Today, our guest is an award-winning beauty reporter and critic whom you might have stumbled upon while reading her super popular newsletter, The Unpublishable, which, as HuffPost says, "basically gives the middle finger to the entire beauty industry." Writing about what the beauty industry won’t tell you, Jessica DeFino has built an identity as a reporter on a mission to reform it. It all started, however, in a place as opposite as it could be: a few years back, Jessica was a product-obsessed e...
Mar 28, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's episode of Simplify brings you a special collaboration: a conversation with Dhiraj Mukherjee, who is not only the entrepreneur behind Shazam (the app we all love and use so much!), but also a devoted impact investor focused on social good. Drawing from his experience at Shazam, Dhiraj learned firsthand that the best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s why today, his work mostly focuses on investing in mission-driven companies aiming to create a better future for the pla...
Mar 06, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Although we're at the tail end of 2024's symbolic new beginning, we're still confronted with the flood of discounted "detoxes," "cleanses," gym promotions touting a "New Year, new you," and the latest buzzword, "resets." Despite our desire to think that fad diets are relics of the past and that we have collectively moved away from diet culture, we may instead have fallen for a wolf in sheep's clothing. Drawing from her personal narrative and investigative reporting experiences, Cole Kazdin, an E...
Feb 21, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we bring you Simplify's first ever crossover episode with the #1 Technology show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: Acquired! For nearly 9 years David Rosenthal—today's guest—and his co-host Ben have been sharing the strategies and history of 200+ of the world's most successful businesses. From Sequoia to Sony, through to TSMC, Amazon, The New York Times, the NBA and Oprah, Acquired's hosts go deep—sometimes 3 hours deep!—into the details of each business's ups and downs. In this episode of S...
Feb 08, 2024•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1971, Joni Mitchell released Blue, an album teeming with stories of a life shaped by romance, desire, longing, and the default path of sharing life with another person. The ideal might persist to this day, but what happens if the romance we are told will give life meaning... never shows up? How gorgeous and fulfilling can we make our lives, sans romantic partner? Amy Key, the celebrated British essayist and poet, sets out to explore exactly these questions in her memoir, Arrangements in Blue,...
Jan 25, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast We might say that “age is just a number,” but if we're really honest with ourselves, a lot of us still think of “old” people as stubborn hoarders who eat dinner (too) early and are forever talking about their aches and pains. Why is that? And could there be another way? These questions prompted Steven Petrow, an award-winning journalist and author to begin compiling a list of things he won’t do when he gets old shortly after his 50th birthday. The list, which included “You won’t have to shout at...
Jan 22, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast What do people mean when they say, 'I'm a perfectionist'? The colloquial and widespread opinion would sound like this: A perfectionist is someone who desires everything to be perfect at all times and becomes upset when things aren't perfect. This definition is often followed by the (generic) advice that the best way for them to set themselves free is to get rid of their perfectionism. According to Katherine Morgan Schafler, a psychotherapist and a former on-site therapist at Google, this is not ...
Dec 15, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast When we experience a traumatic event or decide to pursue healing, what often follows is the tendency to isolate and hide from the world. Shame, exclusion, and the feeling that no one understands remain intertwined with the term "healing." However, this can and should be different—and that 's the message licensed social worker and therapist Minaa B. is here to spread. "Owning Our Struggles," Minaa’s first book, as well as her work in general, stands out for its unique approach and strong emphasis...
Nov 30, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the post-pandemic era, the debate over whether or not to return to the office seems far from settled — and yet, the push to bring employees back to the office is growing more aggressive. Amazon issued a warning to staff not long ago. Google is factoring employees’ in-office attendance into their performance reviews. And ironically, working from home has been officially replaced by a return to the office by Zoom. So is returning to the old structured schedule really the best way to optimize ou...
Oct 27, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
