More Chicken Thigh

For decades, American poultry producers exported their dark meat. Russia wanted it. Mexico wanted it. Asia wanted it. Americans did not.

The dark meat stigma was stubborn and largely unfounded: white meat was lean, white meat was clean, white meat was correct. The industry complied, and a generation of home cooks dutifully pulled apart dry chicken breasts over their kitchen sinks.

Then something shifted. Immigration patterns changed the composition of American neighborhoods and, in turn, American menus. Food media eroded the authority of old nutritional myths. Beef prices climbed. And the boneless chicken thigh, long exported and undervalued, became one of the fastest-growing proteins in the country. Double-digit volume growth across food service. A 93% price increase on bone-in dark meat in five years. Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Cava, and the halal cart on the corner all telling the same story.

Chef Eric Huang, who trained at Eleven Madison Park, put it plainly: kimchi used to get kids teased. Now it is at Whole Foods.

What strikes me about the chicken thigh story is not the reversal itself, but the mechanism. No single actor drove it. No campaign, no mandate, no viral moment. It happened through the slow accumulation of demographic change, cultural contact, economic pressure and chefs willing to say out loud what they had always known. The market did not lead. It followed.

That pattern shows up everywhere, once you start looking for it.

When the mainstream finally catches up to what a subculture already knew, who actually deserves the credit, and what does that tell us about how change actually happens?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point.

Zero Introspection

Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz recently told a podcast audience that he operates with "zero" introspection.

Move forward. Go.

He credited Sigmund Freud with manufacturing the modern habits of second-guessing and self-criticism, and argued that the great men of history never wasted time on such things.

It is a crisp line. And it has the satisfying shape of a contrarian truth.

But I have spent years watching sharp, driven people in rooms together, and I have noticed something Andreessen's framing leaves out: the founder who cannot read the room, the executive who keeps making the same hire, the investor who cannot figure out why his best people keep leaving. These are not people who dwell too much on themselves. They are people who have never seriously tried.

Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10-15% actually are. The gap shows up in decision quality, in relationships, and in how people lead. Andreessen is right that excessive rumination is a trap. But he has conflated rumination with reflection, and that is a meaningful distinction.

There is also the question of what "moving forward" means if you carry the same blind spots from one decision to the next. Speed is not the same as progress.

I am not sure Andreessen is entirely wrong. There is something to the idea that high performers trust their instincts and do not overanalyze every choice. The question is whether that posture is a cause of their success or a story they tell afterward.

Which brings me to what I keep thinking about: If self-awareness is genuinely useful, why do so many of the people who need it most remain convinced they already have enough?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point.

When the ceremony isn't enough

17.9 million people watched the Oscars on Sunday. That sounds like a lot until you note it was 9% fewer than the year before, in a year with no real controversies and no shocking upsets. The kind of night the Academy probably thought it wanted.

There is something worth sitting with there. A clean show, a stable broadcast deal with ABC and Hulu through 2028, and the audience still shrank. Conventional wisdom says controversy drives ratings. Will Smith. Political speeches. Memorable moments that become Monday morning conversation. The 2025 ceremony had its share of those and drew nearly 20 million. This year, relative calm, and nearly two million people quietly stayed home.

Meanwhile, the Academy has already made its bet on what comes next. Starting in 2029, the ceremony moves to YouTube. Not cable. Not a broadcast network with 70 years of Sunday night habit behind it. A platform built on infinite scroll and algorithmic discovery, where the audience decides what matters and no institution gets deference just for showing up.

I have spent years thinking about what happens when formats outlive the cultures that created them. The Oscars is not just a TV show. It is a credentialing ceremony for an industry that still believes its own judgments carry weight. But credentialing only works when the audience agrees to show up and recognize the credential.

The move to YouTube is not simply a distribution decision. It is a renegotiation of authority. The Academy is asking YouTube's audience to care about the Academy's verdicts. Whether that audience accepts the trade is genuinely unclear.

When a legacy institution moves to a new platform to reach its audience, is it adapting, or quietly conceding that the audience has already decided it doesn't matter?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon is a small annual gathering built around real conversation: no PowerPoint slides, no panels, no name tags, and no clear ROI. The only requirement is genuine curiosity.

Last Call

Restaurants are losing the bar tab — and nobody saw it coming.

Alcohol has been the financial backbone of the American dining industry for decades. A $14 glass of wine costs the restaurant roughly $3. The margin on a cocktail makes the margin on a steak look modest. For most full-service restaurants, the bar subsidizes the kitchen. Always has.

Not anymore.

Americans are drinking less. Not dramatically, not all at once — but measurably, consistently, and across demographics. The shift isn't driven by a single cause. It's a combination of GLP-1 medications blunting appetite and cravings, a generation of younger consumers who never developed the drinking habits of their predecessors, and a broader cultural recalibration around wellness that is showing up in behavior, not just in surveys.

The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Restaurants that built their economics around alcohol as a margin engine are now staring at a structural gap that a better cocktail menu won't close.

Here's what I keep thinking about: this isn't a restaurant story. It's a story about a business model built on a behavioral assumption that quietly stopped being true. Every industry has a version of this. A revenue stream that feels permanent until it doesn't. A customer behavior that felt locked in until it shifted. The assumptions that get buried deepest are the ones that have never been wrong before.

What behavioral assumption is your business model quietly built on — and when did you last actually test it?

-Marc

Brigadoon is small gatherings. Radical curiosity. No PowerPoint slides. An unknown ROI. The kind of conversations you'll still be turning over in your head six months later. If that sounds like your kind of room, you're probably the kind of person we're looking for.