Crack It In An Hour

Every January, we promise ourselves change. Eat better. Move more. Finally become the person we swore we’d be last year. And then… most resolutions quietly die by February. In this episode, Simon brings a question he’s been circling with Romain and Jesse: how do we actually help people stick to their New Year’s resolutions?

The group digs into the role resolutions are supposed to play, why they so consistently fail, and whe...

“Value” has always been one of QSR’s biggest weapons. Cheap, fast, dependable. But what happens when rising food costs start chipping away at the very thing that made QSR… well, QSR?

In this episode, Jesse, Romain, and Simon dig into the future of quick service restaurants and ask a deceptively simple question: are value customers actually your most valuable customers anymore? From redefining what “value” really means today...

It’s the Holiday Special, which means normal rules do not apply. In this episode Jesse, Simon, and Romain crack open five past topics — Aging, Sleep, Dating, Tennis, and College — to see what they got right, what they got wrong, and what new takes have emerged after letting these ideas sit for a while. Some opinions have evolved, some have hardened, and a few get completely re-litigated. It’s reflective, messy, funny, and ...

The American mall didn’t die overnight—it slowly lost its reason to exist. In this episode, Jesse, Simon, and Romain unpack how overbuilding, e-commerce, cultural shifts, and the loss of hangout spaces like record stores hollowed malls out. Then they flip the question forward: what should a mall be in a world where online shopping is permanent? From experiential brands to fandom-driven spaces and destination food, the crew...

Why do some people leap while others freeze? In this episode, Romain, Jesse and Simon team up with French entrepreneur Alix Petit, founder of Heimstone, Creative Director of The Refreshment Club and the mind behind the Substack WHAT COMES AFTER. Together they unpack the psychology of making big choices, what failure really means, how physical well-being fuels mental courage, and the reasons people avoid change even when th...

Drinking isn’t down because indulgence is down — it’s down because the entire culture around it is cracking. In this episode, Jesse, Simon and Romain tackle the decline of drinking as a social experience and ask what it would take to revive it. Are bars worse now? Is the rise of remote work, wellness trends, and “protecting your peace” killing the collective joy of being a little buzzed together? And what happens to human ...

Social used to be… social. Remember that? Before everything became an ad, a performance, or a perfectly-filtered version of life? In this episode, Biz sits down with Jesse, Romain and Simon to figure out what it would actually take to make social media feel personal again. From whether Instagram introduced “the aesthetic era,” to the rise of finstas and close friends, the gang digs into how we went from genuine connection ...

Driving used to be a right of passage, a symbolic moment of attaining a new level of freedom on your journey towards adulthood. But things are changing, fewer young people are getting their licenses and fewer people are driving in general. With the rise of rideshare and other services it's never been easier to get by without having to drive, so how do you sell people on the idea of driving when freedom is no longer the mai...

Travel used to be about discovery, or relaxation or adventure. But lately the process of travel has started to feel like a hassle that gets in the way of the enjoyment of the process. We've been given more freedom to go more places and stay in anything from hotels to homes which is great... but forces us to be alot more active in the decision making of it all. Throw in social media, and other modern pressures and it's a pe...

Everyone says dating has never been easier...apps, algorithms, endless choice. But if that’s true, why does it feel so hard, so awkward, so… miserable? In this episode, Jesse and Romain dig into the modern dating paradox with guest Sarah Jenkins, Head of Creative Brand Initiatives at Grindr. From swipe fatigue to the illusion of abundance, to what love even means when everything is optimized, we ask: is dating broken, or a...

I scream, you scream we all scream for ice cream...well we used to scream a lot more. It turns out ice cream has actually been on the decline for a while, peaking in the 2000s before beginning its steady drop for the last two decades. How can that be? Is it societal? Is it competition from other sweet treats? Changing tastes? In this episode the gang gets into how to start the great ice cream resurgence. This is a fun one....

Small talk might seem like, well, a small thing but did you know that small talk has been proven to boost mood, make people more receptive to outside opinions and change people's perception of the world? It's all true! So what if small talk was actually the tiny, little secret to helping us get back to a more cohesive, happy society? In this episode the crew breaks down how to bring small talk back, how it could be made mo...

Humans are a paradox. A collection of wants and needs that run directly into each other and make no sense. In this episode we dive directly into one of those paradoxes. While most of us want for nice things, we also often want to be seen as unpretentious and unbothered. Why is that? is it because we're worried as being a person who likes nice things and what it says about us? Is it something deeper? Something more shallow?...

Tennis is in an interesting situation. For all intents and purposes the sport itself is doing well. People continue to play it and engage with its biggest tournaments. But when you look a level deeper there's the whiff of an existential threat thanks to the growth velocity of pickleball. While tennis is growing, pickleball is exploding. Now tennis players are seeing their courts get swallowed up and replaced with picklebal...

The Algorithmic Aesthetic. It's a thing that has gone beyond your social feed to inform just about everything. The long and short of it is that in a world where content is optimized for an algorithm, eventually everything starts to look like what would work best for the algorithm. It sounds like science fiction but we're in the middle of living it. In this episode Simon and Jesse are joined by Chris McPherson to discuss th...

Only 30% of families eat dinner together, 46% of all U.S. meals are eaten alone. Besides just being a little sad, there are bigger reasons why this is a problem. Communal eating has massive positive effects from dietary to emotional. In fact it is just as predictive of life satisfaction as things like job status or income. So what's stopping us from breaking bread together and how do we fix it? Give it a listen and find ou...