Crack It In An Hour

Live from Cannes at the PayPal Ads Studio, Sylvain Tron from Cylndr Studios drops a deceptively juicy question on the table: does Timothée Chalamet have a branding problem?

Romain immediately flips the question, Jesse challenges whether there's even a problem to solve, and Simon reaches for a Taylor Swift comparison when the Leo/Gosling reference points start breaking down. Things get real when the conversation cracks open into ambi...

Maria Galleriu from 72andSunny joins the crew live from Cannes (at the PayPal Ad Studio) and drops a heavy one on the table: the male loneliness epidemic. She comes armed with stats — men with zero close friends have shot up over the decades — and a thesis she's very happy to needle Romain with: women are just better at this.

From there it gets real. The gang digs into why male friendships fall apart (they're shoulder-to...

Crack It on the Croisette continues at Cannes Lions, live from the PayPal Ads Studio — and this time the challenge comes from guest Gareth Kay of Coinbase. His question: how do you make financial literacy not suck? Three quarters of Americans fail basic financial literacy tests, yet most financial education is dull enough to guarantee nobody pays attention.

The crew quickly agrees the real problem isn't the tools — it's ...

Crack It heads to the Croisette in Cannes for a fast 20 minutes at the PayPal Ads Studio — and this time the challenge comes from guest Kirsten Rutherford, Executive Creative Director at DoorDash and self-described 47-year-old rave bunny who's usually the oldest person on the dance floor by about 25 years. Her question: how do we stop people aging out of the things they love?

What follows is part tactical, part philosophical. ...

In a society where we’re not having enough fun, birthdays feel like a layup. They come around every year, they’re personal, they’re a reason to get together and celebrate someone you care about. So why do so many of us act like they’re no big deal? In this episode Simon, Maria Van Buskirk and Biz Anderson dig into why birthdays can make people uncomfortable, why we don’t like talking about ourselves an...

Networking is responsible for countless jobs, partnerships, friendships, and business opportunities. It’s also one of the most universally disliked activities in professional life. Why does something so valuable feel so terrible? Ahead of their first trip to Cannes Lions, Jesse, Simon, and Romain attempt to redesign networking from the ground up: from debate-club panels and no-phoned allowed hot-take sessions to banning the q...

The global athleisure market is on its way to $900 billion. Formal wear? About $4 billion. Comfort won. But at what cost?

This week, Romain brings the problem: how do you get people to dress up again? What starts as a data drop (enclothed cognition, productivity hits, one in twelve remote workers in pajamas every single day) turns into a deeper conversation about confidence, identity, and why "formal wear" might just be the worst tw...

Being late seems like one of those small everyday annoyances, but it turns out there’s a lot more going on under the surface. On this episode Simon brings the topic of lateness to Romain and Biz, and the gang gets into the strange ripple effects of people not showing up on time. When is being late understandable? When is it unacceptable? Why does it bother us so much? And what would it actually take to make people stop doing ...

We're back with only our second-ever lightning round — three hosts, three problems, 20 minutes each. Nobody knows what's coming.
Jesse kicks things off asking why we can't get more people to start cooking. Romain admits cooking stresses him out (it's the time pressure, not the talent), Simon reveals a rampant cocaine addiction — which, for the record, is just Romain mishearing "cooking" — and we land on a surpr...

Cable TV peaked at 105 million households in 2010. Today it's in less than 34% of American homes — and yet, somehow, streaming has become the new cable. Complicated bundles, decision fatigue, and the constant pressure to watch the right thing at the right time have made TV genuinely stressful.
This week, Simon, Jesse, and Romain are joined by Maria Van Buskirk — newly minted Head of Comms and Go-to-Market at Signific...

House parties are dying. The data is real, the stats are wild, and somehow Romain is the one mad about it. In this episode, Romain tasks Simon and Jesse with figuring out why nobody throws parties anymore — and more importantly, how to bring them back. The gang gets into the liking gap (why we're all secretly waiting for someone else to make the move), why LA kills the vibe by 11pm, whether the dinner party even counts, and t...

When did everything get so serious? In this episode Simon tasks Jesse and Romain with trying to get the world to laugh more. In a time when people are feeling more lonely, isolated and anxious than ever, laughter feels like it might be more than entertainment, it might be medicine. The gang gets into how comedy has been sapped from corporate life, what it would take to bring it back, who stands to gain the most from a funnier world...

On this episode of Crack It, we try something new baby!!!!! Instead of spending the whole episode on one problem, Jesse, Simon and Romain each bring their own and give themselves 20 minutes to solve it. Jesse wants to know how the heck we stop public bathrooms from inevitably becoming disgusting and whether it’s possible to inspire a little more societal decency. Simon takes on airport security and the challenge of making it ...

“Everyone agrees learning a second language is valuable. Almost no one actually does it.”

In this episode of Crack It In An Hour, Romain speaks with Jesse and Biz to unpack a question that feels obvious on the surface and surprisingly broken underneath: why aren’t more people learning another language?
They get into the real barriers: the illusion that it’s too late, the dominance of English, the way educa...

What makes great TV… great? Is it art? Is it comfort food? Is it something in between? In this episode, Jesse brings a deceptively simple question to Simon and Biz: how do we make great TV today? What follows is a wide-ranging, nuanced conversation about the current state of television, the pressures of the modern landscape, and whether “greatness” is even something we can all agree on anymore. From prestige dram...

Most of us are stuck. Stuck in the same playlist, the same three artists, the same songs we discovered in high school. And the algorithm isn't helping, 70% of music consumption comes from titles older than 18 months. So Romain brings the question to the table: how do you actually get people to leave their taste bubble? Joined by friend and digital creator Luke Yun, the crew digs into why taste is so hard to shake — comfort, i...

Creating a new sports league sounds easy…until you actually try to do it. In this episode Simon brings a big swing to the table: can they invent the next great American sports league? Alongside Jesse and Romain, the group dives headfirst into what modern audiences actually want. From rethinking gender in sport, to dialing in the right level of physicality, to dissecting what past leagues got right (and very, very wrong), the...

Only about 3% of eligible Americans donate blood. THREE PERCENT. For something that quite literally saves lives, that number feels…insane. In this episode Jesse brings the problem to the table and tasks Romain and Simon with figuring out how to change it. Is it awareness? Is it fear? Or is it something deeper about how we form habits and what actually motivates people to do things that don’t immediately benefit them? T...

Somewhere along the way, “community” became one of the most overused words in marketing. Every brand wants one, every founder claims to build one, but what does it actually mean? In this episode, Jesse, Biz, and Romain are joined by brand strategist and creative director Nourhan Wahdan to unpack the buzzword and get closer to a real definition. Is community about scale or intimacy? Is it built around shared ideology, mu...