That Costs You with Christopher Lochhead | Better Leaders Better Schools with Danny Bauer
What does it truly mean to make a difference in someone's life? According to Christopher Lochhead, Category Design pioneer and author, the answer is surprisingly simple: you have to be different. On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Danny Bauer, founder of the Ruckus...
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429 A Creator and a Capitalist are the Same Person with Jessica Miller of the It’s Your Offer Podcast
In a world flooded with content, credentials, and competition, most people are still playing the wrong game. On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we sat down with Jessica Miller on the It's Your Offer Podcast to challenge one of the most deeply held myths in business:...
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428 Almost Everyone Is Missing the Real Value of Artemis 2 | Different
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, let us talk about the recent feat of Humanity with the Artemis 2 and the real value that people are missing. On April 10th, 2026, a capsule named Integrity fell from the sky at 25,000 miles per hour, glowed like a small sun as it…
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427 The California Government Wants Your Assets | Different
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, let us talk about California. California is considering something that has never existed in American history: a tax not on what you earn, but on what you own. The proposed Billionaire Tax Act would impose a 5% levy on the total net...
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426 Knowledge is Not Power Anymore: Creation Is Your New Superpower
On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Christopher Lochhead moves over to the guest chair and answer our questions about AI, Creator Capitalists, and the future of work. At the AI and Copilot Summit in San Diego, Christopher Lochhead had a conversation that resonated far...
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425 The Category Creation Formula: Why Most Business Strategy is a Trap with Kevin Maney & Mike Damphousse
In a world flooded with content and incremental business strategies, standing out is more than a competitive advantage, it's a necessity. Legendary Category Designers Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse joined Christopher Lochhead on this week's episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different…
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424 AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Christopher Lochhead on Creator Capitalists and the Future of Work
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the business landscape, redefining how value is created and where human work fits within the new paradigm. Long-standing advice to amass knowledge and out-execute others is now running up against sophisticated AI agents that can process information...
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423 Military Creator Con: Celebrating Military Creators & Entrepreneurs with James Van Prooyen and Marah Lago
In a business world awash with endless content, few voices cut through the noise like Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. In this episode, we sit down with the co-founders of Military Creator Con, James Van Prooyen and Marah Lago, for a candid conversation about the untapped...
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422 The Transformation Economy with Joe Pine, World-wide Bestselling Author of “The Experience Economy”
This episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different reunites us with the renowned business thinker Joe Pine, whose work on the experience economy transformed how organizations define value. We join Christopher and Joe in tracing the progression from products and services to experiences…
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