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Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™

Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™

Di: Christopher Lochhead
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Christopher Lochhead | Follow Your Different is pioneer in real dialogue podcasts. “The best business podcast” – Podcast Magazine “The worst business podcast” – Neil Pearlberg© 2022 Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™ Podcast Economia Scienze sociali
Episodi
  • 465 Growing Up With Radical Islam with Işık Abla

    465 Growing Up With Radical Islam with Işık Abla
    Oct 22 2026
    In this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we sit down with Işık Abla, a Turkish-born Christian minister and broadcaster. Işık 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 United States in 1996. In the late 1990s, after a spiritual turning point, she converted from Islam to Christianity. The conversation moves between her memories and her opinions on religious extremism, women’s rights, and political responsibility. Her life story is her own testimony. Her wider views on religious communities and countries are her perspective, and nothing in the conversation sets them out as settled fact. You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go. A Childhood Shaped by Fear Işık describes a devout Muslim household where things were rarely calm. Her father was often away, and her mother battled depression and difficult pregnancies. Because of that, Işık was sometimes the only one with her mother during medical emergencies, even as a small child. She also remembers feeling unwanted simply for being a girl. Outside the home, Istanbul was unsettled and often violent. She says she saw people hurt and killed, and fear became an ordinary part of life. At religious courses, she was taught that Christians, Jews, Israel, and the United States were enemies. By the time she was 12, she says, she’d been convinced that becoming a suicide bomber could be a holy calling. From Questions of Faith to a New Life Işık talks about how religious law shaped what was expected of families and of women, even where the country’s official laws said something different. She argues that some interpretations of Sharia put religious rules above civil law and restrict women’s rights. These are her views, grounded in how she lived and understood what she was taught. After leaving her marriage, she came to the U.S. looking for safety and independence. Depression and trauma followed, and then her conversion to Christianity. That faith became the center of her work as an ordained minister and broadcaster. She also shares a moving detail: her mother eventually converted too, after moving to the U.S. and watching Işık’s broadcasts. Extremism, Freedom, and Personal Responsibility Işık draws a line between Muslims who practice their faith peacefully and what she calls radical Islam, which she links to political rule under Sharia. She warns that this kind of ideology can clash with constitutional protections and with the rights of women and LGBTQ people. Again, this is her interpretation and experience, not a full picture of Islam or of Muslim communities. Christopher adds something personal: a close friend of his was murdered by men raised in a Christian community, which is why he believes violence and hatred can take root in any religious setting. Işık agrees that evil can wear any religious label. The two also touch on Afghanistan and what followed from the political decisions made there. To hear more from Işık Abla and her thoughts on religious extremism, women’s rights, and political responsibility, download and listen to this episode. Bio About Işık Abla Links Connect with Işık Abla! Facebook | X (formerly Twitter) | Website | Youtube We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    1 ora e 12 min
  • 464 Jersey Mike’s Is Worth $7.5 Billion And 2% Of Its Customers Are Gen Z | The Pirate Street Journal

    464 Jersey Mike’s Is Worth $7.5 Billion And 2% Of Its Customers Are Gen Z | The Pirate Street Journal
    Sep 30 2026

    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 younger eaters show up.

    This episode of The Pirate Street Journal breaks down three major business topics through that lens. Christopher, Eddie, and Bri take a hard look at the week’s most important business news and share what the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the mainstream press consistently miss. The result is a faster, sharper, and more honest read on how business actually works.

    You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.

    Jersey Mike’s: The Debt, the Price Tag, and a Sandwich Category Gen Z Doesn’t Crave

    Blackstone loaded Jersey Mike’s with about $1.8 billion in debt, and some of it paid Blackstone before the IPO. That pressure explains why the chain needs 15,000 stores. Now, a sub with chips and a drink runs 15 to 20 bucks, which is a long way from the $5 footlong that built Subway.

    Then there’s the palate issue. Ask a Gen Z kid where to eat and Chipotle comes up before any sandwich shop. Mexican food is now what the sandwich was 20 years ago. Marketing spend alone, like a TikTok dance, won’t fix a category that simply isn’t on their list.

    Strong Unit Economics Meet a Subway Warning

    There’s a real bright spot. A Jersey Mike’s franchise costs about $575,000 to open and does roughly $1.37 million in sales. Jimmy Johns needs about $550,000 for around a million, and Subway takes $380,000 for just $500,000. Which means Jersey Mike’s converts cash better than its sandwich rivals.

    The danger is repeating Subway’s mistake. Subway chased cheaper, younger customers with discounts and has been shrinking ever since. Jersey Mike’s already has 12.5 million loyalty members who visit three times as often as everyone else. Protecting that base while courting a new one is the tightest wire the new CEO has to walk.

    Getting Different With the Menu and the Franchise Pitch

    The fix is to get different, not just louder. Jersey Mike’s only put about 1 percent of its marketing into social last year, while peers spend 10 to 25 percent. Still, more TikTok won’t create a new reason to care. A banh mi sub, a Mexican sub, or a chicken parm sub could give the chain a palate that matches how younger people actually eat.

    There’s also an entrepreneurship angle. Gen Z is putting business formation ahead of family formation. A six figure investment in a Jersey Mike’s franchise could look better to them than six figures of college debt, and that turns the 2 percent problem into a recruiting pitch.

    To hear more about the topics in this week’s The Pirate Street Journal, download and listen to this episode. You can also read more Pirate Street Journal entries in the Category Pirates newsletter.

    We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    34 min
  • 463 James Dyson built a $499 Toothbrush And Has No Idea How Many He’ll Sell | The Pirate Street Journal

    463 James Dyson built a $499 Toothbrush And Has No Idea How Many He’ll Sell | The Pirate Street Journal
    Sep 23 2026
    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. When the Wall Street Journal asked Dyson how big the market is, he said he had no idea how many would sell and that he doesn’t structure decisions around a business plan. That answer would make most consultants nervous. For anyone paying attention to how categories actually get created, it’s one of the most honest things a founder has said in years. This episode of The Pirate Street Journal breaks down three major business topics through that lens. Christopher, Eddie, and Bri take a hard look at the week’s most important business news and share what the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the mainstream press consistently miss. The result is a faster, sharper, and more honest read on how business actually works. You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go. Why Nobody Else Would Have Built This Every traditional business process would have killed this product at the market sizing slide. Oral care is a crowded category controlled by a small number of large companies, and a meaningful portion of toothbrushes are given away free at dental offices twice a year. The numbers would have told any reasonable analyst that a $499 toothbrush had no addressable market worth chasing. Dyson didn’t look at the market that existed. He looked at the behavior that wasn’t working. Only about 30% of American adults floss every day, and a third never floss at all. That’s not a market gap sitting in a spreadsheet. That’s a visible, daily failure that nobody in the category had built a real solution around. When a founder sees something like that and decides to spend six years fixing it, that’s where new categories begin. The Super Consumer Nobody Was Selling To There’s a specific type of oral care buyer who already owns an electric toothbrush, a water pick, floss, and whitening products. They’re not buying these things out of habit. They believe what the science supports, that oral health connects directly to overall health, that bacteria from gum disease can enter the bloodstream and affect the heart. For this buyer, $499 for a device that addresses the part of brushing that nothing else fully handles isn’t an indulgence. It’s a logical purchase. This is the same dynamic that drove Oral-B’s power manual toothbrush years ago, a product that many people inside the company thought was a terrible idea. A battery-powered brush that looked like a regular toothbrush, priced at $7, with a non-replaceable battery. People said no one would pay for something they already got free. Those same people probably didn’t think anyone would pay for bottled water either. The Data Play Nobody Is Talking About The Airow, as it stands, is a camera in your mouth taking nearly 30 frames per second. That camera is going to get connected to software, and that software will generate health data that no other company in the oral care space has ever had access to at scale. Over time, the Dyson toothbrush becomes less of a hardware product and more of a data collection platform, one that dentists, orthodontists, and health companies will find genuinely useful. Dyson’s long game here follows a logic similar to what Tesla has built with its vehicle fleet. The cars on the road today are gathering the driving data that makes autonomous systems better tomorrow. A connected Dyson toothbrush does the same thing inside a market that has barely been touched by this kind of thinking. The person who owns a category like that doesn’t just sell more product. They own the information infrastructure that everyone else eventually has to work around. To hear about the topics in this week’s The Pirate Street Journal, download and listen to this episode. You can also read more Pirate Street Journal entries in the Category Pirates newsletter. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    35 min
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